On October 9th, 2017, the
Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) hosted a campus screening of the 2016 documentary
The Destruction of Memory, directed by Tim Slade and narrated by actress Sophie Okonedo. A conversation via Skype between Slade and audience members from across the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus followed the screening. The screening of this exigent film, which invites its viewership to closely consider the relevance of what Raphael Lemkin once termed the “cultural” dimension of genocide: the destruction of cultural property, and the Skype discussion could not have come at a better time.
During Fall 2017, Professor Brett Kaplan taught the Introduction to Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies graduate seminar. Members of our interdisciplinary class, many of whom will present at the upcoming
One Day Graduate Symposium in Memory Studies on campus this April 6th, 2018, engage with the histories, legacies, and memories of diverse traumatic events in different national contexts, past and present. Broadly, then, the documentary offered us another avenue to grapple with some of the questions that we recurrently raised in class. That is, we regularly discussed the politics, stakes, and potentials that working comparatively within the fields of trauma and memory studies affords and the codification of terminology that informs processes of identifying, historicizing, and adjudicating acts of mass violence. In what follows, we will focus our reflection on the documentary around some of its comparative gestures. Before we do so, however, we want to provide a brief overview of the film.
Specifically, Slade’s documentary is based upon Robert Bevan’s book, entitled
The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2006). Bevan, a widely-published journalist, architecture critic for
The London Evening Standard, and member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, examines in his book a variety of cases of war and conflict during which physical structures of cultural and historical significance were razed to the ground. Slade’s documentary walks its viewership through a selection of historical instances analyzed in Bevan’s book, employing video clips, photographs, and interviews with witnesses, scholars of genocide, and experts on cultural heritage sites. A few case studies examined in the film include the Siege of Sarajevo in the mid-nineties, the bombing of Germany during the Second World War, and the actions of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Slade’s juxtaposition of case studies of cultural destruction—or the annihilation of irreplaceable artwork, artifacts, and historical sites—in the 20th and 21st centuries comes to the fore as the documentary’s primary comparative gesture. Indeed, the film begins with a series of clips in which interviewees articulate the purpose of perpetrators’ deliberate destruction of cultural property before, during, and after presumably historically-bound acts of mass violence. This includes the words of Simon Maghakyan, an Armenian American educator and activist, who draws upon the history of the Armenian Genocide to assert, by “targeting monuments,” for example, “you are oppressing the people and making it easier to get rid of them, not just to wipe out their physical record and make it impossible for them to return, but also using it as a weapon.” We will later discuss in more detail the effects of the film’s return to such arguments, which it does by situating collective traumatic histories and ensuing memory work in conversation. For now, we want to map another key conceptual knot of connection that percolates throughout the film and manifests most legibly when Okonedo states in her voiceover regarding a trial judgment as part of the proceedings for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), “The voice of Lemkin could be heard distantly returning.”[1]
This comment about the pertinence of Lemkin’s words also welcomes audiences to recall the beginning of the documentary, which prepares viewers to ask the following of the temporally and spatially distant yet intimately linked contexts that the film ultimately references: how do these histories lend themselves to a call for an expansion of definition of the term “genocide” to include a key component Lemkin originally proposed? Indeed, the documentary illuminates that while the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9th, 1948, the definition of genocide in legal terms is best understood when seen as a culmination of years of efforts by Lemkin and when situated within a larger trajectory of declarations on the laws of war and war crimes within international law.
In this vein, the documentary illuminates that clauses to protect cultural property in times of war were introduced in early twentieth-century peace conferences, such as in The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the inclusion of wanton destruction of cultural property as part of a list of 32 individual criminal acts identified by the Commission on Responsibility of the Authors of War, which was created by victorious Allies to investigate allegations of criminality against the leaders of the defeated German and Ottoman Empires.
[1] While the documentary, like others, goes on to note how the failure to prosecute the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide informed Lemkin’s conceptualization and coinage of the term “genocide,” it departs from others by seemingly arguing for 1933, 1944, and 1946 as years just as defining as 1948 (if not more so) in the genesis of the term “genocide.”[2] At a League of Nations legal conference in 1933, historian of genocide Dirk Moses explains, Lemkin proposed the prosecution of two new international crimes: “vandalism” (attack on cultural property) and “barbarism” (what we would now call genocide, physical attacks on peoples). States in the League of Nations at that time declined to criminalize these kinds of acts and in 1944, Lemkin used “genocide” as a single term for what he earlier called barbarism and vandalism. Shortly after, in 1946, early drafts of the genocide convention, commissioned by United Nations General Assembly, defined genocide as one of three acts: physical, biological, or cultural genocide. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand objected to the inclusion of a cultural dimension because, as Moses asserts, they “worried about the fallout from their treatment of indigenous peoples and their cultures.” Thus, with the exclusion of cultural elements, the 1948 convention remains “essentially what Lemkin proposed as barbarism in 1933.”
By “reading” what is present in the 1948 convention in relation to what is absent from Lemkin’s original proposals and the repercussions of this removal, The Destruction of Memory prepares audiences to contend with the implications of arguments presented through Okenodo’s voiceover about succeeding legal documents that address attacks on cultural heritage and property. These include the ruling of appeal judges in the ICTY in April 2015 that targeted cultural destruction cannot be considered as evidence of genocide nor possibly even intent of genocide, the citation of “military necessity” to cloud intent, the lack of recognition of the intents to suppress the culture of groups as a matter of human rights despite arguments during the adoption of the 1948 convention that this question would one day be dealt with as such, and the need to protect cultural heritage more than through a document such as the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict that is bound by the rules of war. In so doing, viewers are deliberately left to imagine the potential repercussions of, as Bonnie Burnham, President Emirata of the World Monuments Fund, posits, recognizing cultural heritage destruction as a crime against humanity and as Bevan asserts in an interview in the documentary, inserting those vandalism clauses back into the 1948 genocide convention.
One way in which The Destruction of Memory emphasizes the significance of taking into consideration attacks on cultural heritage and property within the study of genocide and mass violence is through the connections the documentary makes between the numerous case studies it examines. The manner in which The Destruction of Memory links the variety of historical events with which it engages is not done arbitrarily: the film leaves its viewership with a few key impactful messages as a result of its comparative approach. Firstly, the documentary underlines the repetitive nature of the strategies employed by those who set out to eradicate a certain group of people. One can notice across the different cases mentioned in the film that the eradication of objects and/or buildings representative of the targeted group’s culture and history is an often carefully arranged dimension of the overall plan of genocide.
However, it is not just the ways in which genocide and acts of mass violence are plotted and carried out that are portrayed as symptomatic of a common phenomenon. The Destruction of Memory furthermore demonstrates that the underlying intentions of the perpetrators when they plot to destroy cultural property tend to be similar: they are fueled by motivations such as launching a symbolic attack on a group’s collective identity or disseminating fear and intimidation. During the lengthy interview with Bevan that appears in the film, he explains the “carpet bombing” of Germany by the Allies during the Second World War as “clearly a tactic to attack historic cities… [in order to] to demoralize people.” Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels’ diaries are subsequently quoted by Okonedo to reveal that the Axis powers had similar intentions. “Like the English,” Goebbels proclaimed, “we must attack centers of culture… such centers should be leveled to the ground.” This point is driven home even further with regard to the Croat-Bosniak War of the 1990s, when the film recalls Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic’s words from her elegy to the Mostar Bridge. Yet again, an attack on a physical structure is described as an attack on identity: “because [the bridge] was the product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it transcended our individual destiny… the bridge was all of us, forever.” In each case study, the desires of those committing the crimes and the willful nature with which they commit them are clearly portrayed to be similar across time and space. The Destruction of Memory thereby traces the common threads in perpetrator practices for its viewership, demonstrating the unsettling ways in which many aspects of the implementation of genocide tend to repeat themselves throughout history.
The documentary’s manner of connecting these different events furthermore serves to blur the line between the past and present for its viewers. This is a result of the fact that the film touches upon both historical and contemporary instances of destruction of cultural property, suggesting that all are trends of the same phenomenon. As a result, when learning about these attacks on symbols of culture during genocide or war that occurred decades ago, the film’s viewership cannot simply disregard these events as tragic losses of the distant past. The documentary mentions both at its beginning and examines in more detail towards the end contemporary instances in which the Islamic State is acting to eradicate objects and sites representative of cultural heritage. The group’s annihilation of the Tomb of Jonah in 2014 and their looting, damaging, and destroying artifacts of the Mosul Museum in 2015 are but two of the examples highlighted in the film. Therefore, although certain precious artifacts or structures of the past may already be lost, the film makes it clear that plans to eradicate materials of cultural and historical relevance in certain areas are still being carried out and will continue to be in the future. The Destruction of Memory thus encourages its viewership to recognize the continued significance of the destruction of cultural property as well as the importance of speaking out against such acts.
One of the many intriguing avenues for future reflection that The Destruction of Memory opens up for us as viewers is inquiry into the ethics of studying the cultural dimension of genocide. Professor Brett Kaplan posed a question on this very subject to Slade during the question and answer session that followed our October 9th screening, asking whether he found it morally problematic to produce a film that gives more screen time and attention to the loss of objects, buildings, and other structures during genocide than it does to the loss of human life. One could, on the one on hand, take issue with the filmmakers’ choice to focus at length on critiquing violence against physical edifices rather than violence against human beings, which was simultaneously occurring during these moments in history cited in the film. On the other hand, it can also be argued that this documentary portrays the different dimensions of genocide as closely interconnected. As previously quoted, Maghakyan for one qualifies “targeting monuments” as a “weapon” against people and as an act of “oppression.” Early in the film, Okonedo lingers upon Lemkin’s words on this same subject: “physical and biological genocide,” Lemkin claimed, “are always preceded by cultural genocide or by an attack on symbols of the group.” The film thereby also proposes that the destruction of cultural property can serve as an indicator of a broader plan to eliminate an entire people, which begins with the elimination of the physical proof of that people’s history.
We thus conclude by proposing that how one understands and chooses to represent the links between violence against human beings and cultural heritage broadly construed is a matter open to debate. It is this type of conversation—challenging, yet important on an ethical level—that The Destruction of Memory will serve to incite among its viewers. With each screening, Slade’s documentary will reopen discussions concerning the study of the different dimensions of acts of mass violence and genocide of our societies’ pasts, thereby promoting an enduring critical engagement with these crucial topics.
[1] Okonedo quotes the following from a trial judgement: “Where there is physical or biological destruction, there are often simultaneous attacks on the cultural and religious property of the targeted group as well, attacks which may be considered as evidence of an attempt to physically destroy the group.”
[2] Specifically in the Commission on Responsibility of the Authors of War, under Chapter II: Violations of the Laws and Customs of War, the list includes “Wanton devastation and destruction of property” (item #18) and “Wanton destruction of religious, charitable, educational, and historic buildings and monuments” (item # 20). See the Commission on Responsibility of the Authors of War document
here. For the Hague Convention documents, see
here and
here.
[3] For a timeline noting the major and conceptual legal advances in the development of the term “genocide” see
this page on the United States and Holocaust Memorial Museum website. For the text of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, see
here.
