The Historiography of the Holocaust

520 Dan Stone
imply costly demands on Americans to redress the wrongs of the past, contemplating
the Holocaust is virtually cost-free: a few cheap tears.’ 54 Cole notes that
the ‘peepshow’ telling of the Holocaust – identified by Gourevitch – is ‘more than
simply a desire for “titillation” in an America schooled in Hollywood’s celebration
of technicolour violence. . . . it is more about a sense of the “Holocaust” being
the “Other”, and thus being portrayed as the great antithesis to all-American
values.’ 55 Richard Handler says the museum ‘reproduces rather than challenges
the cultural politics of nationalism and individualism’ because, while it condemns
racial intolerance, it simultaneously does not demonstrate the need for
individuals to do anything about it: ‘the culture of individualism and equality
leads people to imagine an abstract and universal humanity while at the same
time making them reluctant to participate in the specific relations of dependence
necessary to redress particular injustices.’ 56
Merely the placing of the USHMM is problematic in some people’s eyes. Its
position next to the Mall suggests its place in American history is as central as
the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial. Likewise, the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage – which
devotes a large amount of space to the Holocaust – stands in Battery Park,
lower Manhattan, opposite the Statue of Liberty, which is the first thing that
visitors see through the window as they emerge from the Holocaust exhibition
(contrast this with the blocked windows of the USHMM’s Hall of Remembrance,
preventing visitors from viewing the central monuments of the American
national narrative on the Mall). On the one side of the Hudson Rappoport’s
Liberation; on the other, the Jewish Museum, with the Statue of Liberty in the
middle. What this implies about the role of the Holocaust in American history
and politics unnerves some commentators.
Britain’s first permanent state-funded Holocaust exhibition opened in 2000
(a smaller, private one, Beth Shalom, had been in existence for some years). Rather
than being custom-built, it occupies space within the Imperial War Museum
(IWM). This fact worried many commentators, who saw a museum originally
designed to glorify the achievements of the British Empire, and whose entry
lobby is full of warplanes and tanks, as no place for a Holocaust exhibition. Yet
just as the IWM has changed, so that its many sensitive exhibitions offer searching
critiques of warfare through art and testimony as well as more traditional
forms of museum exhibition, so too its Holocaust exhibition was well received
by critics. In many ways, it is a small-scale replica of the USHMM, following
a similar narrative strategy, playing down the aesthetic appeal of Nazism, relying
on the power of numerous ‘authentic’ objects to give visitors a ‘feel’ of the past,
and making careful and extensive use of survivor testimony, which can be heard
at strategically placed ‘listening posts’ throughout the exhibition. 57
The same questions were asked about the IWM as about the USHMM: why
did Britain need a Holocaust museum? Was this a way of making the British