Slides from Wednesday, Jan 17
As part of your discussion post tonight, pose a question or questions you’d like to ask the archivist at HHRC tomorrow. This could be about the work of an archivist in general or specifically about archival practice at the Center. What would you like to know in order to analyze the documents housed there?
“Mumford suggest that it is usually the shakiest of regimes that installed the least movable monuments, a compensation for having accomplished nothing worthier by which to be remembered. (Young, 5)
As we have discussed many times the dominate culture or powers that be have tremendous authority in how and what is recorded to be remembered. I thought this was an extremely interesting and explicit example of “regimes” attempting to create their own history. Erecting a huge monument to recognize an insignificant or immoral happenings absolutely leaves a potentially undeserving legacy. Regardless of what happens with the termination of the authority, a tangible memory provoking object prevails. This is one of the problematic elements of more formal archival of history that oral history lacks.
Question for archivist: In class we discussed varying messages promoted through things like memorials even on the same topic? How would you describe the message your center is trying to promote? Just awareness? How has the collection of your archives been defined by that message?
“As the shape of the Holocaust memory takes in Europe and Israel is determined by political, aesthetic, and religious coordinates, that in America is guided no less by distinctly American ideals and experiences-such as liberty, pluralism, and immigration.” (Young, 2)
I think this quote is really useful for understanding the nature of the American Holocaust Museum/ many of the monuments/ testimonies recorded for the archives of the Museum. For example, the article talks about how one of the most visited Holocaust monuments in America is a giant statue of an American solider carrying a dying Holocaust survivor. That monument fits into the mold of the American idea of liberty, as it depicts America being the force the for good that is liberating the oppressed.
Moreover, I am excited by this quote because I think it will fit nicely into my paper as I am discussing two video testimonies from Holocaust survivors discussing their liberation. I think this quote explains nicely why these two clips were preserved and why they were edited down to their short length. the clips show the American ideal of liberation and freedom.
Question for archivist – whats something that you have discovered that really counters a narrative/ theme that people have come to accept with the Holocaust?
Quote: “Since the various practices of collective or social remembering typically serve to legitimize and strengthen sociocultural and political orders, serious history at odds with broader memory narratives is often read in a facile way as subversive, especially (but not only) in more authoritarian orders” (Blouin and Rosenberg 105)
Comment: I thought about this quotation in the context of Colby’s decision to rename the president’s house after Samuel Osborne. Colby’s administration is trying to establish a social memory around Osborne that is not corroborated by the documents in the school’s own special collections. The school is using this collective narrative in an attempt to strengthen the sociocultural bonds between Colby students, faculty, and (especially) alumni/donors around the idea that Colby is a progressive community. Colby has used this method before; in fact, Colby tour guides are told to talk about how early Colby became a co-ed school, despite the fact that women and men were segregated on campus until very late in the college’s history. The administration is trying to rewrite its own history in our collective memories.
Question: What is the process that archivists at the HHRC go through when deciding which documents to preserve? Are multiple people involved in the decision-making process?
“I did a complete video and oral history tape of all the survivors in my — Maine is such a small state, all we had was 25 survivors and maybe less than a dozen t — much less than a dozen liberators. And we — we — we interviewed them all. We also interviewed non-Jewish people. Our criterion for survivor simply was anyone whose life has been dramatically changed because of Hitler” (Haas 63)
Haas brings up an important point. In Holocaust testimony collection, who counts as a survivor? Children of Holocaust survivors are often referred to as “second generation survivors” because of the large impact the Holocaust has on their lives, too. Liberators survived the war, so do they count? I really admire the approach Haas’ team took in declaring that the criteria for a survivor was “anyone whose life has been dramatically changed because of Hitler.” This must be an important question for archivists who put together collections of swaths of people who have something to say about an event–who do they include? Who is left out? Why?
My question for the archivist: What happens when, say, someone wants to give something to your collection but you don’t see the documents as having value toward your mission? Can you decline? Or, on the other hand, how do you go about collecting documents of value from someone who might not want to part with them?
“But this formulation may overlook one of the basic functions of ‘public art’: to create shared spaces that lend a common spatial frame to otherwise disparate experiences and understandings. Rather than presuming a common set of ideals, the public monument attempts to create an architectonic ideal by which even competing memories may be figured” (Young 6).
The intersection of art and history has always made me feel more connected to humanity. Even though our concept of what art is from different periods in history differs, I think a general consensus (even just considering the popularity of museums) is that art usually helps people understand people from the past. I was really interested in this part of the article where Young talks about the power of art that isn’t necessarily a stoic memorial, but some survivors consider that offensive. I am torn. I don’t think the past is something to mock or condense into something small, but I do think there have been some really successful pieces that capture historical atrocities or moments more effectively than other monuments. What comes to mind first is Picasso’s Guernica—I have no connection to the Spanish Civil War, but seeing that piece in person moved me just as much as going to WWI memorials in France. I believe that humans have a capacity to invoke emotion in pieces that aren’t inherently connected to the event itself.
My question for tomorrow’s field trip is whether or not (or to what extent) does the museum feel pressure to “stay relevant.”
“Still others have argued that rather than embodying memory, the monument displaces it altogether, supplanting a community’s memory-work with its own material form. ‘The less memory is experienced from their,’ Pierre Nora warns, ‘the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs.” pg. 5
Monuments, obviously, represent historical eras or events. When placed in metropolitan areas, where the pace of life is quick and history itself is everchanging, monuments can seem out of place. It can be hard to contextualize events when life has rapidly whipped past old tales. I do not believe that monuments place pedestrians into an appreciation of the past. I think that without a background or setting to truly admire and understand a monument, the message is less effective.
Question for the archivist: How often do donor request and bureaucracy get in the way of the message that you want to get across after truly getting to know the documents that you have been studying? Do you think that red tape often ruins the efforts in your own cause?
Quote: “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never pure. Both the reasons given for Holocaust memorials and the kinds of memory they generate are as various as the sites themselves” (Young 3).
Young argues that each Holocaust memorial has been built in different contexts and each one portrays a different message about the Holocaust to its visitors. He gives the examples of the New York memorial that was never actually built as well as the San Francisco memorial. It is striking to find out that not only did this memorial never get past the planning state, but also that the majority of the public is completely unaware of the square stone that honors the Jews in the Holocaust. This is in comparison to the San Francisco Holocaust memorial, which gives a morbid and telling representation of the Holocaust. This memorial was built with the idea that it would appeal to both artists and the general public. These cities had different ideas behind the layout of the memorial and the story behind the memorial (or lack thereof) gives a sense of the feelings of the public about it at this time. For example, in New York, there was a lot of debate throughout the public about the memorial because not only was the city unable to execute a single plan, but they also made remarks that generated a sense of divisiveness through the city. This may have been the final straw and led to a memorial never being built.
Question: Do you ever look for particular records to add to a specific collection?
“In its various practices, social memory is thus not some magically constructed body of ideas or images, but a sociocultural artifact in and of itself, an imagined “reality” of the past that is socially and culturally articulated and maintained.” (Blouin and Rosenberg, ch. 6)
I think that this is a really well-put summary of Blouin’s and Rosenberg’s analysis. By that, I mean two things: Firstly, it aptly encapsulates the arguments made over the course of the chapter. Secondly, and more interestingly, it invites the historian or archivist to take a critical look not only at how oral histories are taken, but how oral histories age. A document is a document: What something says now is exactly what it will say ten years from now. But consensuses and their implications age differently: There are sociopolitical forces at play that can alter perceptions of lived experience.
For those wishing to access a positivist conception of “truth” (which, despite how “constructivist” academics become, will almost inevitably remain an end goal for historians), it therefore is insufficient to merely analyze the words one hears. Just like how historians look at the archive itself when they pull a document therefrom, oral historians and ethnographers must look at the larger elements of social memory when attempting to elicit a testimony. While archivists maintain their archives, amorphous and constantly shifting social forces maintain “social memory.” What is kept, maintained, and even altered all comes down to those who maintain it, whether it be a small group of archivists or public (and even private, familial) discourse at large. that’s a really important parallel between the basic concepts of our class and the basic concepts of ethnographic anthropology.
Question: How would an ethnographer go about accessing past “social memories?” This chapter makes it seem like once a sentiment is altered by society, it will resist reversion back to its original content.
Question for the archivists tomorrow: Do you think of yourself as historians, or do you think of yourself as caretakers? Is there a middle ground, or even a third end of this spectrum?
Quote: “For once it was recognized that monuments necessarily mediate memory, even as they seek to inspire it, they came to be regarded as displacements of the memory they were supposed to embody. Even worse, by insisting that its memory was as fixed as its place in the landscape, the monument seemed to ignore the essential mutability in all cultural artifacts.”
Comment: I find this quote very interesting as it criticizes the concept of monuments as timeless objects anchored in the landscape that represent some form of memory. Monuments fail to represent the “mutability” of our collective memories and how they can be shaped and changed through social facts instead of objective facts.
Question: How can we represent memory in a “modern” way the takes into account the mutability of social facts?
Quote: “The visual resonance between Shamir’s wall etchings and the petroglyphs of the Hohokam tribe may be apparent only to those who have seen both, yet it still links the memory of one genocide to another and in so doing ties the monument that much more closely to its surroundings.” – Young (301)
“On arrival today at the turnaround at the Legion of Honor, the visitor is struck by a seeming dissonance between the Holocaust theme and its beautiful setting. But within a few minutes, this incongruity become less problematic… As we look around, we may be reminded, as well, that the concentration camps were often placed in stunningly beautiful, secluded countryside in Germany and Poland—an ironic perversion of pastoral oft noted by survivors.” – Young (316)
Comment: In the above quotes, Young highlights the relevance and importance of the location of these Holocaust memorials. The connection between the Holocaust and the lost Hohokam tribe and mass murder of Native Americans connects to the discussion we had Wednesday on US portrayal of the Holocaust and (as I think James brought up) the US practice of avoiding grappling with its own troublesome history (not being more proactive to prevent the Holocaust, the mass murder and displacement of Native Americans, to name the two mentioned here). Thinking about the second quote and the discussions last week on the production of narrative, the “seeming dissonance between the Holocaust theme and its beautiful setting” symbolically explains the great disbelief associated with the Holocaust.
Question: How has perception of the Holocaust changed? From its realization till now? In the US and elsewhere?
“The second is that many of our library and archive consortia — this one included — excludes our librarians, libraries, archivists, and archives at black colleges and universities, so even when you think you are immersing yourself within the field of librarianship, you remain blissfully unaware that there is a whole different world out there to which you are functionally illiterate. This unawareness is both a product and reification of systemic racism, and it doesn’t require racists whatsoever.”
As we have seen through out the past two weeks of the course, selection of the archive is one of its biggest influencers. We have also discussed how a society’s rooted culture will influence the documents in those archives. However, if a school did fail to archive its dark moments or its students’ protests, it is doing a disservice to everybody. Even if the truth is ugly, it is still the truth and must be exposed. It also goes to show how much can be gotten away with when a culture turns a blind eye on horrible acts. Even though we now perceive the racism seen in earlier times, the people of those times had little to no chance of ever achieving the same thoughts.
Question: Is there any objective, formulaic way to define any archive’s overall validity?
“If my own kids don’t know it, other kids don’t know it either” (Haas, transcript page 58).
Does this mean that she views the primary purpose of the archives are to educate? Does the desire to educate effect of any of the layout or storage decisions of the archives?
She also states that “the (her) kids didn’t want to know all that much”. I wonder if we feel too close to divisive history if we find it too difficult to study, and yet we could as easily say that to feel too far removed from a history we loose interest.
Question: how important is the connection to the state of Maine? Do you look for sources that are connected specifically to the state in some way, or is it serendipity that certain documents find their way to the archives here? If there is a concentration on connection to the state does that ever inhibit the possible documents?