Oren Baruch Stier

Dr. Oren Baruch Stier is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. A specialist on Holocaust memory and representation, Stier is the author of Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) an exploration of how contemporary public consciousness of the Holocaust is shaped and communicated. In that book he analyzed the development and institutionalization of Holocaust memory and how Holocaust memory is inscribed, framed, displayed, and performed through a variety of media in a range of settings. Stier is also the co-editor of a new book, Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place (Indiana University Press, 2006), a collection of essays that, as the title indicates, investigates the memorialization of violent pasts in a range of global contexts. Stier is currently working on another book, Holocaust Symbols: The Icons of Memory, which examines the historical and cultural contexts of symbols commonly associated with the Holocaust, exploring how a variety of iconic images, including personalities, artifacts, texts and visual forms convey awareness of and associations with the Holocaust. With keen attention toward the basic symbolic building blocks of memorialization, his research focuses on images with which we are all familiar: railway cars, Anne Frank, yellow Stars of David, and the Arbeit Macht Frei gates, among others.

Stier has published articles in a number of venues, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Prooftexts, and Jewish Social Studies. He has received several FIU grants for his research, and in 2004 he was a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  He currently serves as co-chair of the Religion, Holocaust and Genocide Group of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Stier earned his B.A. with Honors in Religion at Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Stier teaches courses in comparative religion, Judaic studies, and the Holocaust, including “Jewish Mysticism,” “Religion and Literature,” “The Holocaust: Jews and Christians Before, During, and After World War II,” “Representing the Holocaust: A Multimedia Inquiry,” and “Holocaust Memorials,” among many others.

The Holocaust has been represented and imagined in a wide variety of media.  In recent years, a number of scholarly monographs and essay collections (by Barbie Zelizer, Dora Apel, Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, and others) have addressed specifically the manner and modes in which the Holocaust has been represented visually.  As research progresses in this area, some tensions have emerged, some of the same ones that concern scholars working in other fields like history and literature, such as the distinction between victim and perpetrator representations, different levels of aestheticization and memorialization, and issues of voyeurism and subjectivity.  One issue of particular interest to me is the degree to which a specific visual representation reveals its own story, its own genesis—something that points to a deeper tension between what is hidden and what is revealed not only in the work itself, but also in Holocaust representation in general.

Panel speaker: Sunday, April 29 at 3:15 p.m.
"A View from Above: The Hidden and the Revealed in Holocaust Visuality"

In this paper, I wish to highlight these tensions by comparing two projects.  The first, the “swastika forest” in Brandenburg state discovered in the 1990s after German unification and finally cut down in 2000, was a 20 square meter grove of larch trees planted in the shape of a swastika, presumably by a Nazi party supporter in the 1930s.  It was visible only from the air and only in autumn, when its reddish-brown leaves stood out against the evergreen background of the surrounding trees.  The second, Arie Galles’s 14 Stations, is a series of large-scale charcoal drawings based on tracings of aerial photographs of various Nazi killing sites, whose execution involved writing and erasing text from the Kaddish and smudging beyond recognition the traced photographs themselves, only to painstakingly re-draw them.

Both projects are linked by a “view from above,” and discussing each one will allow me to connect other related themes, such as the meaning of the forest for Jews and Germans, the significance of the swastika symbol, the motifs of erasure and visibility, religion and memorialization, and artistic practice.  Building on James Young’s important work on counter-monuments, I ask how such a “view” can further inform our scholarly reflections.