Abstract: Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.
Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just "learners". Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as "agents of memory", endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.
Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Visitors at Holocaust Museums and Memory sites
Diana I. Popescu
Part I: Visitor Experience in Museum Spaces
Mobile Memory; or What Visitors Saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Michael Bernard-Donals
Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights: TripAdvisor Responses to the Topography of Terror (Berlin) and the Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen)
Stephan Jaeger
"Really made you feel for the Jews who went through this terrible time in History" Holocaust Audience Re-mediation and Re-narrativization at the Florida Holocaust Museum
Chaim Noy
Understanding Visitors’ Bodily Engagement with Holocaust Museum Architecture: A Comparative Empirical Research at three European Museums
Xenia Tsiftsi
Attention Please: The Tour Guide is Here to Speak Out. The Role of the Israeli Tour Guide at Holocaust Sites in Israel
Yael Shtauber, Yaniv Poria, and Zehavit Gross
The Impact of Emotions, Empathy, and Memory in Holocaust exhibitions: A Study of the National Holocaust Centre & Museum in Nottinghamshire, and the Jewish Museum in London
Sofia Katharaki
The Affective Entanglements of the Visitor Experience at Holocaust Sites and Museums
Adele Nye and Jennifer Clark
Part II: Digital Engagement Inside and Outside the Museum and Memory Site
"…It no longer is the same place": Exploring Realities in the Memorial Falstad Centre with the ‘Falstad Digital Reconstruction and V/AR Guide’
Anette Homlong Storeide
"Ways of seeing". Visitor response to Holocaust Photographs at ‘The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust’ Exhibition
Diana I. Popescu and Maiken Umbach
Dachau from a Distance: The Liberation during The COVID-19 Pandemic
Kate Marrison
Curating the Past: Digital Media and Visitor Experiences at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Christoph Bareither
Diversity, Digital Programming, and the Small Holocaust Education Centre: Examining Paths and Obstacles to Visitor Experience
Laura Beth Cohen and Cary Lane
Part III: Visitors at Former Camp Sites
The Unanticipated Visitor: A Case Study of Response and Poetry at Sites of Holocaust Memory
Anna Veprinska
"Did you have a good trip?" Young people’s Reflections on Visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Town of Oświęcim
Alasdair Richardson
Rewind, Relisten, Rethink: The Value of Audience Reception for Grasping Art’s Efficacy
Tanja Schult
"The value of being there" -Visitor Experiences at German Holocaust Memorial Sites
Doreen Pastor
"Everyone Talks About the Wind": Temporality, Climate, and the More-than Representational Landscapes of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes
Ian Cantoni
Guiding or Obscuring? Visitor Engagement with Treblinka’s Audio Guide and Its Sonic Infrastructure
Kathryn Agnes Huether
Abstract: This dissertation illustrates how a moral burden of history manifests itself in social relationships, cultural processes, and material products. Specifically, it argues that what appears to many as a superficial, commercially motivated revival of Jewishness in Poland is also a significant joint venture between non-Jewish Poles and Jewish visitors to Poland in exploring inter-ethnic memory-building and reconciliation. The findings are based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the historical Jewish quarter (Kazimierz) in Krakow, Poland, with further research in Israel and the United States among diaspora Jews. My research reveals that the notion of uniform Holocaust tourism disguises a movement to contest lachrymose conceptions of Jewishness as victimhood. I document a sense of Jewish connection to Poland---overlooked in mainstream discourses---that animates new generations of Jews and Poles to seek each other out. Similarly, much of the Jewish revival in Kazimierz is orchestrated by non-Jewish Poles. I show how they use identification with Jewishness to reconfigure their own Polishness and their visions for a pluralistic Polish nation state. I conclude that (1) popular cultural products, practices, and spaces can be important manifestations of---and tools for---moral reckoning; (2) identification with someone else's ethnicity/religion (often called appropriation) can be understood as an enlargement of, rather than an escape from, the self, and (3) Kazimierz in Krakow represents the cutting edge of Polish-Jewish relations via local grassroots culture brokers who use Jewishness to expand the Polish universe of obligation.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.
Topics: Educational Tours, Israel Tours, Main Topic: Education, Jewish Education, Jewish Identity, Israel Attachment, Israel Education, Israel Experience, Teenagers, Youth, Interviews
Abstract: Cet ouvrage dirigé par Jacques et Ygal Fijalkow découle du colloque qui s'est tenu en 2011 à Lacaune sur le thème des voyages de mémoire de la Shoah (colloque soutenu par la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah). Enseignants, personnels des musées mémoriaux, témoins de la Shoah, acteurs institutionnels, experts et universitaires y livrent leurs regards et leurs analyses sur les voyages d'étude sur la Shoah.
Enseigner la Shoah n’est pas chose facile. Tous les enseignants le savent. Dans le souci de développer des formes nouvelles d’enseignement, certains ont trouvé une solution : sortir de la classe et aller avec leurs élèves sur des lieux de mémoire. Cette façon de faire, dans un contexte de développement des voyages en général, est en plein développement.Du côté des pouvoirs publics, la formule a plu et les soutiens arrivent de sorte que le nombre de voyages augmente d’année en année. Le succès aidant, un débat est né : qu’apportent véritablement ces voyages de mémoire aux élèves qui y participent ?
C’est sur cette toile de fond que cet ouvrage a été rédigé. On y trouvera des éclairages sur ce qu’apportent les institutions spécialisées dans ce domaine. On pourra y voir également comment les choses se passent, aussi bien lors de la préparation que sur les lieux de mémoire eux-mêmes. Et ceci en France mais aussi chez nos voisins anglais, belges, espagnols, italiens, suisses, ainsi qu’en Israël. Le cas d’Auschwitz est privilégié, mais d’autres lieux sont également examinés.
Abstract: This story is about a kind of pilgrimage, which is connected to the course of events which occurred in Częstochowa on 22 September 1942. In the morning, the German Captain Degenhardt lined up around 8,000 Jews and commanded them to step either to the left or to the right. This efficient judge from the police force in Leipzig was rapid in his decisions and he thus settled the destinies of thousands of people. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the town (renamed Tschenstochau) had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and incorporated into the General Government. The Nazis marched into Częstochowa on Sunday, 3 September 1939, two days after they invaded Poland. The next day, which became known as Bloody Monday, approximately 150 Jews were shot deadby the Germans. On 9 April 1941, a ghetto for Jews was created. During World War II about 45,000 of the Częstochowa Jews were killed by the Germans; almost the entire Jewish community living there.The late Swedish Professor of Oncology, Jerzy Einhorn (1925–2000), lived in the borderhouse Aleja 14, and heard of the terrible horrors; a ghastliness that was elucidated and concretized by all the stories told around him. Jerzy Einhorn survived the ghetto, but was detained at the Hasag-Palcery concentration camp between June 1943 and January 1945. In June 2009, his son Stefan made a bus tour between former camps, together with Jewish men and women, who were on this pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. The trip took place on 22–28 June 2009 and was named ‘A journey in the tracks of the Holocaust’. Those on the Holocaust tour represented different ‘pilgrim-modes’. The focus in this article is on two distinct differences when it comes to creed, or conceptions of the world: ‘this-worldliness’ and ‘other- worldliness’. And for the pilgrims maybe such distinctions are over-schematic, though, since ‘sacral fulfilment’ can be seen ‘at work in all modern constructions of travel, including anthropology and tourism’.
Abstract: The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) is a dynamic, performative space that negotiates between representing the Jew as an integral part of German history and as ultimate Other. While this tension has been documented through the political history of the museum (Lackmann 2000; Pieper 2006; Young 2000), we focus on the dynamics of guided tours and special events. We claim that guiding and festival events at JMB marginalise Holocaust memory and present an image of Jews of the past that promotes a multicultural vision of present-day Germany. In guiding performances, the identity of the guide as German/Jewish/Muslim is part of the guiding performance, even when not made explicit. By comparing tour performances for various publics, and the 'storytelling rights' granted by the group, we witness how visitors' scripts and expectations interact with the museum's mission that it serve as a place of encounter (Ort der Begegnung). As German-Jewish history at JMB serves primarily as a cosmopolitan template for intercultural relations, strongly affiliated local Jews may not feel a need for the museum. Organised groups of Jews from abroad, however, visit it as part of the Holocaust memorial landscape of Berlin, while many local Jews with weaker affiliations to the Jewish community may find it an attractive venue for performing their more fluid Jewish identities – for themselves and for others.
Abstract: THE 2001 HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY SPEECH delivered by Israel's Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, is not so much a description of the current Israeli situation, as a prescription for Israeli Holocaust memory in general, and for the visits by Israeli youth to the death camps in Poland, in particular. The objective of these visits is to imbue students with experiences that will make this view of the world plausible: that the Holocaust never really ended, and that, but for the State and its defense forces, the Jews in Israel would today be on their way to the gas chambers.
This essay aims to illustrate how the Israeli Ministry of Education has built its world view—sometimes unconsciously—into the framework of the ritual visits to Poland. It will show how these visits draw a clear, but constantly threatened, boundary around the Jewish-Israeli collective, and present that boundary in such a way as to appear to those participating in the visits as natural. I will examine this process in light of Mary Douglas's characterization of the practices of the enclave. I will conclude with some reflections on the broader societal effects of the visits, and offer some suggestions for alternative pilgrimages commemorating the Holocaust.
Research data has been gleaned mainly from Israel's Education Ministry's pre-visit instruction course and six trips (between 1992 and 1997) as part of Ministry-organized delegations to Poland, of which five were with state secular schools and the last with a National Religious group.
Abstract: Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.
