Who Owns History?

Thinking more about our discussion on Tuesday, and having read this New York Times article and the reactions to it, I want to explore the topic of “ownership” of the Holocaust a little more.  I am increasingly frustrated with the point of view that any one group should “own” history. It is critical that we respect those who lived through traumatic events, and those who are still affected by them today.  These survivors and descendants deserve the chance to tell their story and have their voices heard.  However, they do not “own” history.

The centrality of Jews in the story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust must remain.  However, efforts to overhaul the exhibitions at Auschwitz in order to serve a more educational purpose are a natural evolution.  Critical sites like these should not become historical footnotes of interest to small, directly affected groups.  Rather, they should share their lessons with the world.

Shared authority is one of our guiding concepts as public historians.  While we usually look at it from the perspective of museum professionals needing to give up some of their control, we shouldn’t forget that shared authority works both ways.  This concept also means that the “owners” of history also need to be less protective of their story, and allow it to be told in a way that will be instructive to a broader audience.

Is this racist?

I remember the first time I saw someone wearing this t-shirt.  I was at an after party in downtown LA for a comedy show.  I didn’t get the message that this was going to be a hipster party.  It was obvious that I forgot my ironic eyeglasses and converse high tops.  Little did I know that I also didn’t get the message about the obligatory offensive t-shirt.  “Jesus is my Homeboy,” “Live and Die in Compton,” anyone?

I had already made a fool of myself when I had decided that the comedian’s jokes about Mexicans were offensive.  The blank stares I got in reaction to this comment further confirmed that I just didn’t understand the cool kids.  Said comedian now has his own late night show, so I guess the kids over at Comedy Central are cooler than me too.  I didn’t say anything about the Obama t-shirt.  To this day, I wish I had the nerve to confront the boy donning it.

I get the shtick:  “Daniel Tosh is so outrageous that it is ironic and funny.”  “This shirt is so openly racist, so of course I’m not racist.  I’m funny.”  What I don’t get is that it is ok to act this way.  Just because you are a hipster and it is cool to be jaded, witty, and ironic, doesn’t mean it is ok to be racist.

I have always thought that I was on the outside looking in, and that I just never really got the joke.  However, as I was looking for an image of this t-shirt, I found many articles about this very outlook.  Carmen Van Kerckhove over at Racialicious, was the first person to give this phenomenon a name:  “Hipster Racism.”

What do you think?  Is Hipster Racism really racism or has some of society moved past racism?  Are hipsters (and the rest of us) evolved enough to make a derogatory comment in order to expose real racism?  In class we have been talking about racism in the past, but we really have been dancing around modern racism.  It is easy to say that racists live somewhere else – geographically, socially, and economically.  In reality racism is among us.  I think true feelings and fears hide inside Hipster Racism, but then again, maybe I just don’t get the joke.  Do you?

The Silent Sufferers

The first part of last week’s class focused on the blog post dealing with domestic abuse and provoked a thoughtful discussion of feminism and domestic violence. As we observed, domestic abuse is a topic that evokes many feelings and can be controversial in its display. I for instance, was completely shocked by the images of battered women taken by an outsider known to be present by the abuser and the abused. Even after the discussion, I think we recognized the importance of bringing such issues to light yet we did not know exactly how to educate others and expose such violence. Nor do I think we know exactly how to recognize domestic abuse in all its forms and victims. What about men in abusive relations?

 

No, I’m not talking about the men who abuse their wives and children. I am talking about the men who are the abused.

 

So why are there more support and awareness groups for abused women? One reason why is that more women are coming out on their abusive relationships than men. Perhaps due to being embarrassed, in denial, or feeling as though the abuse is a sign of weakness, men simply do not report attacks made on them by their significant others.

Regardless, it is ignored by the general public because it is expected that men should be stronger, and if they are abused, then they should have an easier time leaving the relationship. Still, many men silently suffer and the abuse is overlooked. While there may be more women victims out there who need help, this is no excuse to make the male population feel as though they have nowhere to turn.

 

For more information:

http://www.livescience.com/2539-men-suffer-domestic-violence.html

http://www.oregoncounseling.org/Handouts/DomesticViolenceMen.htm

As Firsthand Memories Fade, the Guilt Remains

As a young child, my father told me that my grandfather served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II on Okinawa. He also told me that my grandfather was quiet about it, granted he did not see any action during his stay as an occupying force on the island. So, I along with much of my family took that as a cue to not directly ask him. It did not seem unusual to me, as many of my friends had the same experience with their family members from that generation. Now, as the years go by, these WWII veterans are dwindling and with them, their personal stories.

The same can be said of the men, women, and children who survived the Holocaust. Stories—if even told—are losing their firsthand authority. The memories are too painful, and it took many years for these people to open up and share their experiences. The pain is obvious, as common themes of guilt and shame come out through these accounts and recollections. Guilt for surviving. Shame for doing what had to be done to survive. As with Art Spiegelman, the guilt often permeates the family life and now it resides on the faces of the survivors’ children.[1]

Despite these obstacles, the stories are out there and many are now willing to share to ensure that the memories and the lessons of the Holocaust will never fade.

Photograph by Mark Seliger. Used in "When They Came To Take My Father" travelling exhibit.

Mark Seliger has chosen to preserve the faces of the Holocaust through his specialized medium of black and white photography.  Growing up in Texas, Seliger had few, yet powerful encounters with the Holocaust and Jewish survivors. In particular, the young man remembered the Auschwitz tattoos on the arms of three brothers who owned a local bakery and a trip to notorious camp when he was a teenager.[2] Inspired by the legacy of these survivors, Seliger travelled around the country capturing the images of over fifty men and women who had firsthand accounts of the atrocities occurring in the ghettos and the camps. These poignant portraitures would later motivate the photographer to write a book entitled When They Came To Take My Father: Voices of the Holocaust which supplements his visual displays with his subjects’ experiences during and following the Holocaust.

Seliger’s reputation and the emotional power of his images sparked a travelling exhibition organized by the Holocaust Museum Houston named “When They Came To Take My Father” after Seliger’s book.  Out of his collection, twenty-two black and white photographs were selected to display the lives and dark memories of survivors.[3] The images are so emotional and honest that the audience cannot help but be greatly moved by the mixture of strength and guilt shown.

Vladek beginning to share his story with Art, with his Auschwitz tattoo exposed. (Art Spiegelman, Maus, p. 12)

Vladek Spiegelman, like the survivors in the “When They Came To Take My Father,” is an exception that Art acknowledges.[4] Vladek is willing to share his accounts in order to spend time with his son. Others share in order to vent. Many share because they do not want such an event to occur again. People like Art Spiegelman, Mark Seliger, and Yaffa Eliach recognize the importance of telling the stories of the lives of survivors, as well as representing the Jewish culture as a living entity. There must be a balance, or else these people will only be defined by the Holocaust.[5] The people are still out there, and museums can help preserve the memories and the cultures of survivors.

I am not convinced that we should write off the general silence of people who witnessed the war and the Holocaust as being just a characteristic of that generation. So, maybe my grandfather was uncomfortable talking about the war. Maybe he wasn’t. I never asked him. Now, much of his story is lost because nobody gave him the authority to share.

[1] Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), p. 102.

[2] Mark Seliger, “When They Came To Take My Father,” Travelling Exhibit through Holocaust Museum Houston. http://forsyth.tamu.edu/Root_3.22/story_holocaust.html

[3] Mark Seliger, “When They Came To Take My Father,” Travelling Exhibit though Holocaust Museum Houston. http://www.hmh.org/uploads/pdf/TE%20When%20They%20Came%20to%20Take%20My%20Father%20Fact%20Sheet.PDF

[4] “Art Spiegelman and the Making of Maus,” PBS, 1993. http://www.pbs.org/pov/inheritance/photo_gallery_special_maus.php

[5] Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 183-184.

Wanted: Allies for the Feminist Cause

In the 1990s girls were presented with television shows, movies and books in which anything was possible.

I was raised in the age of “Girl Power.” There was never any doubt in my mind: I could do or be whatever I wanted when I grew up and my gender would not stand in the way. With female role models like Sally Ride and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, every door was open.

In high school, I learned the proper name for this belief system: feminist. I never bought into the “dirty word” theory, and still don the title when I need to defend the sisterhood. For me, feminism is a point of pride in myself as a woman. But I have to thank our class discussion on blues women and domestic violence for pushing my thinking further. Is this a struggle women can take on by ourselves? Should we?

As we talked about Donna Ferraro’s exhibition Living with the Enemy, Matt pointed out the biological divisions to which it is easy to revert. Certainly, the nuance of Ferraro’s title implies abusive partners in domestic relationships, but it is not a huge mental jump is to cast half the population literally as “bad guys.” Are we scaring away potential allies by making female issues an all-girls club?

While third-wave feminism has been criticized for a lack of unity in cause, maybe that cause was just hiding in plain view. As the next generation of feminists, we must continue to bring female issues into public view, but with the alliance and support of our male counterparts. We need to collectively move beyond gender as a defining characteristic of struggle. Because after all, aren’t we all in this together?

Strong Words

Although last week’s class readings revolved primarily around the blues and blues singers, the first part of our class discussion revolved around domestic abuse towards women.  We reviewed the exhibit photos of Donna Ferreto’s documentary Living with The Enemy which depict women in violent situations.  We questioned, and I still do, how Ms. Ferreto was about to take these photos and release them to the public without repercussions.

Bessie Smith, February 3, 1936; by Carl Van Vechten; Library of Congress; reproduction number LC-DIG-ppmsca-09571 DLC

We also brought music into the discussion and explained how the dialogue on domestic abuse has come forward in society through the medium of music.  Originally these lyrics were heard lyrics to songs sung by the early blues singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.  These women were not afraid to sing about being abused by their men.  They sang directly about their experience. They were making the private, public through their songs.  These blues songs made me think about the rap songs and lyrics that are sung today and the difference in how we perceive these songs versus those from the past.

Photo by RJ Shaughnessy (photography), 2006; Wikimedia Commons

Many of the songs on the radio, particularly rap songs, contain lyrics that can be particularly offensive towards women.  Songs that do not just describe women as objects, but crime and violence persist as well.   Violent and suggestive lyrics sung by artists like Lil’ Wayne and others are often lauded as reflective of their harsh perceptions, experience and exaggerated persona.   Like the original traditions of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who both sang of real experiences while utilizing the sexual and blues woman persona that further spurred their popularity.

It is evident that songs with lyrics about experiencing abuse have brought the issue forward in our society, but unlike the blues singers of the past, rap is censored and artists are chastised severely for their songs.  Were the female blues singers of the past censored as well?  Why or why not? Is it because the songs are about Men enacting violence against men (or women) that artist are denounced today? Have the lyrics become more explicit or has society become more censored?  I’m sure that Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey experienced censorship for their lyrics while enjoying praise for the boldness of their lyrics as well.  Should we give artists who use raw lyrics the same consideration? What is the difference if their work comes from a place of experience no less real than that of their predecessors?

Museums and Social Activism

I want to reflect on a part of last week’s discussion that focused on the representation of social issues in museums. Although the conversation centered on domestic violence, it could have applied to poverty, homophobia, discrimination, or any other difficult subject that people don’t like to talk about. I strongly believe that museums have an opportunity to inspire real social change by tackling difficult, contemporary subject matter in their exhibitions and programs. However, I maintain that curators cannot simply mount exhibitions that, “raise awareness,” of social issues and then merely retreat to the privacy of their offices. If museum professionals are going to successfully inspire change, they need to step out of their comfort zones and work with their communities to find solutions to society’s problems.

I searched the web for an example of a museum that partnered with a service organization to mount an exhibition on a difficult social topic. I will use poverty, an issue that every community faces, as an example. Ideally, such a museum would host dialogues and programs in conjunction with an exhibition chronicling poverty in their community. Within the exhibition, the museum would direct visitors to social services that could help them learn more about the topic, obtain needed assistance, or volunteer their time and talents. In addition, the museum would empower the local homeless and shelter populations by collecting their personal histories and artwork for inclusion in the exhibit.

If a museum was really ambitious, it could develop a free after-school program that would provide at-risk children with a safe, friendly, educational space every afternoon. Furthermore, the entire museum would greatly invest in finding sustainable ways to alleviate poverty in its community. It would mobilize staff and museum volunteers to perform direct service to the poor, offer itself as a venue for social service fundraisers and prompt education staff to work with local shelters and food pantries to develop educational materials for at-risk audiences. Not surprisingly, I didn’t find any museums that met my stringent criteria.

While the museum field has a long way to go before it is truly at the forefront of addressing social issues, I do see great promise in the work of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. As the Coalition gains greater influence in the field, I see many museums moving towards a place where they legitimately and powerful address  society’s problems. Such an approach could greatly aid museums in their fight to connect to their communities, cultivate additional funding sources, boost admissions, and remain relevant.

Hide Your Wife

Last week’s discussion on domestic abuse made me think about a particular pastime of mine.  On a lazy day, I can often be found plopped on the couch, fanatically engulfed in a marathon of real life murder mysteries and unsolved missing persons stories on my favorite TV channel, Investigation Discovery.  They play the same episodes constantly, and I’ll still drop everything to watch one I can practically recite.  I even Google cases after I watch an episode from a few years ago to see if there have been any updates.  I also get very into current cases, the kind of thing you read about in People or watch Nancy Grace shout about night after night.  And I’ve noticed that the center of these stories, the distressed/missing/dead protagonist, usually fits a certain mold—she’s middle or upper class, and she’s white.

Chandra Levy.  Laci Peterson.  Yeardley Love.  The list of these infamous white women goes on and on.  The beautiful, tragic women we see on TV and read about in magazines are not the women we heard about in blues songs or saw in Donna Ferrato’s photos.  Those stories almost never get media airtime.  Why?

I would venture to say that it is more dramatic when domestic abuse, rape, and murder occurs in the world of rich white people.  These things are not “supposed” to be a part of elite white culture.  The blues music of the 1920s show that black people have a history of openly discussing the presence of domestic abuse.  Perhaps this dialogue had the unintended effect of making these stories seem commonplace, or, even worse, expected.  This type of acknowledgement does not seem to have been a part of white culture, especially among the upper class.  Because stories of domestic abuse among high society are considered rare (even if they may not be), they are dramatic, emotional and interesting.  In other words, they make good television.

While I do also love a nice episode of Law & Order, there is something about watching a true story unfold that trumps the scripted ones.  My personal attraction to these Dateline and 48 Hours Mystery specials is because of their authenticity, not because of the shocking mix of glitz and crime.  I could certainly get emotionally invested in the rape or murder of an impoverished black woman just like I do with the endless stream of white women whose stories I watch.  I just never see or hear those other stories.  What does it say about the media when an Auto-Tuned version of Antoine Dodson singing about his sister is the only recent example of a black woman’s attempted rape that got national attention?

The Men with the Pink Triangle: Breaking the Long Silence

German Concentration Camp Chart of Prisoner Markings from the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Photo Public Domain.

The word “holocaust” is of Greek origin and means “sacrifice by fire.”  But that is the easy definition.  The Holocaust means many things to many different people.  It is about remembrance of the victims, recognition of the strength of survivors, and acknowledgment of what happens when humans fail to tolerate others’ differences.  In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27, the day Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to not only to honor the memory of victims, but to educate and raise awareness about genocide worldwide. [1]  While the proportional majority of Holocaust victims were Jews, Nazi policies before and during WWII targeted a wide range of people designated as inferior.  The horrifying breadth of Nazi genocide has lead to many blanket statements such as, “During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma, the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples.  Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communist, Socialist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.” [2]  So with such a wide range of victim groups, how do we move beyond categories and numbers?

The planners of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were worried about the same thing: “there was concern that the millions of individual deaths that made up the Holocaust would be lost in a story of mass death and overwhelmed by a fascination with the technique of destruction.” [3]  One way to avoid this was the identity-card project, where visitors were given a card identifying them with a victim of the Holocaust.  In Preserving Memory, Edward T. Linenthal brings up how this project served “subtly to extend the boundaries of memory to connect visitors with some oft-overlooked victim groups” such as homosexuals. [4]  Linenthal also mentions that Dr. Klaus Muller, who prepared the identity cards for homosexual victims, had plans for a special exhibit on gay victims for the museum.

Since Linenthal’s book was published in 1995, I wondered what progress had been made since then.  It did not take me long to find a page for the traveling exhibition “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-45.” Began in 2003, the exhibition has since travelled coast-to-coast on display at colleges and universities, museums, and community centers.  The exhibition includes reproductions of 250 historic photographs and documents examining “the rationale, means, and impact of the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality.” [5]  Since I couldn’t experience the exhibit personally, I visited the online exhibition to learn more.

Upon visiting the site I found a substantial amount of content that stood out and provided valuable perspective into the homosexual experience during the Holocaust.  I appreciated the historical context in the write-up and video on Paragraph 175, which was the “legal” means that the Nazis used to suppress homosexuality.  Another section, clearly marked For Teachers, provides identity-cards of homosexuals that faced persecution at the hands of the Nazis.  Unfortunately, the teacher resources expand no further than the cards, including no lesson plans or classroom discussion outlines.  In fact, throughout the whole online exhibition there is a feeling that something is unfinished.  Compared to the meticulous planning and presentation of the live exhibitions at USHMM, this online resource is basically a compilation of links.  It is a nice resource, but not something that “will motivate gays to ‘take responsibility for this part of [their history]’” and break “an unholy tradition of silence.” [6]

My study of Nazi persecution of homosexuals, combined with my reading of Maus by Art Spiegelman, made me wonder if there were any alternative mediums of interpretation of homosexual Holocaust victims.  Spiegelman, a graphic artist, utilizes his craft to help him understand his father and document his family’s past.  While I was unable to find anything quite as “alternative” as Maus, I did come across the trailer for the 2000 award-winning documentary film Paragraph 175, which tells of the story of five of the ten remaining homosexual victims of the Holocaust.  It is very telling that these men’s stories are some of the last “untold” recollections of life in Nazi Germany. A quote from the Baltimore Sun in response to “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945” says it well- “[This] new exhibit shows how slow prejudice is to wither, if it ever does.” [7]  The silence surrounding story of homosexuals during the Holocaust seems to be changing.  In coordination with the current LGBTQ movement, this “forgotten” history may gain increased visibility and study in the field of Holocaust scholarship and remembrance.

[1] “International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/ihrd/comment_post.php.

[2] “Introduction to the Holocaust,” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143.

[3] Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 171.

[4] Linenthal, 187.

[5] “Traveling Exhibitions: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933 1945,” http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/traveling/details/index.php?type=current&content=nazi_persecution_homosexuals.

[6] Linenthal, 188-89.

[7] “Traveling Exhibitions: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945.”

Replaying Horrors with Cartoons and Toys

I didn’t live through the Holocaust.

I haven’t experienced human rights atrocities. Therefore, I’ll never fully comprehend the inhumanity suffered under Hitler’s regime. But I must try. As long as we value the sanctity of human life, each of us has a responsibility to ensure that the Holocaust and its victims are not forgotten. This begs the question: how do we preserve and retell history and memory when we can never completely grasp what happened?

Artists Art Spiegelman and David Levinthal would argue that since the Holocaust was so incomprehensible—particularly to those who never experienced it—Holocaust history and memory might effectively be communicated through the absurd. In Maus, Spiegelman, the son of Auschwitz survivors, tells his father Vladek’s story through a graphic novel. The younger Spiegelman’s process of recording his father’s memories is verbally and visually interspersed with the elder Spiegelman’s oral history. At first, a cartoon seems an odd, even irreverent medium through which to explore the Holocaust. Yet the inside cover of the book defends this choice: “Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice) succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.”[1] The cartoon form effectively communicates evocative, emotional imagery, and visualizes the tension between Art’s and Vladek’s narrative voices.

Scene from Levinthal's Mein Kampf. davidlevinthal.com

Spiegelman’s Maus is frequently compared to the work of David Levinthal, another child of a Holocaust survivor.[2] Levinthal’s Mein Kampf is a series of photographs of toy Nazi figurines committing atrocities.[3] Mein Kampf has appeared in many locations, including the former Judah L. Magnes Museum at Berkeley and the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.[4] Levinthal used Nazi action figures, miniature dolls, and meticulously designed backgrounds to construct scenes of mass murders, rapes, gas chambers, concentration camps, and crematoriums. It is unclear whether his scenes were based upon actual photographs or images of war crimes seared in popular memory. Rather than displaying the three-dimensional tableaux, he photographed his scenes. The images are slightly blurred. It is, at first, difficult to discern what’s going on, though one does get the sense that it’s something sinister. The barely visible Nazi armbands, machine guns, and nude women confirm that these are scenes of Nazi crimes. The blurriness of the photos places the burden of memory on the viewer: the viewer has a choice to let the challenging image fade into obscurity, or to recognize it as a scene of a horrific event.

Both Spiegelman and Levinthal use nontraditional media not only to preserve memory but also to demonstrate how far removed they were from the Holocaust. Spiegelman inserts his father’s narration into the framework of his struggle to preserve his father’s memories. The graphic novel format illustrates the shifts between Art’s and Vladek’s narrative voices; this allows the reader to visualize that Vladek’s story is being filtered through Art’s process of memorialization. Consequently, Maus is a secondary source, rather than a primary one. Levinthal, meanwhile, takes photographs of tableaux based upon photographs or memories of actual events. As a result, his work is several degrees removed from reality. How would it be different if his work were not photographs, but the three-dimensional scenes themselves? The name “Mein Kampf”, or “My Struggle”, may also have another meaning in addition to referring to Hitler’s 1925 book; it could signify Levinthal’s “struggle” to comprehend and express what his family and others endured. Through the mediation of comics and toys, Spiegelman and Levinthal articulated their distance from horrors of the Holocaust, thereby recognizing that they could never fully grasp what happened.

Scene from Levinthal's Mein Kampf. davidlevinthal.com

Aside from confirming the difficulty of memorializing the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s and Levinthal’s work raise some interesting questions. How do survivors and non-survivors approach the memorialization process differently? Are non-traditional media the only way non-survivors can memorialize the Holocaust? Do absurd forms of memorialization stem exclusively from the younger generations’ failure to fully comprehend the Holocaust? Or was the Holocaust so absurd that survivors may also use non-traditional media to tell their stories?

[1] Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), inside front cover.

[2] Kenneth Baker, “The Holocaust on a Whole New Scale.” San Francisco Chronicle. 14 May 1996. Accessed 27 March 2011. < http://articles.sfgate.com/1996-05-14/entertainment/17774840_1_mein-kampf-nazis-and-victims-adolf-hitler>.; Christopher Benfey, “David Levinthal’s Dollhouse History.” Slate Magazine. 20 February 1997. Accessed 27 March 2011. < http://slatest.slate.com/id/3469/>.

[3] David Levinthal, “Mein Kampf, 1993-1994.” David Levinthal. Accessed 27 March 2011. < http://www.davidlevinthal.com/works_mk.html>.

[4] Baker, “The Holocaust on a Whole New Scale.”