Sightseeing in the mansions of the dead

Abstract

This paper looks at a type of tourism visit which inhabits an ambiguous and relatively unmapped territory of meaning, crossing boundaries between the conceptual domains of pilgrimage, commemoration and pleasure-seeking. These visits and activities have developed in response to traumatic histories, and also reflect the growth of secular forms of spiritual experience, in which the pursuit of revelation is personal rather than hierophantic. Sites of Holocaust memorialization raise questions of memory and forgetting, guilt and redemption, meaning and ownership, with particularly acute force. However, even these most consecrated and highly cathected sites are experienced through the mediation of mimetic forms and processes of representation which significantly re-order testimony and evidence. Furthermore, the grounding of collective memory in sacralized locations and structures tends towards the distancing, externalizing and disarming of traumatic memory. Under these conditions, visitor motivations and experiences are polysemic: fractured, ambivalent, unstable, and resistant to paradigms of either the sacred or the profane.

Cet article porte sur un type de tourisme qui existe dans un territoire de signification ambigu, relativement peu cartographié et qui traverse les limites entre les domaines conceptuels du pèlerinage, de la commémoration et de l'hédonisme. Ces visites touristiques et les activités qui s'y rattachent ont été conçues par suite d'histoires traumatisantes, et sont également le reflet de la montée en importance des formes laïques de l'expérience spirituelle par lesquelles la quête de la révélation est centrée sur soi plutôt qu'être hiérophantique. Les sites commémoratifs de l'Holocauste soulèvent avec force des interrogations sur le souvenir et l'oubli, la culpabilité et la rédemption, et la signification et l'appartenance. Toutefois, même ces sites hautement consacrés et chargés d'émotions intenses sont vécus par la médiation de formes mimétiques et de processus de représentation qui reclassent témoignage et preuve de façon significative. Par ailleurs, l'enracinement de la mémoire collective dans les lieux et dans les structures sacralisées a tendance à distancer, externaliser et désarmer le souvenir traumatique. Dans ces conditions, les motivations et les expériences du visiteur sont polysémiques tant qu'elles sont fracturées, ambivalentes, instables et résistantes aux paradigmes relatifs au sacré ou au profane.

Este papel estudia un tipo de visita turística que ocupa un territorio de significado ambiguo y poco estudiado; traspasa las fronteras entre los campos conceptuales de peregrinación, conmemoración y la búsqueda del placer. Estas visitas y actividades han desarrollado como respuesta a historias traumáticas y también reflejan el aumento de formas seculares de experiencia espiritual en que la búsqueda de revelación es algo personal en vez de hierophantic. Sitios de memorialización del Holocausto plantean, de modo contundente, cuestiones sobre la memoria y el olvido, culpabilidad y redención, y significado y propiedad. Sin embargo, hasta estos sitios tan consagrados y de efecto catártico están experimentados por la mediación de formas y procesos de representación miméticos que cambian considerablemente testimonios y pruebas. Además, el cimentar del recuerdo colectivo en lugares y estructuras hechos sagrados tiende a hacer que el recuerdo traumático sea distanciado, exteriorizado y desarmado. Bajo estas condiciones las motivaciones y experiencias de los visitantes son polisémicas: fracturadas, ambivalentes, inestables y resistentes a paradigmas tanto de lo sagrado como de lo profano.

Keywords:

• Auschwitz
• memory
• Holocaust
• tourism
• museum
• Auschwitz
• souvenir
• Holocauste
• tourisme
• musée
• Auschwitz
• recuerdo
• el Holocausto
• turismo
• museo

Keywords:

• Auschwitz
• souvenir
• Holocauste
• tourisme
• musée

Keywords:

• Auschwitz
• recuerdo
• el Holocausto
• turismo
• museo

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Hopkins and David Howard of the University of Edinburgh for the suggestion to develop this paper from one I gave at the RGS-IBG 2003 Annual Conference in London.

Notes

 1 The case of Santiago is interesting, in that the medieval pilgrimage has evolved in its modern form into a hybrid journey, in which religious and secular motives and behaviours are closely and explicitly related. See Frey (1998) and Murray and Graham (1997).

 2 This process of ‘grounding’ is ambivalent: individual or collective memories attach cathectically to structures and locations; but memory, and especially traumatic memory, may be distanced and disarmed when it is embodied in the physically or symbolically external. See below.

 3 Thanks to Ridley Scott and others, we are as entertained by images of blood and death in that arena as the citizens of Domitian's Rome were. It is worth noting that death is not collateral to the functioning of the Colosseum, but its raison d'etre.

 4 The film-making process introduced a major re-ordering of evidence: Spielberg filmed in the former Jewish Quarter of Kazimierz, from which the Jewish population was expelled by the Nazis, forced out of their homes and across the river to Podgorze, the actual site of the wartime ghetto. Podgorze is a fairly delapidated working-class suburb, in contrast to Kazimierz, where the housing stock is better and the area more picturesque. So Kazimierz has experienced tourist regeneration while Podgorze has not. Tourists in Kazimierz, viewing what they may take to be sites of historical significance, are looking at movie locations. See Charlesworth (2002).

 5 Research, interviews and personal observations derive from a study visit to Krakow and Auschwitz made by the author during July 2003, and a field-trip to the same locations in April 2004.

 6 ‘While in Poland, the England team, led by David Beckham, visited the World War II concentration camp Auschwitz. The players, so often criticised for their behaviour … and arrogance … walked solemnly round the camp’ (Chilton 2004: 56).

 7 In the case of the 1967 monument at the far end of the ramp at Birkenau, between Gas Chambers and Crematoria II and III, the location is quite literally buried under vast and obscurely symbolic slabs of granite.

 8 This scale is perhaps analogous to the transformation of memory from involuntary traumatic reliving, through to distance, reflection and syncretism.

 9 Research, interviews and personal observations derive from a study visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in July 2004.

10 There is a widespread mythopoeic belief that many visitors throw away these ID cards on leaving the Museum, and that they can be seen spilling out of dustbins or blowing about in the gutter—a second, symbolic destruction of identity. This story originates in worries expressed by a member of a focus group taking part in early Museum planning-stage discussions (see Linenthal 1995). It has since been frequently cited as fact (Lennon and Foley 2002). However, personal observation and interviews with Museum staff failed to reveal any sightings of discarded cards. In fact, many visitors are ‘surprised and pleased that they can keep the cards as mementoes of their visit’ (personal communication with member of Museum administration, 7 July 2004).

11 At USHMM, some video installations of killings and medical experimentation are set behind ‘privacy walls’—screens set low behind a rectangular frame which shields them, so that people lean over the edge to watch, as though staring into a well, the flickering light playing up on their faces.

12 Personal observation at Auschwitz-Birkenau, April 2004.

13 Water-drinking forbidden! His health is your responsibility!

14 I have a recording, made at Birkenau on 5 July 2003, of a skylark, singing his head off above the ruins of the crematoria.