Bordering on the Visible

Abstract

Memories of World War II and of the Holocaust are grounded in insistent images: burning synagogues, lines of bent figures awaiting deportation, lopsided piles of bones and skin, smoking chimneys, bombed-out buildings resembling broken teeth. For the first time in the history of news reporting, words, inadequate tools for rendering the unprecedented horror, ceded their place to image for documenting and hearing witness to atrocities for which traditional news reporting knew no precedent and thus possessed no standards.² Unlike the memory of previous wars, or even of conflicts since World War II — recall the imageless perception we carry of the Gulf War — our memory of the Holocaust is focused through and steeped in images of Nazi atrocities. From this global roster of images, Germany and a number of its wartime allies and collaborators have developed nation-specific imagistic and spatial ideolects which in turn became central to the re-negotiation of those national identifies which had emerged, shaken and damaged, from World War II. The decade-long debate in Germany concerning the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, for instance, focused the memorial politics of the newly united Germany; Austria’s mechanisms of memory were honed when remnants of a medieval synagogue were found on the spot where a planned memorial was to mark the destructions of Kristallnacht; Holland’s most noted memorial site, the Anne Frank House, enabled the nation to articulate its wartime collaboration early on; and France’s most recent negotiation of memory, the spectacular and controversial trial of war-criminal Maurice Papon, has heightened that nation’s awareness of its past.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

— Walter Benjamin¹