From Stockholm to Stockton: The Holocaust and/as Heritage in Britain

Abstract

Reviewing the musical Imagine This for The Guardian, Michael Billington wrote: ‘they said it couldn’t be done: a musical about the Warsaw ghetto. And now that I’ve seen it, I know that they were right’.¹ A few weeks later in the same newspaper, Anne Karpf suggested that one could be forgiven for thinking that every day was Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in the United Kingdom. The plethora of Holocaust-related films and other ‘cultural’ events (I use the term loosely, to include the musical of the Warsaw Ghetto and other such ill-considered phenomena) indicated to Karpf that there is an excess of attention being paid to the Holocaust and that, especially at a time when Israel was pounding the life out of the Gaza Strip, such attention is unjustified. Karpf, unintentionally recapitulating a standard trope of British responses, writes that we have ‘now become saturated with images and accounts of the Holocaust’.²