This book is about how monuments, and specifically the genocide museum complexes in Yerevan and Jerusalem, gather and elaborate on ethnic and religious beliefs and practices in the context of state-driven extermination of part of an ethnic or religious group (25). Transcending the mere display of records, monuments explore and theorize about origins and destinies, primarily of the peoples who suffered genocides, but also of the perpetrators and movements that planned genocides. The author, Dr. Jutta Kirsch, describes the book as an outgrowth of fieldwork at Yerevan State University and the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, which also led to a PhD in theology from North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa, and the Greenwich School of Theology (5–6).
It is possible to represent the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust as a contemporary legacy of age-old religious persecution after ancient faith communities fell under foreign rule, as with the fall of Judah to Babylon and then to Rome (190), and as with Ottoman rule over Anatolia and greater Syria and the Armenian massacres of the nineteenth century of the Common Era (148–149). Another set of thoughts about memory grasp the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah as failures of modern governance, the solution to which is the same: secular nationalism. In this framing, the Ottoman Empire as radicalized by Sultan Abdul Hamid targeting local homelands including Armenia in the 1890s and World War I has a parallel in the Third Reich trampling on its own ethnic and religious minorities as well as nationals of the various occupied countries in World War II. The first frame appears to lend itself to discourses of martyrdom and mysterious sanctification and divine action, and the second to heroism and ethnonationalism infused with religious beliefs and symbols.
In their geography, design, exhibits, and texts, the Tsitsernakaberd and Yad Vashem museums connect and meditate upon these two themes. These reflections culminate in differing, although linked, accounts of a destiny. The scriptural or religious tradition of memory (81, 125–126, 181, 190–191) does not necessarily lend itself to nationalism, let alone to progressive twentieth-century nationalism with a collectivist or socialist character, as both Israel and Armenia experienced during their early years (175). Dr. Kirsch argues that theological notions of rebirth from destruction—embodied in the Christian cross and the phrase Shoah WeGe'ula (or extermination and rebirth/redemption)—helped shape these monuments. Like saviors, the heroes of the redemption phase show their countrymen that evil and oblivion can be defeated and that the nation can survive forever. These sentiments were invoked, to take one example, in a speech by the Israeli President a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic:
Citizens of Israel, it was the human spirit that vanquished the Holocaust. The monstrous Nazis crushed our bodies, but not our spirit. Through the paths of tears, in the depths of hell, in a disintegrating world stripped of cohesion with death stalking them daily, our brothers and sisters risked their lives in order to save those weaker than themselves. Not one Jew saved from the inferno, not one survivor of the Holocaust did not have a helping hand from another Jew, another human being. . . .
My brothers and sisters, Holocaust survivors, heroes of the “Tekuma” (rebirth): The life of memory is longer than the lives of its owners (H.E. Mr. Reuven Rivkin, Address by President of the State of Israel, State Opening Ceremony of Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2020, https://www.yadvashem.org/remembrance/archive/address-by-president.html).
Dr. Kirsch suggests that the Armenian and Israeli peoples produced precedent-setting monuments because they were distinctly or disproportionately affected by genocide, compared to other peoples (225, 229). The Armenian genocide has been called “the mother of all genocides” (225) or one that changes the meaning of mass murder in history—perhaps because the phrase “crimes against humanity” was first used after it happened, in the context of massacres rather than the slave trade. More well-understood, the “Holocaust became a benchmark for all moral judgments” and has been classified as a “singularity” (229). Touching upon the distinctiveness of genocide or Shoah from other traumas, tragedies, and war crimes created an opportunity for Dr. Kirsch to address the growing literature on inclusiveness in monument-building and memory-making. Raphael Lemkin, for example, who coined the term “genocide,” connected the Nazi murders of the Jews to murders of Slavs and Roma/Sinti people, as well as to the fate of the Jewish Diaspora in Catholic states and the Russian Empire where pogroms were perpetrated. He also drew a line backwards in time from the massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in 1894–1924 to nineteenth-century massacres of Ottoman Christians in Greece, Bulgaria, Lebanon, and the quasi-independent Assyrian tribal territories of Hakkari in what is now Turkey. By contrast, influential contemporary historians of the Shoah reject efforts to include several million persons other than Jews in a broader “Holocaust” toll, saying that the killings of homosexuals, Russians, Poles, Serbs, Greeks, Roma/Sinti people, Christian priests, communists, socialists, the disabled, and others were not total in nature, and thus not part of any “Holocaust.” This debate seems to be shaping the construction of museums in North America and elsewhere, leading to questions concerning the extent to which US or Canadian museums on the Holocaust, for example, should commemorate other genocides as precedents or sequelae.
The methodology employed in the book is eclectic, combining the historical method with theological or theoretical reflections, and in a topical rather than a chronological structure. The back cover of the paperback edition suggests that the symbolic languages of postmodern architecture will be a focus, and they are, but in a way that emerges more from describing monuments than theorizing about postmodernism. Indeed, the book's rich descriptions of monuments convey a sense of having been a visitor and seeing not only the inexpressible devastation of the era but its architectural form as well.
The sources are a mixture of primary-source photographs and museum captions or text, and academic and journalistic studies, mostly in German. One of the strengths of the book is its rare collection of striking images of the Armenian genocide and of the two museums. The book also distinguishes itself from others by exploring theological and anthropological perspectives on memory-building initiatives after genocides.
The book is unique in offering a deep exploration of the meaning of genocide memorials and memory rituals from the standpoint of nationalism, religious and sectarian transmission, and literary and architectural culture. Aside from the central comparison of the Armenian genocide and the Shoah, the theoretical approach seems to be not as comparative or analytical as some other approaches in the field of genocide studies. Future works in this field might further develop Dr. Kirsch's analysis of the emergence of Armenian and Jewish memory of twentieth-century genocide to address the nineteenth century and the period before 1942 in the Jewish case, and the political and military contexts that shaped the place of memorials to great tragedies and triumphs in national and global cultures. The apparatuses of Armenian genocide memory and Armenian cultural transmission were arguably made possible, for example, by decisions and actions by the Russian, British, US, and French empires during the First World War, then by the Soviets and their allies especially prior to and during World War II, and finally by Soviet and post-Soviet leaders in the 1980s and 90s. While Dr. Kirsch describes the Zionist origins of Holocaust memory institutions in Israel, the foreign (US and Soviet, mainly) contributions to Israel's history are not analyzed. Arguably, the two major blocs of the Cold War shaped, alongside larger religious movements and national identities, the character and biases of our historical memory. Had the United States rather than the Soviet Union collapsed to end the Cold War, a different archipelago of museums would dot the earth, and a different outcome to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 would have prevented the Halabja Museum and the Halabja Martyrs’ Cemetery from taking their present form (Eccarius-Kelly, Reference Eccarius-Kelly and Rey2020).
