Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Remembering, Representing, Reframing presented by ENGL 7239: Making Memory: Censorship in Locations of Memory

In the field of Museum Studies, museums are analyzed as if they were texts, that is, they are analyzed in relation to their rhetorical situation: their purpose, audience, and context. Lindsey N. Chappell argues that “the museum is itself a historical argument” (2) that is “built to integrate both objects and visitors into a cohesive story of cultural and political dominance” (3). Regardless of intent, the way museums are curated and designed tells visitors that the museum is the authority on the subject and that the presented story is the story about history. This, of course, partly applies to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, but memorials have a separate purpose. For memorials, the goal is to remind the public of a specific event. Thus for the Memorial Museum which claims to do both, the goal is to present artifacts and exhibits to preserve facts and history and also to present a story of remembrance. Meanwhile, the Berlin Memorial aims to remind its visitors of the tragedy in general.

One of the key ways this different goal is interpreted in the two locations is through the overall architecture and structure. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is primarily composed of a field of Stelae, that undulate at different heights. Underneath this Stelae is the Information Center which houses four themed rooms about the Jewish victims. The Information Center includes the Room of Dimensions which primarily includes written testimonies from victims, the Room of Families which follows 15 Jewish families through the Holocaust, the Room of Names which has audio readings of stories of the Holocaust and names of victims projected on the walls, and the Room of Sites which covers the locations of extermination. Noticeably, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a memorial solely for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This means that the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe does not have to cover as large a range of material as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s goal is to “offer a chronological narrative of the Holocaust.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum follows a more traditional museum layout, with three permanent floors inside a stately building. Visitors enter the permanent exhibit by ascending in an elevator as a group before descending the three floors in a self-guided tour. The first floor covers the rise of Nazi power and the outbreak of World War II. The exhibit then moves through a sunlit glass hallway with the names of destroyed communities etched into the window. The second floor covers “The Final Solution,” the extermination camps, ghettos, and oral testimonies from survivors. The third floor covers the end of World War II and the liberation of the camps with a space to watch the film Testimony at the end. This concludes the permanent exhibit of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and visitors can then move into a room of reflection which encourages visitors to reflect on their time in the museum. 

One of the key differences between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe lies in the choice to censor graphic imagery or not. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the constructed narrative is interrupted by literal walls that block children from seeing graphic imagery and leave it up to adults’ personal choice whether they engage with the imagery or not. Contrarily, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, there are no walls or even signs indicating that visitors will be encountering graphic imagery or descriptions. By doing so, these two spaces have different narratives that are created by choosing to use censorship walls or not. The choice to censor graphic imagery can be due to any number of factors including appealing to children of younger ages, not wanting to sensationalize or focus on gruesome images, etc. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe website recommends the Memorial for ages 14 and up while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website recommends its space for children 11 and up. Whatever intent the spaces had in censoring imagery, taken in context the choice to censor or not will inevitably build a narrative of some sort.  

One way to analyze this difference is to engage with the imagery behind the censorship wall at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which includes two of the three images of Nazi women in the entire museum. According to Lucille Eichengreen in her memoir, not only were there SS women, but “their cruelty and vindictiveness exceeded that of the male SS” (15). In Ruth Klueger’s memoir, she states that “The Nazi evil was male, not female” (115). Klueger outlines the problem that arises when calling Nazi women SS officers because the Nazi power and decision-making did not fall into the hands of women, they simply exerted the power given to them over Jewish women. 

By censoring, either unintentionally or intentionally, images of women in Nazi uniforms, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum signals to visitors that most of the Nazis were men and that most of the people who murdered and brutalized Jewish victims were men. This is dangerous for numerous reasons, chiefly because it exonerates the Nazi women from the crimes they committed during the Holocaust. There is no possible way for any museum to illustrate a holistic, unanimous, and clear picture of any part of history, especially when so much of history has been lost to time and – in the case of the Holocaust – deliberate erasure. By not using censored sections, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is more ambiguous than the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in these instances.