Introduction
In 2014, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland,officially became Europe’s most-visited memorial site.1 Approximately 1,534,000 people travelled to the preserved grounds of the former concentration and death camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, representing the highest annual figure since the institution first opened to the public in 1947.2 While full-year figures for 2015 have yet to be
published, a new record of one million tourists was received between the start of January and the end of July.3 Commenting on the tally, the institution’s Deputy Director, Andrzej Kacorzyk, stated: ‘All indications are that the year 2015 will be marked by the increase in attendance of up to a dozen per cent.’4
The growing popularity of the museum among tourists has not gone unnoticed by mainstream media outlets in the United Kingdom. For example, in April 2015 the institution reported a 40 per cent rise in first-quarter visitors compared to the same period in 2014, attributed to the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.5 This
prompted the Daily Mail newspaper to brand the site ‘the world’s most unlikely tourist hot spot’.6 The article was accompanied by the results of a survey conducted by the online travel company sunshine.co.uk, which listed the internet’s ‘Most Common Dark Tourism Searches’: Auschwitz placed second, after New York’s Ground Zero.7 In late 2013, The Telegraph carried a feature entitled ‘Dark Tourism: Why are we Attracted to Tragedy and Death?’ which referenced the high tourist turnover at the Auschwitz site,8 while an article in The Guardian noted an apparent trend among travel companies operating in Poland to include Auschwitz tours in stag party packages.9
In each of the aforementioned examples, the act of visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is connected, either explicitly or implicitly, to the phenomenon of ‘dark tourism’. Anthony Carrigan defines this as ‘a practice that can be traced historically
1 Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum website, ‘1,5 Million People Visited’.
2 Ibid.
3 Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum website, ‘1 Million People have Visited’.
4 Ibid.
5 Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum website, ‘Growing Attendance and Security’.
6 Emily Payne, ‘So Popular They’re Turning People Away’.
7 Ibid.
8 Natalie Paris, ‘Why are we Attracted to Tragedy and Death?’
9 Catherine Bennett, ‘First it’s a Visit to Auschwitz’.
through many different modes of human travel which involve encounters with, and memorialization of, death.’ 10 While dark tourism’s origins are arguably ancient, with roots stretching back to ‘the gladiatorial games of the Roman era, pilgrimages and attendance at medieval public executions’11 in the view of Richard Sharpley, the term itself only entered modern parlance twenty years ago, as a result of growing interest in the subject from the academic sector.
The phrase ‘dark tourism’ was coined by Malcolm Foley and John Lennon in 1996, specifically to refer to ‘the presentation and consumption (by visitors) of real and commodified death and disaster sites’.12 However, it has since become an umbrella term for a series of contemporaneous related phrases, each with their own distinct characteristics. These include: ‘thanatourism’, which Anthony Seaton defines as being determined by visitor motivation, denoting ‘travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death’;13 ‘morbid tourism’, which Thomas Blom claims as a specifically postmodern conceit;14 and ‘black-spot tourism’, which Chris Rojek links to the notoriety of atrocity victims,
encompassing ‘sites in which celebrities or large numbers of people have met with sudden and violent deaths’.15 Other sub-categories noted by Sharpley include ‘grief tourism’, ‘fright tourism’ and ‘dissonant heritage’.16 In 2006, Philip Stone further proposed a ‘Dark Tourism Spectrum’, placing disaster sites on a scale ranging from
‘darkest’ to ‘lightest’ based on criteria including educational impetus, tourism
infrastructure and authenticity of location.17 Within Stone’s framework, concentration and death camp sites – considered ‘the ‘canon’ of dark tourism destinations’18
according to Carrigan – sit at the very darkest end of the spectrum, while
entertainment-focused ‘dark fun factories’ such as The London Dungeon inhabit the lightest region.19
10 Carrigan, ‘Dark Tourism and Postcolonial Studies’, 237.
11 Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, Loc 157.
12 Foley and Lennon, ‘JFK and Dark Tourism’, 198.
13 Seaton, ‘Guided by the Dark’, 240.
14 Blom, ‘Morbid Tourism’, 29.
15 Rojeck, Ways of Seeing, 136.
16 Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, Loc 280.
17 Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum’, 151.
18 Carrigan, ‘Dark Tourism and Postcolonial Studies’, 241.
19 Stone, ‘A Dark Tourism Spectrum’, 152.
The journey of the dark tourism moniker into popular usage correlated with a new influx of western travellers visiting perhaps the world’s best-known former
concentration camp memorial institution: the Auschwitz Birkenau-State Museum. This was a direct result of Poland’s 1989 rejection of Communist rule, which opened up both the country and the institution to a previously untapped sector of the
international tourist market. In turn, this provoked renewed scholarly discussions regarding the ethical implications of locating a museum on a site of genocide. In her 1992 memoir, Still Alive: a Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, Ruth Klüger
problematised the ‘museum culture of the Shoah’,20 asking what the ‘carefully tended, unlovely remains’21 of former concentration camps could possibly communicate of the actual experience of being incarcerated there. Meanwhile, in the early- to mid-1990s, James Young, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork offered targeted critiques of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, questioning the methods of historical representation it employed and branding several aspects of its exhibitions ethically insensitive or even deceptive in nature.22 Such concerns spoke to wider debates within Holocaust scholarship, namely the limitations of representation and the transmission of what Marianne Hirsch has christened ‘affiliative postmemory’23 – in this case from the second to third post-Holocaust generations onwards.
The concurrent emergence of these two distinct-yet-overlapping fields of research may explain the sense of suspicion that often permeates both critical and creative texts dealing with Holocaust tourism. For example, Ana Carden-Coyne asks: ‘How can the Holocaust be represented both accurately and ethically, without sensationalizing, trading in ‘edutainment’ or encouraging macabre fascination with atrocity imagery?’ 24 In Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, Martin Gilbert twice refers to the number of visitors to the Auschwitz I site as ‘disturbing’ – though interestingly, he
20 Kluger, Still Alive, 63.
21 Ibid.
22 For examples see Young, Texture of Memory, 132–133, and van Pelt and Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270, 359–369.
23 Hirsch defines ‘postmemory’ as: ‘The relationship of the second generation [of Holocaust survivors] to powerful, often traumatic experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless
transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.’ (‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Abstract). This is sub-divided into ‘familial’ and ‘affiliative’ postmemory, indicative of those with ancestral links to the Holocaust, and of those without direct ancestral heritage seeking a connection to the events (in a broader, cultural sense), respectively. (Ibid, 114–115).
24 Carden-Coyne, ‘The Ethics of Representation in Holocaust Museums’, in Dreyfus and Langton [eds], Writing the Holocaust, 167.
seems to distinguish his own research group from the general throng of tourists.25 Meanwhile, in the memoir The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn equates the commercialisation of the Auschwitz site with historical misappropriation.
Calling it ‘the gross generalization, the shorthand, for what happened to Europe’s Jews’,26 he continues: what of ‘Jews who were lined up and shot at the edges of open pits’, or those sent to ‘camps that are less well-known to the public mind precisely because they […] produced no survivors, no memoirs, no stories’?27
Many such works are rich with implied judgements regarding the motivations of those who visit Holocaust sites: in Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra warns of ‘vicarious victimhood’ and of ‘fetishising trauma narratives’;28 in ‘Sightseeing in the Mansions of the Dead’, Chris Keil quotes an Auschwitz guide commenting on the behaviour of tourists at the site: ‘it’s not yet a park and picnic place, but it’s
approaching that atmosphere’;29 and in the novel Hope: a Tragedy, Shalom Auslander parodies guided group tours of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp –
‘Mother said, Are there ovens at least? The trip shouldn’t be a total waste?’30 Thus the
‘Holocaust tourist’, as conceived by its associated literature, tends to carry overwhelmingly negative connotations.
It is arguably this preoccupation with visitor motivation which brings Holocaust tourism scholarship most directly into dialogue with what Carrigan has called the ‘new wave of dark tourism research’.31 He traces this to the 2009 publication of The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, co-edited by Stone and Sharpley. Central to this collection of essays is Sharpley’s notion that dark tourism research has thus far ‘lacked theoretical foundations’, revealing ‘little about the nature of the demand for and supply of dark tourism experiences’.32 This influential volume thus brings together various theorisations of dark tourism, interrogating their philosophical intersections and examining their sociological implications. However,
25 Gilbert, Holocaust Journey, 174 and 175.
26 Mendelsohn, The Lost, 112.
27 Ibid.
28 LaCapra, Writing History, 47.
29 Ibid, 484–485.
30 Auslander, Hope: a Tragedy, 208.
31 Carrigan ‘Dark Tourism and Postcolonial Studies’, 238.
32 Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, Loc 300.
Sharpley notes that ‘limited attention has been paid to exploring why tourists might be drawn towards sites or experiences associated with death and suffering’.33
This concern is starting to be addressed by contemporary academics, as evidenced by a 2013 special edition of the International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research dedicated to dark tourism.34 In one article, Rachael Raine proposes a ‘Dark Tourist Spectrum’ as an expansion of Stone’s original scale. This sister-spectrum identifies nine distinct ‘types of dark tourists, presented in a darkest to lightest
framework’.35 These comprise: mourners, pilgrims, the morbidly curious, thrill seekers, information seekers, hobbyists, sightseers, retreaters and passive recreationists.36 Meanwhile, Anna Farmaki examines visitor motivation alongside ‘supply-side drivers’37 in ‘Dark Tourism Revisited: a Supply/Demand Conceptualisation’.
However, while visitor motivation is quite rightly becoming a more developed strand of dark tourism research, I would argue that in the field of Holocaust tourism its relative historical dominance has led to another, equally important area of study being comparatively overlooked. I am referring to the experiential aspect of visiting
Holocaust sites – from a dark tourist’s perspective. It is my contention that the form a visitor’s encounter takes will impact directly on their experience and understanding of a Holocaust site. This must therefore be taken into consideration when interrogating the supply-demand relationship that characterises both Holocaust tourism and the wider dark tourism field.
There is a noticeable lack of access-type analysis within the critical literature of Holocaust tourism – although tentative steps are starting to be taken within the Holocaust education sector, with Victoria Nesfield’s recent analysis of the impact of guided experiences on groups of school students taken to view the Auschwitz site.38 This seems a particularly striking omission given that many concentration camp museums, including the Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen, Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, the State Museum at Majdanek, and the
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum now actively promote participation in guided tours
33 Sharpley and Stone, The Darker Side of Travel, Loc 300.
34 A. Birna and K. Hyde [eds], Vol 7:3 (2013).
35 Raine, ‘A Dark Tourist Spectrum’, 242.
36 Ibid, 248.
37 Farmaki, ‘Dark Tourism Revisited’, 281.
38 ‘Keeping Holocaust Education Relevant in a Changing Landscape: Seventy Years On’ (2015).
to visitors.39 In the case of the Auschwitz museum, several varieties of guided experience are now available, including group tours, private tours, school trips, and two-day study sessions.40 Perhaps as a result of the museum’s promotional efforts, tours have also become the means by which the majority of people view Auschwitz:
84 per cent (1,124,262) of visitors employed the services of a guide in 2013, while a further 77 per cent (1,180,975) followed suit in 2014.41
It further appears that a desire exists among many previous visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for access-type research to be conducted. For while a cursory glance at online reviews of the group tours reveals strongly positive visitor responses, when monitored over a period of time a pervasive undercurrent of discomfort
emerges. Participants refer to a perceived commercialisation of the site (‘Auschwitz has become a money-making machine!’; ‘It may seem like Disneyland’), inadequate tour management (‘The speed […] [of] the organized tour left little time for reflection’), and an apparent emotional disconnection generated by the overall experience (‘There is somehow something missing’; ‘Everything had been […] sanitised to the extent of losing its impact’). Reactions like this are often linked to a genuine wish by tour participants to develop their knowledge of the site’s history, but to do so in an ethically appropriate way (though of course opinions vary as to what constitutes
‘ethically appropriate’ in this context). One visitor ultimately concludes: ‘I had a dismal feeling about the fact that I also was a tourist’.42
This thesis therefore attempts to expand the scope of Holocaust tourism scholarship by analysing one of the most popular forms of guided experience offered by the Auschwitz museum: the 3.5 hour group tour of Auschwitz I and Birkenau. Its primary aim is to evaluate this tour in terms of both its form and content, focusing on elements which speak to ethical concerns previously raised – or yet to be raised – about the site’s reconfiguration as a visitor destination. This interrogation is framed by my own first experience of a guided group tour of the Auschwitz site, although in the interests of being representative it incorporates material relating to a total of ten group tours, taken between August 2009 and April 2014.
39 Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum website, ‘Visiting’.
40 Ibid.
41 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Report 2014, 19.
42 User reviews taken from tripadvisor.com, viator.com and yelp.co.uk between January 2011 and January 2016.
There is a specific reason why I have elected to take a personal-theoretical and strongly narrative approach within this thesis: it enables me to address the broader question of whether a dark tourist’s experience is ‘borne’ of their own expectations and motivations in attending a particular black spot, or ‘made’ by the form of the encounter they have once there. In posing it, I wish to (respectfully) suggest that constructions such as Raine’s ‘Dark Tourist Spectrum’ prove unhelpful in the face of such a query, being limited in their ability to reflect the complexities of human nature.
Not only would I argue that a person’s motivation for attending a location considered
‘dark’ is seldom singular (for example, a ‘thrill seeker’ can equally be an ‘information seeker’), but the determinative presentation of such scales contains no facility for fluctuation or change as a result of the dark tourist’s experience (a ‘passive
recreationist’ may consider themselves a ‘pilgrim’ by the end of their encounter, for instance). In this way, I feel Raine’s spectrum speaks more to a specific, arguably fear-based mind-set, predominant in Holocaust tourism: that only particular ‘types’ of tourist are desirable at such sites.
What I hope to show via the filter of my own first-person responses to the Auschwitz museum – and through the often-divergent views of others, expressed in the online reviews dotted throughout my analysis – is that a visitor’s relationship to a black spot is at all times inconsistent, pluralistic, and affected by a range of factors. However, while an institution cannot account for many of these variables (a person’s political persuasion, for example), they do control one primary source of influence: the form of the tourist’s encounter. This, of course, is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, desirable responses can be, if not elicited, then facilitated or encouraged by close analysis and adaptation of the types of visitor experiences on offer. But without due attention, these framings can also generate negative effects – as this thesis demonstrates.