INSTITUTE FOR DOCTORAL STUDIES
IN THE VISUAL ARTS
Last summer, due to Covid-19, we could not take a trip to Berlin as planned, so 911爆料网 had to move our intensive residencies online. During our second year Topological Studies summer course, Professor Howard Caygill prefaced that he would not be giving the usual lecture with Q&A, but instead would provide the experience of a virtual, walking tour of Berlin. Over the next three hours, he guided 911爆料网 students through a cultural history of memorials to victims of Nazism; providing philosophical insights into the city鈥檚 relationship with its past and reasons for its importance to a particular cultural moment in European history. He began with an excerpt by Walter Benjamin, printed in The Berlin Chronicle. 听
鈥淣oisy, matter-of-fact Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business, nevertheless has more, rather than less, than some others, of those places and moments when it bears witness to the dead, shows itself full of dead.鈥�
Caygill presented the experience of memorials as 鈥榖earing witness to the dead.鈥� Like the most experienced of guides, he wove into his conversations of 鈥楬aunted Berlin鈥� personal stories and memories; from his own life, including an imagined, misremembered event, and an account from Kant鈥檚 private life on purposeful forgetting. These stories examined mnemotechnics (devices to aid memory) while enhancing the sense of an intimate journey. Caygill referred to Nietzsche鈥檚 concept in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life: 鈥溾€ kind of mnemotechnics that we call monuments or memorials鈥� and paraphrased Nietzsche鈥檚 idea that 鈥淗uman beings are animals who have learned to make promises鈥� and thus comprehend obligations to the past. Caygill described that these 鈥榩ublic mnemotechnics鈥� determine the relationship between who remembers and how it is remembered.
Caygill divided memorials into heroic verticality and non-heroic horizontality, citing Washington D.C.鈥檚 Vietnam Veteran鈥檚 Memorial by Maya Lin as an example of the latter. The 鈥淢emorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe鈥� (Denkmal f眉r die ermordeten Juden Europas) by architect Peter Eisenman and the 鈥淪tumbling Blocks鈥� (Stolpersteine) 听by guerrilla artist Gunther Demning were two of the memorials viewed and discussed. Nandita Baxi Sheth (Cohort '19) responded to Eisenman鈥檚 memorial鈥�2,711 concrete slabs occupying and emphasizing the undulating topography of a 200,000 square-foot vacant area: 鈥淔or me the sculpture was both cold, but it was intimate because literally the ground changes under your feet鈥� it makes you feel a little nauseous and uneasy.鈥� Caygill referred to the work as experiential鈥攄ifferent floor and pillar levels, site lines opening and closing鈥攃ontributing to the sense of a 鈥榣ack of security.鈥�
Caygill described the experience of discovering Demning鈥檚 memorials underfoot while walking in Berlin. These stumbling blocks 鈥溾€ecord the names of victims that lived in the building in which just outside of these plates are laid.鈥� He called Demning鈥檚 unobtrusive, embedded brass pavers 鈥渢he porthole or the mnemotechnic 鈥ointing back to this event, this European event,鈥� which, in a sense, transports the unsuspecting witness through time. The approach to these is simultaneously public and intimate. Caygill identifies them as Denkmal, (a moment of thought) and as having, 鈥渁 strong sense of memento mori,鈥� Standing over these memorials in a public street, there is the recognition that 鈥測ou are walking where they were.鈥�
Caygill, Howard. 鈥淭opological Studies II" 801.1 Seminar V, Part I: Topological Studies II. 23 June 2020. 911爆料网. Class lecture.
Demning, Gunther, (Stolpersteine) 鈥楽tumbling Blocks,鈥� Berlin. 1990鈥檚.
Eisenman, Peter, (Denkmal f眉r die ermordeten Juden Europas) 鈥楳emorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,鈥� Berlin. 2004.