The Holocaust presents a profound challenge to memorialization.

In The Art of Memory, James Young wrote that Holocaust memorials are crafted from the "national myths, ideals, and political needs" of the countries and communities that create them. "Each reflects both the past experiences and the current lives of their communities, as well as the state's memory of itself." (p. 19) Holocaust remembrance does not exist in isolation but rather within the preexisting contexts of different places and peoples, and invariably there is a political impact on remembrance.

"What is remembered as Shoah Vegvurah (catastophe and heroism) in Israel was remembered in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War; what was called the Nazi-Zeit in Germany is recalled as an era of national martyrdom in Poland" (The Art of Memory, p. 21). As Young points out, these basic differences in initially naming what was to be remembered are a crucial first step toward the "disparate and varied" memorials that such many-sided remembrance produced.

In the Soviet Union, art was a powerful tool for propaganda, so that Soviet-sponsored memorials at liberated camps often cast history in terms of class struggle and communist ideology. Murdered Jews were grouped with all other victims, regardless of the disproportion, and placed into the undifferentiated category of "victims of fascism," or "heroes fighting fascism," part of the ongoing class struggle. It is valuable to hold in mind that remembrance does not escape political imperatives but rather is crafted and reshaped by them.

For the most part, artists transform remembrance into monuments and memorials using the materials and following the aesthetic judgments of their times. The intention may ultimately be for art to achieve a timeless status, but it is created within the context of a specific time and place that deeply influences that creation.

At the end of World War II, there was some distrust in Western Europe of monumental architecture and sculpture, in part because of the Nazis's and the Soviet's use of both as propaganda.

Nazi architecture sought to dwarf the individual and accentuate the dominance of the state, and Nazi sculpture tried to express the heroic superiority of the German people and the Aryan race.

Coupled with this distrust of art as propaganda was a shift in art away from representation to abstraction. The golden age of monument and memorial building that had begun in United States after the Civil War and run until the 1920s had passed, and in United States and internationally new and different forms of expression would be needed to cope with memorializing the Holocaust.

If the old forms for expressing pathos and the heroic were in shambles and art was moving away from representation, how would artists wrestle with the Holocaust?

Natan Rappaport, whose memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of our going-deeper examples, is one answer. He did not engage the new artistic mandates but stuck with representational art, such as the statue to the right of the United Statesn soldier carrying a survivor from a camp after its liberation. As our two other going-deeper examples, Treblinka and Berlin, will show, other artists and architects embraced abstraction and symbolism and moved memorialization in these new directions.

If the artists and architects who made the major Holocaust memorials had inherited the artistic norms and materials from 1900, or from today, instead of from the mid-20th century, how do you think memorialization of the Holocaust would have been different?