Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory

By Oren Baruch Stier

The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake.
 
Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah.
 
In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813574042

Book preview

Holocaust Icons

Holocaust Icons

Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory

Oren Baruch Stier

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stier, Oren Baruch, 1966– author.

Holocaust icons : symbolizing the Shoah in history and memory / Oren Baruch Stier.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7403–5 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN 978–0–8135–7402–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 978–0–8135–7404–2 (e-book (epub))— ISBN 978–0–8135–7405–9 (e-book (web pdf))

1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Influence. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. 3. Semiotics—Social aspects. 4. Signs and symbols—Social aspects. 5. Memorialization—Social aspects. 6. Collective memory. I. Title.

D804.3.S793 2015

940.53'18—dc23

2014046190

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2015 by Oren Baruch Stier

All rights reserved

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For Danielle

Contents

List of Figures

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Holocaust Symbols: The Shapes of Memory

Chapter 1. Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance

Chapter 2. Thresholds of Initiation: Arbeit Macht Frei

Chapter 3. From Innocence to Experience: An Icon Comes of Age

Anne Frank as a Literary Icon

Anne Frank as a Visual Icon

Chapter 4. The Holocaust as an Iconic Number: Six Million

Conclusion: Looking Again at Holocaust Icons

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Figures

Figure 1. Female prisoners sort through shoes at a warehouse in Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944

Figure 2. Poster, Silence=Death (1987)

Figure 3. Samuel Bak, Alone (1995)

Figure 4. Homomonument, Amsterdam (1987)

Figure 5. Tom Sachs, Manischewitz Luger (1996)

Figure 6. Jews await selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944

Figure 7. Reconstructed portion of Holocaust-era railway car, Dallas Holocaust Museum Center for Education and Tolerance

Figure 8. Installation of Holocaust-era railway car at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum construction site, Washington, DC, February 9, 1991

Figure 9. Suitcases belonging to Jewish death camp deportees, beside the railcar display at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 10. Child’s or woman’s ring, on display at the Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

Figure 11. Railway car in the atrium of the Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

Figure 12. Tzedaka (charity) box replica of a Holocaust-era railway car, formerly available at the gift shop, Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

Figure 13. Moshe Safdie, Memorial to the Deportees (1995), Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Figure 14. Robert Kuśmirowski, Wagon (2006), installation at the 4th Berlin Biennial, Of Mice and Men, Berlin, 2006

Figure 15. Flossenburg, Germany, May 3, 1945

Figure 16. Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, Gestapo prison called the Small Fortress, 1939

Figure 17. Dachau, Germany, concentration camp gate, April–August 1945

Figure 18. Arbeit macht frei gate at Auschwitz I, May 11–25, 1945

Figure 19. Still photo from Soviet film The Liberation of Auschwitz 1945

Figure 20. Still photo from Soviet film The Liberation of Auschwitz 1945

Figure 21. Frank Stella, Arbeit Macht Frei (1967)

Figure 22. Arrival at Auschwitz I, from Maus by Art Spiegelman

Figure 23. Judy Chicago, Arbeit Macht Frei/Work Makes Who Free? from the Holocaust Project (1992)

Figure 24. Casting of the Auschwitz I gate, US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Figure 25. Entrance to display on slave labor, Holocaust Memorial Center, Farmington Hills, MI

Figure 26. Cover of the cloth edition of Melvin Jules Bukiet, Nothing Makes You Free (2002)

Figure 27. Conservators examine the pieces of the Arbeit macht frei sign following its recovery, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Poland

Figure 28. Anne Frank’s first diary notebook

Figure 29. Dust jacket of the first US edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

Figure 30. Page spread from Anne Frank’s first autograph book

Figure 31. Annelies Marie Frank, winter 1941–1942

Figure 32. Inside cover of Anne Frank’s first autograph book

Figure 33. Cover of the 1967 paperback edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1952)

Figure 34. Anne Frank, Montessori school photograph, Amsterdam, winter 1940

Figure 35. Anne Frank, Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, 1941

Figure 36. Anne Frank, Zandvoort, The Netherlands, August 1934

Figure 37. Anne Frank, Singel, Amsterdam, winter 1935

Figure 38. Anne Frank, May 1942

Figure 39. Age-progressed photograph of Anne Frank

Figure 40. Remember what Amalek did to Thee! Collect and Record! Central Historical Commission, Munich, US Zone of Germany, 1947

Figure 41. Cloth banner in Yiddish from the DP camps

Preface and Acknowledgments

It all started with the railway cars.

I do not mean that the Holocaust started there, though it accelerated once railcars were deployed to transport human beings like chattel to conveniently located murder factories.

I mean that this project started some years ago while I was writing my first book, on institutionalized Holocaust remembrance and communal commitments to that remembrance, and I began thinking about the curious, repetitive use of these goods wagons as artifacts in memorial and museum settings. I wrote about four of them (they return here) and used them to develop a notion of iconic as opposed to idolatrous representation. As I continued to explore and publish on this recurring railcar motif, I began to make lists of other things that might be considered iconic, and this book was, in a way, born: the items on those lists multiplied, life intervened, and it took longer to whittle the project down to manageable size than I anticipated.

This book is a follow-up and companion to my first: if the earlier volume focused on macrolevel memorialization, this one concentrates on the microlevel, on the building blocks of Holocaust remembrance. These Holocaust icons, as I refer to them, are the tools we use to think about and reflect on the Shoah and its presence in our lives. I have identified four of them, exemplifying a range of possible representational forms. A toolbox with only four items might seem meager, not much more than a starter kit for a new homeowner perhaps, but I believe it is deceptively small; in actuality, each of the tools I describe and analyze here surprises with its many uses, like a multipronged Swiss Army knife or some all-purpose device sold only on late-night television.

It falls to me now to thank everyone who provided assistance through the long gestation of this book. If I could only remember all of their names! This book was made possible thanks to my tenure as a fellow at what is now the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (the Mandel Center) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM); I am grateful for the collegial spirit at what I still tell my colleagues is academic paradise, and for the particular intellectual exchange with several scholars with whom I overlapped during my fellowship period: Jennifer Jordan, Stuart Liebman, Dirk Rupnow, and especially David Shneer, whose engagement with my work continues to the present. Members of the Mandel Center staff were also enormously helpful, and I thank them: Benton Arnowitz, Victoria Barnett, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Robert Ehrenreich, Aleisa Fishman, Paul Shapiro, and Lisa Zaid. Additionally, I am grateful for the assistance provided me by Judith Cohen, director, Photographic Reference Collection, USHMM.

I also acknowledge with thanks the research support provided by a Florida International University Foundation/Provost’s Office Faculty Research Award and two Florida International University (FIU) College of Arts and Sciences summer research grants. At FIU I have received the steady encouragement of my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies; I would like to thank in particular Christine Gudorf, who suggested critical readings on Christian icons; Tudor Parfitt, who prodded me at the right time to finish the book; Whitney Bauman, my ever-willing coffee partner; department chair Erik Larson, who agreed to some flexible scheduling of classes to allow me more uninterrupted time to write; and my mentor Steven Heine, master of Daijobu, from whose steadfast advice I have benefited immeasurably. I am also grateful to Stephanie Brenenson, FIU research librarian extraordinaire, for her uncanny ability and creativity in locating and securing sorely needed materials and information.

This book would not have been possible without the support, feedback, and encouragement of Marlie Wasserman at Rutgers University Press, who never once balked at the prospect of publishing a book with over forty figures: it is a rare pleasure for an author to have as his sponsoring editor the director of the press, and her guidance and decisive hand have helped enormously in keeping things on track. Thanks as well to Anne Hegeman, without whose timely attention to my many image-related queries I would not have managed to get it all together, to Paula Friedman for her expert copyediting, and to Marilyn Campbell, Allyson Fields, and Carrie Hudak at the press for efficiently handling my many queries and concerns regarding the preparation of the manuscript.

Portions of this book were presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Jewish Studies and the American Academy of Religion, and I appreciate the feedback I received from participants. I also thank colleagues and audiences at several universities and Holocaust institutions around the United States where parts of this book were performed: University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University, Lehigh University, Temple University, University of Vermont, Vassar College, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, University of Denver, Holocaust Museum of Southwest Florida/Florida Gulf Coast University, Texas Christian University, Dallas Holocaust Museum, Hofstra University, and the USHMM. I am especially thankful for the opportunity to present my research at several more specialized gatherings: the Judaism and Postmodern Culture Colloquium at the Berman Center for Jewish Studies, Lehigh University; the Imaging the Unimaginable: The Iconicization of Auschwitz conference, University of Florida; and The Social Lives of Jewish Numbers conference at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan. My deepest thanks to the organizers of these more intimate gatherings for inviting me and for the fruitful conversations engendered there: Laurence Silberstein at Lehigh, and Nora Alter and Jack Kugelmass at the University of Florida; to Michal Kravel-Tovi and Deborah Dash Moore at the University of Michigan, I express my gratitude as well for essential feedback on what became chapter 4 in this volume.

Research for chapter 1 was enhanced by discussions with the following individuals currently or formerly affiliated with institutions examined therein: Sara Abosch, Jack Altman, Elly Dlin, Mike and Ginger Jacobs, Max Glauben, and Mindy Rubinstein at what is now called the Dallas Holocaust Memorial Center for Education and Tolerance (DHMCET, formerly the Dallas Holocaust Museum); Steve Goldman at the Florida Holocaust Museum; and Jeff Carter, Steven Luckert, Warren Marcus, and Shari Werb at the USHMM. I also want to thank Alfred Gottwaldt, senior curator of railways at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, for his voluminous knowledge of German railcars and for the time he spent sharing it with me during my engaging visit there. While researching chapter 3, I benefited greatly from the archival resources and assistance of René Blekman and Yt Stoker and from discussions with Rian Verhoeven and Hans Westra, all of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Chapter 4 was enriched through e-mail exchanges with Patricia Heberer Rice, historian, and Peter Black, senior historian, at the USHMM, for whose assistance I am grateful.

As readers will see, this volume relies heavily on a series of figures that illustrate and explicate many of the ideas conveyed herein. I could not have even considered including so many were it not for financial support from Targum Shlishi, a Raquel and Aryeh Rubin Foundation; I wish to thank especially founder Aryeh Rubin and program director Andrea Gollin for their support for this book. In addition I am grateful for Andrea Gollin’s encouragement throughout its production, from helping me secure an image to providing critical feedback on the manuscript and even assisting with the marketing blurb. In my search for the most appropriate images, the assistance of the following individuals and the institutions they represent was invaluable, and in many cases my request for an item led to rewarding discussions about the figures and their roles and uses: Judith Cohen and Caroline Waddell (USHMM), Reed Vreeland (ACT UP/NY), Amy Silverman (The Wolfsonian-FIU), Destiny Barletta (Pucker Gallery), Maaike van den Berg (Stichting Homomonument), Daniel Caputo (Tom Sachs Studio), Sara Abosch and Paula Nourse (DHMCET), Elena Sanderlin (Florida Holocaust Museum), Maaty Frenkelzon and Michael Tal (Yad Vashem), Aleksandra Sciegienna (Foksal Gallery Foundation), Paweł Sawicki (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum), J’Aimee Cronin (Artists Rights Society), Thomas Dobrowolski (The Wylie Agency), Bette Graber (Random House), Louise Emslie-Smith (Penguin Books, UK), Liz Kurtulik Mercuri and Peter Rohowsky (Art Resource), Stephen Goldman and Lawrence Willim (Holocaust Memorial Center, Michigan), Elizabeth Clementson (W. W. Norton & Co.), Alicia M. Dercole (Doubleday), Emanuel Craciunescu (phojoe.com), and Sascha Pohflepp. A very special thank you to Miguel Asencio in Media Technology Services at FIU, for preparing digital scans of several of the images. Finally, special words of thanks are due to Barbara Eldridge at the Anne Frank Fonds, who not only took care of my large request for photographs with care and diligence but also kindly responded to all my e-mail queries with more information than I could have ever hoped for.

I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to those friends and colleagues who, over the years, have read and responded to my work, replied to my questions, schmoozed over a beer, or generally encouraged me at various stages of the project: Michael Berenbaum, Laura Brahm, Olga Gershenson, Andrea Gollin, Steven Heller, Leah Hochman, Edward T. Linenthal, Avi Patt, David Shneer, Gerrold van der Stroom, James E. Young; I am grateful as well to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for helpful feedback. I thank Jay Geller especially for conversations long ago that influenced my thinking about Anne Frank as a Holocaust icon. And I express my deepest gratitude to Laura Levitt, the other reviewer of the manuscript, for her detailed, insightful, and encouraging comments; it is no exaggeration to say that I do not think I would be in academia were it not for Laura’s offer of friendship long ago. To those whose names I have inadvertently left out, I apologize for the omission and thank you nonetheless.

Writing this book has been taxing at times, and I am grateful for the diversions offered by my many friends in South Florida and elsewhere: it is impossible to name and thank them all, but I will single out Fred Klein, Stephen Korn, Marc Shandler, and Hod and Chaya Tamir for special recognition; additionally, Levi Kahane read a draft of the manuscript and shared his wisdom on, and fascination with, the phenomena I analyze here. The last months of work were particularly challenging, and I thank Dr. David Berkower, Rabbi David Botton, and Nancy Croughwell for tending to my physical wellbeing. I wish to acknowledge as well the fellowship of the other members of Rabbi Leizer Barash’s Bes Midrash for Chasidus, Yitzchak Kravetz, Matt Lerner, and Jim Reich; and my chavruta, Raphael Bouskila. My thanks as well for the supportive communities of the Beit David Highland Lakes Shul and the Young Israel of Hollywood–Fort Lauderdale, and to the Kasdin and Weiss members of my extended family for never asking When will the book be finished? I am grateful for the support and encouragement of my parents, Jochanan and Rina Stier, and the resilience and understanding of my children, Noa Gavrielle and Shmuel Dov: now I will have more time for you all! I dedicate this book to my wife, partner, and best friend, Danielle, whose patience has been stretched to the limits in the final months of this endeavor, and whose confidence in me never flagged: thank you for making it possible for me to complete it.

—Hollywood, FL, Erev Yom Kippur, 5775/October 3, 2014

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following material:

Excerpts from The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, by Marianne Hirsch. Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car, by Dan Pagis, published in The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Copyright © 1996 The Regents of the University of California. Used with permission.

An early version of chapter 1 was published as Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (spring 2005): 81–106. Published by Oxford University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Used with permission.

Excerpts from Working through Working, by Werner Hamacher, trans. Matthew T. Hartman, Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 1 (January 1996): 27–28, 50. © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Excerpts from Dachau Lied: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ words by Jura Soyfer, music and translation by Herbert Zipper. Copyright © 1993 Verlag Lafite. Reprinted with kind permission of MUSIKZEIT, http://www.musikzeit.at.

Excerpt from The Complete Maus: a Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman. Copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC (US), Penguin Books Ltd. (UK), and The Wylie Agency LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. 

Excerpts from Misparim (Numbers), by Hadag Nahash. Copyright © 2003 MUSIC 972—Anana Ltd. Used with permission.

Excerpts from Anne Frank: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose. Copyright © 2009 by Francine Prose. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank: the Revised Critical Edition by Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Copyright © Anne Frank Fonds; translation copyright © 2003 by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, Penguin Books, Ltd., and Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland. All rights reserved.

The author thanks the USHMM for permission to use images from its collections reproduced in this book. The views or opinions expressed in this book, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Introduction

Holocaust Symbols

The Shapes of Memory

A notorious Nazi once said that when he heard the word culture he reached for his revolver. Now, it seems, every time we hear the word Nazi we reach for our culture. Thus we might protect ourselves from the terror of the Nazi Reich, even as we provide a window into it. It is almost as if the only guarantee against the return of this dreaded past lies in its constant aesthetic sublimation—in the art, literature, music, and even monuments by which the Nazi era is vicariously recalled by a generation of artists born after, but indelibly shaped by, the Holocaust.

—James E. Young, Foreword, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art

James Young, the foremost scholar of Holocaust memorial culture, wrote this in an introductory essay to the catalog for the seminal Jewish Museum New York 2002 exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. Young’s comments bear broad significance for the project undertaken in this volume: in his view, culture is a refuge and mechanism for the subtle transformation of a fearful and threatening history into more benign forms of appropriation and vicarious engagement. Although my concerns in this book encompass a range of representation wider than Young’s focus on cultural productions by post-Holocaust artists, his words nonetheless offer a thought-provoking starting point for this study of key wartime and postwar symbols. How have the various images, phrases, and artifacts we have inherited from the Holocaust been culturally absorbed and sublimated? If this structure of inheritance, which comparative literature scholar and feminist critic Marianne Hirsch has termed postmemory, works by imaginative investment, projection, and creation,¹ how has it become culturally lodged? What are its lingering cultural effects?

Among other legacies, the Holocaust bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon, as it were, of powerful symbols. This is a book about those symbols and the symbolization process; it is about the symbols used culturally to refer, whether directly or obliquely, to the Holocaust, and about how they came to be used in this way. It is in interacting with this symbolic vocabulary that people today, nearly seventy years after World War II’s end, come to feel they know something about the Holocaust. But what do these images and artifacts really communicate? In addition to their emotional impact, these symbols appear to convey the essence of the Holocaust: its bureaucracy, its depravity, its poignancy. But the most common Holocaust symbols do not directly communicate its brutal violence. This is one of the reasons these particular images and artifacts are so recognizable and so powerful: they are representative without being overwhelming, succinct without being too graphic.

Most especially, this book is about certain symbols that have come to represent the Holocaust in encapsulated form—those that summarize complex narratives of the Shoah, simplifying, condensing, and distilling these narratives and producing meanings for cultural consumption: I call these symbols Holocaust icons. They span a range of overlapping cultural representations in material, linguistic, literary, photographic/cinematic, and numeric terms. The icons I have selected, those I think represent the essence of this referential process, together with their analysis suggest that it is through the use of iconic symbols that the public meanings and perceptions of the Holocaust are created, even when (and especially when) the distillation process that produces these icons strips out much of the historical context and specificity of each icon. Indeed, the more we see and hear about the Holocaust in the twenty-first century, the less we seem to actually know. But what if we could restore to these icons their own histories? My project here is to re-infuse each selected icon with its own past, thus allowing us to better apprehend its significance.

My selection of icons relates in part to another mark of Holocaust memorialization and representation in the present, what Hirsch remarks as the striking repetition of the same very few images, used over and over again . . . emblematically to signal the Holocaust. Hirsch understands these repeated images as tropes (that is, forms of expression signifying recurring themes) for Holocaust memory itself. . . . It is as such tropes, and not for their informational value about the Holocaust, whether denotative or connotative, that they are incorporated into the visual landscape of postmemory as pervasively as they are. And, at the same time, the repetition also underscores their figurative role.² The four icons I analyze in the central chapters of this book are images that recur and have come to symbolize certain recurring themes: the Holocaust-era railway car, the "Arbeit macht frei slogan and gateway, the persona of Anne Frank, and the number six million." We come to understand that what sets these icons apart from mere symbols are the ways each one has come to so completely embody and encapsulate the Shoah, allowing each to serve as a metonym for it—as, that is, an aspect, artifact, or adjunct of the Holocaust that stands in for the whole. This is not a book about Holocaust art, though some works of art, including some about the Holocaust, will be referred to. Rather, this is a book about a selection of symbols—an object, a phrase, a person, and a number—originating in the Holocaust era, and about how these have been transformed into icons of the Holocaust and of its memory. I engage this selection of icons on two levels: the first, the historical, places them in their Holocaust (and, in some cases, pre-Holocaust) context, asking where they came from and what, if anything, they meant when first noted; the second, which might be called the representational or memorial level, places these same items in their post-Holocaust context, asking how they have been used and appropriated, how they have evolved, how they have been reproduced, and to what ends. In other words, I am interested here in both the life and the afterlife of Holocaust symbols.

This study begins with a few initial premises:³

1. There is nothing we know about the Holocaust that has not already been mediated for us by some interpretive methodology and/or some cultural form. With the possible and increasingly rare exception of encountering eyewitness accounts of the events of World War II still being shared, we live in the age of the Holocaust’s cultural aftermath. And even those firsthand accounts are mediated by forms of representation and transmission, shaded by the wearying effects of time and distance from the events remembered. All this is neither new nor surprising, but it is worth noting nonetheless. For it is the mediation of the Holocaust that produces knowledge and awareness of its effects in the present, under the broad rubrics we call cultural memory, public history, and the like. Needless to say, this cannot be understood in any way as to support the offensive and ridiculous claims of Holocaust deniers, who seize on any shred of so-called evidence to buttress their own refusals to respect the truth of history: mediation is not fabrication.

2. The Holocaust’s cultural memory matters. That is to say, the entire broad swirl we conveniently refer to as Holocaust memory (an organic metaphor not to be confused with individual remembrance)—a sense of the meaning of the past in the present reflected in a conglomeration of artistic, literary, cinematic, museological, ritual, documentary, monumental, and other genres of cultural-memorial acts and activities—is viewed by Jews, and indeed, by a large cross-section of the general public in the West, as important, as valuable, as something to be nurtured, cherished, protected: as something sacred.

3. This memory is something distinct from Holocaust history. Public memory is a distillation of the material of the past, poured into vessels useful in the present. Even though both history and memory select items from the past in their attempts to describe and appropriate it, history tends toward elucidation, clarification, and differentiation, while memory tends toward simplification, mythologization, and identification: that is, toward symbolization. This distillation process is acutely evident in the symbols most commonly used to represent the Holocaust in the contemporary cultural milieu, especially in its icons.

These premises point to critical issues at the center of the symbolization process, which we might call authenticity and authentication. Long a concern in Holocaust studies, due to the challenges posed by Holocaust denial, the evidentiary aspect of Holocaust material is a core component of the effectiveness of postwar representation. In short, Holocaust symbols must convey a degree of historical authenticity if they are to be used to communicate the truth of the events they are intended to represent; when such materials are viewed as inauthentic, a cascade of questions are likely to follow, ultimately threatening the viewer’s faith in the veracity of the events depicted.

Closely related to this dynamic is the authentication process, in which the authenticity of Holocaust materials is confirmed through their use in memorial applications, even as those uses heighten the truth value of the materials as they refer back to their original contexts. So, for example, Hirsch notes, in comparing Art Spiegelman’s Maus (to which we return in chapter 2) to