Trauma, Memory and Memorials

In the last two decades we have witnessed a tremendous growth in both the building of war memorials and in writings about them. The memorial sites of the First World War now receive more visitors than ever before; in the last ten years there have been several new competitions for memorials for Holocaust victims and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall has become perhaps the most famous and one of the most visited monuments of the late twentieth century. The need to build memorials is also beginning to spread outside the West as can be seen in the monument built to commemorate the war of independence in Zimbabwe and the debate on how to remember the victims of genocide in Cambodia. This, of course, does not inevitably mean a late twentieth century or late capitalist obsession with mass death nor that the experience of traumatic violence inevitably becomes a public act of relief from private misery in public bereavement and mourning but it does suggest that the need to ‘find out’ what happened, that the process of coming to terms is now and probably always has been more complicated than a passive acceptance that ‘they died for a good cause’.

The question I wish to ask is why some monuments ‘work’ at the personal level of healing and reconciliation whilst others evoke distaste and condemnation. The latter is particularly true of the minimalist architecture of some recent memorials which have aroused considerable controversy. Rachel Whiteread's winning composition for the new memorial to the Holocaust victims to be built on the site of a medieval Jewish synagogue in Vienna remains, because of local opposition, a design waiting to be unveiled. James Young explains popular resistance to modernist memorials as due to the inadequacy of these sites to gather together personal memories into a collective space (Young 1993). The implication that the visual structure of a monument fails to encourage certain kinds of remembering and forgetting as part o