Places of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in Vidzeme and Their Symbolic Language

In analysing the symbolic language of Holocaust memorials, the author uses the concept of lieux de mémoire, elaborated by the French historian Pierre Nora. Nora highlights the essential differences, even rupture, between history and memory and the growing importance of lieux de mémoire, places of memory that lie between memory and history. The task of these places is to return the event to the present, reviving it in both the individual memory and the memory of society. Therefore, a memorial can also be considered a lieu de memoire. Moreover, the memorial is a more complicated case with material, symbolic and functional significance, a lieu de mémoire and a historical text with changing relations between them. The paper will briefly describe the basic principles of Holocaust iconography and the history of the development of Holocaust memorials as a new genre of commemorative art. The author will look at the development of this genre in Latvia using the example of memorials dedicated to victims of Nazism in Vidzeme. The monument’s symbolic language and whether it has been influenced by the specific place and events or whether artists have followed a specific iconographic canon will be explained. The examples will also be considered from the point of view of the dialectics between a place of memory and a historical text, mentioned above.

A global label and its local appropriations. Representations of the Righteous Among the Nations in contemporary European museums

This paper, intended as a contribution to transnational memory studies, analyzes museums devoted to people who helped Jews during the Holocaust that recently opened in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland. The author’s particular interest lies in the “traveling motifs” of the “Righteous” narratives. This category encompasses symbols such as a list of names of the help-providers, a fruit tree/orchard, or a wall with photographs of Holocaust victims, which recur in many of the examined exhibitions and are a clear reference to Yad Vashem and other well-established Holocaust memorials. At first sight, they seem to point to a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust remembrance and to the emergence of a common reservoir of historical notions and images. However, on closer inspection one discovers that the use of these symbols varies and that they refer to differing ways of understanding and telling history.

Review Essay

In this essay, the authors respond to Laura Robson’s “Memorialization and Assimilation: Armenian Genocide Memorials in North America,” published in Mashriq & Mahjar in 2017, regarding analysis of the history of Armenian Genocide memorials in the U.S., the relationship between these memorials and Holocaust memorials, and Armenian assimilation in America.

Commemorating from a distance: the digital transformation of Holocaust memory in times of COVID-19

The severe restrictions on public life in many countries following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic specifically affected Holocaust memorials and museums in all parts of the world, especially in Europe and in Israel. These measures posed a significant challenge, because contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration are particularly based on the personal experience of presence at museums and historical sites. In contrast to the experience of distancing in face of the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing the presence of the past is thus a crucial element of contemporary Holocaust commemoration. This article explores the relationship between presence and absence, proximity and distance, guided commemoration and online engagement by critically analyzing digital activities of Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. It argues that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holocaust memorials began experimenting with the potential of social media for Holocaust memory. These experiments finally accepted the ongoing generational change and reacted to significant previous shifts in media consumption that were already affecting Holocaust commemoration.

The Well-Tempered Memorial : Abstraction, Anthropomorphism, Embodiment

This paper addresses some crucial categories in contemporary practices of memorialisation and public sculpture, including the polarities of “abstraction / figuration” and “transitivity / intransitivity” and the questions of anthropomorphism and embodiment. Referring to paradigmatic cases belonging to different media—sculpture, architecture, video installations—and comparing different memorialistic subjects (the Holocaust memorials, the Italian fascist sacraria, the monuments dedicated to the Vietnam war), the chapter investigates the dialectics of presence and absence in the relationship between the present material body of the monument and the absent bodies evoked by the process of memorialisation.