Chapter 7: the Holocaust and Perpetration in War Museums
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Chapter 7: The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums The representation of the Holocaust is one of the most significant topics in the analysis of how Second World Warmuseums, and those military and cultural history museumsthat strongly emphasize the Second World War, combine nar- rative,memory, and experience to produce restricted, primary,and secondary ex- perientiality.The term ‘Holocaust’ here will be referred to using the most widely accepted scholarlydefinition: “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”¹ However,this chapter will alsoshow that in warand military history museums, the Holocaust as the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews quickly becomes interwoven with other atrocities and genocidal activities carried out by the Nazi regime against various Slavic populations, the Romani people of Europe, the mentallyand physicallyhandicapped, Jehovah’sWitness- es, black and mixed-race Germans, and homosexuals (see Stone 2010,2–3). Two decades ago, Holocaust museums and warmuseums wereseemingly different entities with marginal overlap. This has changed in the twenty-first century,al- lowing Holocaust representations to be used in warmuseums as alens for un- derstandinghow these museumsmake the Second World Warcomprehensible or even experienceable for their visitors.There are two main reasons for this shift: first,the Holocaust,atrocities and genocidal activities – perpetratedby Germany, the Soviet Union, and other totalitarian regimes – and the Second World Warare seen as closelyinterwoven; and second, the merging of history and memorythat has been increasinglyspearheaded by Holocaust memorial museumshas been transferred to representations of the Second World War more generally. On the whole, thereare anumber of obvious historicalconnections that make the Holocaust an importanttopic in Second World Warmuseums.² The per- spective of the Western Allies liberatingthe camps and the subsequent trials have shaped the perception of the ‘good’ war in the West and established a clear frame of good and evil. In this way, the Holocaust has become an integral part of assessing the war effort.All occupied countries took part,inone wayor another,indeportations and in the Holocaust.Inthe occupied countries of Cen- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019,https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust.Accessed 13 October 2019. See also Celinscak 2018, 16 for asurvey summary of the Holocaust in Allied war museums. OpenAccess. ©2020 Stephan Jaeger,published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664416-011 222 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums tral and Eastern Europe, othervictim groups sometimes takepriority in narra- tivesofthe war,which this studyfurther analyzes through examples taken from recent Polish exhibitions. The Allied countries that remained unoccupied had to react to streams of refugees and reconcile theirown values and, in part,their own antisemitism, with their objectiveofending the war. The first significant argument as to whythe Holocaust clearly belongsina contemporarySecond World Warmuseum is the concept of the space of violence (Baberowski 2015) or “bloodlands” (Snyder 2010), which connects the war in the East with the events of the Holocaust.Asseen particularlyinthe permanent ex- hibition of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden (MHM), the Holocaust,other atrocities, genocidal objectives, and the war effort are so inter-twined that it is impossible to narrate one story without referencing others. Although the permanent exhibitions opened in the last decade have aclear ten- dency towardintegrating the Holocaust,recent developments in the MHM³ and in the Second World WarMuseum in Gdańsk (MIIWŚ)⁴ alsoindicate that such integration might change, whether this is duetoapossiblystronger concentra- tion on military forces than on cultural and societal history (MHM), or because the Holocaust has become asub-themeused to setupother,oftennational, nar- ratives(MIIWŚ). Holocaust museums mainlyrepresent the persecution and ex- termination of European Jewry by Nazi Germanyand possiblyalso cover the ex- periences of othervictim groups such as the Sinti and Roma,orthe victims of other systematic Nazi killing programs such as the ‘euthanasia’ program that tar- geted patients with mental and physical disabilities.Inwar museums, otherNazi crimes against civilians,the killing of Poles, the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war,Slavs, and political opponents such as Communists and Social Democrats, overlapwith the events of the Holocaust.Further exhibitions alsorepresent war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by other powers such as Japan and by the So- viet Union from the Central and Eastern European perspective. The second compellingjustification for interweaving the Holocaust and the Second World Warwithin museum representations is connected to the observa- tion that historical representations of the Second World Warinmuseums today cannot be separated from culturalmemory.This can be traced back to the “rap- prochement between history and memory in the shadow of the Holocaust” (Ass- mann 2016 [2006], 32). This shift,inwhich the clear distinction between history and memory becomes blurry,leads to changes in historicalrepresentations. Alei- da Assmann identifiesthreedevelopments that have enhanced history writing See also chapter5.1. See also chapter6.2. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 223 from the perspective of memory: “the emphasis placed by memoryonthe as- pects of emotion and individual experience; its emphasis on the memorial func- tion of history as aform of remembrance; and the emphasis it places on an eth- ical orientation” (2016 [2006], 34). All of these developments have been first employed in Holocaust museums’ historical representations, particularlyinthe prototypicalUnited States Holocaust MemorialMuseum (USHMM) (Linenthal 2001 [1995); Luke 2002,37–64;Hansen-Glucklich 2014; Bernhard-Donals 2016). These developments have since been transferred over to warmuseums in recent years. While the representation of the Holocaust has clearlyinfluenced the repre- sentation of war,and the Second World Warinparticular, in museums, there are clear differencesbetween Holocaust and Second World Warmuseums. Fur- thermore, the Holocaust has become adifferent global phenomenon thanthe Second World War(Rothberg2009). Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider follow the- orists like Max Horkheimer,Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendtinidentify- ing the Holocaust as a “tragedyofreason or of modernity itself” (2002, 88) that leads – aided by new technology and media in aglobalized world – to “ashared consciousness and cosmopolitan memories that span territorial and linguistic borders” (2002, 91). Such ade-territorialization (Levy and Sznaider 2006 [2001], 46–49)isconsiderablyless present in war museums in which national perspectivesremain relevant,evenwhen the museum highlights transnational (House of European History) or anthropological (Bundeswehr Military History Museum) themes and perspectives. Another differencebetween Holocaust and Second World Warmuseums lies in the discussion about sayability versus unsayability – the challengeinbreak- ing the silence about the Holocaust and the simultaneous need to do so (Lentin 2004b, 2–3). This has channelled into the discussion about the representability and/or unrepresentability of the Holocaust (e.g. Friedländer 1992; Agamben 1999;Reiter 2000;Krankenhagen 2001;Lentin 2004a, Didi-Huberman 2008 [2003]; Frei and Kansteiner 2013). Ronit Lentin argues: “afurther crisis in repre- sentation is the tension between historical ‘facts’ and interpretation, or the di- lemmaofhistorical relativism versus aesthetic experimentation in the face of the need for ‘truth,’ on the one hand, and the problems raised by the opaque- ness of the events and the opaqueness of language, on the other” (2004b, 3). The question of whether there are immersive representational techniques that allow empathyfor victims’ suffering, or the mind of aperpetrator to be created is particularlychallenging. Anysuch immersion immediatelyruns into the criti- cism that onlysurvivors should be (ethically) entitled to speak about the Holo- 224 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums caust (Lentin 2004b, 2),⁵ which leadstothe question of generational remem- brance (Felman and Laub 1992; Hirsch 1997; LaCapra 2001, 2004). Museums that intend to represent the Holocaust,despite its enormity and incommensura- bility,which defy materialization, undergo representational and ethical challeng- es. They need to be aware of “the potential dangers of aesthetic spectacle,pre- venting victims’ voices from being heard” (Carden-Coyne 2011, 168). Consequently, museums are challenged to applydifferent techniques of distant- iation to avoid simplistic immersive techniques. In contrast to Holocaust muse- ums, the explicit representation of trauma in war museums is usuallyrelatively minor (see alsoJaeger 2017c). Museums depict the hardship, suffering,and valor of fighting;there is no discussion of secondary trauma. This onlyshifts when war,atrocities,genocide,the Holocaust,and the sufferingofcivilians begin to overlap, demonstrating again whythis book features chapters on the Holocaust and on the Air WarinEurope in order to further understand these connections. In museumresearch, the