1 Vita Dadoo Lomeli
April 2016
ENG 393 – Word Art
Dr. Churchill
The Semiotics of Memory
“Our concern with history is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our
brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all,
somewhere as yet undiscovered.” – Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Introduction: Kristallnacht
On the eve of November 9th, 1938, Nazi occupied Germany witnessed one of the
most violent anti-Semitic riots prior to the beginning of World War II. Through November
9th and 10th, Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were plundered, destroyed, or
defiled across Germany and the recently annexed territories in Austria, Czechoslovakia,
and Sudetenland. Popularly known as “Kristallnacht,” and translated as “The Night of
Crystal” or “The Night of Broken Glass,” members of the SA, Hitler Youth, and local
communities ignited the Jewish Pogrom of 1938. Although Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister
of Propaganda, highly encouraged the event to take place, Kristallnacht is often
remembered as the spontaneous public outburst of anti Jewish sentiment that occurred as a
result of Ernst Von Rath’s assassination – a German embassy official stationed in Paris.
Kristallnacht marked a Nazi attempt to purify Germany and its annexed territories
from the evils of Judaism prior to the war. Kristallnacht also gained symbolic importance
after the war and is now regarded as one of the stepping-stones for the complete
2 dehumanization and annihilation of the Jews in Europe. Noting the importance of
Kristallnacht in World War II and Holocaust historiography, it is pertinent and imperative
to examine the significance and implication of the term “Kristallnacht.” According to the
United States Holocaust Memorial, “Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered
glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom—broken glass from the windows
of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered and destroyed during the
violence” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). “Kristallnacht” is both descriptive
and prescriptive in nature. The term unequivocally speaks to the violence enacted towards
Jewish communities in Nazi Germany and what the violence consisted of (i.e. the
defilement of public spaces occupied or owned by Jews.) However, “Kristallnacht” is
prescriptive in that it privileges the image of broken glass and equates it to Jewish violence.
In her essay, Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish women’s responses
to daily life in Nazi Germany, Marion Kaplan provides a glimpse into the life, attitudes, and
experiences expressed by Jewish women prior and during the early stages of World War II.
As Kaplan notes, women’s victimhood in Nazi Germany was different than men’s (155).
Female experiences in Nazi Germany during the mid and late 1930s were characterized by
social isolation (Bartov, 157). According to Kaplan, “women…took responsibility…for the
psychological work necessary to raise their family’s spirits and tide the family over until
better times” (Bartov, 158). Further, women’s “narrower-picture” of domestic life alerted
them to the dangers at home (Bartov, 161).
Daily life for women in Nazi Germany resonates with their particular experiences
during the November Pogroms. In her essay, Kaplan notes the stark differences between
male and female testimonies of Kirstallnacht. According to Kaplan, “Jewish women’s
memoirs often focus not on broken glass but on flying feathers – feathers covering the
3 internal space of the home” (Bartov 161). Similar to earlier pogroms in Russia, “the mobs
tore up feather blankets and pillows and shook them into the rooms,” leaving Jews “bereft
of their bedding and the physical and psychological security that it represented” (Bartov,
161). The desecration of the intimate space the home embodies points to the trauma
experienced during Kristallnacht.
The term “Kristallnacht invokes images of what really happened during the
November Pogrom in 1938. However, the term “Kristallnacht,”used to refer to the
November pogrom, obscures the female narrative of the event. Drawing from Peirce’s
theory of signs, I am interested in analyzing the semiotic functions of Kristallnacht – The
Night of Broken Glass – in contrast to its female counterpart, 2The Night of Falling
Feathers.” Drawing from Maggie Hum’s essay Memory, Photography, and Modernism:
The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virgina Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas’ and Marianne
Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory, I will argue that gendered memories of traumatic
events, such as the November Pogrom of 1938, inform collective memories and cultural
representations of the event itself. In exploring the glass feather dyad, my aim is to uncover
how gendered representations create a landscape for memory. In challenging the original
narrative of Kristallnacht, I will examine the weight of female testimonies as a way to
remediate our understanding of the Holocaust and counter the spiritual death of women in
war.
The Semiotics of Memory: The Night of Broken Glass
Peirce’s Sign Theory, developed in the 1970s, “is an account of signification,
representation, reference and meaning” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Peirce’s
Sign Theory offers a modern and comprehensive explanation of different signs. Peirce
defines signs as “anything which is so determined by something else, called its object, and
4 so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is
thereby immediately determined by the former” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Peirce differentiates signs based on their function and their configuration. Peirce accounts
for three different types of signs: icons, symbols, and indexes. Icons are signs that
physically resemble the signified object. The resemblance is either sonic (i.e.
onomatopoeia) or visual (i.e. road signs). Symbols indicate a purely conventional
relationship between the signifier and the signified. Written language is an example of a
collection of symbols that express meaning. For instance, the arrangement of the letters “c,”
“a,” “t,” spell “cat.” “Cat” denotes the furry, four-legged critter, but does not resemble the
actual animal. The reader of the symbol “cat” relies on conventions – i.e. the English
language – to identify its meaning. Indexes show an existential or causal relationship
between the signifier and the signified. For instance, dark clouds are indexical of
impending rain, smoke is indexical of fire, and personal pronouns are indexical of people.
Peirce’s semiotic account offers a framework to allot meaning to signs and understand how
individuals interpret signs.
“Kristallnacht” operates as a sign that denotes different meanings. More
specifically, the term “Kristallnacht” functions as a historical image. In her essay, The
Generation of Post Memory, Marianne Hirsch offers a semiotic breakdown of the
photographic image and the impact it has on memory. According to Hirsch, photographs
“shape our conception of the events and its transmission” (116). In lieu of Hirsch’s
argument, the imagistic properties of the term Kristallnacht operate similarly to a
photograph. Kristallnacht is a term that conjures vivid imagery of the pogrom and, for the
purpose of this essay; Kristallnacht will be regarded as a historical photograph. Like
5 photographs, specific terms to describe historical events such as Kristallnacht “survive
massive devastation and outlive their subjects and owners” (Hirsch 115).
Hirsch argues that photographs “function as ghostly revenants of an irretrievably
lost past world” (115). In light of Hirsch’s claim, it is important to reclaim the historical
photograph that “Kristallnacht” concocts and examine the evolution of the image as a
historical sign. Using Peirce’s Theory of Signs, it is evident that “Kristallnacht” operates as
an index, an icon, and a symbol. “Kristallnacht” functions as an index in that it expresses a
causal relationship between the image it stands for and the actions that took place during
the event. The term “The Night of Broken Glass” links “broken glass” to danger, violence,
and destruction, all of which resulted from anti-Jewish sentiment. “Kristallnacht” is an icon
in that the image denoted by the term “Kristallnacht” shows a mimetic similarity to the
image of the glass broken during the Pogrom. “Kristallnacht,” as an icon, also operates as
metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech that replaces the name of a thing with the name
of something else with which it is closely associated. In Holocaust memory and
historiography, “Kristallnacht” is an icon that has been equated to the systematic expulsion
and violence against Jewish people before World War II.
Hirsch argues that the combination of a photographic image’s indexical and iconic
qualities give the image symbolic importance (116). Kristallnacht evolved as a symbol for
the Holocaust in similar ways. Kristallnacht, as a symbol, operates similarly to a metaphor.
In this case, Kristallnacht “symbolize[s] the sense of family, safety, and continuity that has
been hopelessly severed” as a result of anti-Semitic violence (Hirsch 116). It is a metaphor
that transcends the broken glass imagery that the term conjures and one that taps into the
collective trauma experienced by the Jewish community during and after the Holocaust.
“Kristallnacht” and “broken glass” are both symbols that carry similar emotional weight as
6 symbols such as barbed wire, gates, and trains that pervade Holocaust narratives.
“Kristallnacht” is a ubiquitous term in Holocaust studies that fails to account for female
testimonies of the event.
Gender and the Historical Photograph: The Night of Fallen Feathers
In her essay, Memory, Photography, And Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined
houses” of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas,’ Maggie Humm pinpoints several instances in
which Virginia Woolf criticizes photography as a traditionally male medium of expression.
According to Humm, Woolf argues that photography only recognizes and canonizes male
experiences permeate narratives about war. Kristallnacht, as a historical image, resembles
the photographs alluded to in Three Guineas in that both represent and privilege a male
narrative about war. The historical image of shattered glass, viewed predominantly by men,
trumps the image of falling feathers experienced exclusively by women during the
November Pogroms of 1938.
According to Humm,“visual memories can reveal gendered subjectivity” (646).
Humm, like Hirsch, argues that photographic images are “memory fetishes acting as both
index and icon” (647). According to Humm, Woolf perceives photographs as static
representations of male experience. Humm posits that photographs lack the “corporeal
affect” that characterizes the absent or invisible images of female memory (647). “The
absent photograph,” Humm notes, “functions as a transactional act of memory between
narrator and spectator” (650). In other words, the invisible female images of war and
trauma offer a different mode of interpretation and representation of historical events. If
“The Night of Broken Glass” were remediated as “The Night of Fallen Feathers,” feathers
7 would function as the transactional object of memory, instead of glass. Feathers, as an
object of memory, recall unique female experiences of the Pogrom.
Humm’s “transactional act of memory” speaks to Hirsch’s concept of post-memory.
Post-memory is the appropriation of an experience one was not directly exposed to, but has
nonetheless shaped one's worldview (Hirsch, 112). Kristallnacht, as a historical
photograph, object, and symbol, operates as post-memory. Post-memories are essential in
constructing a modern narrative about past traumatic events. Representing Kristallnacht
using glass as the transactional object of memory inevitably obscures female narratives
about the past. Further, as Humm argues, neglecting female memories reduces the postmemory generation’s affective connection with the past. According to Humm, women’s
invisible images from war are capable of “fusing past memory” and “present feeling” (652).
Therefore, exploring the image of falling feathers during the November Pogrom of 1938
bridges the gap between the generation of memory and post-memory, simultaneously
giving voice to a traditionally underrepresented demographic in narratives about war.
Truth and Trope: Women in War
In her essay, The Split Between Gender and Holocuast, Joan Ringelheim discusses
gender-specific suffering during the Holocuast. Ringelheim rightfully questions the lack of
attention given to female narratives and affirms that researchers often ignore complex
issues regarding gender in the Holocaust (Ofer, 344). As a result of my research, I have
found that there is a wide discrepancy between gendered testimonies and gendered
representation. Kristallnacht is both a gendered testimony and a historical photograph that
represents the November Pogrom of 1938. Kristallnacht, as previously discussed, has
semiotic implications on people’s collective memory that shapes their understanding of the
8 event. Remediating the image of broken glass as falling feathers can be problematic as a
form of gendered representation, regardless of its historical accuracy.
Hirsch breaks down the semiotic implications of the historical photograph but
unlike Humm, Hirsch argues that photographs do “give rise to certain bodily acts of
looking” (117). Hirsch’s description of photographs echoes Humm’s claim regarding the
corporeal effects of female invisible images. Hirsch uses Sebald’s Austerlitz and Art
Spiegelman’s Maus to argue that photographs are gendered representations of the past that
invoke female imagery, rather than male. According to Hirsch, the pictures shown in
Austerlitz and Maus function, not as direct historical referents, but rather “blur and
relativize truth and reference” because of their affective qualities (121). The historical
image of fallen feathers renders a different semiotic reading than the image of broken glass.
The image of fallen / falling feathers is inherently poetic. Compared to glass, feathers are
light, delicate, soft objects that are plucked from animals. While broken glass is indexical
of glass breaking – a traditionally violent act -, fallen feathers are indexical of many things:
a bird in flight, a pillow fight, etc. Fallen feathers, like broken glass, are iconic in that they
mimetically resemble what was seen during the November Pogrom. Nonetheless, “fallen
feathers” are neither iconic nor symbolic in the same way “broken glass” is. The image of
“Fallen feathers” is not a part of the traditional Holocaust narrative and does not carry the
same symbolic weight as broken glass nor does it conjure the trauma experienced by Jewish
communities during the Holocaust.
The image “The Night of Fallen Feathers” conjures is both poetic and imaginative.
While Humm praises invisible images such as my falling feathers example, Hirsch argues
that the gendered reading of the image is problematic. According to Hirsch, all images of
war are re-mediated by the generation of post-memory to invoke the trope of the lost
9 mother and the lost child. Hirsch could argue that remediating Kristallnacht as the Night of
Fallen Feathers trivializes the importance of the event. Hirsch is concerned that images are
used as historical canvases in which the generation of post memory projects their own
desires (119). In other words, Hirsch condemns historical photographs because they reduce
memories into tropes. The intrinsically stylized and feminized image of falling feathers
troubles the perpetuated record of glass breaking and questions our knowledge about
Holocaust history.
Although female testimonies in war are not as pervasive as men’s, female imagery
is often invoked to represent collective suffering. In her book, Memorializing the
Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory, Janet Leibman discusses how
Kristallnacht is depicted in the German landscape. As Leibman discusses, Kristallnacht
garnered public attention in the 1980s (85). By 1988, yearly commemorations of the
Pogrom began to take place and memorials were built to honor the sacred spaces that were
desecrated during the Night of Broken Glass (Leibaman, 87). Liebman uses female imagery
to describe the atrocities of Kristallnacht and the monuments created to memorialize the
event. Liebman characterizes the event as the “emasculation of the sacred” and discusses
how the imagery of atrocities during the Holocuast “takes as its subject the Jewish female
body” (92). Using the female body as a medium to explore the topographies of trauma is
one of the ways in which the female experience of the Holocaust is reduced to metaphor.
Female testimonies do not usually inform feminized models of memory.
In spite of its poetic weight, “The Night of Falling Feathers” is a legitimate
testimony that should operate as a responsible representation of the Pogrom. “The Night of
Fallen Feathers” sheds light on female experiences that historiography has systematically
repressed and does not feminize Jewish suffering gratuitously. Further, as Humm argues,
10 female representation of warfare that is mediated through invisible images bridge the gap
between the actual memory of the event and how the event is revisited by later generations.
Hirsch fears that developing an affective relationship with a past we did not experience
obscures, relativizes, and stylizes historical events. However representations of the
Holocaust and trauma are already plagued by pre-existing tropes that carry pre-fabricated
meanings and implications. Remediating “Kristallnacht” as “The Night of Fallen Feathers”
allows Holocaust scholars to forge a personal relationship with a distant past, recognize the
weight of female testimonies, and revitalize Holocaust memory.
Conclusion: The Landscapes of Memory
In Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz quotes his boarding school history master
André Hilary to say “Our concern with history is a concern with preformed images already
imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere,
away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered” (Hirsch, 120). This passage encapsulates
Hirsch’s concerns with the performativity of historical images. The term “Kristallnacht” is
a historical photograph that is imprinted in people’s understanding of the Holocaust.
Although there is truth to the image conjured by Kristllanacht, it obscures female narratives
of the event and perpetuates the popularity of a half formed historical photograph.
In their book, The Iconography of Landscape, Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove
claim that, “a landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or
symbolizing surroundings” (2). If memory is a landscape, its topography is built from
images, photographs, texts, and affect. Remediating “The Night of Broken Glass” into “The
Night of fallen Feathers” has several implications in collective and individual postmemories about the November Pogrom and the Holocaust. Canonizing the image of fallen
11 feathers acknowledges the unique presence of women in war. Additionally, including the
image of fallen feathers in Holocaust iconography enriches narratives about the November
Pogrom and shows the Jewish experience in a different light.
The topographies of memory mirror the architecture of our experiences.
Experiences are colored through feeling, images, and immediate impressions. Experiences
melt unto memories, reshaping and reconfiguring their landscape. Some memories – ours or
foreign - have been ingrained so deeply into our psyche that, as Austerlitz illustrates,
become inert, static, and unalterable. As scholars of History we are concerned with how
things really happened. We are afraid of having an individual stake in the making and
breaking of memories. We are afraid of reducing history to tropes. We are afraid of
essentializing memories into myths. However, in acknowledging our unique role in history,
as immediate receptors of events and memories, we can reconfigure the landscape of the
collective consciousness to shed light on traditionally subordinate experiences in order to
find this truth, one that “lies elsewhere, away from it all.”
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