Your Ghost Rachel Whiteread’s memorial to the H…
Your Ghost
Rachel Whiteread’s memorial to the Holocaust victims of Austria was unveiled last week - staggering to think that it’s actually that country’s first memorial to the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. Unfortunately the article on the Guardian website which describes the memorial’s opening doesn’t feature the sombre photo of Whiteread’s creation that appeared in the print version. The memorial follows the same lines as her most famous work, “Ghost“, which was a life-sized cast of the inside of a room. The memorial is a cast of the inside of a library room - “The Austrian president, Thomas Klestil, called Ms Whiteread’s ‘nameless library’ - a hermetically-sealed room of books to symbolise the large numbers of victims and the untold stories of their lives - an attempt to ‘describe the indescribable’. ” It’s eeriely appropriate to see the idea from one of Whiteread’s previous works applied to the commemoration of a real world atrocity rather than the embodiment of an abstract idea.
On the same subject, Steve M gave me a novel by Jeri Weil a few months ago called “Life With A Star”. It’s inspired by Weil’s time as a Jew living within Prague during the Nazi occupation, and has distinct Kafka-esque overtones with the horror and uncertainity of perpetually living in fear for one’s life. The Nazis are never mentioned by name throughout the novel - Weil only refers to them as the nameless “They”. What makes this book vital reading within the canon of Holocaust literature (that’s probably an oxymoron - surely all accounts of the Holocaust are vital reading) is the sense of Weil conveys of the ruination of everyday life, the complete absence of peace of mind and omnipresent fear of being sent to the extermination camps. It’s this concentration on the day to day living under a barrage of fear, hatred and uncertainity that makes the reader empathise with the more subtle emotional violence of being outside the camps but still deprived of the most basic human rights. In a sense, it brings the Holocaust closer to home - while it is difficult to imagine life within the extermination camps no matter how many descriptions one reads (and Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel have produced invaluable, essential accounts), Life With A Star brings the violence of the Holocaust from out of the camps and into people’s homes, demonstrating that the Terror began much before the arrival at the camp gates.
Unfortunately, Life With A Star is out of print in Britain, but it is available from Amazon.com. I’d urge you to read it - and Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man too. (Levi’s book is published under the title “Survival In Auschwitz” in America. Some of the pig ignorant reviews on Amazon.com will make you want to punch your monitor).
You’ll find a rare and extremely good interview here with Primo Levi, and an excellent review of If This Is A Man here.
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- The Secret Life Of Primo Levi There was a mesme…
- Post-Death Experience This article by Lawrence …
- The Ruins Of Memory Steve M made a couple of ot…
- The Real Oskar Schindler
- Necessary reading I don�t want to dampen your wee…
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