Emotional Approaches to Holocaust Remembrance: Memoirs and Art

When approaching a topic from a legal standpoint, one is supposed to dismiss emotions and make decisions based on reason; this holds true when attempting to create an understanding of the Holocaust based on legal issues. However when considering the Holocaust from the mediums of memoirs and art, emotion is key.

Memoirs are written accounts penned by people seeking to share their thoughts and experiences with the world. Agate Nesaule, who survived the horrors of World War II as brought on by the Soviets, wrote her memoir as a way to deal with her guilt and also confront her experiences. Her memoir A Woman in Amber traces her time spent in Europe during and after the war, and also the life she had in the United States after moving there at the age of 12. Agate used the writing of her memoir as a means of healing; it is fused with emotion and inner conflict, reflecting her lifelong struggle to understand what she and millions of others experienced during World War II (and the Holocaust). The Diary of Anne Frank, was never meant to be a memoir, but rather was a means of expression for Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager hiding out in Amsterdam. Otto Frank, Anne's Father, published the diary posthumously in order to allow his daughter's spirit and love of life to live on. This type of memoir is filled with everyday banter, and also serves as a means of coping, but not in the same way as Agate's does; after all Anne Frank never got to reflect on the horror of camp life, she perished in one shortly before the end of the war.

While memoirs are emotion filled, they are bound in some ways by the conventions of the written word such as sentence structure and grammar rules; expressions of emotions in art forms such as paintings and poetry are not however. Paul Celan is a survivor of the Holocaust and his poetry, like the memoirs discussed above, reflect his attempts to address the wrongs done to him. His most famous poem "Death Fugue" uses the characters of Margarete and Shulamite to embody a German woman and a Jewish woman respectively. Through his extensive use of metaphors, Celan conveys such dark emotions as fear and despair, referring often to the image of death. Anselm Kiefer is a German artist who in many of his paintings, creates visual representations of Celan's poetry.The raw emotions of Celan's poetry are made visible through the use of dull colors punctuated often by the image of straw. Kiefer often incorporates the image of straw in order to reference the "golden hair" of Margarete, a character who represents the ideal German woman. Both these mediums are able to portray human emotions in such ways that convey depth and an inability to be tamed.

Sources:
"Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 22 July 2013.

Nesaule, Agate. A Woman in Amber. New York: Soho Press, Inc., 1995. Print.

"Paul Celan." POETS.org. Academy of American Poets, 2013. Web. 22 July 2013.

Wischer, Stephen Alexander. "Incarnations of Paul Celan’s Todesfuge in the Paintings of Anselm Kiefer and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Berlin." Architectoni.ca, 2012. Web. 22 July 2013.