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Visiting history, witnessing memory: A study of a Holocaust Exhibition in Paris in 2012
Author(s): Gensburger, Sarah
Date: 2019
Topics: Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Memorials, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Museums, Memory
Abstract: Over the past 20 years, the number of memorial museums and memory exhibitions has increased exponentially and the commemoration of the Holocaust paved the way for this increase. This evolution has given rise to a significant amount of research. However, two questions remain largely unanswered: how are the protocols of memorial exhibitions planned and constructed in concrete terms? And then how do the visitors to these exhibitions use and appropriate this material? The search for the ‘visitor’s gaze’ which is at the heart of contemporary museum studies has only rarely been extended to memorial museums and exhibitions, even those dealing with Holocaust-related topics. This article aims to address this goal. It is thus situated at the crossroads of memory studies and museum studies. Based on extensive empirical material but within the limits of a case study, it focuses on the exhibition C’étaient des enfants. Déportation et sauvetage des enfants juifs à Paris, which was held at the Hotel de Ville in Paris, in 2012. In so doing, it aims to consider some of the underlying assumptions that often go unexamined in the scholarly work on Holocaust memory exhibitions and highlights the centrality of the witnessing memory mechanism as the main way of appropriating the exhibition.
Lived multidirectionality: "Historikerstreit 2.0" and the politics of Holocaust memory
Author(s): Rothberg, Michael
Date: 2022
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, History, Antisemitism, Post-Colonial
Abstract: This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020-2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today's controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust's uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached its limits in Germany's "postmigrant" present. Yet, as an example of migrant engagement with the Holocaust illustrates, German society already includes alternative practices of memory that could transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways.
Ways of looking: Observation and transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin
Author(s): Dekel, Irit
Date: 2009
Topics: Holocaust Memorials, Ethnography, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory
Abstract: Observation is one of the core actions at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Observing fellow visitors, photographing and looking at photos at the memorial transcend its actual time and probe its space and the boundaries of discourse about the past. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on the ways visitors experience the memorial, and argues that in taking and looking at photos at the memorial and observing other visitors and the scene, visitors create a space for self-realization and transformation, in which they explore their relations to the past and to present memory politics. They do so through reflection on the memorial's lack of stated meaning, alongside the impossibility of representing the Holocaust.
Selfies in Auschwitz: Popular and contested representations in a digital generation
Author(s): Feldman, Jackie; Musih, Norma
Date: 2022
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Photography, Holocaust Memorials, Tourism
Abstract: Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presence. Yet it also builds on previous practices: photography, postcards and souvenirs, the affordances of the architecture of the memorial site, the bodily presence of the survivor-witness as mediator of the Holocaust, and the redemptive value assigned to the physical presence of the visitor as “witness of the witness.” We suggest that the combination of continuities with the past alongside the radical break with previous witnessing practices empowers selfie-takers, while arousing the indignation of gatekeepers of Holocaust memory.