History and Traumatic Memory: Memorial Camp of Auschwitz

“The history that showed things as they really were was the strongest narcotic of the century”[N3, 4]

If we flip over the chronicle of the twentieth century, we will find the First and the Second World Wars on the darkest pages. Killing in battlefield is the struggle of life and death. Soldiers kill enemies in order to survive, or they will see themselves the next one lying in the trench. Nevertheless, there is another type of killing–purer, simpler, and much more atrocious–killing with reasons, killing the marginalized, such as children, the old, Jews, or Gypsies. It is no longer categorized as ‘killing’ but as ‘slaughter,’ or even ‘genocide’ against specific ethnic subject. The Holocaust at Auschwitz is the most well-known and the most notorious case of the unbearable fragment of history. In this essay, I will try to combine the memorial camp of Auschwitz and Benjamin’s idea about history. As a Jewish-German, Benjamin had no way to get rid of the fear of being put into the concentration camp by Gestapo. Moreover, Benjamin indicates an unique treatment of history, interpreting history by collecting the fragments or debris, rather than constructing a whole narrative to present history. Long before he wrote On the Concept of History, Benjamin had started “brush[ing] history against the grain” (Selected Writings 392) when he revisited the flourished arcades in the nineteenth century Paris. “Telescoping the past through the present” [N7a,3], writes Benjamin, and he demonstrates how to swim in reverse direction in the currents of history. Michael Löwy, in Fire Alarm, makes a further explication that Benjamin’s peculiar perspective of history is to, on the one hand, manifest the oppressed “who have fallen beneath the wheels of those majestic, magnificent chariots called Civilization, Progress and Modernity” (Löwy 49). Benjamin has marked out a road not taken, while it is the exact road leading us to a full recognition of history. This reverse introspection should be cast upon the memorial camp of Auschwitz because it is a monument too complicated to be interpreted. As a self-contradictory building, the remains of the memorial camp signify the ending of the Second War, yet every visitor finds no glory of victory but only the melancholy far cry from the past, echoing among the empty barracks. It is this contradiction that makes the memorial camp a more illegible symbol, hard to penetrate and comprehend. The monument, like memorial camp, designates two dilemmas to be dealt with: Firstly, the memorial camp of Auschwitz is still looking for a definition. How Auschwitz, the synonym of the Holocaust, the Shoah, the most imperceptible misery in the twentieth century is transformed and presented? After the representation is fulfilled, its function should be ostensibly in memorial of the 1.6 million victims, in which 1.3 million were Jewish, while the institutionalization seems to carry the visitors away from historical fragments ‘chosen’ to be represented. How can the traumatic memory be inherited after the survivors have all passed away?

Auschwitz, know as Oswiecim to the Poles, is actually a rough geographical designation. It consists of many components: Auschwitz I, the main camp on the peripheral town Oswiecim, has stayed intact since it was liberated by the Red Army in 1944 (Young 120). Because it is preserved so well that visitors have no sense of “abstract history” but “tangible actuality” (Dwork & Pelt 232). Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, also know as Birkenau, composes the ‘Auschwitz’ which people refer to today. A small part of the barracks at Auschwitz were adopted from former Polish barracks, while most of the constructions finished by two hundred and fifty local Jewish. “The memorial,” laments James Young, “were built by the victims it would later commemorate” (Young 120). The Memorial camp does not just preserve the remembrance to the past but accommodates contemporary experience as well. The spacious, well-constructed barracks were left behind the German’s hasty retreat, and they served as immediate shelters when Poland was in desperate short of housing in 1945. The demarcation of Auschwitz and the free world was blurred after the barbed fences were torn down and its gate welcomes not trains filled with Pows or Jews but visitors from all over the world (Dwork & Pelt 236-237). The setting of a monument, a cenotaph, may give out ambiguous messages because it is built to represent an abstract history. As a representation of the memory of misery, What a cenotaph should reveal in the design? The monument, or the memorial camp, is a construction to remind people of a specific passage of history. From the memorial, we seem to witness the past lively restored before us. however, if we chose the wrong perspective to start with, we may end up conceiving an erroneous understanding of history. Benjamin proposes an allegorical character, the angel of history, well-known for its eerie image:

“His eyes are wide, his mouth open, his wings are spread. [...] His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling a wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. [...] The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky”(Selected Writing 392)

The angel of history bears a little resemblance to war memorial when he sees piling wreckage and flies against the storm from paradise. Löwy interpretes the angel of history as to “prefigure Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the two greatest catastrophe of human history, the two most monstrous ruins that crowned the pile ‘grow[ing] toward the sky” (LöwyLöwy mentions the important notion of Trauerspiel which means “the faces hippocratica of history” (qtd. Löwy 62). The hippocratic representation could make the worst deception of history. Adorno and Benjamin held opposite attitude toward representation and misrepresentation of history. Adorno adheres to the idea “[...] nature and history constituted a concrete unity” (Hanssen 14) and regards nature as a component of human history. There is, to Adorno, nothing prehistorical and any theory alleging “an ahistorical ‘arche-principle’ of primal origin” will be inevitably be questioned by Adorno. He insisted that “one must understand historic bring itself as an ontological, that is, natural being” (Hanssen 14). Nature’s affinity with history allows Adorno’s history study to refuse “suprahistorical, transcendant meaning in favor of an analysis that lingered on transience and a logic of decay” (Hanssen 15). Adorno’s sense of history deeply roots in human history, the axis of perspectives and understanding. Hanssen makes up a brilliant metaphor to distinguish how Benjamin’s history is deviated from Adorno’s ontological representation of history. He compares Adorno’s history to “resurrecting the skeleton of history,” while Benjamin utilizes allegory to “unearth the debris of human history” (Hanssen 15). 

In the nineteenth century, ‘history’ was reduced to the records of the past, and “historiography has been reduced to historicism,” the archeology of relics from specific times (Hanssen 20). The study of history turned its focus on the excavation of stubbles of previous times, the “antiquarian collecting of rests, reminders, remnants” (Hanssen 20). History’s “skeleton” insinuates the decayed body, an ontological subject that manipulated the activity of the joints of historical parts.  Benjamin examines history neither by re-narrating the past nor by restoring the historical scenes for people to regain the atmosphere of the past. He stresses on allegory and transforms it into “the figure of natural history” which signifies “the incontrovertible historicity that defines all human acts of signification” (Hanssen 15). Nature’s history accounts for Benjamin’s main concerns for history, and in the retrospection of the true historical moment, Benjamin finds the opportunity for human kind to reach the messianic moment of redemption. “Historicism,” criticizes Benjamin, “offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past” (Thesis XVI). From the allegory of angel of history, Benjamin brings up his distinguished viewpoint of slugging against the current of time, breaking the unitary judgement of history. Löwy further explains the “Once upon a time” prostitute-like expression welcome any political regime under the historistic cover.  History, in a sense, is appropriated to give rise to false consciousness, the notion of presence is “not a transition, but [...] a standstill” (Thesis XVI), argues Benjamin, and he notices the fragments of history in transience. Progress is no longer a temporal derivation with material renovation, but a very strong embodiment, an “actualization” of now [N2,2]. This very moment is discontinual , extracted from a constellation, a synchronical demonstration of history, and be found as the crystallized thinking like a monad (Thesis XVII). Benjamin always advocates to blast “a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history,” which is demythologized by the monad of history. 

Benjamin discusses ways of reviewing history and these measures may be applied to the discussion of institutionalizing war memorials. Unlike the objective history, private or collective memory lies latent in people consciousness. In sum, history consists of actual happening along with temporal movement, while history, in a solipsistic form, can be ‘ahistorical,’ prancing over the boundary or reality. It is not reality, or we can say memory is the transformed reality. Whenever anyone say “I remember...” he or she is caught in a self-managed context deeply rooted in human mind. Without reflection, memory is nor more than one’s hallucination or deviated imagination. Combined with personal experience, sole memory is concealed in one’s secret wish of clinging to the irretrievable past. As people share a collective experience, the collective memory thus comes to realization, partial and holistic at the same time. To Benjamin, memory is “the recollection of unfinished moments” (MM 68). The unfulfilled parts of the past comes back, even haunts the one in grievous reminiscence. As a story-teller in his Berlin essays, Benjamin talks about two kinds of memory. The first kind, mémoire volontaire,  is based on “the faculty of conscious recollection, the bring back of past experience at will.” As the “Once upon a time” style mentioned in previous passage, mémoire volontaire choses the ingredients it needs and presents itself in a complete form. To Benjamin, a city dweller, the “shocks and multiple stimuli” cannot be “assimilated by the individual” (Gilloch 69). The hustle and bustle of city life makes memory incapable of being presented in an unity, and is presented in a spastic, intermittent form through the unconscious. Gilloch alleges these “scars on the unconscious” are the not-fully-forgotten residues of memory (Gilloch 69). Collecting these residual memory on the fuzzy boundary between the conscious and the unconscious, Benjamin illuminates the long-ignored corners with the “spontaneous recollection” in which “remembrance is the woof and forgetting warf” (qtd. Gilloch 69). Triggered by specific object or incident, the mémoire involontaire becomes the unpredictable, inevitable, and representative recurrence in a futile cycle. Benjamin connects his injured city memory with Freud’s war neurosis which demonstrates the compulsion to repeat, haunting the victims as the rancorous and tenacious apparition of the past. Dream’s basic function is to fulfill the dreamer’s wish(desire) and provides an outlet for the suppressed desire. However, the suppressed unconsciousness, containing the embarrassing or annoying memory, tries to disarm the dominating consciousness at times. Especially to veterans, mishap survivors, or people who once lived in great bereavement, every contact with the traumatic memory is shared by more people, the memory will grow into a collective nightmare. 

Among all the wartime records, the massacre in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, gas rooms and crematories, made a vacuum status of humanity and is thus footnoted in every book about war history. When the war was over, European countries set up all kinds of memorial cenotaph, camp, or museum in order to remind the latter generations of the lacerating pain of warfare. Auschwitz, unquestionably, was elected an important site, and would be “forever preserved as a memorial to the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other people” (Young 130). Unlike the set-up monuments or museums, Auschwitz is not just an archive of historical documents but also part of the unforgettable memory, a historical site. However, the memorial camp is encountered with a interrogation: Whether the memorial is built to commemorate or to obliterate the scarred war memory?

The Shoah, according to Rose, is an “unthinkable event” and a “figuration of an epistemological or interpretive limit” at the same time (Rose 115). The tabula rasa of historiography comes with the general destruction of ideologies. To Lyotard, “Auschwitz” signifies “a rupture in modernity’s grand narratives of emancipation and legitimation” (Rose 119). Due to the debasement of modernity, the crisis elevates the Holocaust beyond “the reach of speech, representation and thought” (Rose 120). Monuments, photos or historical archives give the Holocaust a sense of reality, while these historical facts can possibly conceal what a historical sign means. Lyotard regards Auschwitz as one of the signs and he tries to remove the Holocaust from the history and historiography. The Holocaust deniers insists that only eye-witness can prove the Holocaust has ever happened. Since the witness of gas chambers were all killed, no eye-witness and evidence can attest to the genocide. If the cry of the victims are not heard, the cruelty and atrocity have never existed–this is why memorials were under a trend after the war ended. Historical facts, such as crematory, victims’ remains, photos, and official or private documents, preoccupy the memorials and museums, yelling at visitors and reminding them of the bloody past. Nevertheless, Lyotard ‘seems to’ agree with the deniers’ silence. He perceives a dialectical representation of the lack of narrative. “[A]n unforgettable, affecting silence is precisely what is ‘there,’” and ‘there,’ a hollow ground for explanation and comprehension, is understood in “all its wandering, haunting deictic indeterminacy” (Rose 122). Lyotard does not approve of the deniers’ negative attitude toward the perception of war memory. On the contrary, the silence, according to Lyotard, are the markers which show how devastating the Shoah is. He uses an analogy to illuminate the silence:

“Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitively measuring is does not prohibit but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a very great seismic force. The scholar claims to know nothing about it, but the common person has a complex feeling the one aroused by the negative presentation of the indeterminable. Mutatis mutandis, the silence that the crime of Auschwitz imposes upon the historian is a sign for the common person”(qtd. Rose 122-123)

“Auschwitz,” as a pure sign of history, is “by definition removed from the reach of knowledge and representation” (Rose 123). Lyotard’s silent memory proves the best way to examine the wounded memory is the gaze directly at it, rather than cover it up with New constructions. What is buried under the memorial camp are the indescribable, massive suffering of all the victims. The passion of the sacrificed should be beyond any form of representation. If it is represented, sculptured or painted, the pains have been taken will transfigure into a limited representation and thus reduces the strength of retrospection. In a postmodern  viewpoint, “the poverty of reality” consists the very reality per se. 

The memorial camp’s goal is help people remember history, reminding them of what had happened. Nevertheless, the subject of the commemoration is ambiguous, and the memorial camp ironically makes the visitors oblivious to history. The memorial camp manifests the past “dead and finished, and is to be subject either to obliteration by the bulldozer or linear organization and display within the confines of the museum” (MM 77). Benjamin’s review over urban history can be applied to the study of memorial camp while the camp congeals into a spectacular wartime nostalgia. The institutionalization of Auschwitz has drawn a rupture between the survivors and people in latter generations, including the second-generation after the WWII. If the atrocity at Auschwitz, as the deniers advocate, has lost its traces, how to recollect the traces and even piece them up becomes the main issue for the successors of the traumatic memory. Dwork & Pelt clearly points out the architectural derivations, and these changes could misguide people toward an erroneous history. The reception center of Auschwitz memorial camp is to provide tourists with “a restaurant, cafeteria, post office, money exchange, cinema, book shop, conference roo” and even “hotel” (Hartmen 237). This multiple-purpose recreational building served similar functions sixty years ago, while no visitor felt satisfied or delighted. This very building was “the prisoner’s reception center, and included a delousing installation with 19 gas chambers for clothing, a bath house for the prisoners” (Dwork & Pelt 237). For being dismantled and refurbished, even the memorial camp can be reduced and constrained into “a specific, controlled, ideological message” that leads people to an unilateral discourse of history.

Because we are all excluded from the primal traumatic scene, the collective memory is reorganized and passed down to the postwar generation. Visitors from all over the world may not share the collective memory when they can only understand it through secondhand, or even thirdhand information. The camp is challenged with “sustain[ing] a continuing understanding of the Holocaust’s significance” (Heckner 63). When visitors enter the memorial, browse through the photos of shocked, helpless faces, bins of victims’ possessions, and the remains of deliperated gas chambers, they stand in a detached spectacle. The disconnection between the spectator and the historical objects cannot kindle the instant reminiscence, the involuntary recollection anymore, while the visit has been commercialized as a scheduled tour. In a sense, sight-seeing is a fast and easy way to review history, yet it identifies a crisis of partial understanding to the panorama of history. As tourist can only take picture of the remains of gas chambers and the chimneys of the crematories on the praire around Birkenau in a far distance or in the omnibuses, they cannot situate themselves in the aura of impulsive history. Instead of showing Lyotard’s silence, this bleak scene presents the visitors another barren wasteland, a scenery postcard without captions and notifications. Dwork & Pelt discovers the memorial site of Auschwitz is problematic because of “the way people remember and commemorate it” (Dwork & Pelt 246). Heckner even claims:

“To frame the critical transmission of Holocaust memory in terms of making such memory one’s own, however, runs the risk of eclipsing the racial and ethnic difference of postmemorial subjects by the apparently shared assumptions of collective witnessing.”(Heckner 65)

Collective reflections over wartime history indeed causes the question of locating the very individual experience in the massive constellation. Spectatorship of the visitor or latter generation allows not crystalline review over the tragic past. In order to restore the connection between the survivors and the second-generation memory, Hirsch highlights the importance to lay bare the wound to cause a “traumatic repetition that connects the second generation to the first, producing rather than screening the effect of trauma that was lived is much more directly as compulsive repetition by survivors and contemporary witnesses” (qtd. Heckner 67). He accentuates the demonstration of trauma, which is rather productive than devastating. The belated effect of trauma can affect the viewer through aesthetic representation. Although Hirsch’s postmemory theory mainly focuses on the exhibition of the atrocity photos, his postmemory still provides us a new way to translate the previous memory into contemporary sense. Through the aesthetic representation, postmemory provides a “dynamic mode of transmission” instead of merely “an inert storage place for Holocaust memory” (Heckner 67).

The International Committee of Auschwitz held a competition of monument of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oscar Hansen’s team won the first prize with their outrageous and daring maquette of the monument. Henry Moore, chair of the competition, delivered a short speech on announcing the the winner, and the speech revealed the difficulty to design the Auschwitz monument:

“The choice of a monument to commemorate Auschwitz has not been an easy task. Essentially, what has been attempted has been the creation [...] of a monument to crime and ugliness, to murder and to horror.”(Young 135)

To reveal the horror in the frankest way, Hansen’s design “refused to allow the ruins of the camps to become objects for others to arrogate” and avoided catching visitors’ eyes to specific building. The monument draws a “seventy-meter wide swatch of black stone slabs cutting diagonally from one end of the camp to the ruins of the largest crematorium at the other end” (Young 136). The ingenious part of Hansen’s design is he did not  set up a new statute or other abstract measures to express the pain beyond expression. It aims to “confront the living with oblivion, to bring them face to face with the essential truth of the site, [...] no memory could connect them to Birkenau’s past” (Dwork & Pelt 249). Tourists at the Great Pyramid of Khufu or the delapidated Troy always try to connect themselves to the once-dominant history. A heterogeneous perception of history interwines in the very gaze at the relics. Nevertheless, visitors at Birkenau, according to Hansen’s model, will be overwhelmed with tabula rasa, the complete blankness. On the vast expanse of waste, there is “no monument, no inscription, nothing” (Dwork & Pelt 249).

Hansen’s maquette was not adopted in the end. One of the reasons to reject the modle was it was “too diffused and abstract, without a focal point for commemorations” (Young 136). The comment shows Lyotard’s “silence” idea is still to unbearable and unsettling to later visitors of the trauma. “Auschwitz” cannot be simply a vacant name, insinuating the poverty of a sustaining reality. The postmodern representation of war trauma demarcates the memory from man’s understanding. As the traumatic memory stays suspended, people will face an inconceivable horro in which the most fear derives from its indefinability. However, the institutionalized memorial camp can still bring some positive fedback. Distance of the spectator explains people’s callous reaction to the devastating memory, while it can also provide room for eschewing “continued and painful reliving” (Heckner 72). Hirsch dopts the attitude of direct confrontation with the insufferable, and the traumatic will not last permanently but be transfered to a tolerable scale. “Controlled retraumatization,” declares Heckner, “is a momentary shock effect within the parameters of the museum, and not as a traumatic shock for life” (Heckner 73).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Eiland, Howard and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Tiedeman, Rolf. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

Dwork, Deborah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. "Recaliming Auschwitz." Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Ed. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1994. 232-51. Print.

Gilloch, Graeme. Myth & Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Malden: Blackwell, 1996. Print.

Hanssen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin's Other History : Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1998. Print.

Heckner, Elke. "Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory." Visualizing the Holocaust : Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Eds. Bathrick, David, Brad Prager and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. 62-83. Print.

Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘on the Concept of History.’. Trans. Turner, Chris. New York, New York: Verso, 2005. Print.

Rose, Sven-Erik. "Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and Image Malgre Tout: Jamseson, Lyotard, Didi-Huberman." Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory. Eds. Bathrick, David, Brad Prager and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. 114-33. Print.

Young, James Edward. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Yale University Press, 1993. Print.