Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ and some no doubt leave with a mistaken belief that they know “what it was like.” But many others will reflect the experience of Michael, who accompanied his father to Mauthausen, and realize that they can never truly experience the ordeal of a site that is now guided by a trusted staff member, perhaps in the comforting presence of friends or family. Still, there is a knowledge of space that tourists acquire that may indulge a desire to bear witness, much like the one Martin Gilbert conveys in his description of Birkenau at the outset of this chapter. Like Gilbert, one experiences the geography, the landscape, the relation of one locus to another, and one’s own status within a given space, which in turn produces knowledge that can be accounted for in phenomenological terms. The conditions under which tourists encounter that landscape can vary radically and impart different affective dimensions to the experience of a tour. For example, my first visit to Auschwitz occurred on a beautiful, sunny day, and I was not prepared to experience the tree-lined lanes among solid brick structures as superficially pretty. In some ways, that incongruity of expectation and experience made the knowledge of the crimes committed there that much more horrible. In addition to the setting, I found myself as attuned to other tourists as I was to the site itself, which introduced a disconcerting sense of doubling in my perception: I observed the memorial, while also observing how others observed the memorial. Some of the other tourists were teenagers on school trips, a few of whom talked loudly, giggled, or, in the case of one pair, took advantage of their perceived freedom from adult supervision to kiss. Needless to say, such experiences are incongruous with expectations of utter solemnity. I would suggest that such unexpected encounters, rather than undermine the value of tourism to Auschwitz, actually intensify it. Ranging from the minor distraction to disturbing behavior, such disruptions prompt visitors to ask what is appropriate and what is inappropriate at a site whose very existence is obscene to begin with. They place the tourist in a bind between standing by or expressing disapproval, wondering whether one has any right to dictate behavior to others when the traces of brutal coercion—guard towers, once-electrified fences, gallows, and crematoria—are never far away. The comparison is both overblown and, at the same time, all that the reflective tourist has. There is nothing about the experience of visiting Auschwitz, including the most coercive practices common to tourism (queuing up, waiting, moving at a dictated pace, obeying certain prohibitions), that can ever amount to the brutality endured by prisoners, and yet the expectation of respect for the memory of the dead places tourists in a relationship of obedience to authority.

      It is this awareness of the camp as authoritarian space that makes Agamben’s work most relevant to tourism. If there is anything truly new in his notion of witnessing, it is the way he links his understanding of the communicative nature of witnessing with an account of the spatial dynamics of power. His focus on the camps as “spaces of exception”—a term he borrows from the political theorist Carl Schmitt—and his reliance on the philosopher Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and surveillance allow Agamben to show how discourses of community determine who belongs and who does not and how these discourses are realized in spatial configurations that include and exclude, that reveal and conceal.104 Discourses of exclusion are made manifest in the concentration camp, where those deemed outside the lawful community are relocated to a space that lies beyond the protection of the law.105 By linking the spatial or visual with the discursive, Agamben reintroduces the juridical sense of witnessing, which relates observation and testimony, what I am insisting on as the intersubjective quality of bearing witness.106 We should not forget the ways in which witnesses to the Holocaust continue to provide testimony in a juridical setting to this very day. Beginning with the early trials of the Allies in 1945, through the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, to the recent cases against former SS guards in Germany charged as accessories to murder, witnessing continues to fulfill a desire for justice to redress the Nazis’ crimes.107 Indeed, the juridical sense of witnessing and the desire to comprehend the space in which abuses of power unfold coincide. It is no trivial matter that the judges in the first independent efforts to prosecute camp personnel in West Germany, the Frankfurt trials of 1963–1965, traveled to Auschwitz to tour the grounds for themselves before reaching their verdicts.108

      Agamben’s awareness of power as unfolding not simply in discourse (ideology, law) but also in perceptible space has clear implications for tourism’s capacity to bear witness. Tourists temporarily inhabit structures and places imbued with cultural significance and arranged in ways to communicate particular messages: An art museum may showcase a national heritage, a historical movement, or the evolution of a particular artist; journeys into the wilderness promise to take the tourist away from civilization into pristine nature; and beach resorts encourage travelers to break free from their routines (and to spend money in the local economy). In the case of tourism to Auschwitz, travelers encounter a space conceived for the exercise of power by one group of human beings over others. The guided tour directs the visitor’s gaze to the spatial configurations of a violent authority that excluded individuals from the human community by including them in a space designed to de-humanize them.109 At the same time, the way in which tourism directs the gaze, and the ways in which tourists may or may not comply, offer a pale reflection of that interplay of power, discourse, and space.

      By emphasizing spatiality, the tourist to Auschwitz becomes a witness by encountering the scene of a crime and confronting its arrangements of space.110 This experience of space includes an understanding of the relationship of the camp to nearby surroundings—at Auschwitz, the camp’s adjacency to a center of population is startling. One is forced to accept the simultaneity of brutality and everyday life side by side. Did the locals know? Did they intervene? This encounter with Auschwitz as a physical space where people still live and work may confound, shock, even disappoint the tourist who expected something more overtly extraordinary or terrifying. In this way, tourism encounters Agamben’s “aporia of Auschwitz”—that is, of the incommensurability between experience and facts. Tourism requires the visitor to do the work of witnessing to seek whatever comprehension is available, even if that comprehension can never be considered complete. The museum and memorial are physical manifestations of the facts, not the reenactment of imprisonment and extermination, and as such they impart a form of historical understanding combined with an experience of sharing the space with one’s contemporaries.

      The doubling of perception mentioned above, the duality of listening to the past and to the present, is not only an unavoidable aspect of historical tourism, it is also one of its most important mechanisms by which tourism enables reflection. While the primary communication between the site and the visitor conveys testimony from the past, there is a continual act of communication focused on the present. From the moment the tourist arrives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the museum complex begins to speak not only about the extermination but also about the manner of tourism that is expected. Along with the usual indicators guiding the visitor to the ticket windows and restrooms, there are signs that announce the site’s expectations of decorum from its visitors. One may not smoke on the grounds, one must dress properly, and most important, one must behave “appropriately” (a vague notion, to be sure, and not always heeded).111 The first conscious communication the tourist has with Auschwitz comes in the form of directives: where to go and how to behave. These initial messages set the parameters for the communicative experience of the tour, establishing a code shared by the speaker and the listener that stems not only from a basic notion of respect for the victims who perished but also from a belief that tourists are there to bear witness.

      These directives help regulate an encounter that can be quite chaotic. The reception hall, which was built by the SS as the “intake” facility, is often crowded, and the lines to purchase tickets and to wait for the tour to commence become tangled.112 Numerous guides conduct simultaneous tours, with many languages competing for the attention of their respective groups. The guide first takes an assigned group, which can range in size from five to thirty members, out of the reception area to the infamous entry of the prisoner’s camp, marked with the motto “Arbeit macht frei” in wrought iron. For larger groups, the guide speaks into a microphone that plays on headsets distributed to the group’s members. The group is led through several of the “blocks”—the two-story brick buildings that once served as prisoners’ barracks, administrative offices, interrogation and punishment cells, and the “hospital” where many СКАЧАТЬ