Objects recovered from sites of mass atrocities have a special significance today.  This is because we live in what University College Dublin Professor Lea David labels as a human rights memorialization culture.  Central to this culture is the conviction that we should face difficult histories, we should remember human rights abuses, and victims should be the focus of our memorization efforts.  Objects from sites of mass atrocities are deployed by an array of new memorial museums to pull on the emotional heartstrings of visitors to identify with this new human rights memorialization agenda. In her book, A Victim’s Shoe, a Broken Watch and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights, Lea David explains how shoes are now the most potent example of what she describes as desire objects.  Transcending the confines of the museum, shoes have become powerful memory containers and rallying symbols for diverse movements that often have nothing to do with the human rights memorialization agenda.

The elaboration of this human rights memorialization agenda is the focus of Lea David’s first book, The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Danger of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights.  It was through the media coverage of the Nuremberg trials that the notion that we should face that past and that we have a duty to remember first took shape.  This conviction was further reinforced by a series of high profile Holocaust related trails that followed: Adolph Eichmann (1961), Ivan Demjanjuk (1986-1988), and Klaus Barbie (1987).  However, it wasn’t until 1978, Lea David notes, that West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, first articulated the “duty to remember victims of mass crimes” in his Kristallnacht commemorative address.  This conviction has since become a central tenant of the German memory culture and the core feature of the new human rights memorialization culture.  

Scientific advancements, in particular the development of forensic anthropology, have also made it possible to identify the victims of politically motivated violence.  The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, has been instrumental not just in Argentina, but in helping to establish investigative teams in former conflict zones around the globe.  These efforts, Lea notes, have been supported by international humanitarian and human rights laws which have enshrined the right of families to know what happened to their loved ones. The right to identify victims after death, Lea stresses, is a recent development recognized by Interpol’s General Assembly only in 1996.  From Bosnia to Rwanda, survivors now have a vocabulary of rights and justice in understanding and responding to their loss. 

While desire objects come in various shapes and sizes, they all reinforce a similar representation of death, violence, destruction, injustice, absence, and void. And all desire objects serve the same purpose: to shape visitors’ understanding of the past and to promote certain future moral orders.  Lea David, A Victim’s Shoe, a Broken Watch, and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights. 

Desire objects, Lea David explains, have the ability to affect our emotional energy, to move us.  They are highest in emotional energy when returned to the families of the victims.  For a father, wife, sibling, or other close surviving family member they evoke powerful memories of the deceased and profound longing for their return.  But this type of emotional energy is limited to a small circle of family, friends and close acquaintances.  Precisely because of the new human rights memorialization culture the families who possess these objects sometimes decide to donate them to museums where they can be used to educate and sensitize a wider public.  

Once these objects move from the private to the public sphere to places like museums they lose the intense emotional energy they generate for the families of the victims.  However, through careful staging they can be infused with another kind of energy.  By placing them along a deliberate trajectory, by using recordings, lighting, placards and even the very structure of the building, museums can deploy a host of old and new technologies to instill visitors with the desired emotional messaging and impact.  To achieve maximum impact, these objects often needed to be grouped together and concentrated in large numbers, not unlike the special effects of a blockbuster movie.  

Desire objects, Lea David explains, are now integral features of a new type of memorial museum.  From the Holocaust to the story of slavery and its aftermath, these museums feature past human rights crimes, acts of violence and injustice.  They have become the primary purveyors of the human rights memorialization culture’s three pillars that we need to “face the past”, that we have a “duty to remember,” and that we should seek “justice for the victims.” Museums have long relied on donations of private collections for public display.  The objects donated to these new memorial museums include very different donations.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, has benefited from donations ranging from coats and concentration camp uniforms to badges and bars of soap.  Just like works of art, these objects must be carefully conserved and preserved for posterity.  

These desire objects, through their staging and the ideology that underpins them, are intended to spark an emotional charge to inspire moral labor.   Moral labor is a voluntary willingness to embrace and act on the imperatives of the human rights memorialization culture.  The vast majority of desire objects never travel beyond the museum.  It is at this final destination that they become fixed in what Lea David describes as a “feedback loop” enticing visitors to do the work of remembering the victims and promoting justice and human rights.

Most desire objects require some kind of contextualization or explanation for visitors to recognize them.  Simply seeing a suitcase, a wallet or glasses is not sufficient to link them to the 9/11 attack in New York City or the genocide in Bosnia.  The only object that requires no explanation are shoes.  Shoes, Lea David explains, are instantly recognizable because we all have them and to all of us they represent the many aspects of life.  Precisely because shoes represent life, empty shoes evoke loss. From the large quantities of shoes left behind in extermination camps to the prominence of shoes in documentary and cinematic treatments of the Holocaust, shoes have acquired unique symbolic power that allow them to transcend the museum.  

Shoes today are unique in their use as symbols of protest.  All around the globe shoes are used to rally support for causes ranging from the red shoe campaign against sexual violence to shoes commemorating the children who’ve died in mass shooting since Sandy Hook. In some cases shoes are used by opposing sides in a conflict.  For example, shoes have been used in Israel to call for the release of the hostages held in Gaza and in protests around the world against the killing in Gaza.  When shoes are used as symbols of protest they typically function within a national framework.  Perhaps the main exception is the use of shoes by climate activists.  

Desire objects have undeniably played a role in sensitizing us to the importance of human rights.  From the United Nations to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, ordinary citizens donate considerable sums to organizations that fight to promote and defend human rights.  But despite this outpouring of support, desire objects are by no means limited to the cause of the human rights memorialization culture.  From peace memorial museums in Japan to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, previous episodes of this podcast have made clear that desire objects often bolster national narratives and nationalist agendas.**

**I would like to thank award-winning Bosnian photojournalist Midhat Poturovic for allowing me to use his photos for the landing page and header images for this episode.  These photos originally appeared in the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article «Srebrenica Victims’ Personal Items Help Keep Memories Alive. ». Photo © Midhat Poturovic.