Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds

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СКАЧАТЬ confront the death that awaited millions of victims like her. The Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer writes of Anne Frank and her diary’s legacy, “She is in no way to blame for not knowing about what she could not have known about. But readers are much to blame for accepting and promoting the idea that her Diary is a major Holocaust text and has anything of great consequence to tell us about the atrocities that culminated in the murder of European Jewry.”57 Furthermore, Frank edited her diary for eventual publication as a book, so it is both a document of her experience as well as an aestheticized text. In short, its status as a source of information about the Holocaust is problematic, even if one concedes that Frank and her family were hardly the only Jews to hide from their persecutors and that these stories depict an aspect of the Holocaust experience that merits attention. But as a catalyst for engagement with the Holocaust, there have been few works that have made such an indelible mark on their readers.

      The link between Anne Frank’s story and Holocaust tourism is striking: Lines of tourists queue up to see the house in Amsterdam where the young girl hid with her family, making it one of the city’s most heavily visited destinations.58 In what ways do visitors to the house encounter similar questions we might ask about the book, the play, and the films? Do visits to the house distort the reality of the Holocaust by focusing, not on violence and death, but on a doomed effort to survive? Does the museum portray the Holocaust accurately or in a morally responsible way? Does it educate, entertain, or do both? Clearly there are as many responses to these questions as there are tourists at the Anne Frank House. There is good reason to be suspicious of the insights gained by some visitors, but surely some of those who see the exhibit are capable of critical reflection on the Holocaust and its memorialization. Furthermore, whether through reading her diary or touring her house, Anne Frank’s story can be a point of entry into learning about the Holocaust that does not end when the last page is turned or the museum’s exit is reached.

      Holocaust Tourism: A Phenomenological Approach

      As the examples of the miniseries Holocaust and the Anne Frank House show, the collective remembrance of the Holocaust depends at least in part on representations in mainstream culture, and tourism has a close connection to other forms of popular culture in literature, film, and television. Holocaust tourism raises many of the same questions about what can be known about the calamity, and how we can know it, that other genres do, but it also adds other considerations about places of memory. In turn, what we discover about tourism to sites of Holocaust remembrance can inform how we consider reading texts or viewing films. A common feature of many essays on the ethics of Holocaust representation is that the perspectives of readers and viewers are usually secondary to considerations of aesthetic form. Most critics of Holocaust-related cultural productions foreground matters of genre or medium when analyzing a book, a memorial, or a film, exploring their signifying structures and codes as if they were determinative of their meaning independent of the audience with which they engage. Just as texts need readers to generate meaning, tourism is not possible without tourists. Of course, form matters, and this book pays attention to formal aspects of tourism: how museums are arranged, how tour guides shape the experiences of visitors to camp memorials, how displays use text and image, and so on. But the perspective of tourists remains central to the inquiry, which, relying on a term first articulated by the social anthropologist Eric Cohen and further developed by other scholars since, I am characterizing as a phenomenological approach to Holocaust tourism.59 By that I mean that it is an account of the ways in which tourists interpret sensory stimuli to produce knowledge and negotiate their identities in relation to the surrounding place.60 That includes a consideration of how tourists encounter visual displays of artifacts, photos, and documents; how their hearing is addressed both intentionally through audio recordings, lectures, or guides communicating through headphones, as well as through ambient sources, including other tourists; or how tourists’ bodies navigate configurations of space. Tourism, though heavily visual, relies on a full array of sensory experience in imparting both rational and more affective impressions to travelers. In the case of Holocaust tourism, I address how tourists process their encounters with places of remembrance, including their affective and sensory qualities, in order to construct a coherent narrative of the Holocaust and to situate themselves in relation to the event and its memory.

      In applying this approach, I place more emphasis on exploring the possibilities for knowledge than on a quantitative or statistically verifiable ethnographic account of Holocaust tourists. Such work would be a welcome contribution to the study of Holocaust tourism, but it must build on an awareness of the full range of available responses that tourists have to Holocaust sites if it is to ask the right questions.61 Furthermore, it will have to confront the reality that tourists to Holocaust sites come from such a variety of backgrounds and experiences that any effort to make definitive claims about the phenomenon will face enormous challenges in identifying broad trends shared among different visitors. This book identifies an observed range of subjectivities available to travelers: not just as consumers, but also as witnesses, pilgrims, mourners, commemorators, students, and educators. By linking the questions about knowledge and representation that drive Holocaust studies with theoretical and empirical insights from tourism studies, this book aims to offer a rich account of those who undertake travel to these destinations and what they recall, including my own experiences and those of other travelers, who often share their responses in print and online media. It also draws on conversations with tour guides, reports by agencies that manage such sites, and tourist literature. It identifies tourist responses to sites that go beyond a description of the business of tourism, although I pay attention to the role of market forces in shaping accessibility to sites of remembrance. In addressing the possibilities for knowledge and acknowledging a range of responses, I hope to counter a prevailing tendency in many common responses to tourism at Holocaust museums and memorials, namely that it is appalling that a market for this kind of travel exists. This tendency, which finds expression in both general and more academic critiques of tourism, has played an especially important role in one particular branch of tourism studies concerned with “dark tourism.”

      As noted above, the term “dark tourism” was coined by J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, British researchers of tourism and management. Lennon and Foley define “dark tourism” as travel to places of death and disaster, including Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Robben Island, and the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, which is dedicated to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Such places draw tourists because of the heavy circulation within media accounts of the calamities that took place there. Indeed, for Lennon and Foley it is the mediatized nature of these places (or, rather, of the events they have come to represent) that links them together, lending them an allure within mainstream culture that they might not otherwise possess. (We see here an echo of the concern for mainstream culture that runs from Horkheimer and Adorno through to Wiesel.) These aspects of dark tourism theory certainly reinforce the connection between Holocaust tourism and other forms of popular culture. But for Lennon and Foley the association is rather negative, raising questions of poor taste on the part of travelers whom they regard as “invariably curious about suffering, horror and death,” which become “established commodities” within the tourism industry.62 While Lennon and Foley allow that some tourists may have more noble motivations than others, their typical dark tourist is the traveler seduced by media images into spending money on an inauthentic experience.63 Ultimately, dark tourists appear as postmodern travelers who disregard the distinction between the original event and its subsequent representations.

      Like many other critiques of tourism, the dark tourism model focuses on tourism as commodification. Evoking familiar concerns about mass culture, dark tourism sees those who purchase tourism’s commodities as submitting to the dominant logic of capitalism—the logic that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as enabling the establishment of extermination camps. A certain superficiality adheres to the rather obvious and not very insightful observation that tourism involves commodification. It is as if, by establishing a fact that few would legitimately dispute, one has adequately dispensed with an age-old phenomenon that continues to diversify and draw ever more people into its networks.

      Despite the admonitions about the dangers of commodifying history as aesthetic object, we cannot ignore the impact of tourism in disseminating awareness of the genocide. Nor СКАЧАТЬ