Holocaust Tourism: A Phenomenological Approach
As the examples of the miniseries Holocaust and the Anne Frank House show, the collective remembrance of the Holocaust depends at least in part on representations in mainstream culture, and tourism has a close connection to other forms of popular culture in literature, film, and television. Holocaust tourism raises many of the same questions about what can be known about the calamity, and how we can know it, that other genres do, but it also adds other considerations about places of memory. In turn, what we discover about tourism to sites of Holocaust remembrance can inform how we consider reading texts or viewing films. A common feature of many essays on the ethics of Holocaust representation is that the perspectives of readers and viewers are usually secondary to considerations of aesthetic form. Most critics of Holocaust-related cultural productions foreground matters of genre or medium when analyzing a book, a memorial, or a film, exploring their signifying structures and codes as if they were determinative of their meaning independent of the audience with which they engage. Just as texts need readers to generate meaning, tourism is not possible without tourists. Of course, form matters, and this book pays attention to formal aspects of tourism: how museums are arranged, how tour guides shape the experiences of visitors to camp memorials, how displays use text and image, and so on. But the perspective of tourists remains central to the inquiry, which, relying on a term first articulated by the social anthropologist Eric Cohen and further developed by other scholars since, I am characterizing as a phenomenological approach to Holocaust tourism.59 By that I mean that it is an account of the ways in which tourists interpret sensory stimuli to produce knowledge and negotiate their identities in relation to the surrounding place.60 That includes a consideration of how tourists encounter visual displays of artifacts, photos, and documents; how their hearing is addressed both intentionally through audio recordings, lectures, or guides communicating through headphones, as well as through ambient sources, including other tourists; or how tourists’ bodies navigate configurations of space. Tourism, though heavily visual, relies on a full array of sensory experience in imparting both rational and more affective impressions to travelers. In the case of Holocaust tourism, I address how tourists process their encounters with places of remembrance, including their affective and sensory qualities, in order to construct a coherent narrative of the Holocaust and to situate themselves in relation to the event and its memory.
In applying this approach, I place more emphasis on exploring the possibilities for knowledge than on a quantitative or statistically verifiable ethnographic account of Holocaust tourists. Such work would be a welcome contribution to the study of Holocaust tourism, but it must build on an awareness of the full range of available responses that tourists have to Holocaust sites if it is to ask the right questions.61 Furthermore, it will have to confront the reality that tourists to Holocaust sites come from such a variety of backgrounds and experiences that any effort to make definitive claims about the phenomenon will face enormous challenges in identifying broad trends shared among different visitors. This book identifies an observed range of subjectivities available to travelers: not just as consumers, but also as witnesses, pilgrims, mourners, commemorators, students, and educators. By linking the questions about knowledge and representation that drive Holocaust studies with theoretical and empirical insights from tourism studies, this book aims to offer a rich account of those who undertake travel to these destinations and what they recall, including my own experiences and those of other travelers, who often share their responses in print and online media. It also draws on conversations with tour guides, reports by agencies that manage such sites, and tourist literature. It identifies tourist responses to sites that go beyond a description of the business of tourism, although I pay attention to the role of market forces in shaping accessibility to sites of remembrance. In addressing the possibilities for knowledge and acknowledging a range of responses, I hope to counter a prevailing tendency in many common responses to tourism at Holocaust museums and memorials, namely that it is appalling that a market for this kind of travel exists. This tendency, which finds expression in both general and more academic critiques of tourism, has played an especially important role in one particular branch of tourism studies concerned with “dark tourism.”
As noted above, the term “dark tourism” was coined by J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, British researchers of tourism and management. Lennon and Foley define “dark tourism” as travel to places of death and disaster, including Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Robben Island, and the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, which is dedicated to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Such places draw tourists because of the heavy circulation within media accounts of the calamities that took place there. Indeed, for Lennon and Foley it is the mediatized nature of these places (or, rather, of the events they have come to represent) that links them together, lending them an allure within mainstream culture that they might not otherwise possess. (We see here an echo of the concern for mainstream culture that runs from Horkheimer and Adorno through to Wiesel.) These aspects of dark tourism theory certainly reinforce the connection between Holocaust tourism and other forms of popular culture. But for Lennon and Foley the association is rather negative, raising questions of poor taste on the part of travelers whom they regard as “invariably curious about suffering, horror and death,” which become “established commodities” within the tourism industry.62 While Lennon and Foley allow that some tourists may have more noble motivations than others, their typical dark tourist is the traveler seduced by media images into spending money on an inauthentic experience.63 Ultimately, dark tourists appear as postmodern travelers who disregard the distinction between the original event and its subsequent representations.
Like many other critiques of tourism, the dark tourism model focuses on tourism as commodification. Evoking familiar concerns about mass culture, dark tourism sees those who purchase tourism’s commodities as submitting to the dominant logic of capitalism—the logic that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as enabling the establishment of extermination camps. A certain superficiality adheres to the rather obvious and not very insightful observation that tourism involves commodification. It is as if, by establishing a fact that few would legitimately dispute, one has adequately dispensed with an age-old phenomenon that continues to diversify and draw ever more people into its networks.
Despite the admonitions about the dangers of commodifying history as aesthetic object, we cannot ignore the impact of tourism in disseminating awareness of the genocide. Nor did Adorno ever imagine that his negative critique of mainstream culture would obviate all engagement with a calamity that has so often been called “unthinkable.” Too negative a view of mainstream culture bears a defeatist, even elitist element that cannot imagine resistance or critical reflection as a widespread practice within humanity. And to insist on the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust on the basis of its horror is to invite resignation in the face of atrocity.64
Instead, horror can motivate comprehension. Even Adorno advocates for a moment beyond or apart from rational thought, for an affective moment that is productive. Specifically, he insists that we recoil in the face of Auschwitz. When we learn of the gas chambers and the mass executions in forests and the deaths from starvation and disease, we should respond in horror, but that horror, in turn, should lead us to engage in deep thought about the structures and systems in any society that produce violence. However we engage with the Holocaust, there is a place for affect in our pursuit of knowledge. To dismiss tourism as an inauthentic fascination with the macabre is to ignore the ways in which affect becomes the grounds upon which a critical rationality can build.65
Of course, we can maintain a distinction between genuine affect and the kind of sentiment fostered in mass entertainment that Adorno and others would dismiss as kitsch. Holocaust tourism comprises a range of efforts that span the sincere to the sensationalized. And yes, there are “dark tourists” who are drawn to the macabre—but they don’t necessarily leave the destination with the same morbid curiosity that might initially have drawn them. And even some who conceive of their travel as pilgrimage may, in fact, exhibit a superficial engagement with the site they visit. The point is, tourists are capable of varied and even contradictory behaviors and insights during the same journey. Travel to museums, memorials, and other locales related to the murder of six million European Jews can be both problematic and productive.