Some German artists, wrestling with the issue of remembering the Holocaust, have very intentionally moved away from any form of traditional memorialization. They have created instead what James Young, the University of Massachusetts scholar on Holocaust memorials, called “counter- monuments.”

Young wrote that these artists have, “a deep distrust of monumental forms in light of their systematic exploitation by the Nazis, and a profound desire to distinguish their generation from that of the killers through memory.”

The Nazi’s used the “monumental” – enormous mass meetings, architecture that dwarfed the individual, and sculpture – as a form of state propaganda. That legacy left a profound distrust of monuments and the intentions imbedded in them.

In grappling with the memory of the Holocaust, these German artists face a particular quandary: they are figuratively if not literally the children of the perpetrators.

If it is the unmitigated memory of the Holocaust that separates them from the killers, how can they be true to that memory and not – even unintentionally – subvert or undermine it?

Part of the challenge has to do with the power of traditional monuments to suggest completeness, or a false sense of closure. We grapple with complex political, social, or historical issues and then construct a monument. That monument suggests that we’ve done what needs to be done; we’ve worked through the issues, and the monument is the answer to those issues.

There is an argument that suggests that monuments can ironically disconnect us from history and cushion us from it; they can anesthetize us rather than deeply connect us to the past. It is almost as if memory becomes invested in the monument rather than us, as if the existence of the monument takes over the responsibility for remembering.

This set of German artists realize that there would be a profound betrayal and a staggering irony if permanent German monuments to the Holocaust, no matter how well–intentioned, functioned as the final solution to the Final Solution: if the monuments served inadvertently to erase harsh memory and distance people from that painful past – if monuments made them comfortable enough to move on, forget, and abnegate the responsibility for not forgetting.

For the German artists who create countermonuments, there should be no forgetting, no moving on, no closure, no comfort zone in Holocaust memorialization, no abdicating the responsibility of holding the painful past directly in mind.

Holocaust countermonuments cannot aim to be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. That beauty or aesthetic pleasure should come from such an event as the Holocaust would be another path to false comfort and consequently a lie.

The countermonuments that emerge from these stark premises are often short–lived rather than permanent. They are meant to engage people directly, not to achieve solace but rather discomfort. Some encourage people to write on them, invite desecration, rather than sit separately on pedestals or behind fences. Sometimes they try to capture a sense of loss through negative space – the experience of shire emptiness.

What monuments in the United States, or elsewhere, are designed to hold the wrongdoings of the state in public consciousness, the dark side of its past? Are there countermonument artists elsewhere than in Germany? Should there be?

If the answer is yes that there should be countermonument artists elsewhere, what fading or lost memories need to be recovered and jarred uncompromisingly into public awareness by such artists?

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(Many of the key insights in this introduction come from James Young’s work. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning is a rich resource for further investigation.)