The comments in the post sparked a few thoughts:

1) Matters of scale and subject are clearly factors in seeking to create memorials/monuments. The smaller the scale of the event and the more intimate the subject to be commemorated, the easier it likely is to design an appropriate memorial. In other words, a monument meant to memorialize a specific individual or group of individuals is relatively easy to design – whether it’s one of the ubiquitous mounted generals statues or something like the monument to Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Virginia, or those to entertainers Bojangles or W.C. Handy. These are basically portraits in stone. Groups, too, such as military units, can be easily memorialized as well, by simply engraving the names of the units on a tablet affixed to a generic soldier sculpture. A large-scale event is more difficult to capture satisfactorily in a work of public art. The Holocaust would be an example of an event on the extreme end of the scale in this respect.

2) I resist the notion of applying expiration dates to monuments – the suggestion that they remain relevant only as long as the last of those who built them are still living. This sounds like a perversion of the Jeffersonian notion that each generation should be free to make the world new again, unbound by deference to past practices or beliefs. Jefferson was talking about acts effecting the political order, however, not about memories that may serve to sustain that order. While it’s clear that some monuments outlast their usefulness, applying this radical a standard implies that no historical event or personality can have any meaning to those born later. This, it seems to me, undermines the very idea that the knowledge of history has value.

3) That being said, it is also clear that some memorials are undoubtedly temporary in nature. The numerous spontaneous displays of condolence that sprung up at various locations around Germany following the attacks of September 11 (such as those left at the Feldherrenhalle in Munich) are one example. The trinkets and other items deposited in front of Buckingham Palace in reaction to the death of Princess Diana is another. Yet another were the placards and posters that accompanied the demonstrations in Prague or Leipzig during the upheavals in Eastern Europe in 1989/90. And of course there are the flyers and other items that went up in NYC in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as mentioned above. Many of these were collected and later made part of the permanent collections of various museums. This points to the fact that museums, too, can serve as memorials of a sort. Even exhibits, such as the so-called “Wehrmachtsausstellung,” can serve the dual purpose of informing and commemorating. What’s more, the second, revised “Wehrmachtsasusstellung” went one step further, commemorating its predecessor exhibit by incorporating into its own displays materials that referred back to the controversy that erupted over the original exhibit.

4) Ideally, a memorial or monument should reflect the public sentiments of the community in which it is to be placed. This becomes more problematic, as alluded to above, the larger the community is it is meant to serve or the greater the number of constituent interests/needs there are that it must seek to express. The larger and more demanding these become, the greater the likelihood that the matter will simply be turned over to fashions current in art and architecture. This raises the issue of abstraction: the idea that a work of commemoration must be “underdetermined enough” to represent all the claims placed on it. The problem with abstraction is that, more often than not, it fails to transmit any clear and direct reference to the matter the monument is meant to represent. Substance capitulates to pure form. There is nothing intrinsic in the work itself to recall to mind among future generations the thing the work is meant to impart. It becomes dependent on extrinsic means of explication or orientation With reference to a comment elsewhere (with regard to the post on the Franco-Prussian War memorial), I would suggest that we must draw a distinction between the ability of a memorial to “speak” to us and our willingness or ability to “hear” and understand the message it imparts. Moreover, it seems to me at least shortsighted to say that only abstract monuments can remain relevant over time, that only in abstraction can we find sufficient means for the sort of renterpretation and the application of new messages that keeps the memorial relevant. It would seem to me that even representational monuments, such as the all too common generals astride horses type (those which seem locked in a certain time and place) may also be open to new uses. This could be accomplished by simply standing next to such a monument and saying, “Much like so-and-so sought to do such-and-such in his day, we today seek to such-and-such,” or something to that effect.

5) To my mind, it is the very abstractness of the thing that causes the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin to fail as a receptacle of historic memory. This abstract boulder-garden seems largely incapable of transmitting to future generations any of the meaning of the event it is meant to commemorate. It is too much a blank slate, perfect for the application of any number of messages, but lacking in any means of supplying orientation to those generations to come. Eisenman was right when he said that a monument should stand alone; it should not require an information center to help explain what it is about. But his design is incapable of standing alone. There is nothing intrinsic to it that allows it to serve the one purpose it is meant to serve, to fulfill the one demand that survivors like Elie Wiesel make of those who come after: to remember. Shorn of the orientation center and the signs directing visitors to it, the Holocaust Memorial might be anything. Some have approved of this ambiguity, saying that it is good that the memorial does not “impose” interpretations on visitors. But one wonders at the notion that a memorial meant to commemorate the death of millions should shy away from explicitness Created as a result of the monomaniacal efforts of Lea Rosh and others like her, the memorial serves less to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust than it does to represent a German tendency to find perverse pride in demonstrating how well they have allegedly come to terms with their past. It was my belief that no such memorial was necessary or even useful, since the best sites of memory were already available in the numerous concentration camps still extant both in Germany and across Europe. The larger question is whether there are some events that are so huge that they defy any subsequent attempt to memorialize them. The Holocaust, it seems to me, would qualify as such an event.