I think the average person fails to see restorative justice in everyday events. Growing up in inner city chicago has been an experience to say the least. So what happens when a trauma such as shooting- or something even as commonplace as parental drug use- engulfs a child. Children are at such a pinnacle point in their lives. These events affect us so deeply that they resonate even now. I may have not have ever visited a place such as Auschwitz or Buchenwald, but I’ve had my own share of justice. More importantly, I’ve faced restorative justice in, perhaps, its most raw form.
Thank you for putting this together. I agree with bmw, there is restorative justice to be found in the everyday events. When it is in the everyday and in the little things that we find justice, commemoration, and restoration it cultivates a culture of justice and peace.
At the Jewish Museum in Berlin we were lead into a dark, triangular shaped room with a tiny pinpoint of light at the top. The group was led into the room and then the room was made totally dark—I think the noise of a heartbeat was playing—or some whooshing sound. It was somehow supposed to represent how the Jews felt in concentration camps. It was very confusing to me.
I visit memorial sites because I feel obligated to go. Maybe I feel like I’m counteracting ravenous tourist impulses by trying to understand. But that’s completely ironic, isn’t it?
I visited the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C. My reactions to it were varied—great pain and sadness, a sense of being overwhelmed by the vast number of names engraved on the stark black stones, a feeling of deep loss for the thousands more Vietnamese who perished in that brutal war, and a certainty about the “rightness” of this memorial’s shape—like a terrible black scar, V-shaped on our collective unconsciousness. War is indeed a terrible scar on all of us…not only the Vietnam War, but the current war as well.
I recently visited Yad Vashem, a place meant to keep us from forgetting. Sadly, I thought the site was an insult to memory. A place that seeks to articulate the inarticulatable through wall text, posters and videos does nothing for the memories of those who suffer because of the Shoah. It was the eery rush of wind through trees on Mt. Herzl that provoked something meaningful to me.
When visiting the mall in Washington D.C., I had a profound experience when first viewing the Korean War Veterans Memorial. I remember feeling as though the bronze statues had souls. I felt both a sense of loss and peace. As I walked through the memorial I felt alone even though I was with others. As we came to the end of the gathering of bronze sculptures we entered a new modern complex I was stunned by the sudden Disneyland feel as I was surrounded by strollers and ice cream/water carts.
My best friend’s mom made a cookbook of family recipes for her children. It was a cancer diagnosis that prompted this project. Once finished, other family members requested copies, so additional copies were printed and I was fortunate to receive one.
My friend’s family is Jewish and many of the recipes are traditional Jewish dishes. For several of these recipes, the instructions call for a “glass” of certain ingredients. What that meant, I learned, was a Yahrzeit glass. Thrifty, depression-consciousness Jewish households would often save Yahrzeit glasses to use after the candle had been burned, since it made no sense to throw out a perfectly good glass.
Every time I read through her cookbook, I pause to think about the glasses, and those in whose memories the candles were lit. Many of those were Holocaust victims, and so in its own way this cookbook is a “place of memory” as defined by this exhibit.
I went to North Beach, MD after many years (50). I used to walk the pier. I remember the pier was very far into the bay, and had large painful splinters. When I returned I found it decayed and that the pier was actually a short narrow pier
I’ve visited the Sixth Floor Museum and Dealey Plaza surrounding areas a few times at various times in my life, before and since the museum has been completed.
The first time I was there I was young, Dallas County already had purchased the site and the plans for the museum were in the works. However, without the displays, the videos, the shop, it felt like wandering through history. It didn’t feel like we were there for an ATTRACTION but were there to engage ourselves with history, and remember (or learn about) a huge event in America’s past. We could not go to the 6th Floor, but could go to either the 5th or 7th and look out that floor’s corresponding window. We could wander around on the streets, and walk up one grassy knoll and then another, until we found what my parent’s guessed must have been the one. It was quiet, and sad, and respectful. We felt curious, poking around quietly and respectfully. Parents whispered to their children about what they were looking for and adults comforted each other.
We revisited years later once the museum was complete, and it felt like a visit to the Mall. Docents were on hand to answer questions, point you to the restrooms, or the 6th floor window, videos shone and sounded from several areas of the space. Photography was not allowed, in order to keep it quiet for visitors, but that only leads to more chattering as employees and guests argue about why not. Walking tours were in full swing, which means that “everyone should line up over here, please, over here, this way!” Parents now, instead of holding their children close to them to whisper of events from the past, now shouted at them to stop running, be quiet and show some respect. And there’s a SHOP.
I much preferred it when you had to look for it, when you had to go with someone old enough to know the landmarks, who would inevitably tell you where they were when JFK was shot in Dallas. Now it’s too easy which makes it too busy.
On a trip to El Salvador a few years ago, we visited several “places of memory”, most relating to atrocities that were committed by the Salvadorian government during their civil war. It is so strange to experience these sites as they are surprisingly calm and peaceful, given how disturbing the crimes were that were committed in each site. Many of the places are still in use in one way or another or are so remote that it is virtually impossible to get there. Maybe these facts lend to that feeling, but there is this sense of resolve at each place, as if the people have come to terms with these hellacious acts in ways that I haven’t experienced in other places. It is so strange for people who have had so much taken away, who struggle so much everyday and have experienced so much violence at the hands of the government and are beginning to experience it again. How can they find resolve? The tenacity and character of the people is astonishing.
In Berlin last year I visited Check Point Charlie and saw the remaining portions of the Berlin wall, but one of the other places I visited that really left a lasting impression was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (also called the Holocaust Memorial). The memorial consists of over 2,000 cement slabs which are vertically arranged on a full city block in the middle of the city. Various scandals and concerns arose during the construction of the memorial, but it struck me that the German people continued to support it. I got the feeling that the people were not rejecting their past- instead they seemed to be accepting the historical events and respecting the lessons the world learned. As I walked between the slabs, I was struck with a sense of being disoriented; the ground is uneven and the slabs vary in height, which also makes certain paths darker than others. After walking through the memorial, I noticed what an unusual feeling had come over me. The memorial conveyed a heaviness that I hadn’t felt before- as surreal as it was, nothing else I saw in Berlin had that kind of impact on me. When in comes to memorials, some have a greater, longer lasting impact on me, and I think the feeling I had in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has really stuck with me.
I traveled to Krakow, Poland, in order to visit the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a powerful experience, to say the least. As a history major, I cherish the opportunity to be able to visit the actual areas where events took place. It makes the information one absorbs and learns all the more pertinent and effective. This is a perfect example. Learning about Auschwitz from a distance is much different then actually being there and walking through the same buildings and areas and really seeing the conditions the prisoners lived in. Our guide was very knowledgable and with his words was able to recreate and bring back to life the trajedies and horrors that occurred there. One had no choice but to seriously contemplate the stories he told about what happened there. It was an afternoon I’ll never forget.
I lived in Berlin the winter before the wall was demolished. I was fascinated by the wall- the art on it; the scale of it; the absurdity of it…One day, my friends decided that I should see Checkpoint Charlie. The checkpoint itself looked like a pre-fab shed, or a parking ramp hut. It was tiny. The guards were smoking cigarettes and seemed pretty disengaged. There was a disheveled little museum there. It was dedicated to freedom struggles in general and the plight of people in the GDR in particular. There were lots of pictures of attempted escapes, paraphernalia from successful escapes (homemade guard uniforms, etc), protest posters, documents…
What I remember most from the visit, though, was that my friends were bored- apparently the trip to CC was solely for my benefit. I noticed time and again that my German friends were uninterested by that enormous barrier of free will. They said they rarely thought about the wall. It was built in 1961 and preceded their births. It was simply a reality. I questioned my own obsession with the wall (my friends tolerated it, but it was clearly uncool.) I was so moved by the desolation of the neighborhoods it cut through and the arbitrariness of a drawn line.
I watched the wall come down on TV. My friends were in that sea of celebration in the streets. When we talked, they said that people really had no idea it was going to happen. When I was there, everyone thought it would stand forever. My friend Andrea- normally aloof- sobbed with happiness on the phone. It was like a whole world of possibility opened up in one day.
I wonder about CC as a trauma site. I wonder whether it can be both a site for healing (presuming that that is the function of memorial sites) and a booming economic center. There was an article a few years ago about the widow of the guy who started the museum. She rented the lot behind the checkpoint hut and planted a thousand-plus crosses in remembrance of the victims who perished because of the wall. The next year, the owner of the lot terminated the lease agreemnet and bulldozed the memorial. Apparently the real-estate potential was more significant than the memorial. The city has re-erected a piece of the wall at the site to maintain the flavor and generate tourism. A friend told me the hut had been moved indoors to a museum. I haven’t been back; but am glad I was there when.
Have you thought about places of personal trauma? like homes where kids were abused or trusted places, like churches, that become places to which one returns to for family celebrations that also evoke the memory of the abuse?
there are also the many, many mother-and-baby homes in Ireland –the sad places where the birthing process was used as an instrument of punishment for the women and children-yet-unborne?
In 2000 I went to a reunion for the Heart Mountain Internment Camp, where my father’s family had been interned during the war. They had some ancient Japanese American men who served in MIS (military intelligence) as translators get up and talk about how proud they were to serve their country. My dad cried and wiped his eyes on a napkin during the banquet, but he said that he had allergies.
when I was growing up, we knew that my Dad had been poor, because when we would bitch about our allergies he would talk about thinning sugar beets in the springtime and having to tie a handkerchief to his face because they had no allergy medicine. but I figured that in those days allergy medicine didn’t exist, for anyone, and that this was more about how we should stop complaining.
We did drive our rental car to the site of the actual camp buildings. there was nothing there, except for a small plaque. My grndmother put a stone in my purse to take home to remember it by. I was struck by how much things had changed–my family has done well econmically, and since I grew up in upper middle class splendor in Saratoga, california, all I could think is what hicks the Cody inhabitants were, and how awful their shopping was. I felt very cosmopolitan in that moment, even though I am an extremely provincial person and speak no other languages besides English.
I am a professor now, and teach race, ethnicity, and new media. It’s been said that there was no lieux de memoire in digital space (Wolfgang Ernst’s essay on the Archive in _New Media, Old Media_, edited by Chun and Keenan, Routledge Press, 2005) because there is no physical, material archive. This piece is an electronic lieux de memoire. when I was using it of course the motion of flying over the globe and landing on sites of trauma was very powerful in that it invoked a sense of omnipresence–no continent is not on this map. What was shocking though is that unlike other visual archives of trauma spots, these spots are depicted “live” and thus don’t look different, from the point of view of the digital satellite gaze, from any other spot around them. the yellow push pin seems placed arbitrarily–shouldn’t these sites appear different from others, from the air? of course they don’t because trauma is always about both visibility and erasure–the memorial makes visible what otherwise would disappear, but Google Earth makes all sites look the same, with more or less detail depending on how dense digital activity is around those areas. Google Earth doesn’t cover all parts of the globe equally accurately.
There is a lot of hope in the education business about the possibilities that virtual worlds might offer educators and kids, and people generally. This installation is a virtual world that is very different from Second Life, but it is also a navigable space imposed on a physical place that is the product of a vision of world-building. While Linden wants to make a world where we can all buy and sell idealized bodies, sex, and social discourse, this project makes a world out of navigable spaces of trauma. This eloquent archive is of built environments of suffering, environments that were virtual in the sense that they were ephemeral, and NEEDED to be memorialized (most of the entries here for concentration camps emphasize their short term of operation and efforts to erase them). while digital worlds are viewed in an overly utopian way, but can also be the site of trauma (gay bashing is very common online in multiplayer environments, as are sexual harrassment and so on), this digital piece takes that premise of the virtual world and makes it more real and more grounded.
I like as well that the user doesn’t get to navigate this on her own. instead there is the sense of flying, being transported or jumping from one site to another. It’s good not to be agentive and touristic in this piece. Volitional navigation is the visual reward of the digital class. Not getting to click to where you want to go is a key part of the experience of this piece. Getting a little sick, a little vertiginous, is a feeling that mimicks some that other posters here have described. It is hard to memorialize something without commodifying it, and fixing it in a form. Google Earth is dynamic surveillant content, so this piece will change every day. This ultimate piece of spyware for the masses is deployed here as a map of the now as well as a tour, literally, of trauma sites.
My five cousins were drowned in Houston Texas by their mother when she was seriously mentally ill. I was at their home for during the funeral time. The outpouring of emotion swirling around was overwhelming. There was also some very ugly things going on in the media, and with the police, that were unimaginable for people going though this type of trauma.
Spontaneously the people in Houston, especially children, started leaving stuffed animals nest to a large tree right in the middle of their yard. The pile grew and grew, and epopel would come at night and light candles. You can’t imagine what that physical and visual image did for the people in that house who were suffering, and beleagured by the nastiness and venom that came from other sources.
I believe it is some of those unscripted spontaneous guestures from the heart that make life bearable. People showed how much they cared about those five little souls and kept the focus on what was important.
I like this piece, its interactivity. I’ve been to many memorial sites & have never been that moved really. I feel the need, at such places, to try to feel moved, and the forcing of myself to be moved actually adds to a sense of frustration. I remember visiting the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. It was a cold, odd place. Its more or less untouched as I remember it. I was 12 or 13 then (I am 21 now). Later, I went to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. All I remember was asking a dumb question to one of the memorial employees. And or course I’ve been to Ground Zero in NYC, and that didn’t do anything for me. It’s hard to have a personal experience of tragedies since they are so often appropriated and spun by the media, which I recognize to be a juggernaut of homogenization. What, really, is the difference between September 11th and the death of Anna Nicole Smith?
Last spring I went to the Terezenstadt transit camp in the Czech Republic. It was a unique Holocaust site, because it was used by the Nazis to be the model concentration camp for the Red Cross. The picked healthy looking inmates to act in a propoganda film, showing well-fed, clean, and happy Jewish prisoners. In reality, the food was taken from them when filming ended, and the plumbing shown in the film was never hooked up to water. Most of those seen in the films were very soon after transported to Auschwitz and exterminated. What was also unique about this site, is that the Nazis turned an entire city, Terezin, into this transit area. It is eerie to look around the town, where people now live, and realize that each and every building here was used to inter prisoners on their way to death camps. The town is an interesting mix of museum and memorial, and everyday life. Outside of the museum in the town center, there is a park, where families brought their children to play on the day that I was there. The prison, a few miles away from the town, is also a powerful reminder of the Holocaust. Upon entering the prison gates, you see the famous sign that Nazis put on the entrance to camps to falsely encourage prisoners, “Arbeit Macht Frei”-Work will make you free. There remains the wall against which prisoners were executed, complete with bullet holes. You can travel in the walls of the 18th century garrison, where Nazis used to move from one part of the prison to another.
The most powerful part of this experience was the visit to the crematorium. It has been extremely well preserved, with the original autopsy tables and tools. You can light a candle to place on the ovens, and surrounding the building are symbolic grave markers, and memorials to the religions of those murdered. There are constant reminders of what happened there, including the sinks with no running water, and the artwork of children and artists who strove to preserve a sense of normalcy and culture in those extreme circumstances. I was reminded that as a Jew, it could have very easily been me in one of those barracks, or in the ashes of the crematoria.
I wanted to reflect on my experiences at the DOPS site in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was really hard to find when I went in 2007. I hear it is easier now . I’m not sure because I have not been back. At that time, the experience was fairly empty. I left the DOPS torture center wondering why I had spent so much time trying to find this place. No one knew where it was for good reason: there is nothing there and nothing to see. I headed for the Estação Luz subway. Despite my persistence, I could not convince anyone to tell me about it: what it meant, who came to it, what I should take from it. In an attempt to take a picture from the outside, I had to fend off a drunk who wanted to borrow my camera. I headed away from him only to have a police car pull up next to me on the sidewalk. The officer leaped out of the passenger seat and took aim with his gun at street children sitting on the sidewalk. Some had already fled as soon as they saw the car. Others scattered while the policeman took aim. Still others slowly ran away making sure the officer heard their taunts. This seemed like a pretty typical day for both the officer and the children. No one was surprised but me. I had just left a place aimed at remembering to not repeat. It was a mere block away. The existence of the memorial was not enough, particularly when it had no memories inside. It was devoid not only of memory but also political meaning. The police officer just outside the site could, therefore, act with impunity. Does the absence of memorials make a culture of impunity, or does a culture of impunity render empty memorials?
I visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa in July 2006. It is a well organized museum that maps the history of Apartheid. Some of it was hard to look at, and certainly difficult to understand from a human point of view. Of course I was angry reading about the way Black South Africans were treated during Apartheid. At the end of my way around the museum, I watched the film of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Though I remember watching that on television in real time, seeing it in this museum in 2006, made me cry.
I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC four times, around the time it opened. I live in the Washington, DC area, and went to that museum with out-of-town visitors. Last time I was there was 10 years ago and I won’t go back. Too painful. The museum was laid out in such a way that you have to walk through a Hall of Remembrance on the way out. There is no talking allowed in that hall, and I believe an eternal flame burns there. It gave me a chance to process what I had just seen, and I needed it.
I visited the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2008 and viewed a photo exhibit commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was mesmerized at the photojournalists’ photos of events that took place during the civil rights movement, and particularly in the 60s. The thing that most amazed me, was that these horrific acts of prejudice and violence against people of color and others participating in the civil rights movement took place during my own lifetime.
I think it’s important to remember these atrocities committed by people against other people. It is my hope that by creating memorials to those who suffered and by telling the truth about the history behind these movements of prejudice and suffering, that it will prevent these kinds of things from every happening again.
When visiting the concentration camps throughout Poland, I was most taken back by the memorials that displayed collections of shoes, hair, pottery… that the prisoners owned during their time at the camps. This illustrated the unimaginable quantity of prisoners. It is hard to grasp how terrible the events that occurred were, as it is easy to just remember the total numbers of deaths instead of hearing the individual stories. Visiting the camps, specifically Auscwitz, Buchenwald, Krakow, and several other smaller ones, was an incredibly emotional experience, truly putting a picture to the numbers and facts that are preached in classrooms.
I think the average person fails to see restorative justice in everyday events. Growing up in inner city chicago has been an experience to say the least. So what happens when a trauma such as shooting- or something even as commonplace as parental drug use- engulfs a child. Children are at such a pinnacle point in their lives. These events affect us so deeply that they resonate even now. I may have not have ever visited a place such as Auschwitz or Buchenwald, but I’ve had my own share of justice. More importantly, I’ve faced restorative justice in, perhaps, its most raw form.
Thank you for putting this together. I agree with bmw, there is restorative justice to be found in the everyday events. When it is in the everyday and in the little things that we find justice, commemoration, and restoration it cultivates a culture of justice and peace.
At the Jewish Museum in Berlin we were lead into a dark, triangular shaped room with a tiny pinpoint of light at the top. The group was led into the room and then the room was made totally dark—I think the noise of a heartbeat was playing—or some whooshing sound. It was somehow supposed to represent how the Jews felt in concentration camps. It was very confusing to me.
I visit memorial sites because I feel obligated to go. Maybe I feel like I’m counteracting ravenous tourist impulses by trying to understand. But that’s completely ironic, isn’t it?
I visited the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C. My reactions to it were varied—great pain and sadness, a sense of being overwhelmed by the vast number of names engraved on the stark black stones, a feeling of deep loss for the thousands more Vietnamese who perished in that brutal war, and a certainty about the “rightness” of this memorial’s shape—like a terrible black scar, V-shaped on our collective unconsciousness. War is indeed a terrible scar on all of us…not only the Vietnam War, but the current war as well.
I recently visited Yad Vashem, a place meant to keep us from forgetting. Sadly, I thought the site was an insult to memory. A place that seeks to articulate the inarticulatable through wall text, posters and videos does nothing for the memories of those who suffer because of the Shoah. It was the eery rush of wind through trees on Mt. Herzl that provoked something meaningful to me.
When visiting the mall in Washington D.C., I had a profound experience when first viewing the Korean War Veterans Memorial. I remember feeling as though the bronze statues had souls. I felt both a sense of loss and peace. As I walked through the memorial I felt alone even though I was with others. As we came to the end of the gathering of bronze sculptures we entered a new modern complex I was stunned by the sudden Disneyland feel as I was surrounded by strollers and ice cream/water carts.
My best friend’s mom made a cookbook of family recipes for her children. It was a cancer diagnosis that prompted this project. Once finished, other family members requested copies, so additional copies were printed and I was fortunate to receive one.
My friend’s family is Jewish and many of the recipes are traditional Jewish dishes. For several of these recipes, the instructions call for a “glass” of certain ingredients. What that meant, I learned, was a Yahrzeit glass. Thrifty, depression-consciousness Jewish households would often save Yahrzeit glasses to use after the candle had been burned, since it made no sense to throw out a perfectly good glass.
Every time I read through her cookbook, I pause to think about the glasses, and those in whose memories the candles were lit. Many of those were Holocaust victims, and so in its own way this cookbook is a “place of memory” as defined by this exhibit.
I went to North Beach, MD after many years (50). I used to walk the pier. I remember the pier was very far into the bay, and had large painful splinters. When I returned I found it decayed and that the pier was actually a short narrow pier
I’ve visited the Sixth Floor Museum and Dealey Plaza surrounding areas a few times at various times in my life, before and since the museum has been completed.
The first time I was there I was young, Dallas County already had purchased the site and the plans for the museum were in the works. However, without the displays, the videos, the shop, it felt like wandering through history. It didn’t feel like we were there for an ATTRACTION but were there to engage ourselves with history, and remember (or learn about) a huge event in America’s past. We could not go to the 6th Floor, but could go to either the 5th or 7th and look out that floor’s corresponding window. We could wander around on the streets, and walk up one grassy knoll and then another, until we found what my parent’s guessed must have been the one. It was quiet, and sad, and respectful. We felt curious, poking around quietly and respectfully. Parents whispered to their children about what they were looking for and adults comforted each other.
We revisited years later once the museum was complete, and it felt like a visit to the Mall. Docents were on hand to answer questions, point you to the restrooms, or the 6th floor window, videos shone and sounded from several areas of the space. Photography was not allowed, in order to keep it quiet for visitors, but that only leads to more chattering as employees and guests argue about why not. Walking tours were in full swing, which means that “everyone should line up over here, please, over here, this way!” Parents now, instead of holding their children close to them to whisper of events from the past, now shouted at them to stop running, be quiet and show some respect. And there’s a SHOP.
I much preferred it when you had to look for it, when you had to go with someone old enough to know the landmarks, who would inevitably tell you where they were when JFK was shot in Dallas. Now it’s too easy which makes it too busy.
On a trip to El Salvador a few years ago, we visited several “places of memory”, most relating to atrocities that were committed by the Salvadorian government during their civil war. It is so strange to experience these sites as they are surprisingly calm and peaceful, given how disturbing the crimes were that were committed in each site. Many of the places are still in use in one way or another or are so remote that it is virtually impossible to get there. Maybe these facts lend to that feeling, but there is this sense of resolve at each place, as if the people have come to terms with these hellacious acts in ways that I haven’t experienced in other places. It is so strange for people who have had so much taken away, who struggle so much everyday and have experienced so much violence at the hands of the government and are beginning to experience it again. How can they find resolve? The tenacity and character of the people is astonishing.
In Berlin last year I visited Check Point Charlie and saw the remaining portions of the Berlin wall, but one of the other places I visited that really left a lasting impression was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (also called the Holocaust Memorial). The memorial consists of over 2,000 cement slabs which are vertically arranged on a full city block in the middle of the city. Various scandals and concerns arose during the construction of the memorial, but it struck me that the German people continued to support it. I got the feeling that the people were not rejecting their past- instead they seemed to be accepting the historical events and respecting the lessons the world learned. As I walked between the slabs, I was struck with a sense of being disoriented; the ground is uneven and the slabs vary in height, which also makes certain paths darker than others. After walking through the memorial, I noticed what an unusual feeling had come over me. The memorial conveyed a heaviness that I hadn’t felt before- as surreal as it was, nothing else I saw in Berlin had that kind of impact on me. When in comes to memorials, some have a greater, longer lasting impact on me, and I think the feeling I had in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has really stuck with me.
I traveled to Krakow, Poland, in order to visit the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a powerful experience, to say the least. As a history major, I cherish the opportunity to be able to visit the actual areas where events took place. It makes the information one absorbs and learns all the more pertinent and effective. This is a perfect example. Learning about Auschwitz from a distance is much different then actually being there and walking through the same buildings and areas and really seeing the conditions the prisoners lived in. Our guide was very knowledgable and with his words was able to recreate and bring back to life the trajedies and horrors that occurred there. One had no choice but to seriously contemplate the stories he told about what happened there. It was an afternoon I’ll never forget.
I lived in Berlin the winter before the wall was demolished. I was fascinated by the wall- the art on it; the scale of it; the absurdity of it…One day, my friends decided that I should see Checkpoint Charlie. The checkpoint itself looked like a pre-fab shed, or a parking ramp hut. It was tiny. The guards were smoking cigarettes and seemed pretty disengaged. There was a disheveled little museum there. It was dedicated to freedom struggles in general and the plight of people in the GDR in particular. There were lots of pictures of attempted escapes, paraphernalia from successful escapes (homemade guard uniforms, etc), protest posters, documents…
What I remember most from the visit, though, was that my friends were bored- apparently the trip to CC was solely for my benefit. I noticed time and again that my German friends were uninterested by that enormous barrier of free will. They said they rarely thought about the wall. It was built in 1961 and preceded their births. It was simply a reality. I questioned my own obsession with the wall (my friends tolerated it, but it was clearly uncool.) I was so moved by the desolation of the neighborhoods it cut through and the arbitrariness of a drawn line.
I watched the wall come down on TV. My friends were in that sea of celebration in the streets. When we talked, they said that people really had no idea it was going to happen. When I was there, everyone thought it would stand forever. My friend Andrea- normally aloof- sobbed with happiness on the phone. It was like a whole world of possibility opened up in one day.
I wonder about CC as a trauma site. I wonder whether it can be both a site for healing (presuming that that is the function of memorial sites) and a booming economic center. There was an article a few years ago about the widow of the guy who started the museum. She rented the lot behind the checkpoint hut and planted a thousand-plus crosses in remembrance of the victims who perished because of the wall. The next year, the owner of the lot terminated the lease agreemnet and bulldozed the memorial. Apparently the real-estate potential was more significant than the memorial. The city has re-erected a piece of the wall at the site to maintain the flavor and generate tourism. A friend told me the hut had been moved indoors to a museum. I haven’t been back; but am glad I was there when.
Have you thought about places of personal trauma? like homes where kids were abused or trusted places, like churches, that become places to which one returns to for family celebrations that also evoke the memory of the abuse?
there are also the many, many mother-and-baby homes in Ireland –the sad places where the birthing process was used as an instrument of punishment for the women and children-yet-unborne?
thanks you for doing this
In 2000 I went to a reunion for the Heart Mountain Internment Camp, where my father’s family had been interned during the war. They had some ancient Japanese American men who served in MIS (military intelligence) as translators get up and talk about how proud they were to serve their country. My dad cried and wiped his eyes on a napkin during the banquet, but he said that he had allergies.
when I was growing up, we knew that my Dad had been poor, because when we would bitch about our allergies he would talk about thinning sugar beets in the springtime and having to tie a handkerchief to his face because they had no allergy medicine. but I figured that in those days allergy medicine didn’t exist, for anyone, and that this was more about how we should stop complaining.
We did drive our rental car to the site of the actual camp buildings. there was nothing there, except for a small plaque. My grndmother put a stone in my purse to take home to remember it by. I was struck by how much things had changed–my family has done well econmically, and since I grew up in upper middle class splendor in Saratoga, california, all I could think is what hicks the Cody inhabitants were, and how awful their shopping was. I felt very cosmopolitan in that moment, even though I am an extremely provincial person and speak no other languages besides English.
I am a professor now, and teach race, ethnicity, and new media. It’s been said that there was no lieux de memoire in digital space (Wolfgang Ernst’s essay on the Archive in _New Media, Old Media_, edited by Chun and Keenan, Routledge Press, 2005) because there is no physical, material archive. This piece is an electronic lieux de memoire. when I was using it of course the motion of flying over the globe and landing on sites of trauma was very powerful in that it invoked a sense of omnipresence–no continent is not on this map. What was shocking though is that unlike other visual archives of trauma spots, these spots are depicted “live” and thus don’t look different, from the point of view of the digital satellite gaze, from any other spot around them. the yellow push pin seems placed arbitrarily–shouldn’t these sites appear different from others, from the air? of course they don’t because trauma is always about both visibility and erasure–the memorial makes visible what otherwise would disappear, but Google Earth makes all sites look the same, with more or less detail depending on how dense digital activity is around those areas. Google Earth doesn’t cover all parts of the globe equally accurately.
There is a lot of hope in the education business about the possibilities that virtual worlds might offer educators and kids, and people generally. This installation is a virtual world that is very different from Second Life, but it is also a navigable space imposed on a physical place that is the product of a vision of world-building. While Linden wants to make a world where we can all buy and sell idealized bodies, sex, and social discourse, this project makes a world out of navigable spaces of trauma. This eloquent archive is of built environments of suffering, environments that were virtual in the sense that they were ephemeral, and NEEDED to be memorialized (most of the entries here for concentration camps emphasize their short term of operation and efforts to erase them). while digital worlds are viewed in an overly utopian way, but can also be the site of trauma (gay bashing is very common online in multiplayer environments, as are sexual harrassment and so on), this digital piece takes that premise of the virtual world and makes it more real and more grounded.
I like as well that the user doesn’t get to navigate this on her own. instead there is the sense of flying, being transported or jumping from one site to another. It’s good not to be agentive and touristic in this piece. Volitional navigation is the visual reward of the digital class. Not getting to click to where you want to go is a key part of the experience of this piece. Getting a little sick, a little vertiginous, is a feeling that mimicks some that other posters here have described. It is hard to memorialize something without commodifying it, and fixing it in a form. Google Earth is dynamic surveillant content, so this piece will change every day. This ultimate piece of spyware for the masses is deployed here as a map of the now as well as a tour, literally, of trauma sites.
My five cousins were drowned in Houston Texas by their mother when she was seriously mentally ill. I was at their home for during the funeral time. The outpouring of emotion swirling around was overwhelming. There was also some very ugly things going on in the media, and with the police, that were unimaginable for people going though this type of trauma.
Spontaneously the people in Houston, especially children, started leaving stuffed animals nest to a large tree right in the middle of their yard. The pile grew and grew, and epopel would come at night and light candles. You can’t imagine what that physical and visual image did for the people in that house who were suffering, and beleagured by the nastiness and venom that came from other sources.
I believe it is some of those unscripted spontaneous guestures from the heart that make life bearable. People showed how much they cared about those five little souls and kept the focus on what was important.
Kristin Yates
I like this piece, its interactivity. I’ve been to many memorial sites & have never been that moved really. I feel the need, at such places, to try to feel moved, and the forcing of myself to be moved actually adds to a sense of frustration. I remember visiting the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. It was a cold, odd place. Its more or less untouched as I remember it. I was 12 or 13 then (I am 21 now). Later, I went to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. All I remember was asking a dumb question to one of the memorial employees. And or course I’ve been to Ground Zero in NYC, and that didn’t do anything for me. It’s hard to have a personal experience of tragedies since they are so often appropriated and spun by the media, which I recognize to be a juggernaut of homogenization. What, really, is the difference between September 11th and the death of Anna Nicole Smith?
Last spring I went to the Terezenstadt transit camp in the Czech Republic. It was a unique Holocaust site, because it was used by the Nazis to be the model concentration camp for the Red Cross. The picked healthy looking inmates to act in a propoganda film, showing well-fed, clean, and happy Jewish prisoners. In reality, the food was taken from them when filming ended, and the plumbing shown in the film was never hooked up to water. Most of those seen in the films were very soon after transported to Auschwitz and exterminated. What was also unique about this site, is that the Nazis turned an entire city, Terezin, into this transit area. It is eerie to look around the town, where people now live, and realize that each and every building here was used to inter prisoners on their way to death camps. The town is an interesting mix of museum and memorial, and everyday life. Outside of the museum in the town center, there is a park, where families brought their children to play on the day that I was there. The prison, a few miles away from the town, is also a powerful reminder of the Holocaust. Upon entering the prison gates, you see the famous sign that Nazis put on the entrance to camps to falsely encourage prisoners, “Arbeit Macht Frei”-Work will make you free. There remains the wall against which prisoners were executed, complete with bullet holes. You can travel in the walls of the 18th century garrison, where Nazis used to move from one part of the prison to another.
The most powerful part of this experience was the visit to the crematorium. It has been extremely well preserved, with the original autopsy tables and tools. You can light a candle to place on the ovens, and surrounding the building are symbolic grave markers, and memorials to the religions of those murdered. There are constant reminders of what happened there, including the sinks with no running water, and the artwork of children and artists who strove to preserve a sense of normalcy and culture in those extreme circumstances. I was reminded that as a Jew, it could have very easily been me in one of those barracks, or in the ashes of the crematoria.
I wanted to reflect on my experiences at the DOPS site in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was really hard to find when I went in 2007. I hear it is easier now . I’m not sure because I have not been back. At that time, the experience was fairly empty. I left the DOPS torture center wondering why I had spent so much time trying to find this place. No one knew where it was for good reason: there is nothing there and nothing to see. I headed for the Estação Luz subway. Despite my persistence, I could not convince anyone to tell me about it: what it meant, who came to it, what I should take from it. In an attempt to take a picture from the outside, I had to fend off a drunk who wanted to borrow my camera. I headed away from him only to have a police car pull up next to me on the sidewalk. The officer leaped out of the passenger seat and took aim with his gun at street children sitting on the sidewalk. Some had already fled as soon as they saw the car. Others scattered while the policeman took aim. Still others slowly ran away making sure the officer heard their taunts. This seemed like a pretty typical day for both the officer and the children. No one was surprised but me. I had just left a place aimed at remembering to not repeat. It was a mere block away. The existence of the memorial was not enough, particularly when it had no memories inside. It was devoid not only of memory but also political meaning. The police officer just outside the site could, therefore, act with impunity. Does the absence of memorials make a culture of impunity, or does a culture of impunity render empty memorials?
I visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa in July 2006. It is a well organized museum that maps the history of Apartheid. Some of it was hard to look at, and certainly difficult to understand from a human point of view. Of course I was angry reading about the way Black South Africans were treated during Apartheid. At the end of my way around the museum, I watched the film of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Though I remember watching that on television in real time, seeing it in this museum in 2006, made me cry.
I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC four times, around the time it opened. I live in the Washington, DC area, and went to that museum with out-of-town visitors. Last time I was there was 10 years ago and I won’t go back. Too painful. The museum was laid out in such a way that you have to walk through a Hall of Remembrance on the way out. There is no talking allowed in that hall, and I believe an eternal flame burns there. It gave me a chance to process what I had just seen, and I needed it.
I visited the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2008 and viewed a photo exhibit commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was mesmerized at the photojournalists’ photos of events that took place during the civil rights movement, and particularly in the 60s. The thing that most amazed me, was that these horrific acts of prejudice and violence against people of color and others participating in the civil rights movement took place during my own lifetime.
I think it’s important to remember these atrocities committed by people against other people. It is my hope that by creating memorials to those who suffered and by telling the truth about the history behind these movements of prejudice and suffering, that it will prevent these kinds of things from every happening again.
When visiting the concentration camps throughout Poland, I was most taken back by the memorials that displayed collections of shoes, hair, pottery… that the prisoners owned during their time at the camps. This illustrated the unimaginable quantity of prisoners. It is hard to grasp how terrible the events that occurred were, as it is easy to just remember the total numbers of deaths instead of hearing the individual stories. Visiting the camps, specifically Auscwitz, Buchenwald, Krakow, and several other smaller ones, was an incredibly emotional experience, truly putting a picture to the numbers and facts that are preached in classrooms.