By Christiane Wilke, March 6th, 2013 
How do memorials shape who we think we are? And how do we “do” identities when we interact with memorials? As Salon.com and others noted recently, gay men have been using the signature concrete slabs of the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as backdrops to their profile pictures on grindr, a geo-social app that lets those have have logged on find each other that is popular with gay men. In Salon’s account, the combination of the memorial and the anticipation of erotic pleasure is “odd” and “peculiar.” The Memorial appears as a “prop” for self-presentation. The trend is portrayed as equivalent to the EasyJet airline’s 2009 fashion shoot for an in-flight magazine at the memorial. EasyJet apologized. “We realized that to hold a fashion shoot in front of the memorial was inappropriate and insensitive, and we didn’t wish to offend anyone.”
Is the grindr trend just another “inappropriate and insensitive” use of the memorial space? How are our current identities involved in claiming spaces and making calls of inappropriateness?
I was asking myself these questions, weeks after correcting the proofs of my article on two Berlin memorials and complex identities. For this article, I asked how memorials to Nazi victims deal with the complex identities of those who are commemorated, and how these memorials shape current identities. I looked at a small monument to a group of Jewish Socialist resistance fighters, and to the Monument to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism that is located right across the street from the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Theorists of identities have long emphasized that in order to capture identities and experiences of discrimination, we need to stop talking about identity dimensions as if they existed in isolation from one another. We all are situated differently along axes of, for example, gender, race, sexuality, class, (dis)ability, religion, and so on. We also know that racism, for example, affects women and men differently because racism is already gendered. So goes the theory. It seems to not have made . . .
Read more: Memories of Identities, Identities of Memory
By Jo Freeman, March 4th, 2013 
Several ghosts from the civil rights movement haunted Capitol Hill on February 27, but it was a little unclear how many were the ghosts of CRM past and how many were the ghosts of CRM future. The State of Alabama, where so much civil rights history was made, had built the house from which many of these ghosts came.
On one side of First Street the ghost of Rosa Parks, embodied in a 9-foot-tall statue, waited in the Capitol’s Statutory Hall to be unveiled by President Obama, her political descendant. He was assisted by both party’s leaders while some still-living civil rights activists, a few blood relatives, members of the public and a lot of press crowded the space trying to see.
On the other side, the ghosts of CRM past, present and future were duking it out at the Supreme Court. Shelby County, AL had challenged the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that requires covered jurisdictions to clear any changes in how they conduct elections with the Department of Justice. Its lawyers argued that ghosts of racial sins past had no place in the present. The DoJ maintained that these racial sins were not yet ghosts.
Outside, a couple hundred civil rights supporters rallied on the sidewalk. Some of the speakers soon walked across the street where they had reserved seats in front of the stage in Statutory Hall. The ghosts of CRM present could be seen in the faces of the six elected officials who sat on that stage. The two Republican leaders were both white men. The four Democratic leaders included one white man, one white woman and two black men.
. . .
Read more: Civil Rights Ghosts Haunt Capitol Hill
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 1st, 2013 
Clifton Truman Daniel’s “A Mission of Reconciliation,” describes his recent trip to Japan, honoring the victims of the atomic bomb, ordered by his grandfather. On the first day of Daniel’s trip, Nana Yamada, the Nagasaki correspondent of Japan’s largest television network, asked Daniel whether he came to Japan to apologize.
He didn’t.
“Out of respect for the survivors and their countrymen, I would not defend the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but neither could I apologize for my grandfather or my country. After all, I have shaken the hands of dozens of WWII veterans who tell me they probably wouldn’t have survived the invasion of the Japanese main islands.”
For the remainder of his visit and in his report, Daniel worked to explain and enact this complicated stance, which I appreciate. It hit close to home. As I read his account, I thought of my father.
While Daniel’s grandfather, President Harry Truman, momentously decided to drop the bomb, my dad, Ben Goldfarb, was one of the thousands of GIs who, therefore, were not part of the invasion. For my father, this was after serving in the South Pacific for four years as a conscript (who went in as a private and out as a corporal or private, I can’t remember; he told me about repeated promotions, followed by demotions connected to fighting with an anti-Semitic officer in his unit).
My father and I generally agreed on politics, though he was probably more of a leftist. He didn’t vote for Daniel’s grandfather, but for Henry Wallace. Yet, he strongly supported President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs, not only because it saved him, but also because, he convinced himself following the commonsense of his times, the bombs in the long run saved more lives than they destroyed. I didn’t and don’t agree, but it was one of the very few issues that he really didn’t want to debate, our typical mode of communication once I was an adult. And as Daniel didn’t want to either defend or apologize . . .
Read more: The President and the Private, and the Atomic Bomb: Responding to Clifton Truman Daniel’s Mission to Japan
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