In time for the sixtieth anniversary next April of the liberation of Buchenwald, the concentration camp will begin marketing souvenirs designed by Bauhaus University students: plaques, stationery embedded with minute stones and sticks gathered from the camp, pamphlets retelling certain victims' life histories, clear buttons reading Buchenwald inspired by thousands of unearthed buttons, replanted beech sprigs cut from trees on site, and wristbands.
This latest development in Shoa business is justified by Buchenwald Memorial Director Volkhard Knigge as addressing a need for new methods of communicating the Holocaust across generational divides. "This generation has grown up in a different culture, with different mediums," he says in a New York Timesarticle, "At the Gift Shop: Souvenirs from Buchenwald" (September 15, 2004). "We need to... give them the chance to formulate their own way of accessing. Otherwise we're speaking a language they don't understand."
"The greatest profit," he continues, "will be to see how people between the age of 20 and 30 remember this time. How do they build bridges to this period?"
It's uncertain from the tone and tense whether he has in mind current twenty-somethings or future children who will mature into this decade (in which creative apprehension of destruction can occur if properly kindled, he seems to intone) or both. One also wonders if such questioning is speculative or rhetorical and whether the subject would have been better served by this distinction.
Regardless, those of my generation and future ones cannot remember the Holocaust. We were not its participants. We inhabit a world of scarring and inherit legacy, not event. As numerous survivors have attested, Elie Wiesel surmised that, aside from the dead, the real witnesses—those who truly remember (and who do not re-member)—are the survivors who could not speak of the atrocities. Knigge's bridge-building rationalizations, rooted in wiser-than-thou conceptualizations of history and consciousness, are as slighting to past, present, and future generations as the souvenirs are deceptive, righteous, sentimental, and tacky.
From what generation would anyone of even limited sensitivity purchase, write on, and mail to a friend or enemy stationery embedded with particles of a concentration camp, aside from purposes of black humor? Who invents such a medium much less considers it a meaningful enough capture of the Holocaust to sell it? Hopefully even Knigge would stop short of suggesting that stationery comes close to conjuring all that the Holocaust constitutes, but by what authority does it signify a little?
Stationery especially undermines the nature of Knigge & Co.'s conceptualization of remembrance for its function clearly shows how the Holocaust is beyond the closing of any gap. It's a multiplicity of versions, significations, and implications inscribed over the word. Paper for writing allows more (re)visions—not of the Holocaust but of the packaged version of Buchenwald, further removing the writer, not to mention the reader, from what occurred. Putting rocks in paper becomes absurd, akin to dismantling a cairn. Subjectivity is allowed greater leverage to determine the Holocaust-as-event upon tabula rasas of ash. Buchenwald will circulate like money, a fluctuating symbolic measure of an abstracted quantity—ever elsewhere and nowhere simultaneously.
And what would you write—from the death camp, with love and squalor? What if you mess up when writing on it? What if it goes unused, forgotten about, or thrown out with the rest of the faded stationery and blank note cards lying in drawers for years?
Of the beech tree plantings, Tom Hanke, who concocted the idea, said rather obviously, "The tree, without question, carries the crime within itself while at the same time representing, as a growing plant, something else: life." Hanke was initially reluctant about the enterprise and, I assume, warmed up after settling on arboreal commemoration. Admittedly, he's onto something that the other souvenir creators are not: the sprig cuts highlight the brighter motif of regeneration in memento mori. Although all natural and having a low kitsch factor, it's still a better idea than actualization. Death camp flora for your home and garden is strikingly mawkish. What if it dies?
Hanke further explains the reasoning behind concentration camp keepsakes, and here the lack of awareness of all his statement belies is stunning, considering that he is an appointed caretaker of memory: "Sometimes not just the knowledge, but the feeling that you have is easier to translate into an object than into writing."
Therefore, the project's tenet is inseparable from fetishization, the bestowing of symbolic distance upon objects through which one may endure reality in its cruelty—namely, the cumulative forces that made possible an efficient, anesthetized procedure for annihilating a people. The incomprehensible and reprehensible become accessorized and customized for grieving. In gestures intended to evoke, capture, and contain the Holocaust, such totems deflect it and reflect only the owner's susceptibility to constructed emotion.
Beyond his watered-down succinctness, perhaps Hanke intended that emotion of overwhelming moral violation is easier to deal with in objects one makes personal (or that are packaged for one's consumption in light of such emotion) rather than in another's writing—documents, testimonies, narratives—in which interpretation turns critical and personal—two tricky spheres that interact with readers in challenging ways.
However, the integral and affirmative thing about narrative fantasy, as opposed to the fantasy of fetish, is that stories don't presume that history-as-event can be animated and codified. They show over and over that we can arrive at it via archiving and other methodologies, but that proclaiming this or my x is history creates a closed universe. History, and by extension the Holocaust, is beyond apprehension, so fictional artifacts are created that don't pose as anything but lies—lies as pathways to circle and demarcate truth, to gesture toward all that is lost, never to be regained. Such backward-stabbing logic and circuitous attempts at identification, such plunging into ethos and pathos via language's lack of iconicity, must come off as esoteric and tedious in Hanke's general view of human emotional and intellectual endeavor. The Holocaust, however, is a distasteful platform to take a grim view of others' capacity to read intelligently and meaningfully, indirectly or not. Moreover, texts should usually be promoted as preferable to trinkets, no matter one's commission.
I respect the spirit in which Hanke, Knigge, and others offer such tokens—the altruistic offerings following E. M. Forster's epigraphic decree to "Only connect." But what they miss through their rhetoric of fetishization is how these items permit an escape from confronting the Holocaust, a problem manifested on a grand scale in Schindler's List. When Steven Spielberg's saga so cemented a look and feel to the period that some considered it a near-definitive version, a chorus of academics, writers, and others retaliated, arguing that there can be no representation of the Holocaust: to see it one would have to set it in motion again, in its entirety. The film depicts one version through the plight of a slim, atypical group that marginally survived the infamous plan that almost always meted out the fates of Borowski's characters, keeping with depictions. Furthermore, the film, based on Thomas Keneally's un-engaging book, diminishes the horror: the Holocaust is reduced to a background against which Oskar Schindler becomes morally converted in a most nineteenth-century manner.
The relationship between the meanings arbitrarily ascribed to the Buchenwald souvenirs and their would-be owners' dispensing of meaning is exemplified by Spielberg's use of the girl in the red dress. She is first noticed during the liquidation of the ghetto and later as a corpse. The second viewing is meant to startle and provoke empathy for the only individualized, nameless Jew without lines with whom the viewer is forced to have a relationship—an "innocent" figure rouged among so many black and white ones. She is highlighted for the viewer to have a compulsory emotional response, to gasp. It's a maudlin, operatic ploy. As bodies ascend in mounds and in smoke, you're supposed to get the Holocaust's entirety specifically through the sullied red of the dead girl's dress because you can pick out a needle in a haystack, because you can still individuate while watching the portrayal of a system in which singling out, except to add to various masses, was nil. The viewer receives a pat on the back from the film, not recognition of the untold number of children that the girl represents; rather, she detracts from them. The Holocaust takes a backseat to viewer satisfaction from experiencing contemplative shock at an unfolding nightmare. It is beside the point.
In the same way, the souvenirs de-center subjectivity in relationship to Buchenwald by becoming representations and substitutions, which, by being meditated upon, touched, and owned, suggest an objective reconciliation for one's internalization. Acceptance and reconciliation are two vastly different motions; only the former can utilize the material realm successfully. Reconciliation through objects is conscious and unconscious spiritualized materialism.
The ways awareness and reflective mourning variegate memory are deeply idiosyncratic processes whose distinctiveness should be defended. They forge paths ahead by gazing backward at terrible, sometimes impossible odds. It's a blessing and curse that the abilities to recall and to meditate—and to meditate on recall—are vastly dissimilar from person to person, though they operate in the same broad psychological matrix. The degree to which we feel we owe ourselves to what we have witnessed that is no more, and to what others have witnessed who are no more, are tremendously defining character traits.
What is more, our conduits for doing so are purposely and involuntarily gleaned from impressions, systems, and items, which, like gender and sexuality, are our own and are not. So to create ready-made instruments for consumption, especially on behalf of a deceased group, is tantamount to psychological fascism. They hijack private consciousness and reflection. They offer convenient artifices to accept as mirrors when, in fact, the viewer no longer recognizes himself in them much less whatever the mirrors have replaced. They say, Stare at the sun with pleasure and never realize you've gone blind. For the pitfalls of souvenirs are much like those of metaphors: by offering a method for elucidation, they trap a specific way of seeing. One has to read such mechanisms closely and regard vestiges without sentimentality in order to see what lies beyond the various intents of others.
My roommate in Rome and his girlfriend ate thanksgiving dinner in 2000 at Dachau—in the rain, a detail he included and I remember possibly because it insinuated romance. These are the people for whom holocaust souvenirs were created—everyone who is so contentedly settled with history that they can turn it around to serve themselves and, in the course of striving to have an exceptional experience vis-à-vis its enormity, remain supremely self-focused and unmoved.
Worse still, many people are so cynically disgusted and bored with society and their place in it that they require extremes of horror to feel or to be substantially moved. This phenomenon was memorably evidenced in Michael Middleton's response to "Forbidden Thoughts about 9/11" in Salon about his own thoughts as events of that Tuesday unfolded:
"I was, in outward appearance, the very picture of solemnity and sympathy. Inside, though, I was excited. I got the same weird sense of roller-coaster joy I do when a hurricane comes up the coast or a blizzard shuts down the city. In the chaos of the initial reports, I found myself disappointed to find out that some of the early reports of additional targets being hit were erroneous. As the second tower collapsed, I found myself with a terrible sense of satisfaction. It was almost like, somewhere deep in the parts of my soul that don't see the sun, I was rooting for the event to be even bigger—for it to cut so deeply through the banality of daily life that things would never be the same. I suspect I am not alone... something in human nature gives people a sick thrill in such horrific voyeurism."
It's as if there crouches a seditious desire to be swept up in, or at least have a front row seat for, something greater and graver than everyday existence, something so destructive that, regardless of evil tinge, it will structurally alter the confluence of systems that numb. As Francine Prose writes in Guided Tours of Hell when the protagonist exits Auschwitz:
"Landau stops and stares into the chasm, at a grape-colored plastic bag turning ashen in the sun. The parking lot is before him, and beyond, the cemetery with its silver cross gleaming over the orderly rows of the dead. Landau will join them soon enough, and none of this will matter, just as it no longer matters to those already there. But for now, it's all that counts, and for now, Jiri is right: Landau would feel better, he would have been better off if something or someone had picked him up and thrown him into the abyss."
My point is that the Buchenwald souvenirs can arrest this potentially unconscious thrill of communing with the abyss, freezing it for future, illusory recapture. It's a step beyond commoditization and fetishization; it's the fetishization of commodity, the filling of voids—souvenirs as empty signifiers—with the desire for void.
Perhaps, though, it's satisfying to own certain destructions, to carry fall out into the world.
When the Berlin Wall came down, pieces made their way to hands around the globe almost instantly. My friend has a palm-size chunk spray-painted fluorescent green and orange. It recalls the hardness and immutability of Cold War existence—forced familial separation, people snared by barbwire and shot, the raven-like presence of the Brandenburg Gate lording over all—so much that the crumbling of communism is secondary. Berliners picking at the wall with sledge hammers and chisels are contained in film; the fragment contains all that's beyond remembrance.
Holding it, I thought of stories my father told about being stationed at Ramstein Air base: his admittance through Checkpoint Charlie under guns and silence; the climactic shift in mood and appearance between the Western and Eastern blocs; how he made East Berlin's streets sound empty yet stifling, gripped by perpetual winter; the spare, dismal shops and their storage rooms that he was ushered into with items removed from public view because their value or beauty were extravagances in a marketplace of controlled destitution, like the three-tiered wooden Christmas pyramid he purchased and still sets up every year with candles whose heat rises to spin the intricately-fanned pinwheel, which turns the central pole and, with it, the holy family, wise men, and sheep on their swivels so that shadow and light spin around the room and ceiling.
Every time I see the pyramid, I involuntarily make the Cold War—as embodied in the wall and its demolition—my own: a childhood association with East German hand-carved wood by way of Marcel Proust's magic lantern, and do not usually recall the young nightmares I had about unexplained war and bombs that made the sky run communist red, which I typically think about when remembering the Cold War. Within that light and shadow, the soul-killing spirit of those decades is imbued, and it was all recalled through a stone, an accidental ordinary fragment. Stones speak, if listeners are aware. They don't require enmeshment in paper or showcasing to transmit stories or to transport.
I own a tablespoon of sand in an envelope from a mandala that I watched take shape over a week. I regard these grains as destruction because literally and symbolically that's what they are—residue, an aftermath. Each morning and afternoon Tibetan monks prayed over the mandala taking shape. Upon completion, it was ceremoniously destroyed. Through the sand, I recall the intensity in the room's warm air, crowded with chants and incense; the hardness of the monks' usually calm, still faces; the sweat on their brows; their little muscles tightening as they raked toward the mandala's center; the harsh scrape of the tools on the wood underneath. It felt intolerable yet natural, like violence and sweet release. The sand was distributed to observers, believed to confer good luck since much sacred energy had been chanted into the grains. The detritus of obliteration is what we were intended to take on our journeys, and the essence of the mandala, the exquisite wonder that it had been, was to remain so only in memory and understanding. A picture or postcard would disrupt that process for, as Theodore Roethke showed, "What falls away is always. And is near."
This delicate belief is eliminated in Holocaust commodities. Memory—the kind with which you enter into a dialogue and your own memory of that exchange—is taken out of context, declared null and void. For history is holocaust. It's the archaeology of wind. It's a great negotiation, a summit with ghosts. Viewing it as solid, as some thing that can be (re)claimed and made your own, like the realm of the future, creates a capitalist deception.
Observation alters not only the behavior of what is being studied but also ourselves as tiny pieces of pottery and bone are destroyed in the scrutiny of carbon dating. The trick is to understand our flickering as infinitesimal against history's progression and to focus efforts on sublimating the past, not solidifying and reincarnating it for self-interested idol worship. For the lasting ability of souvenirs does not confer permanence to their owners, and the passive wish for them to do so, to take the edge off the clean sweep of time's scythe, occurs at the expense of true homage and remembrance.
We must see that, as Milan Kundera writes, "history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow."
It is this challenge that is greatest of all, and worthy of it.
