ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes some historical background of the issues surrounding the 9/11 memorial, and describes the Holocaust counter-monument as a framework for understanding monuments to absence from 9/11 memorialisation. The Harburg Monument against Fascism, designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, is a lead column 12 metres high where people can inscribe their names with a special writing implement. The monument is itself empty space, so the visitor becomes the monument, as Young traces. It is this notion of absence in Holocaust counter-monuments that frames the exploration of vanishing monuments, the chapter focuses on the appeal to absence in the memorialisation process. The chapter explores absence in the context of the 9/11 memorial imaginary as a way to reckon with the body/ruins nexus produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. It also explores the way the absent bodies and ruined buildings are materialised by the state and for the state through a variety of mechanisms of memorialisation.
