Diana I . Popescu

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.

Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just "learners". Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as "agents of memory", endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.


Table of Contents
Introduction: Visitors at Holocaust Museums and Memory sites
Diana I. Popescu

Part I: Visitor Experience in Museum Spaces

Mobile Memory; or What Visitors Saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum               
Michael Bernard-Donals

Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights: TripAdvisor Responses to the Topography of Terror (Berlin) and the Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen)
Stephan Jaeger

"Really made you feel for the Jews who went through this terrible time in History" Holocaust Audience Re-mediation and Re-narrativization at the Florida Holocaust Museum
Chaim Noy

Understanding Visitors’ Bodily Engagement with Holocaust Museum Architecture: A Comparative Empirical Research at three European Museums
Xenia Tsiftsi

Attention Please: The Tour Guide is Here to Speak Out. The Role of the Israeli Tour Guide at Holocaust Sites in Israel
Yael Shtauber, Yaniv Poria, and Zehavit Gross

The Impact of Emotions, Empathy, and Memory in Holocaust exhibitions: A Study of the National Holocaust Centre & Museum in Nottinghamshire, and the Jewish Museum in London
Sofia Katharaki

The Affective Entanglements of the Visitor Experience at Holocaust Sites and Museums                       
Adele Nye and Jennifer Clark
　

Part II: Digital Engagement Inside and Outside the Museum and Memory Site

"…It no longer is the same place": Exploring Realities in the Memorial Falstad Centre with the ‘Falstad Digital Reconstruction and V/AR Guide’
Anette Homlong Storeide

"Ways of seeing". Visitor response to Holocaust Photographs at ‘The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust’ Exhibition
Diana I. Popescu and Maiken Umbach

Dachau from a Distance: The Liberation during The COVID-19 Pandemic
Kate Marrison

Curating the Past: Digital Media and Visitor Experiences at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Christoph Bareither

Diversity, Digital Programming, and the Small Holocaust Education Centre: Examining Paths and Obstacles to Visitor Experience
Laura Beth Cohen and Cary Lane

Part III: Visitors at Former Camp Sites

The Unanticipated Visitor: A Case Study of Response and Poetry at Sites of Holocaust Memory
Anna Veprinska

"Did you have a good trip?" Young people’s Reflections on Visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Town of Oświęcim
Alasdair Richardson

Rewind, Relisten, Rethink: The Value of Audience Reception for Grasping Art’s Efficacy                            Tanja Schult
"The value of being there" -Visitor Experiences at German Holocaust Memorial Sites
Doreen Pastor

"Everyone Talks About the Wind": Temporality, Climate, and the More-than Representational Landscapes of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes
Ian Cantoni

Guiding or Obscuring? Visitor Engagement with Treblinka’s Audio Guide and Its Sonic Infrastructure
Kathryn Agnes Huether

This book charts the performative dimension of the Holocaust memorialization culture through a selection of representative artistic, educational, and memorial projects.

Performative practice refers to the participatory and performance-like aspects of the Holocaust memorial culture, the transformative potential of such practice, and its impact upon visitors. At its core, performative practice seeks to transform individuals from passive spectators into socially and morally responsible agents. This edited volume explores how performative practices came into being, what impact they exert upon audiences, and how researchers can conceptualise and understand their relevance. In doing so, the contributors to this volume innovatively draw upon existing philosophical considerations of performativity, understandings of performance in relation to performativity, and upon critical insights emerging from visual and participatory arts.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era shifts focus from discussions on the ethics and limits of representation to the relevance of imagination in Holocaust commemoration. It re-examines ethical, aesthetic and political dilemmas arising from the crucial transfer of memory from the realm of 'living memory' contained by the survivors and their families, to culturally and politically mediated memory practices realised by post-witness generations. Why are artistic imaginative representations of the Holocaust important now? Critical analyses of little discussed artworks, memorials, film, comics and literature point to a diversification of approaches and Holocaust re-presentations in Europe, showing that memory and imagination are increasingly and intimately intertwined. This volume's contributions make apparent the genuine struggle among those born after the Holocaust, whether Jewish, Polish, German, Austrian, or Swedish, to make the past relevant in the present, well-aware that one cannot fully own or comprehend it.

More often than not, cinema’s interest in psychotherapy seems to revolve around
representations of the analyst. Given the Jewish origins of psychoanalysis, the
preferred ethnicity of the psychoanalyst character for many filmmakers is Jewish.
Freud’s creation of the therapeutic setting, its framework, and basic rules laid
the foundations for many of the psychotherapeutic practices that we presently
see. The Israeli TV series Betipul is a prime example of an outstanding attempt
to enter the reality of the psychotherapy practice. Given its wide popularity at
home, I explore the symbolic significance of Betipul as an atypical mediation of
a Jewish Israeli identity in crisis, and the function of and responses to this mediation
among Israeli audiences. The popularity of the show abroad is also of unprecedented
scale in the history of Israeli television. The many remakes of the
original TV series in Europe and in the United States reveal significant cultural
differences in the approach to psychotherapy. Nonetheless, underlying these differences
is a global consensus on the representation of the therapist. I will argue
that references to the Jewishness of the therapist, while subtle, are critical to the
cinematic portrayals of the Israeli therapist abroad. In addition to considering
responses of Jewish audiences to this character, I discuss its appeal to a non-Jewish
and global viewer. In view of this goal I ask what Betipul adds to the representation
of the Jewish psychotherapist in popular culture and how the Jewish aspects
of this representation function when they leave Jewish contexts.

The historically prevailing eruv of the Jewish diasporic experience and the historically recent separation wall that divides the West Bank landscape undoubtedly constitute the most radical expressions of Jewish territoriality. This article engages with several artworks that further shed light upon the antagonistic nature of the two spatial markers, and the ways in which they allow or block contact with the other. While American Jewish artist Ben Schachter’s delicate thread-on-paper-maps of sixteen eruvin (2010) and Sophie Calle’s Erouv de Jerusalem (1996) deal with the poetics of the eruv as a way of reflecting upon the possibilities it offers in understanding Jewish /non-Jewish relationships in Diaspora, art dealing with the presence and politics of the wall such as Ravit Cohen Gat and Moshe Gerstel’s installation Next year in Jerusalem (2005) and Eyal Weizman’s maps – part of the group project Borderline Disorder (2002) – turn the wall against itself, utilising it as a canvas or background for acts of protest and thereby undermining its presence.

When describing Jewish painter Samuel Bak’s style critics refer to the “surreal”, “fantastic”, “eerie”  atmosphere created in his paintings.  While the artist acknowledges that, indeed, his work “borders on the surreal” his vision, argues Bak, is deeply “rooted in the facts of modern history”.  The striking beauty, clarity and sadness of his paintings has been recently complemented with the autobiography “Painted in Words: A memoir” (2001) which gives a detailed account of his and his family’s experiences during the Holocaust. This essay explores the tension between the “real” and the “magic” emerging in Bak’s oeuvre in relation to childhood trauma. By creating symbolic links between painting and writing, I argue that the “magic realist” mode serves as a memory narrative that Bak the adult painter employs to reconnect with Bak, the child survivor, and render the trauma of childhood separation and loss. I will show how both image and text, by utilising elements specific of ‘magic realism’ style, complete each other and fuse one into another to create a complete work.  In the interplay between the realist documentary style of the memoir and the fantastic and metaphoric world of the image, a “displaced” magic realism takes shape, by means of which Bak attempts to reconcile a deeply painful and ambivalent relationship with the past, and equally important, to repair the past, in the Jewish mystical tradition of “tikkun ha-olam”.

Holocaust exhibitions are known for their unique iconography, often constructed by means of exhibition design. This article focuses on how visitors construct meaning based on display choices made by exhibitions designers. It presents insights from an audience research study which was conducted with young visitors of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. It addresses how design choices impact on public engagement and understanding of the Holocaust Exhibition. By drawing on visitor comments, this article shows that design plays a significant role in shaping visitors' understanding of the Holocaust, as well as their level of engagement, focus and emotional response. It further makes several practical suggestions, informed by visitor feedback, regarding the development of new Holocaust exhibition designs.

The film installation by visual artist and filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, The Missing Image (2015) uses historic archival footage to re-configure the meaning of a contested memorial in central Vienna, Memorial against War and Fascism (1988–1991) by Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka. Based on first-hand research, field observations and interviews with contemporary visitors, this article interprets The Missing Image as representative of a counter-archive memorial intervention which facilitates ethical acts of witnessing and which, in their turn, help re-frame and correct public understandings of compromised war monuments. The article offers an account of how viewers create meaning out of their experiences of witnessing difficult visual material. In doing so, I emphasize the importance of empirical reception studies to understand more deeply the impact of public art and of memorial art interventions on contemporary audiences.

Letters to Henio is an emblematic example of an audience participatory memorial practice developed by the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre in Lublin. This article provides an ethnographic account of this initiative and presents insights from an audience research study conducted with young people in 2016. It discerns the immediate impact this initiative has on young participants’ attitudes towards commemoration of Holocaust victims. This research indicates a departure from polarized narratives of the Holocaust which tend to dominate the Polish memory discourse, and the presence of more ambiguous, messier and fragmented positions towards the Holocaust among younger generations of Poles.

This article provides a close analysis of Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017), a documentary essay that brings together authentic archival sources documenting the persecution and murder of Jews in World War II. The sources include a little-known diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish medical doctor and writer from Bucharest, a collection of photographs depicting scenes from Romanian daily life in the 1930s and 1940s, and recordings of political speeches and propaganda songs of a Fascist nature. Through a careful framing of this film in relation to Romanian public memory of World War II, and in connection to the popular new wave cinema, I will contend that Jude’s work acts, perhaps unwittingly, to intervene in public memory and invites the Romanian public to face up to and acknowledge the nation’s perpetrator past. This filmic intervention further offers an important platform for public debate on Romania’s Holocaust memory and is of significance for European public memory, as it proposes the film happening as a distinct and innovative practice of public engagement with history.

This article examines an under-researched artistic practice of Holocaust memorialization, which, emerging in Poland in the early 1990s, combines elements of theater, performance art, and religious ritual and invites a high degree of civic participation. I argue that these artistic practices are similar to traditional practices of lived and embodied transmissions of memory referred to by French historian Pierre Nora as milieux de mémoire. This article will challenge Nora's view that milieux de mémoire have been permanently replaced with lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). To counter this claim, I invoke the memorialization activities of the grassroots and Lublin-based cultural institution the Grodzka Gate – NN Theater Center. Through the series of artistic actions called Mystery of Memory (2000–2011) and Letters to (2005–present), this institution is actively involved in creating and sustaining Polish milieux de mémoire dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. The ensuing milieux de mémoire have a practical, civic and social function to establish a sense of shared community among younger generations of Poles. Therefore, these actions look toward the future, rather than solely remembering the difficult past, and encourage participants to acknowledge and celebrate difference and multiculturalism, rather than singly confronting unsavory moments of Polish–Jewish relations.

This article addresses the performative dimension of the post-1989 Polish memorial culture
of the Holocaust, characterised by a collaborative and audience-participatory model of remembering the
Jewish victims. In this model participants are invited to become creators and owners of public memory,
rather than silent observers or witnesses to commemorations performed by others. The article offers
a critical and theoretical understanding of performativity in Holocaust commemoration through the
examples of educational memorial actions Listy do Henia (‘Letters to Henio’) and Kroniki sejneńskie (‘The
Sejny Chronicles’) led by the Polish grassroots institutions Ośrodek Brama Grodzka (‘Grodzka Gate-NN
Theatre Centre’) in Lublin and Ośrodek Pogranicze (‘Borderland Foundation’) in Sejny. Drawing mainly
on Polish perspectives on memory, the article examines the aesthetic and ethical value of these actions. It
further probes how a performative model of engagement can serve to expose the complex past of Polish–
Jewish relations, to bring the historical past vividly into current consciousness, and to facilitate a sense of
belonging to a moral community of memory among younger generations of Poles.

This article offers a critical analysis of British writer Angela Morgan
Cutler’s and Jewish American author Paul Auster’s accounts of
their encounters with the Nazi sites of mass murder AuschwitzBirkenau
and Bergen-Belsen. Having no personal connection to
the history of the Holocaust, Cutler and Auster post-witness the
past through experiencing contradictory sensorial and cognitive
reactions to the memorial sites, which resemble cognitive
dissonance.