(Tourists at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp)

The following excerpt comes from Daniel P. Reynolds’ book, Postcards from Auschwitz. Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance, published by NYU Press. The book explores what visitors encounter at places of Holocaust commemoration and why millions of people travel to Holocaust memorial sites and museums each year.

The excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

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The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum saw record attendance in 2016, receiving more than two million visitors from all over the world. There have been so many tourists to Auschwitz since its establishment as a memorial in 1947 that the concrete steps in the former barracks, now the main exhibition halls, have been worn smooth and concave from heavy foot traffic. Since 1999, when the memorial museum launched its website, the numbers of tourists to Auschwitz have climbed dramatically. Accommodating such numbers presents enormous logistical challenges for crowd control, for scheduling, and for the provision of personally guided tours in 17 different languages each day. In the face of such massive demand, how does the memorial provide its visitors a meaningful experience that amounts to more than macabre voyeurism, or crass consumerism? Despite the challenges in managing a site that was never intended to host crowds of tourists, the memorial’s mission to remember and prevent future barbarism attracts more people today than ever before. The museum’s director, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, explains the global lure and core message of Auschwitz in the present: “In an era of such rapid changes in culture and civilization, we must again recognize the limits beyond which the madness of organized hatred and blindness may again escape out of any control.” It is tempting to read Dr. Cywiński’s comment as self-referential, as if the description of controlled madness applies as much to Auschwitz tourism as to the events the museum commemorates and documents.

The first impressions at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum can indeed be chaotic, with long lines at the ticket windows, tour guides frantically rounding up their groups, a cacophony of languages, a parking lot full of busses entering and exiting. Tourists ostensibly come to learn about the perils of “organized hatred and blindness” that generated the Holocaust; they are challenged to put the values of tolerance into practice as they share limited space with one another. Sightseers vie for elbowroom to take photos of confiscated luggage, canisters of poison, prisoner uniforms, crematoria furnaces, and other reminders that more than 1.1 million people were murdered here between 1940 and 1945. They fill the museum bookstores, they stand in line to pay for refreshments and use the restrooms, and they crowd the post office window to mail postcards of the memorial to their friends and family back home. What remains to be seen is whether these visitors take any lessons with them after they leave.

It is this image of buying postcards at Auschwitz that I choose to represent the phenomenon at the heart of this book, “Holocaust tourism.” Sightseeing connected to the genocide of European Jews and the murder of millions of other victims will inevitably strike some as a cringe-worthy, inauthentic, and commercialized practice that has no place in connection to a history as inviolable as the Holocaust. After all, the problem of understanding the Nazi crimes through earnest scholarship or committed art is vexed enough without entering the profane realm of tourism. At first glance, postcards are emblematic of the tackier side of tourism, often depicting clichéd scenic views in garishly enhanced colors, so to discover their presence at the most notorious site of Nazi mass murder seems somewhere between distasteful and obscene. Postcards are emblematic of the presumed superficiality of tourism, a momentary and forgettable act of sharing an image. But postcards have a flip side, literally and figuratively, making them a good metaphor for tourism as a practice that allows for more sophistication than meets the eye. Postcards invite travelers to inscribe their own commentary on the back, to direct the images to a particular audience and accompany it with a commentary that may undercut the representation of the place the card is meant to promote. Postcards have the capacity to reveal more than the tourism industry authorizes, and offer a medium for tourists to exercise a degree of critical agency (if they so choose). In contrast to the medium’s cliché, postcards from Auschwitz usually exhibit muted tones and portray somber images, indicating a different mode of tourism that promotes reflection, even unease, over enjoyment. Tourists who send a postcard from a place of atrocity are likely to be more self-conscious about what they inscribe on the back, since their own text exposes them to critique by their readers. What could one say on the back of a postcard that could possibly be commensurate with the history of Auschwitz?

As valid as misgivings about postcards from Auschwitz and the phenomenon they represent may be, Holocaust tourism continues to flourish. The recurrence of genocide around the world should make us skeptical that such tourism has done anything to prevent the kind of insanity and violence that, more than seventy years ago, murdered six million European Jews; yet, visitors to Holocaust memorials typically express appreciation for the opportunity to learn important lessons about humanity and its capacity for violence. And they do so at a growing number of Holocaust memorial sites in places as far away from the original event as Sydney and Shanghai. Tourists in Washington, D.C. wait in long lines to secure limited passes to the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in similar numbers, with 1.62 million visitors in 2016. Since its completion in 2005, the number of visitors to the information center of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has steadily increased from 360,000 to a record of 475,000 in 2015—a number that does not include the many visitors to the outdoor memorial who do not enter the information center. These numbers are part of a larger picture about tourism of all kinds, which UNESCO characterizes as the world’s largest industry and one that is expected to continue to grow globally. Our highly visual global culture seems increasingly obsessed with seeing that which most of us, thankfully, will never endure. It is the job of scholars to offer an account of tourism’s motivations and complexities, to take seriously its modalities of signification, to acknowledge both its appeal and its peril, and to put forth the questions that prompt deeper reflection.

At present, there has been little effort to take tourism’s role in Holocaust remembrance seriously and attempt to understand not only its popularity, but its possible value. The two terms—Holocaust and tourism—have only recently been brought together, usually in a context where the writer can disavow the phenomenon. Indeed, the study of tourism of any kind, let alone Holocaust tourism, is something of a marginal field of inquiry within the academy. Those who research tourism have struggled to have their inquiry taken seriously, combatting well-established attitudes within the realm of scholarship against that which is seen as commercial or frivolous. In contrast, the Holocaust occupies an overwhelming position in Western thought, having defined the trajectory of research in the humanities, social sciences, and even the natural sciences like no other event since 1945. Unlike the study of tourism, the study of the Holocaust has become so firmly established in the academy that some approaches have achieved the status of doctrine, for better or worse. In focusing on Holocaust tourism, this book questions the attitudes and beliefs that inform the study of both the Holocaust and tourism, asking if they are still adequate to address the continued prevalence of the Holocaust in the Western imagination, or to acknowledge the new realities of tourism as the world’s largest industry.

I enter this discussion as something of an outsider, trained in the field of German studies with a focus on literature. While the Holocaust occupies a central place in German studies, it is a field in its own right that draws on research from numerous other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. But it is safe to say that tourism has been, at best, a marginal topic in both German studies and Holocaust studies. To undertake an analysis of Holocaust-themed tourism, I have turned to work undertaken largely by anthropologists, whose questions about travelers have helped me immensely in framing my approach. Holocaust tourism is an unwieldy topic that challenges the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge while simultaneously challenging the boundaries of comfortable discourse. The topic fuses two realms of experience—that of the Holocaust as an unparalleled historical event, and that of tourism as a popular mode of intercultural encounter—that are generally kept separate. This book argues that anyone interested in understanding Holocaust tourism engages by necessity in a broadly interdisciplinary inquiry. This volume draws upon the numerous inquiries into both the Holocaust and tourism that, despite their abundance, have remained largely disconnected from one another. In connecting them, I also rely on personal experiences and observations shared by many Holocaust tourists, as well as my own. The goal here is not to “correct” either disciplinary or non-academic accounts of the Holocaust or tourism, but rather to engage in a conversation about both the pragmatics and the ethics of Holocaust tourism, to identify problems, and to acknowledge possibilities for contributing to public memory.

Before introducing the chapters ahead, it is important to outline the trends in scholarship on the Holocaust and tourism that inform this work and lay the intellectual foundations for this inquiry. The task of theorizing Holocaust tourism is daunting, not least because of the seemingly incommensurate loci of the Holocaust and of tourism in the imagination. In what follows, I chart how the disciplinary developments of Holocaust studies and tourism studies have generated insights and methodologies that have made sense within certain disciplinary confines. Holocaust tourism, however, challenges both fields by exposing the lacunae between the academic theory and an emerging form of practice that neither field has been particularly eager to address.

Daniel P. Reynolds is the Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages in the German Department at Grinnell College.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out Episode 15 of the Revealer podcast: “Holocaust Tourism” with Daniel P. Reynolds.