Agamben’s awareness of power as unfolding not simply in discourse (ideology, law) but also in perceptible space has clear implications for tourism’s capacity to bear witness. Tourists temporarily inhabit structures and places imbued with cultural significance and arranged in ways to communicate particular messages: An art museum may showcase a national heritage, a historical movement, or the evolution of a particular artist; journeys into the wilderness promise to take the tourist away from civilization into pristine nature; and beach resorts encourage travelers to break free from their routines (and to spend money in the local economy). In the case of tourism to Auschwitz, travelers encounter a space conceived for the exercise of power by one group of human beings over others. The guided tour directs the visitor’s gaze to the spatial configurations of a violent authority that excluded individuals from the human community by including them in a space designed to de-humanize them.109 At the same time, the way in which tourism directs the gaze, and the ways in which tourists may or may not comply, offer a pale reflection of that interplay of power, discourse, and space.
By emphasizing spatiality, the tourist to Auschwitz becomes a witness by encountering the scene of a crime and confronting its arrangements of space.110 This experience of space includes an understanding of the relationship of the camp to nearby surroundings—at Auschwitz, the camp’s adjacency to a center of population is startling. One is forced to accept the simultaneity of brutality and everyday life side by side. Did the locals know? Did they intervene? This encounter with Auschwitz as a physical space where people still live and work may confound, shock, even disappoint the tourist who expected something more overtly extraordinary or terrifying. In this way, tourism encounters Agamben’s “aporia of Auschwitz”—that is, of the incommensurability between experience and facts. Tourism requires the visitor to do the work of witnessing to seek whatever comprehension is available, even if that comprehension can never be considered complete. The museum and memorial are physical manifestations of the facts, not the reenactment of imprisonment and extermination, and as such they impart a form of historical understanding combined with an experience of sharing the space with one’s contemporaries.
The doubling of perception mentioned above, the duality of listening to the past and to the present, is not only an unavoidable aspect of historical tourism, it is also one of its most important mechanisms by which tourism enables reflection. While the primary communication between the site and the visitor conveys testimony from the past, there is a continual act of communication focused on the present. From the moment the tourist arrives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the museum complex begins to speak not only about the extermination but also about the manner of tourism that is expected. Along with the usual indicators guiding the visitor to the ticket windows and restrooms, there are signs that announce the site’s expectations of decorum from its visitors. One may not smoke on the grounds, one must dress properly, and most important, one must behave “appropriately” (a vague notion, to be sure, and not always heeded).111 The first conscious communication the tourist has with Auschwitz comes in the form of directives: where to go and how to behave. These initial messages set the parameters for the communicative experience of the tour, establishing a code shared by the speaker and the listener that stems not only from a basic notion of respect for the victims who perished but also from a belief that tourists are there to bear witness.
These directives help regulate an encounter that can be quite chaotic. The reception hall, which was built by the SS as the “intake” facility, is often crowded, and the lines to purchase tickets and to wait for the tour to commence become tangled.112 Numerous guides conduct simultaneous tours, with many languages competing for the attention of their respective groups. The guide first takes an assigned group, which can range in size from five to thirty members, out of the reception area to the infamous entry of the prisoner’s camp, marked with the motto “Arbeit macht frei” in wrought iron. For larger groups, the guide speaks into a microphone that plays on headsets distributed to the group’s members. The group is led through several of the “blocks”—the two-story brick buildings that once served as prisoners’ barracks, administrative offices, interrogation and punishment cells, and the “hospital” where many were killed by lethal phenol injections into the heart. The museum has converted these buildings into a series of themed exhibition spaces: One block explains the evolution of the camp from a deserted Polish army base into the Nazis’ largest center for extermination. Another depicts the living conditions of prisoners in the camp. A third focuses on forensic evidence of genocide, including physical traces of victims (ranging from piles of eyeglasses and prosthetics to the hair shaved from women’s heads). Tourists are exhorted not to use flashes in these interior spaces. There are five blocks that house the permanent exhibition, all told.113 The amount of information conveyed to the tourist is vast, with the guide’s narrative accompanied by explanatory signs and contemporary documents, photographs, maps, and artifacts on display. Among these are maps that show the evolution of particular spaces, including photos that reveal the condition of the camp upon liberation, so tourists can observe what has been rebuilt. Crematorium I, with its reconstructed gas chamber and furnaces, is typically the last stop at the Stammlager.
After the tour of the Auschwitz I Stammlager, which typically lasts about ninety minutes, the group travels to Auschwitz II (Birkenau), located about two kilometers to the northwest. The contrast between the two sites is stunning. While the tour begins in the fairly compact area of Auschwitz I, often under crowded conditions, it recommences at the vast expanse of Birkenau. Many visitors express shock at Birkenau’s enormity, which encompasses an area of approximately 350 acres, dwarfing the 50 acres of Auschwitz I. Fences and guard towers extend out to the northern and western horizons. The guide usually takes the group from the so-called Gate of Death, which sits on the eastern boundary of the camp, along the rail spur that bisects Birkenau. To the south of the track, one sees the smaller but relatively intact Frauenlager (women’s camp) and, to the north, mostly ruins of the wooden barracks that were dismantled after the war for building materials. A row of wooden barracks has been reconstructed near the Gate of Death, showing visitors the three-tiered bunks on which prisoners were forced to sleep as many as twelve to a platform only three meters wide. The group walks along the rail spur to the so-called Judenrampe, built for the arrival of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, where the guide explains the selection process. Finally, the guide brings the group to the ruins of the gas chambers at Crematorium II and Crematorium III, adjacent to a memorial erected in 1967.
Figure 1.3. Part of the men’s camp in Birkenau, with the chimneys marking the spot of former barracks, August 2007. An intact barracks stands beyond the barbed wire fence to the left of the frame. Photo by the author.
At the end of three and a half hours, the group has experienced the space of the camp and heard many stories about the prisoners and their killers. Their mobility through the space where these accounts are set allows tourists to establish a historically informed relationship to a very real and present place. Given the dual awareness of spatial proximity and unbridgeable temporal distance that tour groups encounter, in what sense have they borne witness to the Holocaust? Surely the forensic sense of listening to the testimony, however mediated through the museum, applies to tourism at Auschwitz, which seeks to convert the experience of touring the space into historical knowledge. The degree of success of this kind of witnessing depends on the authenticity of the memorial space.114 That requires that the museum acknowledge any changes to the place, thereby allowing visitors to appreciate what has been altered, restored, or neglected. The tourist encounters not only the evidence of the Final Solution but also the absence of evidence—its loss through destruction or attrition, or its replacement through (openly acknowledged) reconstructions, or its not having yet been retrieved. Tourism presents its participants with speech and silence, with presence and absence, and calls upon the tourist to bridge that gap. Tourism presents the visitor with the challenge of understanding the relationship