Take the example of Holocaust testimony, which alone “not only refers to statements elicited from survivors by courts of law or simply for the historical record, as well as to the chronicles, diaries, journals and reports produced during the war and written memoirs and oral history produced after it, but also frequently encompasses other modes of expression to which survivors have had recourse, such as the short story, the novel, and lyric poetry.”40 As the literary scholar Thomas Trezise makes clear in his work on the reception of Holocaust testimony, if the act of bearing witness to the Holocaust exceeds any single genre’s representational strategies, then efforts to listen to and respond to such acts of witnessing must also draw on many kinds of understanding. Even if the object of study for anthropologists is Holocaust tourism and not the Holocaust itself, the underlying event that motivates such tourism will demand a historical and a moral reckoning that cannot be kept at bay by a desire to police disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, in understanding cultural practices as interconnected, anthropology itself acknowledges that Holocaust tourism must be understood alongside many other forms of Holocaust memorialization, which in turn will inevitably call on multiple forms of knowledge. To understand Holocaust tourism, one has to engage with debates in philosophy, historiography, theology, literary analysis, art history, and many others that have asked, What is to be remembered? How is it to be remembered? and What lessons may one learn or not learn from the event?
Tourism and the Representation of the Holocaust
While no single account can claim to provide complete knowledge of the event, one must nevertheless approach the Holocaust from somewhere, and how one approaches the Holocaust is simultaneously an epistemological and an ethical choice. The question of how to represent the Holocaust—through which disciplinary tools, which media, and which institutional structures—unavoidably engages with an ethics of representation. Take again the example of survivor testimony. How does one weigh testimony and take into account the fragile, sometimes unreliable nature of human memory? How does one portray the victims’ suffering without turning it into a spectacle? Holocaust museums and memorial sites must address these questions and others as they curate their exhibits and manage flows of tourists, who in turn are seeking a personal encounter with testimony in a place that avers authenticity. As a highly (but not exclusively) visual practice, the representation of testimony at such places, whether through documents and photos or through videotaped interviews, always negotiates the boundaries between knowledge seeking and voyeurism.41
As with written accounts of the Holocaust, sites of remembrance make choices about the specific stories they want to tell, which beginnings and endings to emphasize. Since there is no shortage of stories to relate, Holocaust representations, including those encountered in tourism, produce many “emplotments,” each different in some way from the next.42 Did the Shoah start with the Wannsee Conference of 1942, or the Nuremberg Laws of 1934? Perhaps its beginnings must be sought even earlier, in the anti-Semitic propaganda of the NSDAP (the National-Socialist German Workers Party, i.e., the Nazis) that was already on display for all to see in the 1920s. As for its end, many survivors of the Holocaust still bear with them a trauma that extends their experience of victimization into the present. The traumatic experiences of victims impose ethical obligations on those who listen to and represent testimony.43 One major challenge for Holocaust studies has been to recover historical knowledge from traumatic memory, since trauma implies a rupture—an inability or, at least, a difficulty—in rendering experience into a coherent narrative. The translation of individual trauma into collective memory is further complicated by the fact that not all individuals process trauma in the same way.44 What’s more, the category of trauma may account for some memories of the Holocaust but not all, so the nature of Holocaust memory cannot be reduced to the traumatic without obscuring non-traumatic memories that recall the event. Finally, recent theories see collective trauma as transgenerational, suggesting that the Holocaust has not finished shaping lived experience.
The variety of accounts of the Holocaust is also reflective of the vast geography in which the event unfolded, requiring immense levels of bureaucratic coordination, the active participation of thousands of perpetrators, and the passivity or quiet approval of millions of bystanders. Tourism, as an engagement with space, confronts the Holocaust’s physical immensity and its many variations of scale, location, and execution, as well as the differences in how its traces and artifacts are preserved from one place to another. While the earliest Holocaust memorials were the remains of liberated camps in Europe, the history of Holocaust memory has evolved from a strictly European experience to a global one.45 Since the end of the Cold War, many of the camps that previously lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain now have become part of a much more freely moving and thriving tourism industry. One result of the freer flow of tourism after 1990 is that sites previously administered under a more narrowly national or ideological perspective now partake in an increasingly international, even global, network of remembrance. To cite one example, the cooperation among the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem illustrates that Holocaust memorialization is indeed an example of what the sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider call “cosmopolitan memory,” a term they use to describe the interplay between local values and narratives and distant ones that are increasingly linked by modern technologies of travel and communication. Local and global practices around Holocaust memorialization and education are now thoroughly intertwined, often leading to debates about the local versus the global ownership of Holocaust memory.
Tourists who travel to multiple sites of Holocaust memorialization develop that network of cosmopolitan memory by comparing one act of remembrance with another. Tourism ensures that those who administer Holocaust memorials appeal to an increasingly sophisticated, diverse touring public that brings a wide range of experiences and knowledge to the sites it visits. The variations that tourists encounter from site to site reflect both the different histories of these sites, the ideologies of the regimes that inherited the task of preserving them, and the different resources available for administering those sites. For example, remote extermination camps such as Sobibór and Bełżec in eastern Poland reflect, among other things, the administrative reach of Heinrich Himmler’s SS on the heels of German military victories in the East, the determination to carry out killings in secrecy, and the grim logic of systematized murder from arrival to cremation. They also reflect the limited resources in postwar Poland for preserving them and the ideological hindrances to remembrance of Jewish suffering. Meanwhile, a site like the House of the Wannsee Conference reminds the tourist of the so-called desk perpetrators, the bureaucrats who coordinated the “resettling” of Europe’s Jews from distant administrative centers, and its postwar history also displays the shifting value placed on confronting the Nazi past in postwar Germany. The disparities in the ways in which these sites are administered today points to the different memorial cultures that have evolved over the course of the last seventy years in Poland and Germany.
The variety among Holocaust memorial sites also raises the very politically charged issue of whom to include among its victims, since the persecution of other groups, such as the Roma people or the mentally and physically disabled, were no less abhorrent than the murder of Jews.46 Sites of Holocaust tourism respond to this challenge in a number of different ways, with important and often controversial implications for the role of Holocaust memory in different contexts. Indeed, the acknowledgment of the Holocaust as the destruction of European Jewry was slow to emerge as the dominant narrative at many of the camp memorials, where narratives of liberation, martyrdom, or political persecution first took precedent. For an example that we will explore further in the following chapter, the earliest remembrances at Auschwitz emphasized Polish victimization and made little reference to the distinct fate of the Jews, the vast majority of whom were deported there for immediate extermination. Tourism has provided a platform from which to witness those transformations.
Tourism depends on the willingness of travelers to help create the experience they are seeking and even to hold sites accountable