No Lego after Auschwitz?

Lego is all about connecting disparate elements, snapping together different pieces to form new constructions. But for Dan Sieradski, editor of the Web log Jewschool.com, one recent Lego-based project - using the toy to fashion a Holocaust-inspired model - went one click too far.

On hearing that a New Jersey architect was going to lead a children's workshop focused on constructing a 400-square-foot replica of the Warsaw Ghetto at a local Jewish community center, Sieradski, who writes under the nom de blog Mobius, turned apoplectic.

The rest of the report is here. It mentions the exhibition in 2002, 'Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art', that included Zbigniew Libera's Lego Concentration Camp Set, 'a collection of seven empty boxes bearing pictures of death camps fashioned out of Lego'. This, too, was condemned by some as being in bad taste, but there were others who defended it.

In connection with the Warsaw Ghetto replica, the Mobius post at Jewschool says:

[I]t makes me ill to see people trivializing the Shoah in the name of commemorating it.

Not having seen either of these two pieces, I'm in no position to judge whether they do in fact trivialize what they endeavour to commemorate or represent. But that is the issue - whether in the execution of what they attempt they are trivializing or in bad taste. The medium in which they are expressed should not be an issue. There is no forbidden medium for commenting on the Shoah; there are only good and bad, more and less effective, uses of a given medium. Theodor Adorno famously said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz (a remark he later thought better of). It has also been suggested that there cannot be a novel about Auschwitz, that representational movies about the Holocaust are not apt, and that the cartoon form (as used for example - and brilliantly - by Art Spiegelman) is also not appropriate. But in fact there has been post-Holocaust poetry, and fiction, and there have been movies, and the Spiegelman Maus books; and while there can be more than one opinion about the quality of any particular work here, the argument that all of this has been trivializing or in bad taste won't bear scrutiny.

It's a complaint that forms part of the wider theme that the Shoah can't be represented. But it can be and it has to be, whatever the difficulties, whatever the dangers - which do exist. I've discussed this matter at greater length here and here.