In the hour before dawn, I’ve been having a recurrent nightmare about the Westminster Holocaust memorial. It’s not one of those flight-from-Nazis dreams that Jews are prone to experience. Nor is it a fear that the David Adjaye-Ron Arad design of 23 steel snappers is going to spring to life like a Hollywood monster and consume innocent passers-by. I have nothing against the memorial. I was not even automatically alarmed by its official brief to commemorate, as well as six million Jews, “all other victims of Nazi persecution, including Roma, gay and disabled people”.
No, my nightmare is worse, much worse. It takes place at the end of Covid, in the year 2023 or 2033 when Chris Witty has declared it safe to hold a public inauguration and interminable public inquiries have bored us into accepting that the Adjaye-Arad edifice is the best way to remember the Shoah rather than, as you may think, the victims of unemployment at British Steel.
I have been sucked into watching a public inquiry where Baroness Ruth Deech was leading valiant resistance to the memorial, an inquiry which since the closure of the West End is far and away the best show in town. Lady Deech and her counsel, Brian Doctor QC, make an irrefutable case which shows the memorial to be unsightly, ineffectual, insecure and unrepresentative of British values. But due process will, in all likelihood, approve it anyway.
So what I now keep dreaming is that, in line with British values and bipartisanship, the memorial will be duly unveiled by some Tory duffer in a bacon-and-eggs tie on one side and, on the other, by the former leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Corbyn, PC, MP.
Far-fetched? Not a bit of it. There’s nothing the left loves more than a Holocaust memorial. It ticks all the do-good boxes and affirms beyond reasonable doubt the utter impossibility of anyone on the left being mistaken for an antisemite. What were Corbyn’s parting words? “One antisemite in the Labour Party is one too many.” Well, since he’s been suspended, would it be too unkind to venture that I guess that wish came partly true? Corbyn himself has never distorted the Holocaust, though he did appear once on a commemoration platform where another speaker compared Israel to Nazism. Eight years later, as party leader, he apologised. Some of Corbyn’s supporters, though, are less fastidious, using Holocaust Memorial Day to shed croc tears for Hitler’s millions while ranting about the similarities between Zionism and Nazism. Allow their erstwhile leader to lay a wreath at a Holocaust memorial and they cannot all be Jew-haters, QED.
The rehabilitation of Corbyn, which has already begun, will be crowned by his appearance at the Adjaye-Arad opening day, an appearance that would implictly absolve him of calling terrorist Jew-killers his friends and approving an Elders of Zion daub on an East End wall (no irony intended).
The risk in Holocaust memorials is that they allow dishonest people to relativise Hitler’s Jewish genocide by including every other category of victim. This is part of current correct usage of never allowing “antisemitism” to be uttered without adding “other forms of racism”. Corbyn, a man with what Labour’s deputy leader calls a “blind spot” about antisemitism, is a master of relativism. For relativists, the Holocaust is just another horrible history. Commemorating it with abstract art, as Berlin and Vienna have done with concrete slabs, erases its specificity and denies its victims their humanity. Adjaye-Arad claim that their 23 girders represent countries occupied by the Germans, a whimsical addition to Holocaust mythology, the more so since their number fails to take account of Lichtenstein, the Channel Islands and three or four other territories.
What else is wrong with it? The memorial will have an “underground learning centre” which I rather hoped would be a vibrant yeshivah of the kind the Nazis incinerated. But no. Torah learning has no place in this steely neutrality. It might serve to remind people that Jews were actually killed.
Rowan Moore, our best architecture critic, has damned the scheme as “clumsy” and “a bad brief”. But parliamentary approval was secured by David Cameron — yes him, the one in Mrs Swire’s diaries — and the only way to stop it now it is for the Jewish community to challenge a design that the Chief Rabbi welcomed as an “outstanding winning concept” and “an entry point for a greater national understanding of the Holocaust and its contemporary relevance”. Baroness Deech has jumped in on this line at the 11th hour and we need to pay attention to her objections. You can watch the hearing live every weekday on YouTube.
The Westminster Holocaust Memorial is a wonky structure in the wrong place and at the worst Covid moment in our national conversation. Barely have we seen off the Corbyn regime, than this grotesque pile of junk in a once-pleasant park will offer hope and encouragement to relativisers, deniers and every other form of whitewasher. It deserves to be scrapped.
The film of Norman Lebrecht’s novel ‘The Song of Names’ is now available for viewing on Netflix
