Thomas Laqueur
...the idea of connecting a name and place of a body in war had almost no resonance until, very dramatically, in the late 1914, in the early stages of a war of unimaginable destruction...
...the names themselves almost immediately became places of pilgrimage.
Pictures make clear that naming is in some sense about the arithmetic sublime, the notation of and representation of a gigantic number...
A great deal was made at the time of the fact that people were actually interested in the location of a particular person's remains, or of a name.
"How do we actually imagine a million dead people?" The answer was reached, in a kind of hypernominalist way, by showing them as specifically as possible... It's extremely specific and, in their account, anti-representational.
Maya Lin
"What is the purpose of a memorial?"
...not so much of the politics of war but the results of war.
... important to register loss on a fundamental, individual level.
...the experience of visiting the memorial should be a private awakening, a private awareness of that loss.
(Professor Scully on Thiepval Memorial)...the expression of pain and anguish - the open, gaping mouth you walk through as you enter the structure... where you stop at the center and are fully aware of the immensity of the loss.
"For death is, in the end, a personal and private matter and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place meant for personal reflection and private reckoning."
I consider the work I do memorials, not monuments; in fact I've often thought of them as anti-monuments. I think I don't make objects; I make places.
My works try to bring out the notion of the intimacy of reading that which is a book... This is an interesting point of convergence between the notions of text and art and content.
One of the things about remembering the past is that you really have to make it relevant to the present.
Andrew Barshay
This park to memorialize the war dead is essentially a park for the victims of that firebombing. The striking thing about the park is that there is no aura of sacredness, no aura of death surrounding it. It's a normal place where people play. Its simplicity made me wonder, "Where are the dead in a city like Tokyo?"
The state ruled that once the dead were dead, those religious rights don't matter.
...despite the much greater degree of political openness, there are areas where the state can, in fact, reach into the most intimate concerns of people, including the disposition of their dead.
Stephen Greenblatt
...to lose a war against an insurgent peasant army was virtually unthinkable.
But there is something troubling, something wrong with trying to preserve memory, and particularly the memory of name and fame, in material structures.
...we have as a culture grown exceedingly uncomfortable with cenotaphs and obelisks and statues of heroic warriors. For our attempts at memorialization, we prefer narratives and movies and interactive museums.
...monuments, like graves, are not only expressions of the dream of renewal; they are paradoxically expressions of a dream of containment: through the monument the dead will be given a proper place and kept in this place.
The heavy inertness of matter is present in monuments not only as a melancholy limit but as a friend to the living.
To cut words in matter, to transform matter into a book to be read, is the central memorializing act.
The dream of the monument then is to inscribe the name forever in the earth.
Stanley Saitowitz
By day, from the outside, the structure is an innocent player in the making of Boston's urban spaces. At night the monument is lit, like the candles of remembrance, or the lamps made from the flesh of the death camp victims.
The inscriptions provide a picture of the history of this city and inscribe on the floor the names of people who, at another time, in a similar public place in Manhattan, you may have shared a bench with.