James Young, who helped select memorials for victims of the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks, spoke Monday at an event titled “The Stages of Memory: From Berlin to New York” Monday night in the McCormick Tribune Center.
Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, gave a lecture to about 40 community members about serving on a commission to select a design for the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and on the jury in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition.
Young was the 2010 speaker for the biennial Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Lecture, supported by the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Holocaust Educational Foundation.
Weiss, a Holocaust survivor who established a Holocaust studies professorship in his name at Northwestern, attended the lecture.
“How you reflect depends to a degree on the memorial,” he said. “(Young) is a very bright scholar who illustrated how difficult it is to remember.”
The two memorials are different, Young said, but are related through their use of absence and negation to communicate a message to the viewer. Young traced the evolution of this type of memorial through a slideshow, beginning with the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris, France.
“There’s a preoccupation with the voids and with emptiness and the irreparability of the loss of the Jews in Europe,” he said, describing common themes among various monuments in Germany and France.
The members of the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition spent a month sequestered while going through 5,201 designs, Young said.
“There were beautiful, touching designs by families who clearly designed these up on the kitchen table at home. There were unfortunately giant apples with planes running into them,” Young said. “Everything: good, bad, ugly. Our job was just to see everything.”
These designs were eventually narrowed down to eight finalists, including one from a French team that proposed planting fruit-bearing trees over the site, Young said. The jury settled on “Reflecting Absence” by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, who designed two large sunken pools surrounded by trees where the towers once stood. The memorial is currently being built.
Prof. Peter Hayes currently teaches “The History of the Holocaust” and holds the professorship established by Weiss. He said he invited his students to the lecture because it covered a subject he has little time to discuss in class.
“I thought they would get a sense of that dimension of the subject that I can’t do justice to,” Hayes said.
Jingyang Cheng, one of Hayes’ students, said he came because he did not know much about memorials and memorialization.
“It was really interesting,” the Communication junior said. “The way they try to really use the space to make people feel, I’d never really thought about that.”
Hayes said students always ask what the contemporary implications of the Holocaust are, and the lecture helped to address that question.
“It’s a talk that shows the relationship between issues to do with the Holocaust and contemporary American concerns,” he said. “It’s something I think people should reflect on.”[email protected]
