The Jewish narrative in the Yad Vashem global Holocaust museum

Transcription

1 Journal of Genocide Research ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: The Jewish narrative in the Yad Vashem global Holocaust museum Amos Goldberg To cite this article: Amos Goldberg (2012) The Jewish narrative in the Yad Vashem global Holocaust museum, Journal of Genocide Research, 14:2, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 10 May Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1755 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 22 December 2017, At: 19:23

2 Journal of Genocide Research (2012), 14(2), June 2012, The Jewish narrative in the Yad Vashem global Holocaust museum AMOS GOLDBERG The 2005-inaugurated new historical museum of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is one of the most significant and influential global Holocaust memorial sites of the twenty-first century. At the same time, it is also a very local Israeli lieu de mémoire. This essay explores the interactions between these two levels of representation while suggesting a critical analysis of the museum s narrative. I contend that for various cultural and political reasons this museum encourages most of all identification with the Jewish victims. This morally necessary and very much justified empathy is achieved, however, in a way that blocks almost any nuanced historical understanding of the event. Thus by melancholic means the museum suppresses any otherness that would make the story of the Shoah more complex, interrupt in the melodramatic processes of identification, and destabilize the identity of the Western (individual and collective) self. Museums convey a sense of permanence, the idea of collection, as opposed to separation and loss. In a museum I feel that I belong, though nothing belongs to me...art and literature can be a home for those without citizenship, because they remind us of our common race, and they sop you up, yet simultaneously feed you like a magic sponge. They make you part of what you see and what you hear and yet let you stand back and choose. The various Shoah museums and reconstituted concentration camp sites do the exact opposite. That s why I find them so hard to take: they don t take you in, they spit you out. Moreover, they tell you what you ought to think, as no art or science museum ever does. They impede the critical faculty (Ruth Kluger) 1 The museum in context As was suggested by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, and from a different point of view, also by Jeffrey Alexander and many other scholars, Holocaust memory has become paradigmatic to a new form of collective memory, which they term global memory. 2 This new form of collective memory is not connected, as traditionally was the case, to a coherent political or social group like the nation or the ethnos, but first and foremost to a much broader though vague collective entity: the West and to a certain extent even beyond the Euro Atlantic space. 3 This new global memory of the ISSN print; ISSN online/12/ # 2012 Taylor & Francis

3 AMOS GOLDBERG Shoah serves as a means to establish a very broad imagined community and lays the foundation for what Levy and Sznaider call new cosmopolitan ethics. Although others are skeptical about this cosmopolitan ethics and about the very concept of global memory, 4 it is nevertheless difficult to deny the extensive dissemination of the Holocaust memory and discourse across many parts of the globe as a significant historical and ethical symbolic event. Dan Diner summarized this process very accurately: As the twentieth century has drawn to a close, the Holocaust appears to be assuming the character of an icon of a now-past saeculum something like the ultimate core event of our time... Although the conspicuous presence of the Holocaust in public discourse may be easily traced from the late 1970s onwards, and its impact became particularly manifest in the 1980s, its significance for universal historical consciousness and moral standards became irrevocable only after This claim is supported by many. For example, John Torpey and Elazar Barkan have shown that legal and moral issues of compensation and restitution, which were established in regard to Holocaust victims, were quickly reproduced in other historical contexts. 6 Demands for apology, 7 reparations and return of property were made by black people in the USA with reference to slavery; by African and other third world nations for the years of colonial exploitation; and in Eastern Europe for the years of Communist oppression. It is noteworthy that the Holocaust served as a standard and as juridical basis for claims to justice, recognition and monetary compensation not only in the Euro Atlantic space, as Torpey defined it, but also far beyond it. 8 For these reasons, Alon Confino even suggests that the Holocaust replaced the French Revolution as the current founding myth of the West a myth that succeeds in giving a global ethical and political meaning to our epoch a foundational past. 9 The globalization of Holocaust memory manifests itself also at the institutional level. Memory becomes increasingly fixed and established within international institutions and organizations or global cooperative networks. The two bestknown examples are, first, UN resolution 60/7 of 1 November 2005 initiated by the Israeli delegation and adopted unanimously by the General Assembly to designate 27 January, the day on which the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The resolution specifically mentions the Jewish people, one third of whom perished during the Holocaust, as well as the Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide adopted in 1948 in the wake of the atrocities committed during World War II. A second body that symbolizes the institutional globalization of Holocaust memory is the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education Remembrance and Research (ITF) established in 1998 through the initiative of the Swedish Prime Minister at the time Göran Persson. Its current 28 member states are all European or North American, apart from Israel and Argentina. 10 Yad Vashem plays a major role in this institution. 188

4 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM Studies of global phenomena show that national institutions often interweave the global into local context and interests in various ways. 11 It is within this context that I will investigate the 2005 inaugurated Yad Vashem new historical museum, which I argue, is also glocal 12 : the global change in memory of the Holocaust and the meaning of collective memory is interwoven in a very special way into its very Israeli national local context. This is reflected and enacted in the changes that recently took place in Yad Vashem, which also has many links with state and voluntary institutions (educational, political, memorial) all over the globe. 13 I begin with a short history of Yad Vashem growing from a very local institution to a very powerful global one. I then undertake a critical analysis of the new narrative presented in the museum s display that interweaves local and global processes and interests while transforming the Holocaust narrative, at least partially, to a locally and globally reassuring one. Yad Vashem Yad Vashem was established by Israeli state law in 1953, though its foundational history goes back to the early forties. 14 That law authorized Yad Vashem to establish a memorial site, to collect, research and publish testimonies on the Holocaust, to teach the lessons of the Holocaust and to honour the Righteous Among the Nations who saved Jews during that time. At first, it was a minor institution that competed with other national memorial sites, like the Shoah Cellar in Mount Zion in Jerusalem 15 and the Holocaust memorial sites at the kibbutzim of Yad Mordechai and Lohamei Hageta ot (Ghetto Fighters). Gradually, it became the central Israeli national Holocaust memorial site and also one of Israel s most significant national symbolic sites. Its location is very meaningful in this regard. It is situated in west Jerusalem on Mount Herzl (named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism) the Israeli national Mount of Remembrance. This site encompasses, alongside Yad Vashem, also the national military cemetery, Herzl s tomb and the official burial site for the nation s great leaders ( Helkat Gedolei Ha Uma ) among them Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, Ze ev Jabotinsky and many others. A first very basic historical exhibition was presented at Yad Vashem in the beginning of the 1960s. In 1973, a permanent comprehensive historical-chronological exhibition was established, which was subsequently updated and changed over the years. With the rise of the global interest in the Holocaust during the 1980s and 1990s, Yad Vashem also became a very popular visiting place for various sorts of tourism local and external, educational and touristic alike. According to the Jerusalem municipality web site, by the 1990s it was second in popularity among tourists to Israel only to the Wailing Wall. 16 It is noteworthy that all soldiers in the Israeli army are expected to visit Yad Vashem at least once within the framework of their military education programmes. Consequently, every Sunday Yad Vashem is coloured with khaki uniform to the sound of 189

5 AMOS GOLDBERG military roll-calls. Yad Vashem is also a site that many Israeli students visit during their high school education. Over the last twenty years, Yad Vashem has become a substantial and influential institution that employs hundreds of workers, educators and scholars in its various departments, and that cooperates with many of the world s most powerful political and cultural institutions. Its annual budget, according to the New York Times, is 45 million dollars and it is active in 55 countries. 17 Thus, without losing its local and national (sacred) significance, it has transformed itself into a global memorial site, hosting millions of visitors from all over the world. It has become together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (USHMM), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and Auschwitz itself an international Holocaust shrine of pilgrimage. These four shrines serve as anchoring sites for the new Holocaust ethical memory that has become a fundamental component in the current identity of the West. In a way, they also mark the geocultural map of this Holocaust consciousness : Western and Eastern Europe, North America and Israel. Hence, from its beginnings as a very local Israeli lieu de mémoire (site of memory), to use Pierre Nora s well-known term, Yad Vashem has become a very powerful and influential international and global cultural institution. In other words it is now a major agent in the global field of Holocaust memory. As these changes took place, the historical museum obviously had to be replaced, especially after the impressive USHMM was opened in Accordingly, the modest, mostly pictorial, exhibition was completely replaced in 2005 by the extremely modern and sophisticated new museum, which was built Figure 1. IDF Soldiers at the entrance of the Yad Vashem museum (# author) 190

6 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM within the framework of reshaping, enlarging and reconstructing the entire Yad Vashem campus. Now, seven years after this development, it is time to critically reflect on this new museum, particularly within this new context of the globalization of memory. 18 Two most important disclaimers are in order. The first has to do with the nature of my analysis. What I will attempt in the following pages is to suggest a reading of the museum s display as a narrative. I will analyze what kind of historical story is told in this museum and identify its faults. Inevitably, this sort of analysis is partial. A museum is not an historical textbook and it is limited in its capacity to present historical complexities. Furthermore, it is more than a text; it is a performance, 19 and the experience of the visitor is consequently multifaceted. Thus, for example, the museum is mediated to many of the visitors by educational instructors or tour guides who perform the museum for them, contextualize the various exhibits and, in their oral explanations, add a lot of information that is not presented in the exhibits. 20 This dimension is not considered here. 21 Moreover, in many analyses of museums, the architecture, the space and the artifacts take major stage. 22 In other cases, the urban and political contexts in which the institutions are situated are the major contexts for the analysis. 23 These aspects, although not totally dismissed here, are nevertheless marginalized. The second reservation concerns the scope of my critical analysis. It is aimed only at the museum and not at Yad Vashem as a memorial, educational and research institution with its various departments. These include among others: an excellent library; one of the largest modern digitized Holocaust archives; the International School for Holocaust Studies, where tens of thousands of educators and students from Israel and abroad come to study in long and short term seminars about the Holocaust; a very prestigious academic research centre that hosts in its various academic frameworks the most important Holocaust scholars from Israel and all over the world and initiates or supports some of the most groundbreaking research on the Holocaust; some of the leading historians of the field are based there (like Yehuda Bauer, Dan Michman, Yisrael Gutman and, until his untimely passing, David Bankier); and an important publishing house for Holocaust research and testimony literature that boasts among its many publications the excellent journal Yad Vashem Studies. All these aspects of the institution are beyond the scope of my analysis, which is focused on the story that the museum presents. However, as modest and focused as such a study is, it can be illuminating and helpful. Hence, more than anything else, this essay is a call for discussion and debate, which is fundamental to academic culture and essential for the existence of a vital public sphere in which we can reflect on the nature of collective memory and identity. The museum The new Yad Vashem Holocaust historical museum was inaugurated in March The two days of inauguration ceremonies were among the biggest diplomatic and international events ever to take place in Israel, perhaps second only 191

7 AMOS GOLDBERG to Prime Minister Rabin s funeral. More than 35 delegations, mostly from Europe and North America, led by heads of state or distinguished political figures, attended the ceremonies. 24 It seems that the whole world, or at least the western world, in a unique expression of consensus, agreed in Yad Vashem on a contemporary categorical imperative thou shalt remember the Holocaust. The museum itself is an impressive achievement. It is located within the new reconstructed huge Yad Vashem memorial complex and occupies over 4,200 square meters. 25 The building was designed (by the world-famous architect Moshe Safdie) and erected over a decade. The exhibitions are historical (its official name is The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum ) and they tell the story of the Holocaust in a more or less sequential narrative. Beginning with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, proceeding to the persecution of the Jews across Europe until the final solution and ending with the liberation and the rehabilitation of Jewish life after the war. There are also some thematic halls on issues like the death camps and especially Auschwitz, or on rescue attempts, that break the linear progression of the linear narrative as they could not be easily integrated into it. But, all in all, a linear narrative provides the fundamental structure of the displays. The display deliberately and most self-consciously depicts a very concrete focal point. As stated on the Yad Vashem website and in other official publications, and as patently evident in the display itself, the museum presents the story of the Shoah from a uniquely Jewish perspective. It is with this assertion that I wish to begin my critical reflection to which I will relate in this article. Bearing in mind that a Jewish perspective is not something with one essence and meaning, 26 a set of questions must be presented here: what does it actually mean to present the Jewish historical perspective of the Holocaust according to the Yad Vashem museum? How is it structured? What does it include and what does it exclude? And why are so many people from all over the world so interested in this form of Holocaust narrative? Or to put it a little bit differently: why does such a local and national Jewish Israeli narration become so interesting and attractive on a global scale? The narrative As Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro remind us, memorial projects since World War II tend to place ever more emphasis on the individual. 27 The Yad Vashem museum has turned it into one of its major principles. The exhibition places great emphasis on the individual voice of the victim, and it contains artifacts, works of art, original documents and many survivors videotaped testimonies that intend to individualize and re-humanize the victim. The museum s first two halls illustrate this very well. The first one is dedicated to the Jewish world in Europe before the Shoah, which is portrayed by a very sophisticated and impressive video-art exhibition. This seems to express the idea that the visitor should not encounter the Jews only as victims of the Holocaust but as human beings who had lives and histories prior to the war. They are not merely objects of German genocidal history but rather 192

8 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM a subject in their own right. Following this installation, visitors are introduced in a very moving and overwhelming exhibition to the individuation principle of the museum. A large photograph of the Kluga camp (in Estonia) taken immediately after its liberation by the Soviets (September 1944) hangs on the wall. The photo depicts corpses lying on top and in between wooden logs, ready to be burnt. Even though the camp was liberated before that event actually took place, nevertheless the human body is transformed here into a burning material ready for its use. It is a shocking picture. In the display cases, to which this photo serves as a background, letters and artifacts that the victims carried in their pockets to the camp are exhibited. Thus the victim is rehumanized. The display which completely breaks with the chronological order of the museum is a kind of ars poetica statement of the museum s display it is all about the victims. This exhibition is, to my mind, one of the most powerful and moving of the entire museum. The next hall is the only short historical introductory hall before the Nazi era exhibition and it is here that things start to become dubious to my mind. This small hall provides the visitor with the essential data assumed to be needed to proceed into the Nazi era itself. This scant regard for context is noteworthy. It is obvious that the decision to skip almost all introductory explanations regarding the European and German context from which Nazism arose is deliberate. This decision introduces a very significant gap at the beginning of the narrative. As a consequence, the whole story begins in its very middle. To be sure, one hall is dedicated to providing the visitor with some preliminary data, but it is relatively small and almost totally dedicated to one theme antisemitism. Modernity racism, former genocides, colonialism and imperialism, the development of discourses and practices of exclusions in the sciences, totalitarianism, fascism, the First World War, the Weimar Republic, mass society, modern nationalism the modern nation-state and so on are all omitted. However much significance one attributes to antisemitism in understanding the Holocaust, it is obvious that it alone cannot provide a sufficient historical background. After all, if hatred of Jews/Jew hatred is such an old phenomenon as it is presented in the exhibition, why did the Holocaust occur in the middle of the twentieth century? Consequently, an explanatory gap is introduced into the narrative from the outset. By explanatory gap I do not mean to say that the museum s narrative lacks an interpretation but that from its very outset its interpretation is very partial and therefore distortive. Undoubtedly, antisemitism is an essential context for understanding the Holocaust, but as all historians and other scholars, regardless of their historiographical orientation, agree antisemitism is not and cannot be the only explanatory context. While some historians (those who tend to intentionalism ) think it is the most important explanatory context while others (those who tend to functionalism ) tend to moderate its importance, all agree that it could not be isolated from other processes without which it has no historical meaning. Moreover, if historians never explain much simpler historical and even personal events in such a mono-casual way, how then can such a complex, extreme and long term event that encompasses all of Europe be explained in such a simplistic 193

9 AMOS GOLDBERG manner? It is thus reductive and even distorting to provide the visitor at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a single historical context that altogether disconnects the Holocaust from modern European history, especially in view of the vast effort of historical research providing very nuanced and complex historical understandings of these events. It must be stressed here that this expectation to provide the viewer with more modern historical context does not mean that genocides did not happen before the modern era. 28 Genocide, like all other universal phenomena e.g., feelings, wars, rituals, eating, religion, etc could be found universally across cultures and historical eras. However, just as all these phenomena have their special historical features in their modern form, which historians, sociologists and other scholars endeavour to understand and analyze, so genocide contains special features in the modern era without which it could not be understood. Among these features one can list, for example, its overwhelming frequency in the modern era, its bureaucratic nature, its intimate connections to the formation of the modern nation and modern nation-state, 29 and many more. All this essential data is not even hinted at in the museum. Henceforth, almost the entire museum is dedicated to the Nazi era, , following more or less a chronological sequence. It portrays the continual escalation and radicalization of Nazi anti-jewish policies from the first anti-jewish decree in Nazi Germany through the persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe, the establishment of the ghettos, the mass murder by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, the death camps and the death marches. To this unfolding narrative of death many manifestations of Jewish collective and individual life and various kinds of resistance are integrated, presenting the internal Jewish life in major sites such as Germany, the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos and Theresienstadt. Throughout the exhibition, many video or written testimonies are displayed and are an important element of the museum. Here again, one can sense the aporia that pierces the narrative. Why does the persecution worsen? How were the decisions regarding the Jews made? How does one phase evolve into the next one? How were all obstacles overcome? None of these questions are addressed in the museum. This escalation is not explained and is presented as a natural continuum. The visitor gains the impression that this mass evil operates according to some internal logic shorn of an external context. The very minimal and elementary references to the war function here as mere general background and in no way provide even a partial historical context. This lack of historical context is felt all the more strongly when one compares this narrative to another Yad Vashem narrative 30 : Christopher Browning s (who is far from being a radical functionalist -oriented historian) comprehensive research on the final solution initiated and published by Yad Vashem as the most authoritative study on the issue (before Saul Friedländer s magnum opus). 31 This volume, The origins of the Final Solution: the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy, shows how gradual and complex the road to Auschwitz was and how so many minor steps had to be taken and obstacles technical and mental had to be overcome, to reach the final solution (a term that itself could be found in Nazi 194

10 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM documentation already in 1940 relating to other solutions rather than a total murder of the Jews 32 ). Obviously, I am aware that a museum exhibition is not a history book but here there is something very different at stake: what sort of story does the museum convey to the visitor? Does the exhibition, which pretends to be historical, portray a mono- and teleological narrative or does it address the challenge to gesture, even in a superficial or partial way, the multilayered and the non-teleological nature of history? The answer of the Yad Vashem display is categorical: none of the complexities were translated into the museum displays. On the contrary, the museum makes every effort to get the visitor to acknowledge that the road to the final solution was anything but complex. It is portrayed as determined and as already decided upon at a very early stage, although it is never explicitly said. Numerous examples could be given in support of this critique. For instance, at the end of the hall dedicated to the Jews in Nazi Germany , just before crossing over to the Poland display, a clip of Hitler s infamous speech of January 1939 is presented. The visitor cannot avoid this clip, which repeats over and over again Hitler s words that if international finance-jewry...should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! A lay visitor must conclude, contrary to all historical evidence and to the consensus among all historians, that the road to Auschwitz was already in January 1939 completely paved. 33 Another example is the display on the Lodz ghetto where Friedrich Übelhör s (the governor of the Kalisz-Lodz District) order from December 1939 on the closing of the ghetto is quoted in a very central place: The creation of the ghetto is only interim measure... the final aim must in any case be to totally cauterize this plague spot. Here again the average visitor who lacks historical knowledge is driven to conclude that the final solution ( the final aim ) is already planned but delayed while what Übelhör actually had in mind when saying this was the expulsion of the Jews from the Warthegau the annexed Polish area to the Reich. And, on the other hand, the absence, for example, of any reference to the plan to expel the Jews from Europe to the island of Madagascar (known as the Madagascar plan ), which was considered very seriously by the Nazis in the spring and summer of 1940, supports the same determinist mono-layered narrative. 34 It seems that the museum deliberately precludes any data that might confuse the visitor or hint that the issues at stake are a bit more complicated. The same goes for the 1941 exhibition. It seems, according to Browning, who summarizes what had been established by the historians of the final solution, that the mass killings of Jews in summer 1941, certainly until mid-july (some say mid-august), in the Soviet Union, were not yet part of the final solution (as is written on one of the museum s panels) but a Nazi terror policy of pacifying the occupied territories, waging a war against the partisans, and annihilating the Bolshevik elite. At this stage mostly Jewish men (not women and children) were murdered on mass scale. This was the last step in preparing the ground for the total and sweeping annihilation of all the Jews in the Soviet-occupied territories a few weeks later and before the decision to expand this policy to Europe as a 195

11 AMOS GOLDBERG whole was taken 35. Indeed, as Ian Kershaw (who in his recent books, on Hitler for example, came much closer to an intentionalist oriented stance) has recently put it, to speak of a decision may itself be misleading, in its implication of one finite moment when a precise pronouncement was delivered. A series of authorizations, each building cumulatively upon the last, is probably a more appropriate way of imagining what took place. 36 He continues: These [the stages leading to the final solution] did not follow explicit orders descending from the apex to the base of the pyramid. Rather, there was a complex interrelationship of green lights from action coming from above and initiatives taken from below, combining to produce a spiral of radicalization. 37 None of these or any of the many other historical complexities (e.g., Himmler s ethnic cleansing demographic policies in Poland in late 1939 and early 1940 that affected both Poles and Jews) are confronted in the museum. 38 Nor are the almost three million Soviet soldiers who were killed or starved to death in a time span of less than a year and at a rate of some 7,000 a day, mentioned, not to say displayed in the museum. Even if a museum ought not to resemble an academic or historiographical publication, nevertheless it should not and must not exempt itself from the task of coming to terms with some of the historical complexities of this extremely complex event. One might even say that it displays at the beginning of the third millennium a very narrow intentionalist approach which already in the mid-eighties was pretty much outdated in historiography. To my mind the museum exhibition should aspire to leave the visitor with the impression that the Holocaust is a very complex and multi-layered historical event (or multitude of events), even if not all the historical complexities could be represented in the museum. The curators of Yad Vashem s exhibition should have included what Jay Winter calls a historial approach, a midpoint between history and memorial, between academy and public commemoration or... between cold dispassionate precise history, to warm, evocative, messy memory. 39 Within such a historial approach, a totalizing and simplified narrative, which seems so distorting from the perspective of historical research, would have been avoided. In the case of the Holocaust, one could argue that it is not only a historical but also a very crucial ethical responsibility to avoid a narrow one dimensional historical narrative, one that is totalizing and too comprehensive in nature an overreaching authoritative historical narrative that pretends to be the one and only approach to the event. It is precisely the Final Solution, says Saul Friedländer, which allows postmodernist thinking to question the validity of any totalizing view of history, of any reference to a definable meta-discourse, thus opening the way for a multiplicity of equally valid approaches. 40 Further, the museum does not even deal seriously with the perpetrators or the bystanders. 41 To be sure, there are, scattered in the museum, some closed black boxes that contain inside or outside them a few dry and basic biographic details of some of the perpetrators. These texts are revealed once the boxes are opened by the visitor. This is to hint that the perpetrators were also human beings who had a biography. But this is really banal and almost meaningless in terms of historical impression. It does not and could not spare the historical and ethical need at 196

12 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM least to hint, if not to confront in one way or another, the burning historical, psychological, social, philosophical and ethical questions concerning the perpetrators 42. None of the questions concerning the processes that led to and /or enabled the final solution and the Holocaust are confronted in the museum neither on the level of policy nor of the individual. The story of the major protagonists of this historical event the doers is totally absent. 43 This omission is not just a misrepresentation; it is an anti-representation. Because the museum represents the deeds without the doers, and thus, even if unintentionally, it elevates the event to the mythic sphere; it portrays the event divorced from its worldly causes and effect dimensions and from the human sphere of reasoning and explanations. The events are a given, revealing some eternal truth about the world that is what defines a myth. The Holocaust as presented in the museum lacks its earthly dimensions. A historial approach is very much missing. This omission of any serious reference to the perpetrators is a striking curatorial policy. Because the premise, seemingly shared by the museum s implied narrator and imagined uninformed addressee, is that the Holocaust is an unprecedented if not a unique event, it is one that does not lend itself intuitively to reason. It is a huge and catastrophic historical question; and this is why we build, visit and honour such a museum to commemorate this event. Such a premise calls for an explanation, a desire to understand, to start filling the gap of disbelief 44 ; how did that happen? And precisely this question is avoided altogether in the museum. Hence, one can conclude that the museum not only fails to fill in these gaps, but that its dense, linear, perhaps even teleological, determinist and certainly very authoritative narrative actually discourages such gaps from erupting. It must be added that this kind of critique could be directed to other Holocaust museums, as the Ruth Klüger (a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz) quotation in the epigraph to this article indicates: they [Holocaust museums and sites] don t take you in, they spit you out. Moreover, they tell you what you ought to think... They impede the critical faculty 45 ; or as Ross Poole writes in regard to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC: there are very few museums that so rigorously control the order and direction in which they are experienced. 46 All this makes my critique even more pertinent and urgent especially when there are other museums (usually the smaller ones) that take a very different approach (for example the Ghetto Fighters House new exhibition or the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust). Moreover, the Yad Vashem museum is a very strong player in this field of Holocaust public representation, also having a key influential role at a global level. And it is here that such authoritative and reductionist tendencies are most severe because, while Pool writes in his critique of the USHMM that it fails in its genuine effort to link the Holocaust to other global catastrophes, 47 the Yad Vashem museum does not seem to even make an effort. Empathy and authority The architecture of the museum certainly sustains such a non-explanatory and authoritative experience. The museum is situated within a huge memorial 197

13 AMOS GOLDBERG complex that seems to be dominated by one major architectural principal: greatness. Everything is imposing as in forms of very authoritative architecture, where one is expected to subordinate oneself to a higher authority. A monumental arch, ( the wall of the survivors ) welcomes the visitor into a huge imperial piazza (Figure 2). The visiting centre the entrance to the museum campus, is designed in a shape of a Greek temple made of massive bare concrete 48 (Figure 3). In this authoritative vein, the museum contains only one very long visitors path that twists and turns along. The visitor can opt out at only one point at a midpoint in the display (which is actually an emergency exit) and, unless leaving the museum altogether, cannot skip virtually any of its exhibitions. The exhibitions themselves are overloaded with pictures, video clips, artifacts and explanatory panels exposing their ambition to capture the Holocaust in its totality, to produce an ultimate summa interpretation of the Catastrophe, to quote Ksenia Polouektova s relevant critique of the USHMM in Washington. 49 The design of the museum itself consists of a prism-like triangular structure that penetrates the mountain from one side to the other, with both ends dramatically cantilevering into the open air. 50 The visitor enters the museum via a bridge (Figure 4) and ends it on the verge of the abyss (Figure 4). When one enters the museum, one is literally disconnected from the earthly, everyday world. The logic that functions here is not the one that functions there. One has to cross a bridge and go underneath the ground to a place where the gaps in the narrative are taken for granted and lose their disturbing nature. Only there is the visitor invited to confront the Holocaust. It could be argued, then, that the pact between the narrator of the museum s narrative and its imagined addressee (the visitor) is based on an authoritative non- Q1 Figure 2. The wall of the survivors (# author) 198

14 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM Figure 3. The Yad Vashem visiting centre (# author) Figure 4. The museum and the bridge leading to its entrance (# author) 199

15 AMOS GOLDBERG explanatory narrative an assumed mutual desire not to understand. The imagined visitor should not expect and is not expected to receive information that confronts the why and the how of the events to fill in as much as possible the historical gaps. This pact would not even allow her to sense the uneasiness of any ambivalence. The horrifying events appear naturally, as if coming from nowhere. Or in other words, the visitor does not attend the museum to gain even partial historical understanding and meaning but in order to experience something else. This something else is disconnected from earthly meaning and is elevated by the means I just mentioned to the sphere of a sacred and authoritative myth. But what is its nature? As mentioned above, the museum, according to its website, presents the story of the Shoah from a unique Jewish perspective, emphasizing the experiences of the individual victims through original artifacts, survivor testimonies and personal possessions. 51 This means that the museum s major task is telling an historical story by bearing witness to the victim or, to be more precise, bearing witness to the Jewish victim who is the major and only protagonist of the catastrophic narrative. Bearing witness to the victim and being able to feel empathy towards his or her story is of course a major ethical imperative. 52 The individual voices, however, almost never challenge in their individuality the authoritative historical narrative of Yad Vashem s public version as it is represented in the narrative and physical design of the museum. They were very well chosen and for the most part only in order to support, illustrate or elaborate on the totalizing narrative. Very rarely do they somehow challenge, undermine, subvert or even expose ambivalence, as is usually the case with individual voices. Those voices are almost totally subordinated to the overall very stiff historical narrative. They are not dialogical in the Bakhtinian sense of the term 53 and therefore lose their individual nature. One can also wonder what groups and issues are included in this Jewish perspective and in what ways? And which ones are left out? Initially, for example, the display lacked almost any reference to Jewish religious experiences, rabbis, institutions and activities although major sections of the Jews, mostly in Eastern Europe, were observant orthodox Jews. Only after a long struggle was this slightly changed. 54 One can also mention the fact that except for three, all video testimonies are in Hebrew. 55 Obviously, this is due to the fact that Yad Vashem made use of its own rich video testimony archival resources, which are mostly in Hebrew. But nonetheless this gives the impression that Hebrew is the only Jewish language of the victims and survivors whereas in fact only a tiny fraction of the Jews in Europe spoke Hebrew during the Holocaust. Many of them, particularly from Eastern Europe, spoke Yiddish and other languages as well. The focus on Hebrew is therefore a Zionization of the Jewish perspective that excludes other spoken languages and perspectives (except for Yiddish which appears here and there on the display but not in the videos). One can also wonder what image of Jewish life is portrayed in the displays and to what extent the museum was courageous enough to even hint at less flattering aspects of Jewish reality during the Holocaust, such as corruption, lack of 200

16 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM solidarity, Jewish collaborators, huge tensions within the Jewish society, radical internal critique of the Jewish leadership and Jewish police, moral breakdowns, the loss of shame, and so on, which so densely populate Jewish writings? The answer is that except for a very mild hint at the radical, problematic case of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Lodz ghetto Judenrat, nothing in the display gestures to these issues that so strongly emphasized and intensively discussed in writings from the time of the Holocaust. These aspects are excluded in order to construct a glorifying and heroic image of Jewish life in the Holocaust. 56 To a certain extent, it is understandable in a national museum but it could hardly be considered historical. Nonetheless, such an image makes it much easier for the visitor to bear witness and to identify with the victim. But if to bear witness is in one way or another to identify with the victim while giving up confronting in any way the historicity of Jewish life in the Holocaust, especially as was described above, or the diverse logic or reasoning of the events as they were carried out by the Nazis (as if one cannot do both), then we can say that in psychoanalytic terms we are in the domain of melancholia and not the realm of mourning. I use the term melancholic in a very specific sense as was articulated by Eric Santner, 57 following Freud s famous 1919 essay Mourning and Melancholia. 58 This melancholic memory is based on narcissistic processes of identification with the victim which seeks to eliminate from the narrative any otherness 59 that interrupts this identification. In this sense, the Yad Vashem Jewish narrative is self-contained and is closed to any otherness of historicity that makes the story much more complex, and therefore becomes, as I claim, a mythic narrative. As demonstrated, it excludes very much of the Jewish experience and almost every non-jewish otherness from itself: no non-jewish background and context, no previous genocides and mass annihilation, no racism, no colonies, no perpetrators and almost no bystanders. Indeed, almost no non-jewish victims during the Holocaust as well. 60 Presented is a very simple though extremely melodramatic story. There is only one reason for all this antisemitism and from here on the story rolls down automatically and teleologically to its catastrophic end, eliminating every element that might make it even a little more complex. In such a story, as is the case in every melodrama, one completely identifies with the victims but gains a very shallow understanding of the world. Though very narcissistic and problematic, it is also understandable why the victim group of a massive historical trauma like the Holocaust tends to adopt such a melancholic narrative, relinquishing any attempt to integrate other perspectives, even in a very limited way. Moreover, this narrative also makes perfect sense in the Israeli context where remembering the Holocaust, as Idith Zertal so forcefully indicated, 61 is perhaps the major pillar of current Israeli victimized identity, 62 and where such identity has proven itself to be an extremely powerful and useful diplomatic tool in gaining international support in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict and in maintaining the occupation in Palestine. This way of reasoning functions inwards and outwards as very efficient regime of justification (This is of course not to say that Holocaust 201

17 AMOS GOLDBERG memory in Israel is just that. It should certainly not be reduced solely to the political dimension). But it seems that this tendency to experience Holocaust memory by almost exclusively and entirely identifying with the (Jewish) victim is a much broader cultural phenomenon that tends to dominate many of the major Holocaust representations for example, the Berlin memorial exhibition, the recently inaugurated Bergen-Belsen site or even Saul Friedländer s two volume Holocaust history. 63 All examples draw heavily on the victim s voice as a/the central epistemological perspective of Holocaust history and memory. They all somehow manipulate their addressee first and foremost and at times even exclusively to experience intense identification with the victims. So the question that arises is why? Why would non-jews, as part of an ethical and cultural habitus, also tend to identify so extremely with a narrative that places such strong emphasis on the affect of empathy and identification with the Jewish victims? Or to put it differently: why does the Israeli national (perhaps even chauvinistic) version of the Jewish narrative so closely correlate to the global allegedly cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as they both take as their focal point the Jewish victims perspective? The answer is undoubtedly complex and multilayered and it is connected to, at least partially, much broader global cultural trends. I will attempt very briefly to identify a few of these trends. First, it is part of a much larger ethical trend of memorials worldwide, as Bickford and Sodaro have indicated, to (re)humanize the victim and to emphasize with him. Thus for example: At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, the mug shots of the prisoners are displayed, at once making the victims individual human beings, and demonstrating the scale of the atrocities. By looking into each victim s frightened, defiant or resigned eyes, the visitor cannot help but empathize and identify with the victims. 64 However, this trend itself is undoubtedly intimately connected, to the era of the witness, as the French historian Annette Wieviorka has so accurately named our times 65 an era in which every historical or newsworthy event is mediated to the public by the victims and the eyewitness. This era should be understood within the cultural context of contemporary, strong processes of thoroughly melodramatizing the public sphere. As film scholar Thomas Elsaesser has claimed, the role of the victim became a desirable position of universal acceptance and recognition in contemporary societies. In a world devoid of legitimate heroic action and convincing emancipatory narratives, the victim seems to become the only viable moral social position he has become the new hero of this era. 66 It is an era that gave rise to what Eva Illouz calls the homo sentimentalis in a culture that has adopted a fundamentally therapeutic narrative of the self. She regards this as one of the most prevailing features of current Western culture. 67 We can sense these processes everywhere: as Illuz herself had shown in the popularity of the Oprah Winfrey Show 68 but also in the ways which terror attacks are reported in the media, in documentaries, and in Holocaust museums all over the world. In other words, in a culture addicted to the excessive, the Holocaust witness and victim might be considered as emblematic or even paradigmatic of this newly born homo sentimentalis. 202

18 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM But there is of course more to it. I would like to suggest that the answer should be looked for, at least partially, on the political level, since Holocaust memory plays a very dominant political role as reflected so clearly in the above-mentioned fact that the Yad Vashem inauguration ceremony was actually a political and diplomatic event much more than a cultural or educational one. Consider one speaker s the Turkish minister of justice Cemil Cicek s speech (this speech was given before the current crisis between Israel and Turkey): it might be illuminating because one would not expect Turkey to feel bound to such Holocaust discourse and memory. The Holocaust has nothing to do with Turkey but nevertheless, as a country that had been knocking at that time on Europe s doors, it made every effort to adopt Europe s ethical political discourse. Here is what he said: Yad Vashem is not a place serving only mourning. It is a place of humanity. Here, we must recall the lessons of history for a purpose. And the purpose is that the lessons learned must be passed on from one generation to the next, and we must understand, all of us, that we should never allow genocide in any form to happen again. We must learn our lesson from the Holocaust: Despising or dehumanizing any religion or people should not be permitted. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, antismitism, Islamophobia, Christiana-phobia [sic], xenophobia are all historical yet contemporary evils that we all share a solemn responsibility to combat. 69 It is noteworthy here that just two months later Cicek, one of the most fervent Turkish nationalist deniers of the Armenian genocide, accused Bosphorus University as stabbing the back of the Turkish people for holding a conference on Ottoman Armenians while expressing regret that he had given up the rights to bring such cases to court. 70 Hence, a question that might be posed is: why was Turkey, which itself (in its former political entity as the Ottoman Empire) committed a genocide that it still refuses to acknowledge, invited to the ceremonies while no Armenian, Rwandan, Roma or Sinti, Cambodian or other representative of genocide victim nations was invited to attend let alone speak in these ceremonies? This question could be broadened so as to ask: why is no other genocide commemorated or at least mentioned (without taking centre stage) in the museum itself as is done, for example, in the Kigali Genocide Center in Rwanda? 71 This centre naturally places special emphasis on the genocide that took place there in Without, however, undermining this local focus it dedicates, as an ethical gesture, a hall and a garden to commemorate other genocides, including the Shoah. 72 But this is not my main question. My question pertains to the structure and function of Yad Vashem s Holocaust discourse and narrative that enables, or even obliges Turkey to partake in it for it to be considered a member of the civilized world. One can clearly identify a double discourse here. For the Turks, acknowledging the Jewish genocide functions as a means of forgetting another genocide the one in which they themselves were involved. Here they are, standing in Yad Vashem, condemning the Holocaust and all genocides, opposing all hatred and thereby proving that they belong to the civilized family of nations. In a sense, they are willing to mourn the Jewish victim, while avoiding or, even better, to avoid the mourning of the Armenian victims and taking any responsibility for 203

19 AMOS GOLDBERG their extermination. They prefer to identify with the Jew who was for them at that time an imagined other and avoid confronting their real other the Armenian. At Yad Vashem, the Turks could maintain a liberal humanistic discourse by bearing witness to the Jews while avoiding, almost cynically, their own real involvement in genocide that contradicts this very discourse. In this sense Cicek s speech bears the same logic as that of the psychoanalytical screen memory 73 the Turks remember something in order to forget something else. Or even more so it demonstrates the logic of melodrama we already mentioned. When speaking about Anne Frank, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno recalled a German woman who reacted by saying that at least this girl should have been saved, implying that the others could have perished. 74 This is the most dangerous outcome of melodrama. According to the Israeli literary critic Yitzhak Laor, who has produced a thorough study of English melodrama, this genre focuses on the misery of a single individual or family that, more than it extracts tears, remains silent about a greater suffering that prevails all around. It is constituted from a kind of identification that does not demand any real moral action. 75 In a way, contemporary Holocaust memory lends itself to this kind of identification. It tends to oblige one to identify with the Jewish victim when Jews collectively and many times individually are no longer the victims of history but now rather legitimate historical agents, organized in strong prosperous and influential political frameworks (as the state of Israel and various Jewish organizations), and to often withhold empathy toward currently suffering victims; mostly those whose just case contradicts cynical political considerations and who are relatively powerless in the international arena (as the Jews were during the thirties and forties when they really needed this empathy). 76 This logic should undoubtedly be understood within the framework of cynical reason, which is very commonplace in contemporary politics of justification. 77 The state of Israel, as I already mentioned, has used the memory of the Holocaust for decades to refute any criticism of its 1948 Nakba or the severe deprivation and violation of fundamental collective and individual human and civil rights of the Palestinians. 78 (I shall stress again: this is of course not to say that Holocaust memory in Israel lacks traumatic authenticity and can only be reduced to political manipulation. 79 ) Germany, Europe and the United States in their Middle East policy undoubtedly play out this logic along with Israel. 80 But perhaps there is more to it. Perhaps this is emblematic of something more general and fundamental? A reassuring narrative? The historian Charles Maier argued that two great narratives dominate the imagination of the West in understanding modernity both of them locate a catastrophe at their very core. 81 The first one is the democratic narrative and it relates fundamentally to the Holocaust. Here the Shoah is perceived as an eruption of barbaric forces that tried to interdict the teleological course of the West towards modernity, which means towards a more liberal and democratic existence. It 204

20 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM was the Nazis who committed these atrocities, and as long as we stick to our democratic values and strengthen our civil society while moderating radical ideological trends, we can protect ourselves from slipping into criminality, thereby reinforcing our identity as the good guys, the upholders of democracy and freedom. Paradoxically then, this is a reassuring narrative. The second narrative relates to another catastrophe: the colonial and postcolonial experience of the West. Colonialism, according to this narrative, exemplifies the immanent dark and murderous side of our modern Western civilization. The post-colonial narrative has sustained its criticism of Western societies and their liberal democracies for their ongoing actual and structural involvement in acts of domination, racism, extreme violence, and criminality. Broadly speaking, one may say that during the 1950s and early 1960s these two narratives served, at least for some intellectuals, as political narratives and were closely bound up with each other. This is clearly apparent in the work of Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Alain Resnais, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charlotte Delbo and many others. 82 But for the last few decades, the fact of the matter is that these two narratives the postcolonial critical narrative and the post-holocaust lamenting but in a way reassuring narrative barely and very seldom coincide. It is true that in the last decade and a half these two narratives somehow intersect again but still only very partially and mostly in relatively narrow academic and civil circles that tend towards liberal or left politics. 83 I wish to suggest that perhaps the imperative, so forcefully presented in Yad Vashem, to identify with the Jewish victims, plays a role in turning the Holocaust into a reassuring narrative that disguises modernity s and the West s dark side. Instead of historicizing and contextualizing the traumatic events and confronting those catastrophic elements in modern history and in modernity as such, which were the contexts within which the Holocaust occurred, this reassuring narrative reverts to the easy path of a melancholic, quasi-sublime catharsis, achieved by identifying with the horrible fate of the victims of the past. 84 Or as Ross Poole has bluntly put it: Though we feel horror at the images, we can comfort ourselves with the secret satisfaction deriving from our own sense of moral goodness in recognizing that horror. The cultural circulation of Holocaust horrors can all too easily become moral kitsch. 85 I would even go so far as to suggest that it is easy to identify with the Jewish victim when there are so few Jews in Europe today compared to their presence in the nineteenth century and especially from 1919 to 1939 (when many of them in West European countries were refugees, escapees and unwanted poor immigrants from Eastern Europe), and when Jews, as I said before collectively and many times individually are no longer the victims of history but rather fully autonomous and sovereign historical and individual agents. One can also doubt whether the Jews could still be perceived as others any more in regard to Europe, since they are more and more related to, at least in large parts of the mainstream elites discourse, as part of the Judeo-Christian heritage. As the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, representing the presidency of the EU declared in a press conference in March 2007 to mark the signature of the Declaration of 205

21 AMOS GOLDBERG Berlin, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Economic Community, the Judeo-Christian values... sustain the EU... we are marked by this Judeo-Christian past. 86 In this regard, one should also mention the great achievement of recent decades of antisemitism becoming completely banned as a taboo from political life and the formal and the perceived as civilized public sphere at least in the United States 87 and Western Europe but to a large extent also in places like Poland and the Czech Republic (but certainly not in places like Croatia and Ukraine, and in any case this of course does not mean that it is not liable to recur). Hence, Jews have become historical agents with whom it is relatively easy to identify. They are increasingly perceived as part of the West s collective we and are no longer the other with whom it is difficult to identify. Perhaps this unearned identification with the Jewish victim, to borrow Dominick LaCapra s term, 88 serves to silence or minimize, as I just mentioned, empathy toward currently suffering victims an empathy that demands moral and political strength and a far more courageous and complex worldly engagement. 89 If my hypothesis is valid, then one can sense here a correspondence between the victims narrative and the Western narrative. For very different reasons, both narratives wish to frame the Holocaust within a Jewish discourse exclusively privileging the place of antisemitism over racism or any other historical context (as I mentioned above), and the Jewish victims over other groups of victims of Nazism or of other European political experiences. But one has to be very cautious about such identifications, because as LaCapra warns us: It may remain within a quasi-sacrificial scapegoat mechanism whereby the victim of the past becomes the redeeming figure of the present with whom one identifies. 90 What is more, this quasi-sacrificial scapegoat mechanism is already implicitly and on a structural level (though not in its content) at work in the museum itself through exclusionary relations to any otherness of what the museum presumes as the Jewish narrative. By that, it unintentionally repeats within itself this sacrificial exclusionary logic. Every otherness of historicity that interferes with the closed and self-contained (one may even say narcissistic or even chauvinistic) narrative is radically reduced or removed altogether. 91 The result is a mythic narrative of antisemitism and victimhood that cannot be penetrated by history but only invites or even demands identification. Its political lesson is displayed in the last hall of the exhibition dedicated to the aftermath of the Holocaust. Almost nothing is said about the survivors who emigrated to countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia or South America. Nothing is said about the majority of them, those who decided or were forced to stay in Europe in the first years after the war (except that they were still persecuted, as in the 1946 Kielce pogrom) but much is made of their emigration to Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. The museum exhibit s narrative conclusion brings this logic to its peak. The display ends with a beautiful viewers balcony, constructed as if floating in the air on the verge of the abyss and from which the beautiful scenery of the blooming 206

22 THE YAD VASHEM GLOBAL HOLOCAUST MUSEUM Judaic hills and villages is seen (Figure 5). 92 The whole story is now redeemed with this uplifting, beautiful natural and Zionist view and the visitor, after reaching this cathartic point, can sigh with relief thank goodness this metaphysical drama has a happy ending. The visitor is reassured again, in a way that is very similar to what Saul Friedländer called the elevating combination of kitsch and death precisely kitsch and death that, as he defines it, is the striking combination of radical atrocities with pastoral pacifying images. 93 The overwhelmingly shocking experience evoked by the fundamentally de-contextualized exhibitions turns into an elevating experience that lacks any real historically, politically or ethically disturbing notions relevant to real life. This is what some theoreticians have called a redemptive narrative: seeking to redeem the whole traumatic and catastrophic otherness of the story by suppressing it in its happy elevating ending. The political and ethical dangers of such redemptive narratives are discussed at length by these theoreticians. 94 I will not repeat this discussion here but will only say that such redemptive narratives are so uplifting (many times in a melancholic or even melodramatic way) and so emotionally charged for the groups that adopt them as their political narrative (precisely because they are redemptive) that they tend to be extremely authoritative and nonnegotiable. In times of political conflicts this might prove to be very dangerous. 95 The display comes full circle in the elimination of every form of otherness from the historical narrative of the museum no context (only very little background of WWII), no historical roots (except for antisemitism), no real human Figure 5. The scene from the viewer s balcony at the end of the museum (# author) 207