Disasters and the Politics of Memory

The controversy that erupted around the opening of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on May 21, 2014, reminds us that much is at stake in the way disasters are remembered. Costing some $700 million to build, with an annual operating budget of $63 million, this was a remarkable investment in the production of public memory. It is an emotional experience to visit the museum. The entry pavilion, designed to look like a crumpled tower, is wedged between two commemorative pools, each containing a cascading waterfall, that sit over the footprints of the fallen twin towers. Visitors are invited to pause and reflect, but it is not easy to maintain a mood of respectful contemplation amidst the heat and hammer and roar of what is essentially a busy construction site, in a plaza encircled by buildings of glass and steel like the new “Freedom Tower” that now stands as the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere. Once inside, and underground, the solemn aura of the site is more enveloping. Visitors first encounter still and moving pictures of stunned and horrified eyewitnesses, hands clamped to mouths, watching the planes strike the World Trade Center towers. Then they move forward amidst the murmur of recorded eyewitness testimonies toward a cavernous interior space, strewn with artfully arranged relics from burned-out fire engines to discarded shoes, before descending an escalator that spills onto a hallway covered with photographs, headshot after headshot of the victims. And then, finally, they arrive at the two exhibition rooms, one honoring the nearly three thousand men, women, and children killed in “a senseless act of terrorism,” the other recording the history of the 2001 attacks, and the bombing of the site eight years earlier in 1993.What caused the controversy? The opening of the museum was marked by a dispute over the inclusion of a gift shop at this “sacred” site, stoked by the New York Post article “Little Shop of Horror” with its scathing tag line “Visit mass grave, buy a T-shirt.” This was no doubt galling for administrators who had vowed from the beginning that they would resist any temptations to cash in on the suffering. To defuse resentment, they reminded critics that all profits from sales were earmarked to cover the museum’s operating costs, and moreover that mugs, t-shirts, and other store items had been “carefully selected” to support the museum’s mission of “remembrance and learning.” This in itself is worth pausing over. The fact that every decision about what to include in the museum seemed to land officials in what chief curator Jan Ramirez called an “etiquette quagmire” makes it clear that this exercise in public memory was a fraught and contested one, beset by temptations to capitalize upon consumer demand for images of destruction, and an anxious awareness of how easily disasters lent themselves to political manipulation. No wonder officials, aiming at unity and consensus, and concerned with sending the right message, ended up playing it safe. The resulting 9/11 museum is less a site of explanation than one of emotional immersion that pays tribute to victims and first-responders, celebrates the resilience of the city and the American people, condemns terrorism, and bears “solemn witness” so that we will “never forget.”