I am listening to an inteview on Radio Times. Marty Moss Coen is asking James Young, a member of the jury deciding on the memorial at "ground zero" in New York City, about the 9/11 project and about memorials in general. A few months ago he wrote an article about the competing interest groups trying to have their needs reflected in the site.

He is making a number of points about memorial culture that I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject matter.

• Memorials tend to have relevance, usefulness and appeal only as long as the generation that built them. When they die off and the events remembered fade, the memorial's relevance fades. Some memorials, like the Vietnam Memorial Wall, are examples of memorials going through periods of change as each generation comes to interpret the memory differently. Memorials should be more abstract and minimalist to be more accessable to that kind of re-interpretation. He points out that the Lincoln Memorial is an exception to this; it is monumental and not abstract, but works decades after it was built. The numerous World War One memorials scattered around Gemrany are good examples of outdated memorials, I think. The standing soldiers, like this one in Buehl near where I live, play almost no role in contemporary German culture.
• The proposed 9/11 memorial is a balancing act between the needss of the various families, the city, and the nation at large. In this particular case, the needs of the families are also very diverse and difficult to unify into one idea. There were the workers, the rescuers, the visitors, and others. The idea is to find something "underdetermined enough" to accomidate as many of these various needs as possible. We need to take the memorial out of the hands of politicians. Young points out that the Oklahoma City memorial was an example of a more homogeneous victim group agreeing almost immediately on a design.
• But every memorial is built in a political time and will be used politically. To that I would add that memorials are almost by nature political. To the extent that they relfect public memory, they impose interpretations, provide a location for common remembrance (a form of action). People are angry at President Bush for politicizing the event. But as a politician, can he speak to the event at all without it being a political statement?
• The flyers hanging around New York in the first days after the attack were the very first "memorials". They expressed the immediate fear and grief, they became sites for memorialization. He encouraged the mayor of NYC to consider the memorial as broadly as possible, to include things like the flyers to be part of the memorial.
• Memorials should be more than a place to mourn, but a place that you can integrate into your normal life. People should live near ground zero, visitors should be able to move on from there. It should not "block" normal life.

The image here shows a very small memorial to the 9/11 attacks on the lawn behind the Becker County courthouse in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. A large collection of 9/11 memorials is available at http://911memorials.org/usa/.