Memory and Memorials

NATHAN: Well, I mean, there are a variety of ways in which people will respond, regardless of whether or not we agree with that response. And you may remember, from 2014, there was an episode in Auschwitz, which was a Nazi concentration camp, that was converted into a memorial site. And this American teenager took a selfie, and she did so with a smile on her face and put it on social media. And there was immediate backlash about that. And she’s developing a personal connection with a historic site, but there’s a sense that the tone is wrong.

And you can certainly imagine this being similarly a problem if one were to, say, go to the Peace and Justice Memorial for the Equal Justice Initiative and replicate, in effect, the visual grammar of the lynching photograph by taking a selfie in front of one of these installations. And so I think, on one level, people need to go– that that’s partly their civic responsibility. But then there also has to be another element of that, which is getting up to speed on what the story is, us having a robust conversation, be it in public spaces, in social media elsewhere, really framing the event and framing the move to memorialize these various episodes.

And the Holocaust is obviously an easier one to do in some cases, not in all cases, but in some cases, simply because of the way that America stands outside of that particular atrocity. And so we should also be aware of that, I think, and use the moment of remembering the Holocaust as a way to cast an even broader universal dilemma about what powerful people do relative to the disempowered.

BRIAN: But Nathan, just to push back a little bit, is it easier to do when, today, as we speak, the United States is denying asylum to thousands of people who, while not facing concentration camps, are facing systematic violence and all other kinds of terror at the hands of the countries that they live in?

NATHAN: Yeah, I think the best public history work does exactly that. It offers these reminders of the way that history rhymes and tries to encourage people to think about things that they might find abhorrent in the past being replicated or reproduced in some aspect in the present. So I think we should not think about us as somehow, again, standing outside of a very human condition of dealing with refugees, or those in crisis, or, again, a certain kind of political violence, but instead use the moment to memorialize the Holocaust or memorialize lynching as ways to point to, say, the Syrian refugee crisis or police brutality, or any number of other issues that would be resonant with the themes that those other earlier events really do conjure.

ED: You know, it’s one thing that I think is appealing to people about the Holocaust Museum is that it seems, in American terms, nonpartisan. I’m having lots of conversations about slavery and the Civil War, however. And it’s interesting how people can project partisan identities back onto something 150 years ago. So Brian, your question about the current events of the Syrian refugee crisis and so forth, ironically, the thing that’s dangerous– you can confront people with atrocity, but don’t try to make it look like it’s about today.

BRIAN: Correct.

ED: So it raises the question. We’re supposed to do something with this information. But to what extent is going to the museum and confronting these atrocities, which is never a comfortable thing– is that, in itself, an act?

JOANNE: Well, you know, the challenge of these kinds of sites is the different things that people bring to them. So at some point in the past, I went to Dachau. And as a Jew, that was incredibly painful. And I felt like I had to do it, and I did it. But I brought with me everything that I had been taught and everything that my family sort of felt about and had experienced involving the Holocaust.

Now that’s something very different from the person who is being introduced to it for the first time and takes a selfie. That person is bringing– I was going to say no baggage, but just different baggage, right? So bringing yourself there is important, but that’s the complexity and the challenge of these sites is that there’s such a spectrum of kinds of people that they need to communicate with.

NATHAN: So I will say that there is absolutely a need to bring oneself there and a need to recognize that we don’t come unencumbered, anyone of us, to these sites. But I think it’s also that being in these places and standing as a part of the landscape, whether you’re talking about the sites that are in Europe marking the Holocaust or sites on the West Coast of Africa marking slavery, lynching sites in the US. It also takes a lot of work for those sites to be built.

And we have to acknowledge that they’re just as constructed and just as contested as any place else and that there are all kinds of unmarked places, where similarly important historical happenings and human events occurred. And so, in some ways, it’s about reading both the landscape that seems invisible but also recognizing the one that gets built for us as part of our inheritance.

BRIAN: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history.

ED: You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter– @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Ernest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sequoia Carrilo, Courtney Spania, Aaron Teiling, Corean Thomas, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and Jahzzar. Special thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studio in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.