Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ collapse of the Iron Curtain, the number of visitors to Auschwitz has rapidly grown to over two million per year.67 Most are not survivors like Kohn, or perpetrators, or their descendants. Most are travelers curious about a site whose meaning they perceive as primarily historical.

      One of the more critical accounts of tourism to Auschwitz comes from the historian Tim Cole. Like Pollock, Cole rightly situates travel to Auschwitz within the context of broader cultural representations of the Holocaust, reminding us that tourism is not hermetically sealed off from other forms representation, such as cinema, literature, or history books. He discusses the problematics of Holocaust remembrance in our media-saturated era and effectively points to the ease with which popular culture can misrepresent history while commercializing it—a familiar approach to Holocaust remembrance within mass culture.68 Cole ultimately consigns tourism to the unethical body of practices, alongside Hollywood films or sensational novels, that distort Holocaust memory in an effort to profit from it. In his book Selling the Holocaust, he provides numerous examples of questionable tourism related to the Holocaust. For example, he describes the phenomenon of “Schindler Tourism,” in which travelers to Kraków visit the neighborhoods depicted in Steven Spielberg’s famous film, allegedly without appreciating the distinction between Hollywood and history. In particular, he deplores the Schindler tour for reinforcing the film’s oversimplification of the Holocaust into “a story of ‘good versus evil’ ” that displaces attention from the Jewish victims to the heroism of an atypical German “savior.”69 Another tourist destination that Cole finds problematic is the highly visited Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which also perpetuates the myth of a young teen’s optimism in the face of disaster, as foregrounded in her diary. The attention to Anne Frank, whose diary Cole characterizes as “the canonical ‘Holocaust’ text,” tends to lead its many readers to celebrate her perseverance while in hiding at the expense of confronting her terrible demise in Belsen after her deportation.70 These criticisms derive from familiar critiques by the scholars Lawrence Langer, Alvin Rosenfeld, and others, but Cole applies them to tourism without exploring the ways in which tourism is distinct from the arts.

      Having consigned several popular examples of Holocaust remembrance to the status of sellouts, Cole goes on to paint travelers to Auschwitz as duped consumers of a distorted history. While he reserves legitimacy for those he calls pilgrims (including himself), he portrays others as visiting a Holocaust theme park, which he dubs “Auschwitz-land”:71

      Walking through “Auschwitz-land” we do not see an authentic past preserved carefully for the present. We don’t experience the past as it really was, but experience a mediated past which has been carefully created for our viewing.… At “Auschwitz-land” we perhaps unwittingly enter a “Holocaust theme-park” rather than a “Holocaust concentration camp”.

      We visit a contrived tourist attraction, which offers that which a culture saturated with the myth of the “Holocaust” expects to see. “Auschwitz-land” both plays a part in creating and perpetuating that myth, and depends upon the myth for its continued popularity. A tour round “Auschwitz-land” is about the consumption of a familiar landscape.72

      Cole certainly has company in his concerns for the perception of Auschwitz as a “theme park,” but his formulation of what he calls the “Holocaust myth,” which leads him to put the word “Holocaust” into quotations marks, is ill advised.73 To be fair, Cole does not mean to imply the irreality of the genocide, as some might presume; rather, he points to the ubiquity of its literary and filmic representations. And if by “contrived” he means the lengths to which the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has gone to preserve and even to restore certain structures, then he is correct in some superficial sense, although the camp hardly presents itself as a Holocaust reenactment à la Plimoth Plantation or Sturbridge Village.74 If the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is not a functioning concentration camp any more, why must it be a theme park? Cole’s characterization of tourism to Auschwitz presents tourists as so unsophisticated that they cannot distinguish between a carefully managed monument and a simulated killing center.75

      As Holocaust remembrance passes through a critical juncture—the inevitable passing of eyewitnesses to the disaster—it disperses into every corner of cultural representation. The emergence of Holocaust tourism is symptomatic of that dispersal. The diffusion of Holocaust memory into popular forms of remembrance, of which tourism is only one part, exceeds any simple pilgrim/tourist or concentration camp/theme park binary that seeks to contrast Holocaust tourism with prescribed modes of religious, scholarly, or aesthetically exclusive forms of remembrance. Admittedly, it is hardly surprising that Auschwitz should elicit the “They are tourists, I am not” response with such frequency and intensity. The ethical implications involved in “consuming” such a site loom large, and there are certainly tourists to Auschwitz whose engagement is superficial, even inappropriate. There are others, though, for whom a tour to Auschwitz is the catalyst for deeper reflection about the Holocaust.

      Tourism makes reflection possible, but does not guarantee it. One must admit that some tourists will leave Auschwitz with little new insight or interest in further reflection. But the narrative that dominates the accounts by visitors to this site is that of a powerful or disturbing personal experience. Even visitors who complain about the noise or distractions of other tourists insist on the significance of their personal experience.76 Tourists articulate a sense of responsibility to what they have observed and frequently exhort others to follow in their footsteps. Some define their insights more precisely than others, but they share a common theme of having seen something important and having learned from it. The question for the remainder of this chapter is whether their experiences constitute acts of witnessing.

      The Tourist and Testimony

      Tourism’s heavy reliance on visuality alone might tempt us to think of tourists as “eyewitnesses,” at least after the fact. Much as the liberating forces observed evidence of what had taken place prior to their arrival, tourists come to Auschwitz to view the traces of genocide in its most industrialized incarnation, although the scenes they encounter are vastly different. For tourism to enable a kind of witnessing, however, it must amount to more than a simple act of viewing displays that have been curated by museum staff for the last seventy years. Even if Auschwitz were unchanged from the moment of its liberation in 1945, seeing the remains of destruction would not suffice to grant tourists the designation of “witness.”

      “Witnessing” names a communicative act that translates a moment of experience into an utterance that, in turn, is heard by another.77 At stake in the exchange is the veracity of the experience—the witness testifies in order to have an experience of reality confirmed. One becomes fully a witness only when one’s report to a listener has been received and acknowledged. Witnessing is, in short, intersubjective.78 For tourism to Auschwitz to embody witnessing, there needs to be the double articulation of something enunciated and something heard. The idea that the Auschwitz memorial complex conveys testimony about the Holocaust to interested tourists may appear to be a straightforward claim. One can compare a memoir written by a survivor with the evidence of the genocide presented through displays, documents, and narrations by tour guides, acknowledging their similarities in communicating a past experience. But often tourists are called upon to bear witness and produce testimony themselves, and the idea that such testimony can be of value may appear more dubious. As we will see, there is nothing simple about either claim.

      To take up the first issue—how tourism to Auschwitz encounters the testimony of eyewitnesses (beyond the excerpts from such testimony that are on display)—it is useful to compare the artifacts, photographs, or even the landscape itself as forms of testimony that, though non-linguistic, engage in a form of communication with their viewers.79 To ponder the nature of witnessing in this larger sense, the reception of written survivor testimony may indicate ways of thinking, not only about written or spoken eyewitness accounts, but also about such non-linguistic components of tourism that, nevertheless, say something about the past.

      Survivor testimony is a thriving genre; indeed, Elie Wiesel has even claimed testimony as the СКАЧАТЬ