The memorialisation of the Holocaust has been one of the major cultural projects of the post-war period. The pages in this section address the museums, the physical memorials, the films and television, and the commemorative practices through which the events are preserved and presented to subsequent generations. The work is institutional. It involves choices about what to include, what to leave out, how to handle the most extreme material, and how to balance documentary precision against the difficulty of holding the attention of a modern audience that did not live through the events.
The three clusters in this section
Museums and Libraries addresses the principal institutions: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Galleries in London, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, the Jewish Museum Berlin, Beth Shalom in Nottinghamshire, the Holocaust Museum Houston, the Topography of Terror in Berlin. Each has its own institutional history, its own collection, and its own approach to the curatorial questions the subject raises.
Physical Memorials addresses the monuments and memorial sites. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Treblinka memorial in Poland, the Sobibor memorial site, the proposed UK Holocaust Memorial at Westminster: each is a built piece of public commemoration. The decisions about what a memorial should look like, where it should sit, and what it should ask of the visitor are themselves part of the historical record.
Films and Television addresses the principal cinematic and television treatments of the Holocaust, from the 1959 Hollywood adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank to the contemporary streaming series. Pages on Schindler’s List, Shoah, The Reader, Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Hannah Arendt and others address each work on its own terms and in the wider argument about the cinematic representation of mass murder.
The questions the section raises
The pages in this section deal with a recurring set of questions that the memorialising institutions have answered in different ways. How do you represent industrial murder without aestheticising it? How do you reach a public that has no living connection to the events without resorting to simplification? How do you handle the most graphic material? Where is the line between commemoration and appropriation? The pages do not pretend the questions have settled answers. They report what the institutions have done and what the historians and critics have made of it.