Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial

Abstract

We have discussed the creation of virtual communicative memory and the transformative discourse which uses trauma discourse and posttrauma tropes in Holocaust memory as symbolic anchors but departs from them. In this chapter, we will discuss mediation in the memorial, or the interplay of material and symbolic practices that constitute its understanding (Hennion 1997, in Marontate 2005). We will focus on the role and use of various media in the memorial as they facilitate and reflect meaning and knowledge production, consumption, staging and transmission in the site. The prevalent form of media used in the memorial is still-photography and not live media. The unplanned nature of action at the site is elevated in the press through, for example, the discussion about security in and of the site. This discussion, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, brings together the alleged moral career of the society that remembers with the individuals belonging to it, and suspense concerning their outcomes in the site. The latter is referred to in the numerous ‘emergency calls’ regarding the shaky condition of the stones, the stairs and the Information Center, which allude to the shaky condition of ‘memory’.