THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, 9-11-01:
APPROPRIATE COMMEMORATION AND REMEMBRANCE

Speakers from the field of the humanities focus not on the design or form a memorial should take but on principles and guidelines that should prevail in creating the appropriate commemoration of those who perished and remembrance of the tragedy.

Donald M. Reynolds

The site of the World Trade Center has been sanctified by the blood of the almost 3,000 victims who perished there on September 11, 2001. That reality lays claim to the site. How we honor that claim and that sacred space will be a measure of our progress along the road of civilization, because it will express the principles we preserve, honor, and cherish. The form that expression takes--the memorial--should give tangible and permanent form to what we learn from, and how we deal with, the tragedy perpetrated against our nation, the innocent civilians, and our way of life by a mentality that has a total and absolute disregard of human life fused with an all-consuming hatred and contempt for America. A consensus of an appropriate form the memorial should take will come only with understanding the tragedy and its ramifications. That understanding will come only with time and through personal reflection and dialogue among members of the community, especially the families of those who perished, the survivors, the rescuers, and our civic and thought leaders. Meanwhile, designate Ground Zero a monument, develop the 16-acre site as a self-perpetuating memorial, and put a 20-year moratorium on doing anything with the twin towers' "footprint," so that it remains a realm of contemplation, pending its determination. Then enlist the right person to make it happen -- a Remembrancer, as known in biblical times.

Wayne Andersen

On a wood rail of the leading edge of a platform overlooking Ground Zero, someone scrawled, with a felt-tip pen, the words, "Meaningful Emptiness." The anonymous visitor's inscription captures for Wayne Andersen the profound and poignant significance of the devastation that was once the World Trade Center. The void is a metaphor for the emptiness suffered by those whose loved ones were killed in the tragedy-the unwitting victims and the saviors. Professor Andersen's remarks, inspired by those words, focus on the intense irony he felt at the collapse of the twin towers and the grief of thousands so painfully affected. That sense of irony was born of his close association with the architect of the towers, Minoru Yamasaki, which he analyzes. Having designed two memorial places, one in Boston to Cardinal Cushing, and one at Clark University to commemorate Robert Goddard, the rocket scientist whose vision would one day land us on the moon, Professor Andersen believes it is much too early to consider a proposal to meaningfully commemorate the 9-11 tragedy. " Let the place remain for a while-a good, long while-as an emptiness of meaning. In the meantime, pave it over and leave it blank."

Hellmut Wohl

The decision to deal not with the physical form a monument should take but with principles that should guide its creation is right and appropriate for commemorating those who died on September 11. Physical monuments tend to say more about the agenda and artistic preferences of those who erect them than about what or whom they commemorate. It is also questionable whether in our time physical monuments can still serve their commemorative purpose, and whether we still have mythologies and artistic conventions for sustaining this purpose. The question is not new. It was asked in the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Brown, and it has been asked by twentieth-century poets, including Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. The principles that should prevail in any remembrance of the victims of September 11 can no longer guide their lives; but they can guide ours. In commemorating those who died, let us remember the words of a modern historian (Isaiah Berlin in Notes on Prejudice), an ancient philosopher king (Marcus Aurelius in Book I of his Meditations), and a modern poet (W. H. Auden in the concluding verses of his poem In Time of War).

Oleg Grabar

Months have passed since September 11. A great deal has happened since then and even more has been said by political, intellectual, and administrative or business leaders everywhere. Some of the things done and said were appropriate or at least justified. But much is troublesome, and I would like to address two areas, which have concerned me. The first one is the easy way in which terms like "terrorism, war, criminal, evil, Islamic, Arab, freedom, alliance, justice, etc." are bandied about, as though masses of problems and difficulties with deep and complex roots can suddenly be resolved through a concrete effort of single-minded national resolve and violence. Evil does not have a simple shape, and moral justification is not one-sided. But is it possible to deal with each problem separately? Should the only super-power be involved in every problem on earth? Perhaps it is not only easier to do so, but more in tune with an intellectual evolution of several centuries, which assumed more and more that there were unified formulas for all human matters? The second one is the contradiction between a globalization that provides the illusion of a single world, village or not, expressed in a single language accessible on the Internet, and a reality of many different hopes, fears, memories, and expectations expressed in hundreds of languages and cultures. No one, I believe, has found the proper equilibrium between these two poles of attraction, and perhaps none can exist. Perpetual tension is bound to remain the fate of mankind. If so, each culture, and especially the dominant ones, must concentrate their efforts on learning as many other cultures as possible, on providing means for training people to know others in depth, not superficially. It is partly a matter of financial investment, but it is also an ethical decision to find equality in difference and not in similarity. Whether this is possible remains to be seen.

James E. Young

As we wrestle with the issues at the heart of how to commemorate the murderous attacks of September 11th, we need also to ask ourselves: What, exactly, have monuments and memory to do with each other? "Every period has the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments," Sigfried Giedion has written, "which according to the Latin meaning are 'things that remind,' things to be transmitted to later generations. This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed. It will find an outlet at all costs." This is still true, I believe, which leads me to ask just what these outlets and their costs are today. Indeed, what forms this demand for the monumental now takes, and to what self-abnegating ends, throw the presumptive link between monuments and memory into fascinating relief. In this meditation on the issues underpinning our efforts to commemorate the destruction of the World Trade Center, I would like to explore the ways both the monument and our critical approach to it have evolved over the course of the twentieth century, the ways the monument itself has been reformulated in its function as memorial, forced to confront its own limitations as a contemporary aesthetic response to the past. In this contrary approach to the monument, I try to show what monuments do by what they cannot do.

Witold Rybczynski

As American society becomes increasingly heterogeneous, it is increasingly difficult to find common values to commemorate, and common symbols with which to commemorate them. Where once there was a consensus regarding who was memorialized and how-the "man on the horse"-we are a society riven by doubts and dissension. Should FDR be shown in a wheelchair or not, should he be holding a cigarette since smoking is now considered "bad," and what is more important, the man or the events that marked his presidency? No less important are artistic questions. When Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French were commissioned to create memorials to Abraham Lincoln and other Civil War heroes, the elite art world and the public generally agreed on what constituted a fitting commemorative statue. This is no longer the case. The public is largely oblivious of if not hostile to much contemporary art. All these issues will come to the fore in the discussions of a memorial to the victims and heroes of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Alice Wohl

Two aspects of the role of commemoration in the process of memory and recovery after the destruction of the World Trade Center are addressed. First, the general task of keeping memory alive. All too often commemorations, especially monuments, do the opposite, replacing living experience with rhetoric. The Vietnam War Memorial and some German Holocaust memorials are examples of efforts to prevent the deadening of memory. Second, the question of specific principles and values. Commemoration of those who lost their lives at the World Trade Center is quite a different matter from commemoration of the World Trade Center itself. The dead have been and continue to be honored by the extraordinary efforts at Ground Zero and by the profoundly humane spirit generated there. It is to be hoped that this spirit, turning evil into good and inspiring hope by its example, will also inform any commemoration of the dead-in perpetuity.

Bruce Jennings

The catastrophe of September 11, 2001 must be measured first by the massive loss of innocent life and the shock waves of sorrow, grief, and anxiety still pulsating across the land. Another notable feature of this fundamental anomaly in our history is that it destroyed the World Trade Center towers, potent symbols of the urban-based, technological, and globally commercial society that late twentieth century America had become. The tragedy has revealed-or created-a deep-seated and urgent urge for meaning and understanding. We should look forward, then, to a time of struggle. It will be a struggle over reconstructed meanings. That struggle for meaning and memory in the reconstruction of the new city can be compared and contrasted with the two moral and social possibilities of the city that have existed virtually from the time of the invention of the city as a cultural system. Civitas, the city defined by a condition of common human need and purpose, and urbs, the city defined by a condition of individual aspiration, competitive relations, and emotional indifference. The memory of civitas should be the fundamental guiding principle of what we embody in the shape of any memorial of steel, bronze, stone, and mortar. In so doing, we will contribute to a concrete construction of a different kind, fashioned from the materials of reason, love, and imagination. The moral possibilities of civitas have always been present in New York City and in America as a whole. They have often been fugitive and effervescent. Like a Phoenix, civitas can be reborn in, and emerge from, the fire and rubble of Ground Zero.