According to Remmler, the challenge in developing a memorial—or "official" site of memory—is creating a place that has collective meaning for a society yet also allows individuals to develop their own private relationship to the site. "The problem with building a monument is that very often it petrifies one meaning. Differences are erased, and it becomes more difficult for individuals to find their own experience in that place," she explains.

Monuments often fail in their collective aims, Remmler points out. "It’s impossible to fulfill everyone’s needs. There’s always someone excluded, perhaps because they were on the wrong side or came later." Rather than just study monuments and their inevitable complications, Remmler focuses her scholarship on the process of creating unexpected or spontaneous sites of memory. The question that interests her is how a place becomes memorable.

"When I consider sites of memory, what I really want to examine is the process of taking completely different experiences and creating social memory, something that is collective without erasing the individual. In other words, how do you create a site that has multiple meanings and is continually evolving? A site that’s not static, not finished."

Remmler offers Maya Lin’s design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a successful example. "It’s not monumental; it’s not realist. It has the individual names of those who were killed. The problem, of course, is that other people who suffered in the war are not memorialized there. But it’s purpose is to commemorate United States soldiers. And while there’s a sense of sadness at the memorial, there’s also a sense of humbleness that leads, I would hope, to wanting to understand others more."

Education and responsibility are words that Remmler uses often in discussing sites of memory. Her work to date has focused primarily on how Germans mourn the lives lost in the Holocaust and take responsibility for the atrocities. "People in present-day Germany are not guilty because most were not alive during the Holocaust. But they are responsible. A successful memorial creates a sense of responsibility for strangers. It makes us understand that we do bear some responsibility for other people’s lives," says Remmler.

While the victims of September 11 shared a common fate, Remmler notes that people will have different interests in memorializing the World Trade Center site. She thinks it would be fine if there were heated debates about the site, and believes there should be no foregone conclusions at the beginning of the process. "In some ways the events of September 11 have become a collective experience; the whole world watched—and in a way experienced—the destruction. Yet it’s critical to remember that there were individuals in the buildings and planes who lost their lives. Instead of allowing their shared death to create a single motif, the memorial must acknowledge those individuals, perhaps through their stories, photographs, or voices."

To accomplish this, Remmler believes that an abstract memorial is needed. "I like abstract memorials because their openness invites people to imagine and interact. There are different ways of dealing with or reacting to tragedy, and I would not want a site of memory to consolidate these differences into one meaning. That would be dangerous. That would be wrong," she says. And instead of one permanent memorial, Remmler suggests that planners consider a site that evolves over time. Another idea—one she’s sure already has been suggested by others—is to use home videos of the victims. "It could be very powerful. But it’s voyeuristic, too, so it would have to be done carefully, if at all."

Most important, says Remmler, is that adequate time be devoted to the process. "There should be no rush to create a memorial. People seem to be recognizing that—no one wants to do the wrong thing. And sites of memory are appearing all over the city. Memorializing is happening with candles, flowers, photos, and recordings."

And while multimedia technology literally has taken monuments out of the Stone Age, Remmler believes that the twenty-first century offers even more revolutionary ways to create sites of memory. "Another way of honoring the dead is to say the violence stops here," she says. "That could be our memorial to the victims."