![]() As I’ve attempted to sketch the intergenerational trauma, I’ve found that family, like history, includes an accumulation of silences. I grew up with this knowledge but never knew the specifics, only that the family was Polish-no specific names, cities, or camps were ever provided. When he returned home to Poland, all seven family members were gone. My whole life I was told that Uncle Morty’s dad was captured by the Russians during World War II and sent to a labor camp in Siberia. Morty, my mom’s uncle, was the one who told the stories about the family dying in Poland. He was in the middle of a game of solitaire. He was found at his desk, slightly slumped over. My Great-Uncle Morty, a short and portly man with an angular, hooked nose, died a couple years ago. ![]() Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2010. Is this the future of labor? Collecting up our affective capacity, purely for the purpose of fixing and circulating social-historical capital? Or will it be enough, one day, to just walk the earth remembering? The entire planet a memorial, a museum, a place to think and feel? Walk these halls, see these artifacts and documents, stare at these statues in public squares, expend your energy in thinking and feeling, and you will have done the work of remembering. Museums and memorials are factories for memory, articulating the act of remembering as a discrete division of labor. As the affective economy booms and busts, the tempo of memory slows its loop. Falsities can be memorialized into fact and violence can be valorized as beauty. Nothing guarantees remembrance: not the archive, not the internet, not the much-touted “moral arc of history,” nothing. Or will they exist at all? “Nothing insures a poem against its death,” Derrida remarks on Celan, “because its archive can always be burned in crematory ovens or in house fires, or because, without being burned, it is simply forgotten, or not interpreted or permitted to slip into lethargy. Imagine what Holocaust memorials might look like in a thousand years: comprehensive VR re-creations of the camps, massive museum complexes of excruciating scale and detail, algorithmic factories for sorrow. It translates to “Stay healthy, because you can kill yourself later.” There’s a Yiddish saying that goes Abi gezunt-dos leben ken men zikh alain nemen. But as you move through it, your confusion deepens, and we become strangers. Peter Eisenman said his design is all about the “enormity of the banal,” and from the outside, the memorial seems logical, systematic, punctilious. Everywhere you look-despite all the possible turns one could take-it’s a straight line. Visitors cut corners in mischievous delight or solemn repose. Everyone who enters is quickly set along their own path. The rectangular stones are clean and simple, and start to grow taller and taller. Arranged in an elegant, softly undulating grid, they don’t seem very tall from outside the memorial, but as you descend within, an unsettling quiet fills the air. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a labyrinthine, sloping field of stelae. Everyone is sick, but especially “me.” 2. Today politics seems fully pathologized: Adhere to the status quo? Desire radical change? Reignite an old order? Healthy politics don’t exist. The macabre humor of it was titillating at first, but when I think about it now, a guilty sorrow washes over me, a pity for Hitler, but mostly for those who must suffer their relations. My eyes hungrily scanned the paragraphs, which were interspersed with ads oddly related to my email correspondence. I read about the story on major news outlets and local New Jersey websites. During an appeal hearing to get back the children, who are all named after Third Reich characters and white nationalist groups, Hitler was told he needed to seek psychological counseling, but he said he wouldn’t because his psychologist was Jewish.ĭenying custody, the court citied unspecified “physical and psychological disabilities,” including the fact that the parents themselves were victims of childhood abuse. A year later, the state took his kids away, citing abuse and neglect by Hitler and his wife Deborah Campbell. In 2008, Hitler tried to get a birthday cake with his young son’s name on it, but the cake writer at ShopRite refused. Isidore Heath Hitler is some guy from New Jersey who recently changed his name to Hitler-the initials stand for “I hail Hitler.” I found myself collecting all the little fascisms I could.
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