Now we’re going to see very, very touching, touching exhibitions in here. We are going to see original, personal Jewish items, found by Russian soldiers at the end of war. So every item is original and every item here belonged to Jew who was killed in camp.100
There are several artefacts in the museum which have lives outside of Auschwitz. They have been elevated beyond simple archival materials to internationally-recognised symbols of suffering. They include the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, the execution wall in the Block 11 courtyard and the next item on our itinerary: the stolen property of Jews incarcerated in and killed at Auschwitz. These are the objects which have been reproduced on screen, formed the basis of many critical conversations, or referred to by other visitors in online reviews. Thus it is with an uncomfortable yet undeniable sense of anticipation that we enter Block 5: Material Proofs of Crimes, to view giant bins of shoes, spectacles, shaving brushes, prosthetic limbs, suitcases, kitchen utensils, Torah shawls and children’s clothes.
Standing in front of these artefacts is a powerful experience for not only, as Young notes, do they ‘compel the visitor to accept the horrible fact that what they show is
‘real’’,101 they also illustrate (albeit fractionally) the vast scale of the crimes committed at Auschwitz. However, the display of ‘original, personal Jewish items’, both at
Auschwitz and other Holocaust museums, has historically been considered
99 Nesfield, ‘Keeping Holocaust Education Relevant ’, 49.
100 Appendix III, 43:00.
101 Young, Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust, 174.
Ricky Thompson
***
July 2014
Our guide […] left little time to pause and contemplate. There
It’s hard to get your head around the numbers and figures […], you find it hard to comprehend that atrocities that took place.
controversial. Young, for example, asks: ‘What does our knowledge of these objects – a bent spoon, children’s shoes, crusty old striped uniforms – have to do with our
knowledge of historical events?’102 while Oren Baruch Stier argues that the ‘classic object-driven museum […] remains flawed’103 when tasked with representing the victims of the Holocaust.
The debate around the display of ‘material proofs’ at Auschwitz can be linked to a wider discussion within trauma theory regarding the ethics of Holocaust
representation. This gained traction in the 1990s, amid the proliferation of Shoah Studies within the Humanities schools of western universities. Many such
conversations took as their starting point Theodor Adorno’s famous assertion ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.104 In his seminal work, Probing the Limits of
Representation, Saul Freidländer further defines the ethical dilemma facing scholars, curators, historians and artists, interpreting Adorno’s statement as: ‘a need for ‘truth’’
versus ‘the problems raised by the opaqueness of language’.105 He continues to assert that in attempting to establish such ‘truths’, those engaged in representing the
Holocaust run the risk of developing ill-conceived, inadequate ‘master narratives’106 of this history.
Such debates intersect with the practices of the Auschwitz museum, as an institution responsible both for the preservation of Holocaust history via its archives, and for the public dissemination of it through its displays and tours. In effect, this means it is engaged in the production of two distinct types of memory, as Susan Crane observes:
‘Being collected means being remembered institutionally, being displayed means being incorporated into the extra-institutional memory of the museum visitors.’107 Through its decisions regarding how artefacts will be displayed, and how guides will interact with them, the Auschwitz museum is thus the originator of a ‘master narrative’
consumed by over one million visitors each year.
102 Young, The Texture of Memory, 132.
103 Steir, Committed to Memory, 129.
104 Adorno, Can one Live after Auschwitz? 34.
105 Freidländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, 4.
106 Ibid, 3.
107 Crane, Museums and Memory, 2.
Of these deported Jews one million were killed – most of them. Poles: of those deported, seventy-five thousand were killed – half. Roma, gypsies: of those deported, twenty-one thousand were killed – most. Soviet soldiers: twelve thousand of those died – most. And from Czechoslovakia, France, Yugoslavia, also Germany […], about fifteen thousand were killed.108
If the tours and exhibits can be said to focus on one dominant theme, it is the scale of the crimes committed at Auschwitz. To this end, statistics recur throughout the museum – both on information boards detailing the numbers of prisoners who passed through the camp, and in the monologues of the tour guides. As previously
demonstrated, artefacts are invariably linked to these verbal statements, and thus the giant piles of human accessories effectively also function as statistics: physical
representations of how many people were killed. Yet, while arguments can be made about the need to impress the magnitude of the genocide onto visitors, Klüger points out that ‘statistics falls a little short of human interest and is not exactly prodigal with the details of individual lives’.109 This is a concern taken up by Young: ‘armless sleeves, eyeless lenses, headless caps, footless shoes: victims are known only by their absence, by the moment of their destruction’.110 For him, this form of representation affirms only that what was once living is no longer.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, dehumanisation starts ‘at the point when […] the objects at which the bureaucratic operation is aimed can, and are, reduced to a set of quantitative measures.’111 He further states that, in the case of concentration camp victims, dehumanisation was achieved ‘by reducing their action to the most basic level of primitive survival, by preventing them from deploying cultural (both bodily and behavioural) symbols of human dignity, by depriving them even of recognisable human likeness.’112 Once such individuals were sufficiently dehumanised, he suggests, it became possible for operatives working under the banner of National Socialism to commit various tortures and atrocities upon them. This chimes with Hannah Arendt’s conception of the ‘banality of evil’, through which ostensibly ‘ordinary’ men could be persuaded to commit acts contributing both directly and indirectly to genocide.113
108 Appendix III, 16:45.
109 Klüger, Still Alive, 91.
110 Young, The Texture of Memory, 132.
111 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 102.
112 Ibid.
113 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
However, Bauman further claims that all ‘bureaucracy is intrinsically capable of genocidal action’.114 And if this theory is tested with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as the bureaucratic organisation in question, an uncomfortable political association emerges. For it can be argued that by representing people in collectivised form, through piles of property ostensibly ‘the same’, the institution’s tour guides and exhibits deny the Jews of Auschwitz autonomy as individuals, and thus themselves visit their own form of dehumanisation upon them. ‘Jews were described by Nazis as ‘no humans’,115 our tour guide tells us – and then, as if to prove it, we are presented with artefacts which can only testify to the absence of their lives. It is a disturbing effect, one which prompts Young to go so far as to claim that the primary victims of Auschwitz are remembered ‘as the Germans have remembered them to us’.116
However, an important point of distinction should be acknowledged between the tour guides and the governing bureaucratic institution here. As previously established, the guides appear to have been trained to base their ‘master narratives’ only on that which is displayed. And, as Nesfield notes, the Auschwitz exhibits depict ‘a very specific trajectory of victimisation and suffering throughout’.117 Yet within the museum’s archives, Nesfield claims, are many artefacts which speak to the disparate personalities and belief systems of the prisoners of Auschwitz: ‘The collections of works of art, caricature and craft, of incredible skill and effort […] are hidden away from the
standard tour,’ she states. Thus ‘many visitors will leave the site with […] little sense of the defiance, the humour and energy of these prisoners, their identity subsumed beneath […] this singular Jewish identity as that of the victim.’118 The museum, then, chooses to focus on scale, which generates a problematic form of collectivised representation. The guides, meanwhile, as museum employees are obliged to reflect this pre-established, de-individualised portrait within their orations.
The de-personifying aspect of these displays of human leftovers is further exacerbated by their status in popular culture. As stated at the beginning of this
chapter, the site’s best-known artefacts are considered to be an unmissable part of the
‘Auschwitz Experience’. Mendelsohn states:
114 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 106. Emphasis in original.
115 Appendix III, 21:15.
116 Young, The Texture of Memory, 132.
117 Nesfield, ‘Keeping Holocaust Education Relevant’, 50.
118 Ibid.
[They have] been reproduced, photographed, filmed, broadcast, and published so often that by the time you go […] [to Auschwitz], you find yourself looking for what it is difficult not to think of as the ‘attractions’ […] more or less as you’d look for the newly reconstructed apatosaurus at the Natural History Museum.119
This statement carries echoes of an argument which emerged in the late 1990s, as critics started to question the global proliferation of Holocaust imagery. These concerns centred on the fact that certain photographs – of the piles of
hair/shoes/glasses, of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, of starving prisoners – seemed to be reproduced more often than others, and in doing so became symbols rather than historical evidence of the Holocaust. Carden-Coyne states: ‘Repetition without historical context was seen as producing a Holocaust ‘aesthetic’ […]. Voyeurism and dehumanization were seen as the result of such photographs becoming signifiers of reduced meaning.’120
When analysing the group tours of Auschwitz I through such a filter, certainly it could be argued that they support the re-designation of artefacts as ‘attractions’, by
encouraging a particular form of objectified viewing: ‘look at this; now look at this’.
This is supported by official sanction, with the tours being endorsed by the museum.
John Urry believes this treatment, combined with the type of prior conditioning identified by Mendelsohn, results in a ‘tourist gaze’ that ‘is as socially organized and systemized as the gaze of the medic’.121 This analogy is particularly apt as the man of medicine retains a level of emotional removal from their patient or subject, and an apparent side-effect of the tourist gaze, observable in some (though by no means all) group tour participants, is emotional estrangement from these articles as evidence of genocide. Bauman identifies this as a by-product of dehumanisation:‘Once […]
cancelled as potential subjects of moral demands, human objects of bureaucratic task-performance are viewed with ethical indifference.’122
Thus, as we walk through these long rooms piled high with remains, people crane their necks, point, ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’, and ignore the repeated requests of guides for silence and not to take photographs. Such behaviours are noticeable at other well-known Auschwitz landmarks – by tourists and, on occasion, by tour staff too. In
119 Mendelsohn, The Lost, 113.
120 Carden-Coyne, ‘The Ethics of Representation’, in Dreyfus and Langton [eds], Writing the Holocaust, 172.
121 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 1.
122 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 103.
Auschwitz I, a teenage boy poses for a friend’s picture beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, his left arm extended in a Nazi salute; ‘This way, this way to the Wall of Death!’ is our tour guide’s repeated cry as we approach Block 11. While these incidences do not reflect the behaviour of the majority of visitors or guides, they do speak to how easily artefacts reaching this level of notoriety can exceed their historical referent. And when this happens, the risk of dark tourism in its most voyeuristic form appears to
exponentially increase.
One case which gained international notoriety in 2014 was that of the American teenager Breanna Mitchell, who took a smiling ‘selfie’ at the Auschwitz site, which she subsequently posted on Twitter. However, while her actions attracted widespread condemnation, Nesfield takes more sympathetic standpoint, drawing attention to the unrealistic demands the site makes of its young visitors:
Auschwitz is a stage. […] Young students are presented with the tourist version of the Holocaust in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and necessarily participate in this industry as visitors to the site. At the same time, they are expected to elicit the historical, and possibly moral, lessons from the site, a difficult balance for any visitor.123
Expanding on this argument, if it is possible to claim that if Auschwitz in the modern era has been rendered no more than a stage, then do the tours of the site constitute a (theatrical) performance, driven more by the twin demands of narrative storytelling and audience than the accurate communication of past events? Certainly the use of artefacts as mnemonic devices – without acknowledgement of the inherently fractured nature of the history of Auschwitz – speaks to the first of these two public-facing demands. The second, meanwhile, is arguably evidenced by the format of the tours.
One seemingly obvious measure which could discourage the viewing of Auschwitz artefacts as ‘attractions’ would be the de-standardisation the group tour route and thus of the exhibits and artefacts that tourists see. Yet the tight 3.5 hour timeframe for covering both Auschwitz I and Birkenau requires the guides to be highly selective about which articles tourists will view – and, of course, they are obliged to respond to (or perform according to) the demands of a paying public. So while it is true that no guide would consider bypassing the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, the execution wall, or the piles of human accessories, this format is not established by the guides themselves.
123 Nesfield, ‘Keeping Holocaust Education Relevant’, 51–52.
Rather, it is their job to produce for inspection a set of Auschwitz remnants adherent to those visitors have seen, read and heard about throughout their lives. The result can thus only be a standardised tour route, focusing on the camp’s best-known artefacts.
Urry argues that this supply-demand relationship ensures that ‘over time, via advertising and the media, the images generated of different tourist gazes come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system of illusions’124 – in other words, a performance, repeated ad infinitum. Through word-of-mouth or online reviews, the visitors of today determine what the visitors of tomorrow will demand of their
Auschwitz encounter. But this means the tours – and thus the ‘material proofs’ that they show to visitors – speak only to a speculative
Auschwitz, one established long before the next group of tourists ever sets foot in the camp.