Janet Jacobs,Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender,Genocide and Collective Memory

Reviewed by: Bill Niven, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Janet Jacobs, Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, has written a fascinating, if occasionally problematic study of memorialization at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and a number of other memorial and memory sites around Europe (in the main, her final chapter focuses on sites in Australia and the United States). Jacobs, who visited these sites herself and took extensive notes, looks at them through the lens of gender.

Pointing out that women appear to be over-represented in Holocaust atrocity images at Auschwitz and Maidanek memorial sites, Jacobs analyses the nature of these portrayals, coming to the conclusion that many risk replicating traditional representations of women as suffering mothers ‘and/or sexual possessions of the perpetrators’ (31). The danger of voyeurism, it seems, is a very real one, and it is for this reason that Jacobs herself prefers not to replicate graphic photographic images used at Auschwitz or other memorial sites in her book (instead, she describes them, in a manner, however, that is verbally sometimes as explicit as the visual images described). Images of suffering motherhood projected by memorials, photographs of which Jacobs includes in her book, run the risk of implying male emasculation, reproducing the by now well-worn idea that Jewish men had in some way failed to protect their wives and children. In a later chapter on the memorialization of Kristallnacht in Germany, Jacobs also wonders if post-war commemorative representations of the desecration of the Torah during Kristallnacht might not reproduce the notion of the defeat of the Jewish God by Christianity, and simultaneously the feminization of this God at his (and thereby her) moment of demise, narrativized for instance in the medieval embodiments of Ecclesia and Synagoga.

Issues of the feminine come to the fore and recede only to come to the fore once more in Jacobs’s often haunting and often profound discussion. She registers how keen contemporary Germany – and also eastern Europe – seems to be to rediscover and re-appropriate the lost or buried Jewish heritage of the medieval and early modern periods. There is an urge to reconnect to the pre-Holocaust history of Judaism, in a manner which all too easily circumnavigates the rise of racial anti-Semitism and the Shoah. Alarmingly, Jacobs establishes that inscribed into these reconstructions is an evacuation of the history of female Jews, who play little part in memory narratives focused on Hasidic Jewish masculinity (as at Kasomierz). Indeed at some sacred sites in Poland, women are banished upstairs when they come to pray. At towns such as Worms in Germany, while it is admirable that surviving mikwehs have been restored, these stone baths are presented to the visitor in terms such as ‘cave’ and ‘cultic center’, recalling notions of the Jewish body as impure and resuscitating ‘tropes of medievalism that associate Jews with carnality and an underground Jewish hell that was popularized by medieval Christianity’ (128). In such narratives, it is the male body, rather than the female body that is associated with such impurity, thus feminizing the male and the Jewish patriarchy.

Jacobs’s books is full of such insights, and yet at times the power of her argument rests on one-sided readings. Thus the memorialization of Kristallnacht in Germany is not necessarily a way of distancing German national consciousness from genocide, as Jacobs (or Jeff Olick, whom she cites) implies (100). The synagogue memorial sites are not just about the destruction of a building, or a religious symbol. There are several synagogue memorial sites which explicitly reference the murder and deportation of German Jews during or following Kristallnacht. Thus the text of the 1975 plaque commemorating the destruction of Brunswick’s synagogue, while couched in religious terms, nevertheless clearly references the deportation, humiliation and murder of Brunswick’s Jews, as well as the inhumanity which led to this. Remembering the conflagration and destruction of synagogues is firmly established in Germany as remembering the first stage towards the Holocaust. Kristallnacht is seen as a significant step down the road to genocide, which a not inconsiderable number of ‘ordinary’ Germans who looked on or participated in November 1938 helped the SA and SS to take. To equate commemoration of Kristallnacht with an obsessive focus on the destruction of bricks and religious artefacts is not to do justice, in my view, to German memory. Equally, while Jacobs may be right to be sceptical of some of Germany’s efforts to reconstruct Jewish life (in some places, almost in a vacuum given the destruction of the former Jewish communities under Nazism), it would not be true to claim that the focus is purely on the medieval and early modern periods. Thus the Judengasse exhibition in Frankfurt certainly reaches into the nineteenth century. Moreover, while it is true that it was at Ravensbrück that GDR tropes of commemoration began to change (in 1988), this does not mean the topic of anti-Semitism was always absent elsewhere. At Buchenwald in 1954, a modest memorial stone was laid in memory of the Kristallnacht victims incarcerated there; Jewish suffering was topicalized at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, even if the emphasis here was on anti-fascist resistance.

Overall, however, Jacobs has produced a well-written, deeply felt and highly intelligent book that addresses questions of gender and memory at memorial sites in a way that is timely and original.