{"id":79,"date":"2013-05-22T09:13:47","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T09:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/?p=79"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:17:41","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:17:41","slug":"remembering-a-difficult-past-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/2013\/05\/22\/remembering-a-difficult-past-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering a difficult past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Holocaust<\/a>

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin
(Photo by Matt Keyworth 2007)<\/p><\/div>\n

Next week I embark on a fieldwork trip to Bavaria and Austria, as part of ongoing research into memorialisation and the Holocaust, and in particular the concept of \u2018dark tourism\u2019 as it applies to sites of former concentration camps. I approach this trip with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I\u2019m not sure if \u2018excitement\u2019 is the right word when visiting sites of such mass suffering, de-humanisation, and death. Although, the term \u2018dark tourism\u2019 infers that many visitors to these sites go there to fulfil some morbid curiosity or to gain \u2018vicarious thrills\u2019. I suppose I’m just eager to actually go and see the sites I have spent so long reading about, and that are such a primary focus of my current research. But it also has this sense of trepidation in that I\u2019m not really sure how I will feel, and it\u2019s not likely to be a pleasant experience. To me the decision about whether to visit the actual site of such atrocity is a real moral dilemma. Tim Cole, in his excellent book ‘Selling the Holocaust’ (2000), summed this up well when describing his own visit to Auschwitz: \u201cWe were tourists of guilt and righteousness: guilt at an almost pornographic sense of expectancy of the voyeurism ahead. And yet guilt tempered by a sense of righteousness at choosing to come to the place.\u201d (p. 98)<\/p>\n

This guilt and voyeurism seems to come from this sense that the concentration camp is something taboo, something not \u2018meant to be seen,\u2019 something too awful to confront. But morally it also feels right \u2013 that need to remember, to bear witness \u2013 that morally, it is the only<\/strong> thing to do\u2026 Nevertheless, despite my interest in the area I chose not to visit Dachau when I was in Munich a couple of years ago. As we passed the signs to Dachau just outside Munich I felt a social and moral obligation to go. Visiting such sites is now a common travelling experience, as evidenced by the increasing numbers of visitors to such sites \u2013 for example over 1.4 million people visited Auschwitz in 2012 alone. But I was travelling with my husband and his friend at the time, and my husband felt that visiting the camp was unnecessary – we don’t have to see an actual camp to know that the Holocaust happened, and that it matters to us. It was certainly not something that he wanted to do whilst visiting the beautiful mountains, castles and countryside of Bavaria. His friend had been to Dachau before, and it wasn\u2019t something he was that motivated to do again. For him it was perhaps a reminder of a more difficult cultural heritage as his grandfather fought for Germany in World War II, and his mother grew up in post-war East Germany.<\/p>\n

Concentration camps as sites of public memorialisation have always been highly controversial. We perhaps take our accessibility to them for granted nowadays as visiting such sites, and sites of other deaths, become more and more acceptable and commonplace. But those sites opened to visitors shortly after the end of World War II did face public opposition and condemnation. In some cases they were seen as a moral affront to the victims, or a difficult reminder to those still residing nearby. In many cases it was the message they promoted that was problematic, as sites chose to recognise some victims and ignore others, or created a dissonant narrative about the past.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Hungarian Fighters Memorial, Szoborpark, Budapest (Author’s own photo, 2007)<\/p><\/div>\n

It is this political and socio-cultural construction of the past that interests me the most with these sites. Who decides what specific places become public sites of memorial? What agenda is set as to how, and who, we remember? How does memorialisation change as the political and cultural climate shifts? I was struck with such questions when I visited Budapest in 2007. Like many Eastern European countries it is scarred by the Holocaust (and it’s co-operation with the Nazis) and it\u2019s subsequent Soviet occupation (and even today has arguably not reconciled this with its more capitalist, post-Soviet present). Budapest\u2019s House of Terror is one of the darkest but most fascinating places I\u2019ve ever visited. It really made a powerful impact on me \u2013 that one place could be at the heart of both the Fascist and Communist regimes, and witness such abuse of human rights and suffering, and all within the lifetime of my parents\u2019 generation.<\/p>\n

\"Bela<\/a>

Memorial to Bela Kun, Szoborpark, Budapest (Author’s own photo, 2007)<\/p><\/div>\n

I also visited Budapest\u2019s Communist Statue Park (Szoborpark). Located in a very residential district of Budapest, it has quite an unsettling effect to see these huge public monuments to Communism gathered together, and surrounded by family houses. The creation of this memorial park was a very controversial enterprise. They are a reminder of a difficult period of quite recent history. These monuments were designed to celebrate Communism and it\u2019s role in Hungarian culture, but the meaning of them has changed. Monuments<\/strong> become memorials<\/strong> to victims of the Communist regime. To me the experience was a little tragic \u2013 these displaced and sometimes defaced monuments, stripped of all context – and rather eerie in a way. I know that this memorial park and others like it (i.e. Grutas Park in Lithuanian and Fallen Monument Park in Russia) remain divisive within the local populations. They perhaps cater more to us Western tourists than to those struggling to redefine their national identity, and live with the past tragedies and injustices. Maybe some people don\u2019t want to remember. Or don\u2019t agree that this is the right way to remember.<\/p>\n

As well as visiting the former concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen over the next couple of weeks, in June I will be visiting various memorial sites in Berlin, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (pictured above). The commission of public memorials to victims of war and genocide can be especially contentious in countries that hold, or share, responsibility for those deaths. For example, how do nations deal with their own omissions, moral cowardice and complicity in the Holocaust? This was something that was touched upon in the recent Stanley Burton Centre Aubrey Newman lecture by Professor Robert Gordon. In this compelling public lecture, he focused upon how Italians have sought to reconcile Italy\u2019s part in the Holocaust \u2013 it\u2019s Fascist and Anti-Semitic past – and how the nation\u2019s narratives of the Holocaust change. I\u2019m interested in how Germany and Austria memorialises the victims of the Holocaust. How do you memorialise the victims of the Holocaust in Germany, bearing in mind a large number of Germans were involved in the Nazi administration responsible for the deaths? How has the Holocaust been publically remembered in Austria, the first Nazi-occupied country and therefore a \u2018victim state\u2019 or a country that already harboured Nazi and Anti-Semitic sentiments prior to its occupation? These, among others, are questions I hope to consider in forthcoming blogs\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next week I embark on a fieldwork trip to Bavaria and Austria, as part of ongoing research into memorialisation and the Holocaust, and in particular the concept of \u2018dark tourism\u2019 as it applies to sites of former concentration camps. I approach this trip with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I\u2019m not sure if \u2018excitement\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,9,10],"tags":[15,14,13,46,11,12],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dark-tourism-2","category-holocaust-memorialisation","category-holocaust-tourism","tag-berlin","tag-budapest","tag-concentration-camps","tag-holocaust","tag-memorial","tag-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/humancruelty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}