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Talking with images: collecting and displaying private photographs and testimony in Imperial War Museums’ Holocaust Galleries
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This article explores the legibility of photos taken by Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Many museums have collected private photos from survivors, and use them to illustrate Holocaust testimony. But photos and testimonies are not always neatly aligned; private photos can also confound audience expectations. We focus on four case studies, comprising photos taken in Poland, Germany, and the UK, and interviewed survivors about their significance. Testimonies and personal photos, we conclude, reveal different but complementary aspects of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, and, if read together, can enrich the way in which modern audiences engage with this difficult history.
This article analyses two interactive exhibits – The National Holocaust Centre and Museum’s ‘The Forever Project’ and the Shoah Foundation’s ‘New Dimensions in Technology’ – which have created digital versions of Holocaust survivors who will respond to visitors’ questions, with the intention of creating meaningful ‘interactions’ with these survivors long after the ‘biological’ witnesses have passed away. It argues that the formal qualities of these ‘virtual witnesses’ have cognitive and emotional associations that inhibit viewer empathy: first, since the digital avatar is a form normally associated with games and play, participants may consciously or subconsciously ‘test’ the limits of this interactive technology; second, people use vocal commands to interact with the avatar, much like ‘virtual assistants’ found on personal digital devices; and third, their ‘uncanny valley’ appearance is affectively disturbing. It concludes by querying as to the use of these and other technologies for memorial exhibits.
Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum’s strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.
Prior to the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1993, critics voiced concerns about the appropriateness of locating a museum of European mass genocide within the Washington Mall, a space of national pedagogy devoted to celebrating the history and achievements of the U.S. nation-state. However, representing the Holocaust in terms of U.S. national identity has been a central preoccupation of the museum's planners and curators from its inception. The museum (fig. 1) not only tells a story about America's role in the Holocaust, but provides a lesson in how to be a good citizen in the U.S. today. As the project director during planning and construction stated
The current heritage fascination signals the omnipresence of the Present. Recently it has spawned a distinct type of teaching and learning: heritage education. In this article we argue that, despite its presentist connotations, heritage education offers interesting opportunities for understanding the foreignness of the past, a precondition for historical thinking. We examine how heritage education negotiates historical distance from affective, moral and epistemological perspectives. A comparison of two exhibitions on transatlantic slavery and some of their educational resources reveals distinctive constructions of historical distance. The Dutch NiNsee exhibition Child in Chains carries a strong affective and moral perspective through a bridging technique of rhyming. These perspectives can be adopted in assignments that discuss the synchronically compared contexts of past and present. The Atlantic Worlds gallery of the English National Maritime Museum constructs a more complex narrative with little reference to the present. Here students’ sense of the historical comes from the physical experience of authentic objects on display; some educational activities emphasise an epistemological perspective, allowing students to unravel the narrative plot. Precisely the performative dimension of heritage can challenge students in heritage education settings to make them aware of the dialectics of the pastness of the past and its inevitable presentness.
The past 25 years has seen an extraordinary boom in a new kind of cultural complex: the memorial museum. These seek to research, represent, commemorate and teach on the subject of dreadful, violent histories. With World War and Holocaust memorials as precursors, the kinds of events now recognized include genocide in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, state repression in Eastern Europe, apartheid in South Africa, terrorism in the United States, political “disappearances” in Chile and Argentina, massacres in China and Taiwan, and more.
This book is the first of its kind to “map” these new institutions and cultural spaces, which, although varying widely in size, style and political situation, are nonetheless united in their desire to promote peace, tolerance and the avoidance of future violence. Moving across nations and contexts, Memorial Museums critically analyzes the tactics of these institutions and gauges their wider public significance.
What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline.
Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based.
Conceptualised as a series of ‘sensibilities’ rather than a methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to ‘how to’ approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.
The Centenary of World War I (WWI) between 2014 and 2018 attracted international attention. Many Australians travel to key battle sites in mainland Europe, especially Turkey, France, and Belgium to connect with the experiences of Australian soldiers and nurses who served in this war. As no conflict occurred within Australian borders, sites make for popular tourist destinations. Museums and other cultural sites along The Remembrance Trail provide educational tours and experiences to a range of visitors, including private tour groups, individual tourists, school and university groups. Through the exhibition and accompanying guided tours, participants of a university elective study tour developed their historical understanding of WWI, with a specific focus on the Western Front in France and Belgium. Focus group interviews took place after visits to key museums to gauge students’ reflections to their learning, including any affective connections to particular historical narratives and experiences as presented in these cultural sites. This article will discuss the participating tertiary students’ development of historical empathy through visits to museums.
Photographs are used as documents, evidence, and records every day in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work, on passports, permits, and licenses. But how did such usages come to be established and accepted, and when? What kinds of photographs were seen seen as purely instrumental and able to function in this way? What sorts of agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And more generally, what conception of photographic representation did this involve, and what were its consequences?
The Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) permanent Holocaust exhibition opened in June 2000 to general acclaim in the media. Subsequently the exhibition, like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, has proved immensely successful in generating visitors (over a quarter of a million in its first twelve months) and it appears to have elicited positive instant responses from them. In contrast to its American counterpart, however, there has been little questioning of the scope of the IWM exhibition or at a more basic level, whether it was appropriate in the first place. This contribution is an attempt to open up dialogue about the nature of the IWM Holocaust exhibition including the validity or otherwise of some of its items of display. It desires to situate the exhibition in wider debates than those focusing more narrowly on Holocaust commemoration. First, it places the exhibition in the context of collective memory and identity in Britain, especially in relation to the outside world and more specifically, Germanness and Jewishness. Second, it examines how other forms of atrocities and racism have been represented in order to provide a comparative framework. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Sheila Watson, Amy Jane Barnes and Katy Bunning; individual chapters, the contributors.
Relatively little comment has been passed on the role of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum (IWM). There is a critical discourse about the role of the exhibition in the museum of course, and Rebecca Jinks’s and Antoine Capet’s essays contribute admirably to that discourse, yet the specific question of the relationship between thinking about the Holocaust and thinking about Empire and imperial genocide has seldom been asked. Yet as Jinks’s essay makes clear, Britain has an imperial past and as such it is not possible for the Holocaust exhibition to just avoid that context. It would be very difficult anywhere in Britain, but in the IWM, the official repository of the nation’s war memories, it is impossible. What is more, the IWM specifically tasks itself, in its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, to engage with genocide in a wider context and as such to place the Holocaust in that context. And the British Empire was a site of genocide. One might expect then to find that the IWM grapples with the problem of genocide in the British Empire (in Australia, in Ireland, in India for example). It does not. As such, I want to use this commentary to think more about the relationship between the galloping British memory of the Holocaust that Capet identifies, and Britain’s memory of genocide in its Empire that Jinks highlights, using the IWM as a case study.
This paper addresses the long history of photographic relationships in anthropology. It argues that the current concerns with multiple, relational and affective meanings in anthropological photographs are not simply the result of new approaches to photographic analysis, but were embedded in the relationships of the production of anthropological evidence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from British field anthropology it examines, first, the relational histories of production of those photographs, and, second, argues that those relationships have enabled the new ethnographies of photographic engagement that mark late twentieth and twenty-first century anthropological concerns. It argues that photographic “affect”, as a mode of history, memory and identity, becomes the focus of anthropological analysis.
The public increase of interest in the past has not necessarily brought with it a greater understanding about how archives are formed. To this end, this book takes a serious look at archival repositories and collections, suggesting that archives do not just happen, but are consciously shaped (and sometimes distorted) by archivists, the creators of records, and other individuals and institutions. In this series of essays, I offer archivists rare insight into the fundamentals of appraisal, and historians and other users of archives the opportunity to appreciate the collections they all too often take for granted.
1. The term “history” is used here in the sense of historiography.
2. Historiography, writes Jacques Le Goff, “must aim at objectivity and must be built on a belief in historical truth” (Le Goff, 1986, preface). In spite of his ideal of impartiality and commitment to objectivity, even the professional historian is of course never completely free from loyalties and prejudices. But he differs from others in that “he is aware of this fact, and instead of indulging his prejudices seeks to identify and correct them” (Lewis, 1975: 52).
3. Whether the new tool of “objective” scholarship was actually implemented or not depended largely on the specific historiographic discourse. Antiquarian historiography has embraced it, thereby enlarging the realm of historical curiosity and eroding the concept of a “normative past.” Historians of the national past, on the other hand, were inspired by specific visions of the future for which they selected and constructed a motivating past.
4. The pioneers in this form of historiography were often medievalists, who had already been used to investigating social forms of religious and secular memorializiation. See for instance O. G. Oexle (1995).
5. In April 2007, the following news blog could be read on the Internet: “More than a century, time has not washed away the memory of our ancestors’ fate. Therefore, according to President Parvanov, every attempt to re-write history or artificially to create prerequisites for tension on delicate historical topics, is not only deeply unacceptable but will also meet the repudiation of the whole Bulgarian society…. The president’s reaction has come after the Mayor of Batak Petar Paunov announced that the citizens of Batak would not let a conference on 18 May happen. The reason for their decision is the expected presentation of a thesis, which claims that the Batak massacre is a myth, its victims are exaggerated, and Turkish slavery is sham.” See Kostadinov (2007).
“Erst wie eine fremde Gewalt [der Mensch] ergreift, ihm forttreibt, und … in ihm lebendig wird, kommt wirkliches und wahrhaftes Daseyn in sein Leben.”
—Fichte ²
ABSTRACT
For more than thirty years now, thinking about the way we, humans, account for our past has taken place under the aegis of representationalism. In its first two decades, representationalism, inaugurated by Hayden White's Metahistory of 1973, has been remarkably successful, but by now it has lost much of its vigor and it lacks explanatory power when faced with recent phenomena such as memory, lieux de mémoire , remembrance, and trauma. It might be argued that many of the shortcomings of representationalism spring from the fact that it is exclusively geared to “transfer of meaning.” This essay posits that what may be called “presence” (“the unrepresented way the past is present in the present”) is at least as important as “meaning.”“Presence” can be dealt with by employing a “topical” view of history (in the manner of, for example, Vico) in which the whole of history is stored in “places” (that is, “institutions”) that can be “visited” on the plane of the present. Presence can be said to be stored in metonymy. Whereas metaphor is instrumental in the “transfer of meaning,” metonymy brings about a “transfer of presence.” A metonymy is a “presence in absence” not just in the sense that it presents something that isn't there, but also in the sense that in the absence (or at least the radical inconspicuousness) that is there, the thing that isn't there is still present. The presence of the past thus does not reside primarily in the intended story or the manifest metaphorical content of the text, but in what story and text contain in spite of the intentions of the historian. One might say that historical reality travels with historiography not as a paying passenger but as a stowaway. As a stowaway, as what is absently and unintentionally present on the plane of time, metonymy is a metaphor for discontinuity, or, rather, for the entwinement of continuity and discontinuity.
This paper presents a methodological framework for conducting research on the knowledge-making capacity of museum displays. As active agents in the production of knowledge, museum displays are increasingly being recognized as documents of significance to the history of scholarly disciplines and the evolution of ideas. In order to investigate how exhibitions create knowledge, a basic outline of some of the key attributes involved in creating meaning in exhibitions is offered. Building on research in exhibition analysis, the history of collecting, and archaeological representation, this account emphasizes how there is a complex network of factors that warrant consideration when assessing the epistemological function of museums.
When historians, archivists, and museologists turn to Eastern European photos from family albums or collections—for example, photos from the decades preceding the Holocaust and the early years of the Second World War—they seek visual evidence or illustrations of the past. But photographs may refuse to fit expected narratives and interpretations, revealing both more and less than we expect. Focusing on photos of Jews taken on the main avenues of Cernǎuţi, Romania, before the Second World War and during the city's occupation by Fascist Romanians and their Nazi-German allies, this essay shows how a close reading of these vernacular images, both for what they show and what they are unable to show, can challenge the “before, during, and after” timeline that, in Holocaust historiography, we have come to accept as a given.
This collection links the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus in particular is on mediation and remediation as two fundamental aspects of media use, and on the dynamics between them. Key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered? This book first appeared as a hardback volume in the De Gruyter series Media and Cultural Memory Studies. With the present book the original articles are reissued in an affordable paperback edition for graduate students and scholars in the field of Media and Memory Studies.
This article problematizes cultural studies' recent return to the “thing,” assessing the archive's position in research work. I draw on my experience of consultation of the surviving records of the Lord Chamberlain's theater censorship office in order to demonstrate that the archive's seductive charms often serve to conceal its flaws. This archive's undeniable allure obscures the contingency of its construction, its destructive powers, and the way in which its contents remain vulnerable to interpretative violence. These observations are measured against the metaphorical and theoretical frameworks which continue to condition our approach to the archive, coming to rest at the place where the procedures and concerns of psychoanalysis overlap with those of archaeology. I conclude that any study of this archive requires both a theoretical redefinition of the concept of the archive and the introduction of a rigorous ethical framework which foregrounds the interpretative investment of the researcher.
Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies
- Leora Auslander
- Auslander Leora
The Civil Contract of Photography. Translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli
- Ariella Azoulay
- Azoulay Ariella
Affect and the Politics of Testimony in Holocaust Museums
- Steven Cooke
- Donna-Lee Frieze
- Cooke Steven
Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz
- Georges Didi-Huberman
- Didi-Huberman Georges
The Use of Oral History in the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition
- Suzanne Bardgett
- Bardgett Suzanne
The Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949
- David Cesarani
- Cesarani David
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
- Georgio Gamben
- Gamben Georgio
Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy
- Marianne Hirsch
- Hirsch Marianne
The Holocaust and Representations of Jews: History and Identity in the Museum
- Hannah Holtschneider
- Holtschneider Hannah
Interview with Salmon Malka
- Emmanuel Levinas
- Solomon Malka
- James Robins
- Levinas Emmanuel
Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust
- Andrea Liss
- Liss Andrea
We are a Social History, not a Military History Museum”: Large Objects and the ‘Peopling’ of The Holocaust Galleries in the Imperial War Museum, London
- Kasia Tomasiewicz
- Tomasiewicz Kasia