The Historiography of the Holocaust

Memory, Memorials and Museums 521
feel good for not being Nazis while the government continued to sell arms to
unpleasant regimes overseas, to bomb countries it did not like and to enforce
a harsh asylum and immigration policy at home? And the exhibition itself has
been in part criticized: more space should have been devoted to Romanies and
other victims of Nazi genocide; it could make more of the Allies’ inadequate
responses to news of the Nazi genocide as it emerged during the war; and,
given that the building that now houses the IWM was originally an asylum,
the section on the development of eugenics and racial hygiene in Germany
could have been extended to show the worldwide influence of racial science,
especially its British origins. Nevertheless, the exhibition is widely considered
an excellent introduction to the events of the Holocaust and reveals the distance
that has been covered from the days when Yad Vashem set up its first narrative
exhibition. 58
What is striking about the USHMM and IWM is the air of melancholy that
surrounds them. This is not the same as the feeling of horror that one gets
from discovering the events of the Holocaust; rather, it is a result of the fact
that, where Yad Vashem concentrated on antisemitism and Nazi hatred, and
Jewish resistance and bravery, today’s new museums place more emphasis on
the Jewish communities that were destroyed – see the entrance to the IWM
exhibition, or the powerful Tower of Faces at the USHMM – and the disorientation
of survivors. In other words, Holocaust museums have increasingly acquired
a commemorative as well as an educational function. And this commemorative
function is inseparable from their entertainment function, for the poignancy
of nostalgia for lost worlds is – for those experiencing it vicariously – bound up
as much with pleasurable as with melancholy emotions.
The increasing sensitivity to the commemorative role of museums, as well as
an awareness of their importance in shaping and responding to the contemporary
memory culture, is made clear in Sybil Milton’s claim that the common
denominator of the majority of Holocaust memorials ‘is a universal willingness
to commemorate suffering experienced rather than suffering caused’. 59 In other
words, the perpetrators often do not occupy the space one would expect. This
commemorative function versus the museum’s need to explain the workings of
the machinery of destruction creates a major dilemma. The danger is that, in
attempting not to glamorize the Nazis, the victims of Nazi genocide can appear
to be the victims of an invisible agent, people to whom terrible things just
happen.
Just as Cole is correct to note of Yad Vashem and USHMM that ‘In giving to the
past a sense of closure and an ending, these two museums offer a sense of meaning’,
so the ‘national pavilions’ at the Auschwitz Museum prove that Fritzsche
is right when he argues that ‘Because of their boundedness in time and space,
national narratives have an unusual ability to organize remembrance and to
make the past sensible’. 60 The development of Auschwitz as a museum has seen