Abstract
“Orange visits Auschwitz!” reads a Dutch newspaper headline on June 6, 2012, shortly before the start of the Union of European Football Association’s (UEFA) Championship in Poland and Ukraine, referring to the visit of the national football team to the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The young, international sportsmen were deeply moved when entering the gate of Auschwitz I and walking along the ramp of Birkenau. Some players called it an “unbelievable” and “indescribable experience,” an impression confirmed by photographs made by invited press agencies.1 Interestingly, only a month earlier during the commemorations of the Second World War in the Netherlands on May 4–5, a comparable media hype occurred when the well-known deejay and artist Ruud de Wild went to Auschwitz with his crew. The idea had come up shortly after Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, with a “spontaneous” call-out during his weekly radio broadcast. While chatting with one of his sidekicks, De Wild told his listeners that his nine-year-old daughter had asked him what he knew about Anne Frank. Never having visited the Amsterdam Anne Frank House, this made him think: “Shameful, I’ve not even been in a concentration camp. And I’ve done really everything!” Explaining his own ignorance by an unwillingness to share his emotions “with an old mister with 200 medals putting down a floral wreath,” he made a decision.
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Notes
Margriet Oostveen, “DJ in Auschwitz,” NRC-Handelsblad, February 3, 2012.
ThetextoftheStockholmDeclarationquotedfromthelTFwebsite:http://www.holocausttaskforce.org/about-the-itf/stockholm-declaration.html (accessed January 26, 2013); see also Jens Kroh, “Erinnerungskultureller Akteur und geschichtspolitisches Netzwerk. Die ‘Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research,’” in Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive, ed. Jan Eckel und Claudia Moisel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 156–73; and Harald Schmid, “Europäisierung des Auschwitzgedenkens? Zum Aufstieg des 27. Januar 1945 als ‘Holocaustgedenktags’ in Europa,” in ibid., 174–202.
See Robert Jan van Pelt, “January 27, 1945 AD / 13 Shevat, 5705 AM. A Defining Moment in Modern European History?” (lecture presented at the conference “Remembering for the Future,” Copenhagen, April 26–27, 2012).
Years before the UN’s General Assembly supported the ITF in its mission by establishing Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27 was introduced in France in 1995 as a national commemoration day of the anti-Semitic crimes of the Vichy regime, and unified Germany followed in 1997 with a Holocaust Memorial Day. See Aleida Assmann, “Europe: A Community of Memory?” GHI Bulletin 40 (Spring 2007): 11–25, and her recent essay Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gedächtniskultur? (Vienna: Picus, 2012).
Marloes de Koning, “Hongarije is geen kolonie van de EU,” NRC Handelsblad (March 16, 2012).
See Rob van der Laarse, “Archaeology of Memory: Europe’s Holocaust Dissonances in East and West,” in Heritage Reinvents Europe, ed. Dirk Callebaut, Jan Mařik, and Jana Mařiková. EAC Occasional Paper No. 7 (Budapest: Archaeolingua, 2013), 117–26.
Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000).
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994);
see also Zygmunt Bauman, “A Century of Camps,” in Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 192–205.
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–28, here 110–13.
Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), originally published in French under the title Porteur de mémoires: Sur les traces de la Shoah par balles (Neuilly-sur-Seine: Lafon, 2007).
See David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Gregory Ashworth, “Heritage and the Consumption of Places,” in Bezeten van Vroeger: Erfgoed, Toerisme en Identiteit, ed. Rob van der Laarse (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2005), 193–206;
and Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007). See also Laurie Beth Clark on memorial museum objects in chapter 8.
Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 402–03.
See the introduction to De Dynamiek van de Herinnering: Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog in een Internationale Context, ed. Frank van Vree and Rob van der Laarse (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2009), 7–16.
See John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), and idem, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 36–39.
See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California, 1998);
and Rob van der Laarse, De Oorlog als Beleving: Over de Musealisering en Enscenering van Holocaust-Erfgoed (Amsterdam: Reinwardt Academie, 2011). See also Geneviève Zubrzycki’s discussion of Jewish ghetto tourism in chapter 5.
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Henrik Skov Kristensen, “Challenges of a Memorial,” in The Power of the Object: Museums and World War II, ed. Esben Kjeldbæk (Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc, 2009), 168–97, here 183–84.
Sarah Farmer, “Symbols That Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen,” Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 97–119, here 115.
Patrizia Violi, “Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 1 (2012): 36–75, here 39, 70.
See Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006).
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and Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Kunzel, “The Dutch in the Occupied East and the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 55–80.
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Henrik Skov Kristensen, “Frøslev 1944–1945 / Fårhus 1946–1949: Same Camp, Two Narratives” (contribution to the workshop “‘Forgotten’ War and Occupation Heritage: Shedding Light on the Darkness,” McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK, August 25–26, 2012).
See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
A glass wall of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s 2006 exhibition lists the “names of the 69,842 verified victims so far,” as compared to the number of 80,000 in Nevenko Bartulin, “The Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and its Policies towards Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia,” PhD diss., University of South Wales, 2006, 383, and the recent upgrade from 80,000 to 100,000 victims at the FAQ page of Jasenovac’s official memorial website, http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=7619 (accessed March 6, 2013).
The Serbian Jasenovac Research Institute still estimates the number of Jasenovac’s victims at about 800,000, including 20,000 Jews, of a total of about 30,000 Jews killed on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia by Ustaše and Germans; Jaša Romano, “Jews of Yugoslavia 1941–1945. Victims of Genocide and Freedom Fighters,” cited from the English summary of Jevreji Jugoslavije 1941–1945. Zrtve Genocida I Učesnici Narodnooslobodilačkog Rata (Belgrad: Jevrejski Istorijski Muzej, Saveza Jevrejskih Opstina Jugoslavije, 1980), 573–90. https://vhl.nethosting.com/çlituchy/images/jews_of_yugoslavia_1941_1945.pdf (accessed March 6, 2013).
See Jovan Skendžić, “‘Far More Than Shameless’: A Survivor Talks about Croatia’s ‘Museum’ at Jasenovac,” interview with Smilja Tišma (Belgrade), President, Organization of Survivors (February 5, 2007), http://emperorsclothes.com/interviews/tisma.htm (accessed January 29, 2013),
and Pål Kolstø, “The Serbian-Croatian Controversy over Jasenovac,” in Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet and Ola Listhaug (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 226–41.
Nataša Jovičić, “Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s Permanent Exhibition—The Victim as an Individual,” Croatian Institute of History 2, no. 1 (2006): 295–99, here 295.
Jovičić, “Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s Permanent Exhibition,” 296; on Allied photography, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
and Frank van Vree, “Indigestible Images. On the Ethics and Limits of Representation,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, ed. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 257–86.
Jovičić, “Jasenovac Memorial Museum’s Permanent Exhibition, 295–96, and her contribution “Jasenovac Memorial Museum: The Victim as an Individual” (contribution at the workshop “‘Forgotten War’ and Occupation Heritage: Shedding Light on the Darkness,” McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK, August 25–26, 2012). See also Tony Judt, “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus 121, no. 4 (1992): 83–118, here 106.
Stef Jansen, “The Violence of Memories: Local Narratives of the Past after Ethnic Cleansing in Croatia,” Rethinking History 6, no. 1 (2002): 77–94.
Nataša Mataušić, Jasenovac. The Brief History (Jasenovac, undated), 65; based on Nataša Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945. Logorsmrti i radni logor (Jasenovac-Zagreb: Javna ustanova Spomen-područje Jasenovac, 2003).
See David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centered Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 160–80;
and John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar, Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).
See Ljiljana Radonic, Krieg um die Erinnerung: Kroatische Vergangenheitspolitik zwischen Revisionismus und europäischen Standards (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009).
“Julija Kos sent a [sic] Information letter to the ambassadors about poor Exhibitions on Jasenovac Museum”, Margelov Institut, http://blog.dnevnik.hr/margelinstitute/2010/04/1627415776/julija-kos-sent-a-information-letter-to-the-ambassadors-about-poor-exhibitions-on-jasenovac-museum.html (accessed March 6, 2013).
Nataša Mataušić, “Answer to Julija Kos’ ‘Jasenovac Concentration Camp Today, History Re-Written,’” http://www.academia.edu/1324286/Natasa_Matausic_Answer_to_Julija_Kos_Jasenovac_Concentration_Camp_Today_History_Re-written (accessed March 6, 2013).
Jonathan Lis, “President of Croatia Apologizes to Jewish Holocaust Victims,” Haaretz (February 15, 2012), http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/presidentof-croatia-apologizes-to-jewish-holocaust-victims-1.413109 (accessed January 31, 2013).
Britt Baillie, “Chronocentrism and Remembrance as Resistance: The Dudik Memorial Complex” (contribution to the workshop “‘Forgotten War’ and Occupation Heritage: Shedding Light on the Darkness,” McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK, August 25–26, 2012).
Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 331.
Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 287.
See Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Alexander Etkind, “Mapping Memory Events in the East European Space,” East European Memory Studies Newsletter 1 (2010): 4–5.
James E. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pyne, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2007).
See Orner Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
My translation into English from the Dutch edition: Jáchym Topol, De werkplaats van de duivel, trans. from the Czech by Edgar de Bruin (Amsterdam: Anthos 2010), 115. For the English edition, see The Devil’s Workshop, trans. Alex Zucker (London: Granta, 2013).
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van der Laarse, R. (2013). Beyond Auschwitz? Europe’s Terrorscapes in the Age of Postmemory. In: Silberman, M., Vatan, F. (eds) Memory and Postwar Memorials. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_5
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