Abstract
With a new approach to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competitions, this chapter introduces the key aims, theory, and central drive of the monograph. It explains why the book probes the concepts of empathic unsettlement, different forms of empathy, and empathy’s link to cultural memory. In doing so, the chapter shows why these concepts are intrinsic to analysing selected designs, because through these designs, visitors would be closer to victims’ experiences but without seeing the Holocaust mimetically. Analysing counter-monument designs is also justified, so too an explanation of why the memorial museum is discussed in relation to Eisenman’s abstract design and its Information Centre. Political and national memory in regard to the prospect of a German national Holocaust memorial is rationalised, and the monograph’s methodology is also outlined.
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Notes
- 1.
Amy Coplan, ‘Will the real empathy please stand up? A case for a narrow conceptualization’, in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 49 (September 2011) pp. 40–65 (41).
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3–18 (p. 8).
- 4.
Adorno, Theodor, ‘Commitment’, in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 112–123. The much-citied passage was first introduced in Adorno’s essay, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1949).
- 5.
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (New York: Cornell University Press. 1998), p. 182.
- 6.
As Lisa Cartwright also posits, ‘by projecting oneself into the life of the victim, the importance of that original experience is reduced, and that, instead, empathy comes from a recognition of the feelings expressed in representation, rather than by an identification with who the victim was’. Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Post-war Representation of the Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 24.
- 7.
Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 20. Apel goes on to argue that by way of secondary trauma, there can be a sense of ‘unresolved shock and injury shared between secondary witness and the victim’.
- 8.
Aleida Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past’ in Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German Speaking World since 1500, ed. by Christian Emden, and David Midgley (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 18–39 (p. 32).
- 9.
James Young, Peter Carrier, other scholars have paid attention to some of the competitions’ alternative designs, but their primary focus is the competition’s outcome, this being the commissioning, building, and reception of Eisenman’s field of concrete blocks. Analysis of Eisenman’s design includes: Suzanne Stephens, ‘Peter Eisenman’s Vision for Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, Architectural Record, 193.7 (2005) pp. 120–27. Johan Åhr, ‘Memory and Mourning in Berlin: On Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust-Hahnmal’, Modern Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Ideas & Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 28.3 (2008), pp. 282–305. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: On the Origins and Legacy of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, in History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. by Wulf Kansteiner, Todd Presner, and Claudio Fogu (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 283–303. Maike Muegge, ‘Politics, Space and Material: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a Sign of Symbolic Representation’, European Review of History. Vol. 12. (2008), pp. 212–19.
- 10.
It is worth noting that in ‘Against Empathy’, Paul Bloom argues that empathy is a leading motivator of inequality and immorality, a ‘capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices’. Bloom posits that empathy confuses our judgment and that, instead, we should have a more distanced compassion. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco Press, 2016).
- 11.
It is not uncommon to see adults and children lea** from block to block or hiding from each other behind the pillars.
- 12.
A plot which became available after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and had been part of the Todesstreifen (the death-strip)—the barren strip of land separating the walls between East and West—was now the most significant place in the new Berlin. The memorial’s proximity to the Brandenburg Gate and also Reichstag signify its importance in the metaphorical heart of Germany.
- 13.
Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire’, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 5–29 (p. 9).
- 14.
Aleida Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past’, p. 26.
- 15.
It was common for designers and architects to submit proposals with individual titles such as Stone-Breath, by Daniel Libeskind, and Yellow Flowers, by Dani Karavan, knowing they would be changed to the pre-designated title is selected.
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Callaghan, M. (2020). Introduction. In: Empathetic Memorials. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50932-3_1
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