Abstract
This chapter focuses on memorials and memorialization, analysed within the framework of reparation and manic reparation. As individuals, we institute sites and occasions for mourning, remembering and reparation. As social groups, we do the same, through memorials, archives, official recognition of special places, such as historic buildings. In both instances, we can speak of a private and a public dimension. Private mourning is more personal, restores memory and is reparative. Public mourning is prone to group pressures, which distort memory and foster manic reparation, which is akin to Freud’s concept of melancholia and pathological mourning. Memorials become ambiguous locations for remembering and for the distortion of remembering, for private mourning and for public mourning.
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Notes
- 1.
George Mosse (1990) shows how compellingly sites of mourning can also serve to celebrate heroic sacrifice, which reinforces a ‘Myth of the War Experience’. The contrast between private and public mourning is more distinct in the views of politicians, presumably believing they also represent the public. The three soldiers memorial was commissioned amidst controversy over whether the Memorial Wall sufficiently commemorated the sacrifice of soldiers (Gallagher nd). The sculptor nonetheless intended to capture the sort of ambiguity and existential threat, which the politicians’ bravado of heroism hides.
Perhaps the politicians saw in it something more clear-cut than the desperate situation inflicted on the soldiers, to which the sculptor, Frederick Hart, was alert. In a press release for the unveiling of the sculpture, Kathleen Keenan (1984) says
The figurative sculpture that stands before you, three fighting men caught in a moment of watchful awareness, addresses the endless confrontation of man and his own mortality. These veterans stand in solitary repose, viewing from afar the long, dark wall that recounts the 58,022 names of those who have died or who are missing in battle... On one face there is an expression of grave incomprehension; on another, anguish and anxiety; on a third, almost angry defiance. Their faces mirror the turbulent passage from innocence to experience, from boyhood to manhood, and their individual reactions are reflective of the men who have passed before them…Frederick Hart, sculptor of the statue, explains the expression he sought…‘I wanted,’ he said, ‘to get the youth and to some degree the sense of psychology of what took place, the fact that there is a kind of shadow that passes over these young faces that will never go away. I wanted to capture them at that moment when that shadow passed…The statue I created is meant to elevate the veteran, to say something about their experience to them, to help them be acknowledged and understood.’ (pp. 1–2, 6)
In this way, the reparative use that citizens have made of the Wall, the angry resentment of the politicians, and the attempt by the sculptor of the second memorial to represent tragedy inflicted on youth highlight the ambiguity of memorialization. The memorial pair is a site for remembering , mourning and reparation , but, in the politicians’ ire and the absence of recognition of the delusional enemy as innocent victims, also an object that patches over guilt for the damage inflicted on the good object.
- 2.
The monument bears an inscription from a poem by Heinrich Lersch: Deutschland muss leben, auch wenn wir sterben mussen (Germany must live, even if we must die). In the aftermath of the devastation of Germany, including the area in which the monument remained standing, it seemed a mockery and an affront to the war dead (Young, pp. 37–8).
- 3.
There is some survey evidence that suggests a normalization of a group ideal within everyday, unexceptional terms. Johnson and Reuband (2005) carried out interviews and surveys in the 1990s. ‘Sympathy for National Socialism’, based on aggregated figures for several attitudes in four German cities was rated at 56% (49% weighted for the demographics in 1938). But ‘What the People Liked Best about National Socialism’ were ‘Fight against Unemployment’, ‘Less Crime’ and ‘Construction of the Autobahns’ (p. 341) (an ideological project more than a response to car ownership; Evans 2015, pp. 179–90). These memories of the Nazi period are ordinary expectations of government. The fury unleashed by this same government seems a million miles away, as does any delusion of Nazi supremacy or dread of collapse of the delusion.
- 4.
Segal (1995) argues that the loss of the Soviet Union as an enemy, after its disintegration, to nations in the West, entailed the loss of delusional superiority over a dangerous enemy and the need to find another enemy, in order to avoid collective guilt. The guilt of Vietnam provoked the Gulf war, and in agreement with Fornari, so, says Segal, are all wars provoked by the unresolved guilt from previous wars. Groups become psychotic to make the individuals in the group normal, perhaps normally frightened rather than mad. Without an enemy of a nation, individuals are again threatened by their psychotic cores and will create sub-groups, factions whose psychotic behaviour will protect them.
- 5.
The retrospective admission of misrepresenting the threat from North Vietnam to the United States, and the guilt and recognition of tragedy that the war would evoke, is profoundly revealed in the filmed interview with Robert McNamara, screened as The Fog of War (Morris and McNamara 2003).
- 6.
Such a distinction is recognized in German, in there being two words for a memorial. A Denkmal provides an occasion for thinking, a Mahnmal for an exhortation. The former encourages reflection; the latter induces a response: one should feel: accused, chastened, warned.
- 7.
Rudolf Mauersberger also composed a mourning motet, based on the Book of Lamentations, ‘Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst?’ (‘Why does the city lie in such despair?’), which also raises the fate of the city to a level of spiritual questioning.
- 8.
Recently, this ambiguity has been renewed by the so-called PEGIDA (acronym for Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes —Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) movement. Also this movement started in Dresden, where, since October 2014, it has organized demonstrations against immigration to Germany, appropriating the legendary ‘Monday demonstrations’ from 1989, in which citizens protested peacefully against the GDR regime , to articulate ethnocentric sentiments. As Krüger (forthcoming) points out, the movement, whose core is strongly conservative with leanings to the far right, struggles with a kind of patriotism that is as haunted as it is fascinated by German Nazism (note supplied by Steffen Krüger).
- 9.
Moeller (2006) argues that, for Jews, captive workers, Soviet soldiers facing fierce resistance on the Eastern front, and other victims of the Nazis, the Allied bombing was salvation. Just as a symptom in psychoanalytic thinking binds contradictory currents of motive and feeling, and is consolidated as a psychic organization because it does just that, perhaps Dresden has been forced into symbolic status for the same reason . Jerzak (2015) gives a detailed account of the ‘ memory politics’ of Dresden and Hamburg, showing how the myth of Dresden as the innocent Florence on the Elbe developed and the dissatisfaction among different groups whose voices were not adequately represented by the monuments or the commemorations.
In Johnson and Reuband’s (2005) survey, Dresden scored the highest of the four cities in ‘Belief in National Socialism, Admired Hitler and Shared Nazi Ideals’ (Table 11.1, p. 330). While this result may suggest various interpretations, it supports the idea of the innocent city of culture as a myth.
- 10.
Röder and Strauss (1980–1983) have collected data on a range of Jewish emigrants of people with a public profile, such as scientists, doctor, writers. They give at least a glimpse of denied loss to Germany, and it does not include the much greater number who were killed.
- 11.
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Figlio, K. (2017). Remembering, Memorialization and Reparation. In: Remembering as Reparation. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59591-1_10
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