Abstract: In October 2021, Imperial War Museums (IWM) opened its new Holocaust Galleries in its London branch, replacing its first Holocaust Exhibition (from 2000) that had become a landmark in British Holocaust memory. Because of its comprehensive nature and intricate scenography, the new Holocaust Galleries are at the centre of almost all recent major narrative, political, and ethical debates about Holocaust representation in museums. The book provides an ideal global case-study understanding the possibilities and limitations of re-presenting trauma and violence in museums today and whether Holocaust exhibitions can promote democratic, civic, or human rights values, making it an important resource for museum practitioners, public history educators, and university researchers alike, interested in Historical, Museum, Memory, Holocaust, Genocide, or Cultural Studies. The volume brings together texts written by museum practitioners and academic scholars. It is divided in three parts: a long essay by James Bulgin, Head of Content for the new Holocaust Galleries, about the genesis and implementation of the exhibition, supplemented with briefer essays by educators and community members involved in the development of the exhibition, an extensive interview by Stephan Jaeger with IWM researchers James Bulgin and Suzanne Bardgett, and an extensive part with six critical essays by university scholars analysing the new Holocaust Galleries from numerous theoretical angles.
Abstract: In Italy, after the victory of Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist party, “Fratelli d’Italia,” several studies began to discuss whether or not the country has come to terms with the memory of fascism, its role as an inspirer of Nazism, and the collaboration with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. Especially the latter, scholarly literature pointed out, has failed to receive the attention it deserves. This article argues that this is particularly true with regard to public history, the way historical information and events are interpreted and presented to the general public, and focuses on public museums exhibiting the Holocaust and resistance. Evidence for this article comes from two in-depth case studies regarding the oldest yet unaltered Liberation Museum in Rome and the Museum-Monument to Racial and Political Deportees in the Nazi Lagers in Carpi. The article contends that within these museums, the narration of resistance prevails, whilst evidence of Italy’s past collaborationism remains hidden and unexhibited. In essence, these museums emphasise national heroism and sidestep Italian accountability in the Holocaust.
Abstract: La culture mémorielle de l’Europe de l’Est a subi une transformation radicale après l’effondrement du communisme, du fait de l’« américanisation » de la Shoah, c’est-à-dire, pour reprendre les termes de Winfried Fluck, spécialiste de la culture allemande, un processus de démocratisation consistant à éradiquer toute complexité afin de rendre accessibles à un vaste public des événements complexes. De nouveaux musées ont été créés pour réécrire l’histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale d’un point de vue anticommuniste. Le langage utilisé ne correspondait ni à la culture mémorielle nationale, ni à la conceptualisation religieuse de la Shoah, ni au contexte linguistique et culturel de la vie dans l’Allemagne nazie avant et pendant le conflit. Divers auteurs ont analysé le phénomène des pays européens qui n’opposèrent aucune résistance à l’hégémonie de l’Allemagne nazie et de son programme politique. Ceux-ci s’accordent à dire que l’analyse devrait dépasser le clivage bourreaux-spectateurs-victimes.Il existe une contradiction flagrante entre la terminologie employée par la muséologie antifasciste avant 1989 et celle qui est en cours dans les nouveaux musées construits dans les années 2000. L’idée d’une coexistence avec l’Allemagne nazie est une question idéologique et politique majeure, notamment, aujourd’hui, avec la mise en relief illibérale de zones d’ombre précédemment ignorées dans le discours muséologique. Le présent article soutient que le terme « collaboration » n’est pas un bon critère de mesure des phénomènes qui ont fait l’objet de travaux récents…
Abstract: Although digitization has become a word that is almost synonymous with democratization and citizen participation, many museums and other cultural heritage institutions have found it difficult to live up to this political vision of inclusivity and access for all. In Sweden, political ambitions to digitize the cultural heritage sector are high. Yet, institutions still struggle to reconcile their previous practices with new technologies and ethical guidelines for collecting and curating material. In this article we identify, analyse, and try to find resolutions for the current gap that exists between cultural heritage practice and government policy on digitization, open access, and research ethics. By examining two Swedish examples of Holocaust collections that have not been digitized because of internal policies of secrecy and confidentiality, we attempt to demonstrate how discourses about vulnerability affect the ways in which certain archival practices resist policies of accessibility and ethical research. In order to unpack the discourses on vulnerability, Carol Bacchi’s post-structural approach to policy analysis has been used together with Judith Butler’s theories on vulnerability and resistance. In addition to understanding how cultural heritage institutions in Sweden have protected some of their collections and how this has obstructed efforts to make these collections more accessible, we also offer some suggestions on how these issues can be resolved by reimagining digitization as transformation.
Abstract: During World War II, Bosnia and Hercegovina was occupied by the Ustashe-led Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi collaborator par excellence. Ustashe, mostly Croats, Muslims-Bosniaks, and domestic Germans, overwhelmingly participated in the annihilation of more than 85 % of the Bosnian Jewish population during the Shoah. Beside the physical destruction of the community, these Nazi collaborators plundered Jewish assets in an estimated value of over one billion US dollars and robbed priceless cultural artifacts along with the communal archives. While witness accounts agree that looting of most movable property (books, artwork, and other valuables) was carried out in the first days of occupation by the Nazis themselves, the robbery of Jewish property (apartments, houses, businesses) as well as torture and killings of domestic Jews was committed by the Ustashe. What complicates the restitution in this country is the state and memory politics, but also the inexistence of a central registry of stolen items that could be claimed. Moreover, it is of the essence that the GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) within Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia region engage in conducting detailed provenance research of their respective collections.
Abstract: This paper, intended as a contribution to transnational memory studies, analyzes museums devoted to people who helped Jews during the Holocaust that recently opened in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland. The author’s particular interest lies in the “traveling motifs” of the “Righteous” narratives. This category encompasses symbols such as a list of names of the help-providers, a fruit tree/orchard, or a wall with photographs of Holocaust victims, which recur in many of the examined exhibitions and are a clear reference to Yad Vashem and other well-established Holocaust memorials. At first sight, they seem to point to a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust remembrance and to the emergence of a common reservoir of historical notions and images. However, on closer inspection one discovers that the use of these symbols varies and that they refer to differing ways of understanding and telling history.
Abstract: In August 1942, a majority of Bochnia’s Jewish residents were deported to the Bełżec death camp by the German occupying forces – this was the beginning of the direct extermination of Bochnian Jews which lasted for over a year. To commemorate them, as well as all other Jews murdered during the German occupation of Bochnia, the Stanisław Fischer Museum in Bochnia organised an exhibition, inaugurated on the 80th anniversary of this tragic event. The exhibition showed the presence of Jews in the town, remembered important figures whose roots came from Bochnia, and presented the activity of some contemporary descendants of former Jewish inhabitants of the town. The items on display were, in part, property of the museum, Judaica on loan from other museums, scanned documents from the National Archive in Kraków, and also materials submitted by families, descended from Bochnia residents, who live abroad.
Abstract: This study analyses how history museums in Austria, Hungary and Italy, represent the Holocaust. With close reference to debates about European Holocaust commemoration, it addresses how these exhibitions in countries closely related to Germany during the Holocaust construct the past as an object of knowledge/power. It also examines how the conceptualisation of historical agency assigns meaning and creates specific subject positions for the visitor. The research includes 21 different permanent exhibitions, established after 1989/1990, from which four, deemed representative, form the case studies. In Austria the author chose the Zeitgeschichte Museum in Ebensee, in Hungary the Holokauszt Emlékközpont in Budapest, and in Italy the Museo della Deportazione in Prato and the Museo Diffuso della Resistenza, della Deportazione, della Guerra, dei Diritti e della Libertà in Turin. Within the case studies Birga U. Meyer analyses how prisoner uniforms, perpetrator
Topics: European Union / European Commission, History and Historiography: Holocaust, Holocaust: Legacies, Remembering and Attitudes Towards, Holocaust: Memorials, Communism, Main Topic: Holocaust Legacies and Memorial, Memory, Memorials (other than Holocaust memorials), Museums, Post-Communist Transitions
Abstract: Eastern European EU accession candidates have used memorial museums and installed new permanent exhibitions to communicate with “Europe” in view of the Holocaust's “universalization” and “Europeanization.” One group demands that “Europe” acknowledge its suffering under Communism, while the other group tries to demonstrate its compatibility with Europe by invoking “Europe” in their exhibition texts and publications and referencing western Holocaust museums in their aesthetics. This article focuses on two countries from each group: Latvia and Lithuania, which highlight their victimhood under “double occupation,” on the one hand; and the current successor states of the “Slovak Republic” and the “Independent State of Croatia,” two Nazi satellite states, on the other. I begin by analysing how the terms “Holocaust,” “genocide,” and “mass violence” are used in the respective Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak and Croatian memorial museums. I argue that both groups share an awkwardness in dealing with the term “Holocaust,” and a tendency to present “our” victims with the help of individual stories and private photographs designed to evoke empathy, while presenting “their” victims – Jews and, even more so, Roma – with the help of often humiliating photos shot by the perpetrators. I then show that the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – in contrast to the peaceful transitions in the other countries – had a distinctive effect on debates concerning the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence. Moving beyond the realm of museum analysis, I pinpoint the broader cultural phenomenon of Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks portraying themselves as “the new Jews,” before focusing specifically on the new permanent exhibition at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial, which I discuss as a best practice example for the universalization of the Holocaust.
Abstract: This book explores the Holocaust exhibition opened within the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 2000; setting out the long and often contentious debates surrounding the conception, design, and finally the opening of an important exhibition within a national museum in Britain. It considers a process of memory-making through an assessment of Holocaust photographs, material culture, and survivor testimonies; exploring theories of cultural memory as they apply to the national museum context. Anchored in time and place, the Holocaust exhibition within Britain's national museum of war is influenced by, and reflects, an international rise in Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s. This book considers the construction of Holocaust memory in 1990s Britain, providing a foundation for understanding current and future national memory projects. Through all aspects of the display, the Holocaust is presented as meaningful in terms of what it says about Nazism and what this, in turn, says about Britishness. From the original debates surrounding the inclusion of a Holocaust gallery at the IWM, to the acquisition of Holocaust artefacts that could act as 'concrete evidence' of Nazi barbarity and criminality, the Holocaust reaffirms an image of Britain that avoids critical self-reflection despite raising uncomfortably close questions. The various display elements are brought together to consider multiple strands of the Holocaust story as it is told by national museums in Britain
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: Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Museums, Jewish Heritage, Migration: Immigration and Immigrants, History and Historiography: Holocaust, Memory, History: Oral History, Biography and Memoir, Artworks, Artefacts, Objects and Materiality
Abstract: Several exhibitions in recent years – in the ‘Deutsches Auswandererhaus’ Bremerhaven and other museums in Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States – have used suitcases (and ‘the suitcase’) as a central symbol and metaphor for the migration process. Based on a variety of examples, the article discusses the idea and the use of memory containers – and their function as archives – in the context of emigration, transmigration, and immigration. Suitcases are the most obvious material objects relating to these processes and the connected cultural practices. They are concrete objects, but beyond that they have been used as symbols and metaphors for the experience of travel and of dislocation. Suitcases often contained, and therefore are connected to, other items of memory storage: photographs and personal documents (letters, diaries about the migration experience – documents that have been termed, in a different context, ‘Schreibakte auf der Schwelle’ – acts of writing on the threshold); manuscripts, farewell letters (written on the boat, in border stations, in port cities), memorial and yizkor books, songs and poems, self-drawn maps which show the stations of the journey. An analysis of such ‘things’ – material objects which often carried an emotional value – and their representation in museums and exhibitions opens up a wide and rich field of research for the ethnography of migration.
Abstract: Relatively little comment has been passed on the role of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum (IWM). There is a critical discourse about the role of the exhibition in the museum of course, and Rebecca Jinks’s and Antoine Capet’s essays contribute admirably to that discourse, yet the specific question of the relationship between thinking about the Holocaust and thinking about Empire and imperial genocide has seldom been asked. Yet as Jinks’s essay makes clear, Britain has an imperial past and as such it is not possible for the Holocaust exhibition to just avoid that context. It would be very difficult anywhere in Britain, but in the IWM, the official repository of the nation’s war memories, it is impossible. What is more, the IWM specifically tasks itself, in its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, to engage with genocide in a wider context and as such to place the Holocaust in that context. And the British Empire was a site of genocide. One might expect then to find that the IWM grapples with the problem of genocide in the British Empire (in Australia, in Ireland, in India for example). It does not. As such, I want to use this commentary to think more about the relationship between the galloping British memory of the Holocaust that Capet identifies, and Britain’s memory of genocide in its Empire that Jinks highlights, using the IWM as a case study.
Abstract: In the last decade or so, research has begun to address the ways in which global discourses of memory, within which the Holocaust is paradigmatic, often ‘borrow’ Holocaust iconography and tropes of memorialisation to discuss or commemorate other tragedies. This utilisation of Holocaust memory is indicative of the position that the Holocaust now generally holds throughout the Western world, and yet it also raises questions about how we represent, and respond to, the other tragedies of the twentieth century. In this vein, this chapter explores the interactions between the memory of the Holocaust and other contemporary mass atrocities in Britain, using as case studies the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) Holocaust exhibition, which opened in 2000, and its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, which first opened in 2002 and then moved to a different part of the building in 2009. While on the face of it, the sheer difference in size and visitor numbers between the two exhibitions could easily function as a metaphor for the disparity between the status of Holocaust memory, and the memory of ‘other genocides’ in Britain and the West, my object is to explore the symbiotic and perhaps even dependent relationship between the two exhibitions, and by extension the wider categories of ‘Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’.
Abstract: It can be supposed that most people interested in twentieth-century history are familiar with the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and that most will have visited its permanent Holocaust exhibition since this was formally opened in June 2000. What Suzanne Bardgett, the curator who runs the exhibition, calls its ‘artifacts’ cover 1,200 square metres but before 2009 it showed only one piece of ‘art’ indirectly derived from the discovery and liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British Army in April 1945: Edgar Ainsworth’s drawing Wem Berger, Aged 13, after a Year in Ravensbriick (near Bélsen), April 1945 It is not always realised that the IWM has, in fact, many more drawings and paintings connected with what is now known as Holocaust Art. The museum now publishes a history of the ‘hangings’ from which each of these works has benefited and this indicates that, while there were many hangings immediately after the war, there was then a long period of ‘purgatory’ from which these works are only now re-emerging. In a revealing article of 2004, Bardgett suggested that it was the whole issue of representing the Holocaust in the Museum which was taboo until the 1980s.2 Inevitably, the paintings and drawings suffered from this reticence, which largely explains their neglect as an iconographie source for Holocaust studies in Britain.
Abstract: Following on the overview presented at the first annual Holocaust and Restitution Conference concerning what is known about the expropriation of cultural property in Serbia during World War II and where that cultural property is presently located, ways in which restitution of art, Judaica, and other cultural property might best be implemented are discussed.
Serbia is encouraged to do historical research on the history of cultural plunder during World War II and on what was restituted to Serbia and within Serbia after the War, and to create a listing or database on the internet of what was taken in Serbia, noting what was subsequently returned and what is still missing. An entity should be responsible for provenance research in the country, either one that actually does the research as in Austria or one that oversees the research carried out by museums, libraries, and archives as in the Netherlands. Information should be made public over the internet of the results of such provenance research. A separate entity, as neutral and independent as possible, should be responsible for restitution decisions based on the provenance research. Serbia should pass legislation covering the return of private movable cultural property that is applicable to both Serbian and foreign citizens. Preferably there should be no deadline for claims for cultural property, whether individual or communal, since such cultural property is often not immediately identifiable. A non-bureaucratic process for filing claims should be established. Cultural property for which original owners and heirs are not identified (heirless property) should be listed on an internet site so that potential claimants can come forward. Such items should not necessarily move from their current location, but their provenance history should be publicly noted.
Abstract: This paper looks at how historical museums in Germany that are not Holocaust or Jewish museums represent Jews. It examines the permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as their visitors’ experiences, at the two largest national and state-sponsored historical museums: the House of History in Bonn and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. I first analyze the ways in which Jewish symbols and images of Jews tell the story of the Holocaust’s aftermath in those museums. The article then focuses on a temporary exhibition, ‘Shalom: Three Photographers See Germany,’ at the Bonn House of History (August 2015–June 2016). I suggest that the exhibitions create directed viewing, whereby the visitors look at Jews and project the experience of viewing Holocaust images. I argue that as they are presented and viewed in the ‘Shalom’ exhibition, Jews undergo temporal displacement whereby their subject position and possible roles both in remembering and in being remembered are limited. I conclude by showing that Jews, as well as other Holocaust victim groups and migrant groups in Germany today, are not equal subjects of memory, meaning both that their subjectivity as participants in the public sphere is limited to specific roles, times and spaces, and that inter-subjective communication about their representation is limited.
Abstract: TABLE OF CONTENTS
7 Jacek Purchla, "A world after a Catastrophe" - in search of lost memory
Witnesses in the space of memory
13 Miriam Akavia, A world before a Catastrophe. My Krakow family between the wars
21 Leopold Unger, From the "last hope" to the "last exodus"
29 Yevsei Handel, Minsk: non-revitalisation ofJewish districts and possible reasons
43 Janusz Makuch, The Jewish Culture Festival: between two worlds
Jewish heritage - dilemmas of regained memory
53 Michal Firestone, The conservation ofJewish cultural heritage as a tool for the investigation of identity
63 Ruth Ellen Gruber, Beyond virtually Jewish... balancing the real, the surreal and real imaginary places
81 Sandra Lustig, Alternatives to "Jewish Disneyland." Some approaches to Jewish history in European cities and towns
99 Magdalena Waligorska, Spotlight on the unseen: the rediscovery of little Jerusalems
117 Agnieszka Sabor, In search of identity
Jewish heritage in Central European metropolises
123 Andreas Wilke, The Spandauer Vorstadt in Berlin.15 years of urban regeneration
139 Martha Keil, A clash of times. Jewish sites in Vienna (Judenplatz, Seitenstettengasse, Tempelgasse)
163 Krisztina Keresztely, Wasting memories -gentrification vs. urban values in the Jewish neighbourhood ofBudapest
181 Arno Pah'k, The struggle to protect the monuments of Prague's Jewish Town
215 Jaroslav Klenovsky, Jewish Brno
247 Sarunas Lields, The revitalisation of Jewish heritage in Vilnius
Approaches of Polish towns and cities to the problems of revitalising Jewish cultural heritage
263 Bogustaw Szmygin, Can a world which has ceased to exist be protected? The Jewish district in Lublin
287 Eleonora Bergman, The "Northern District" in Warsaw:a city within a city?
301 Jacek Wesoiowski, The Jewish heritage in the urban space of todz - a question ofpresence
325 Agnieszka Zabtocka-Kos, In search of new ideas. Wroclaw's "Jewish district" - yesterday and today
343 Adam Bartosz, This was the Tarnow shtetl
363 Monika Murzyn-Kupisz, Reclaiming memory or mass consumption? Dilemmas in rediscovering Jewish heritage ofKrakow's Kazimierz
Abstract: The Holocaust is a pervasive presence in British culture and society. Schools have been legally required to deliver Holocaust education, the government helps to fund student visits to Auschwitz, the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust Exhibition has attracted millions of visitors, and Britain has an annually commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. What has prompted this development, how has it unfolded, and why has it happened now? How does it relate to Britain's post-war history, its contemporary concerns, and the wider "globalisation" of Holocaust memory? What are the multiple shapes that British Holocaust consciousness assumes and the consequences of their rapid emergence? Why have the so-called "lessons" of the Holocaust enjoyed such popularity in Britain? Through analysis of changing engagements with the Holocaust in political, cultural and memorial landscapes over the past generation, this book addresses these questions, demonstrating the complexities of Holocaust consciousness and reflecting on the contrasting ways that history is used in Britain today.
