In the later half of Edward Linenthal’s Preserving Memory, he describes more in depth the physical aspects of the Holocaust Museum and how committee members and visitors reacted to them. From individual artifacts to the actual permanent exhibit of the museum, Linenthal’s narrative depicts the controversies and issues that overwhelmed the committee from its inception. Once the Holocaust Museum opened its doors to the public in 1993, the American public began to scrutinize the committee members’ years of work. Along with other committee members, Linenthal expressed his concern of the public’s misunderstanding of the museum as a tourist attraction. According to Alison Landsberg, the Holocaust Museum goes beyond a tourist attraction, and instead resembles an institution of preserving Holocaust memory.
To Linenthal, he hopes that the museum will become more than just a symbolic vessel transporting the public overseas to the camps in Europe. While he expresses the importance of humanizing the Holocaust at an individual victim basis, Linenthal believes that the Holocaust Museum has a deeper meaning. According to Linenthal, the museum should be more than just a commemoration, rather a “stark reminder” of how historical events such as the Holocaust begin at grassroots levels of a society. (270) Not only do exhibits such as Yaffa Eliach’s photo gallery preserve the memory of a Lithuanian town that was devastated by the events of the Holocaust, but it also acts as a reminder of how extreme, radical acts of violence can influence a community, and eventually a culture. (179)
Like Linenthal, Alison Landsberg believes that the Holocaust Museum is more than just an American institution. According to Landsberg, the museum is a “cultural technology” that effectively preserves the memory of the Holocaust. In her article “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory,” Landsberg describes the Holocaust Museum as a true display of “prosthetic memories”; although a majority of the visitors did not experience the Holocaust themselves, the Holocaust Museum is a way of expressing a memory to the public that they can incorporate into their own memory base. (66) To Landsberg, exhibits such as the shoe display and the use of the identification cards is more than just individualizing the events of the Holocaust. Instead, these tangible objects provide a narrative to the Holocaust that textbooks cannot portray. (77) By allowing the visitors to “wear” the memories of those who experienced the Holocaust, the more realistic and profound the event is. (86)
Although Landsberg agrees with Linenthal that the Holocaust Museum is more than just a building that houses artifacts, she never mentions the importance of the museum as an essential reminder to the effects of violence and genocide to a culture. In contrast, Landsberg argues that the museum is a true example of the “radical potential” American institutions possess in communicating memories to the public. (75) While Linenthal may agree that the “Americanization” of the Holocaust has proven beneficial in preserving the memory of the event, it is not the major goal of the museum.
According to Linenthal’s Preserving Memory, the Holocaust Museum is more than just a tourist attraction; it is even more than just Landsberg’s vision of a ground-breaking “cultural technology.” Instead, the Holocaust Museum is proof of what unmitigated violence can do to a community and more profoundly a culture. Hopefully, argues Linenthal, the museum can be used as a tool to prevent future uprisings and counter violence.
6 comments:
I really liked Yaffa Eliach's fight for the photo mural. Many of the museum professionals wanted to focus on the death of the village people but Eliach saw beyond that. These were her neighbors and friends and rather than remembering their deaths, she sought to remember their lives.
I think it is important to remember Jewish life before the Holocaust in addition to the horrors that occurred during. Eliach made sure that when visitors go through the hall, they are confronted with people they could have known experiencing events and situations we still go through today. Like Arnold Kramer said, they are "the hardest pictures in the exhibit, for you bring a knowlege of the future to these pictures...You see them in their innocence and you know their fate." (185)
I think it is an important distinction to define the Holocaust Museum as an institution and not just a tourist attraction. Because it is on the National Mall it had the chance to swing in that direction, just a place to visit while in DC or another place to walk through and stare at stuff. It needed to be a place that affected people and affected their actions after they left the institution. If the museum was unable to affect change in people that the Holocaust Museum just becomes a homage to American liberators.
I like how you mentioned Linenthal's point that events in history are born at the "grassroots level of society." The example he used from the incident in Billings, Montana, was a great example of this idea and it helped bring this story of the museum back home to show why America needed a national museum to commemorate the Holocaust. Although the Holocaust was a "European event of German origin," the ideas that spawned it are universal and Linenthal's book does a terrific job of not only documenting the slow arduous path of this museum's creation, but also illustrates how beneficial this museumm is to the country and not another tourist attraction as you said.
I agree with Brents suggestion that it was important for the creators of the Holocaust Museum to define the museum as an institution and not just another tourist attraction. The Holocaust affected many peoples lives and the mususem need to reflect this in its exhibits. It is true that by placing the museum on the National Mall it could be seen as just another tourist attraction in our nations capital. The creators knew the museum needed to be a place that affected people and affected were it be in a positive or negative way. I think it is important to remember the lives of the people in the camps during the Holocaust as well as what their life was like before the Holocaust. In decribing Yaffa Eliach's fight for the photo mural Linenthal did a service becasue it shows how one person faught for a belief and the belief got the support and was placed in the museum. It is just as important to remember life as it is to remember death.
I also thought it was interesting how Linenthal argued for the museum not as a tourist attraction but as a tool for remembering and preserving the Holocaust. It's easy within the atmosphere of the Washington, D.C. mall to see why any building or creation placed in that arena would be subject to being confused with a tourist attraction.
It is clear through his book though that he believes the memorial to be about the victims and the survivors and not about what the public might want to see as it passes through with its cameras and sun visors. He makes several references to this argument through his research into the use of artifacts and the committees work on preserving and representing the story.
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