Postcards from Auschwitz
Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
The uneasy link between tourism and collective memory at Holocaust museums and memorials
Each year, millions of people visit Holocaust memorials and museums, with the number of tourists steadily on the rise. What lies behind the phenomenon of "Holocaust tourism" and what role do its participants play in shaping how we remember and think about the Holocaust?
In Postcards from Auschwitz, Daniel P. Reynolds argues that tourism to former concentration camps, ghettos, and other places associated with the Nazi genocide of European Jewry has become an increasingly vital component in the evolving collective remembrance of the Holocaust. Responding to the tendency to dismiss tourism as commercial, superficial, or voyeuristic, Reynolds insists that we take a closer look at a phenomenon that has global reach, takes many forms, and serves many interests.
The book focuses on some of the most prominent sites of mass murder in Europe, and then expands outward to more recent memorial museums. Reynolds provides a historically-informed account of the different forces that have shaped Holocaust tourism since 1945, including Cold War politics, the sudden emergence of the "memory boom" beginning in the 1980s, and the awareness that eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are passing away. Based on his on-site explorations, the contributions from researchers in Holocaust studies and tourism studies, and the observations of tourists themselves, this book reveals how tourism is an important part of efforts to understand and remember the Holocaust, an event that continues to challenge ideals about humanity and our capacity to learn from the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reynolds, professor of modern languages at Grinnell College, incisively scrutinizes the intersection of tourism and Holocaust remembrance in this revealing book. He first questions how sites associated with the Holocaust interact with the tourism industry, defending that industry against claims that all disaster tourism is superficial or voyeuristic. He then discusses how representations of the Holocaust at heavily visited locations (such as Auschwitz and Dachau) have evolved over time as knowledge and political agendas have changed, addressing specifically the "memory boom" of the 1990s that helped spur the refashioning of many sites into museums. At lesser-known sites, such as Chelmno and Sobibor, he explores the different approaches to preservation and discusses whether commemoration alters history. Cities central to the Holocaust enter his view, too, as Reynolds outlines the dilemmas in Warsaw posed by the desire to commemorate both Polish Catholic and Jewish victims of Nazi aggression while acknowledging Polish complicity. In Berlin, "counter-memorials" (purposefully inconspicuous memorials that aim to question the idea of memorialization) invite alternative interpretations of history, while Israel's Yad Vashem offers a redemptive narrative for those lost during the Holocaust and Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust Museum reveals, in Reynolds's view, an anxiety about Holocaust memory in a period when eyewitnesses are dying. Reynolds covers a wide range of issues, handling his subject carefully and thoroughly. While he sometimes belabors his points, he raises important questions about history, tourism, and genocide.
