The difficult (museum) memory of the Holocaust
“Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down, O Lord our shield!” (Psalm 59, Verse 12)
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Tradition has it that the text of the psalm records David’s prayer to the Lord for help, delivered when he is escaping from Saul. Numerous Jewish and Christian interpretations of the text have been made; of those perhaps the most well-known is that of Augustine of Hippo (354–430) who interpreted the text as reflecting the situation of the Jews in Christian countries. According to that Jews must not be killed; moreover Augustine thought that if Jews could live among Christians they would serve the interests of the Church, yet it must be ensured that their condition should be harsh enough for everyone to see – the low status and humiliation suffered by the Jews would keep proving the triumph of Christianity, as well as what fate awaited those who were reluctant to recognize Christ. So Augustine primarily considered the right of Jewish communities living in the diaspora to settle in Europe, moreover to life itself, as an aid in Christian propaganda. His view largely defined the thinking of Christian Europe about the Jews, yet “without his splendid idea they would have wiped us all out a long time ago,” said Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) with grim humour. The Holocaust, studying which requires us to face the most difficult and most sensitive issues of human existence and its extreme life situations, involves a so-called hard legacy. The theme is very sensitive and its presentation in a museum raises a number of problems. Thus nearly all the issues of contemporary museology are involved when staging and interpreting an exhibition about the Holocaust. This article aims to review these issues and analyse how the Hungarian museum system tackles them.
The problem of documentation
“Get it all on record now – get the films, get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened,” General Eisenhower allegedly said following the liberation of the concentration camps. The documentation of the liquidation of the Jews was already begun amidst the annihilation. Holocaust witness statements were gathered and memoirs were written, then monuments to the victims were erected. In the first year following its liberation Auschwitz-Birkenau was declared a historic memorial place. One year after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, survivors established the first Holocaust memorial museum on the Mount of Zion, which was followed in 1953 by the opening of the country’s ‘official’ institution devoted to the memory of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem. Connected to the latter, Israel’s Parliament established an official Holocaust Remembrance Day (27th of Nisan), thus creating a ritual day of remembrance among the religious holidays. This particular day emphasizes the unique nature of the Holocaust, unlike the remembrance days of the earlier massacres of the Jews, which jointly recall several historical events.
The representation of the Holocaust in museums
The demand for authenticity effected the role of museums as institutions from the 1960s. The linking of the demand for commemorations and the museum boom opened the way for the representation of the Holocaust in museums. As mentioned, a Holocaust museum has existed in Jeru-salem since 1953, but it was only in 1993 that the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington opened. Following this Jewish and/or Holocaust museums have opened across the world. A museum has become an important institution in Jewish collective memory – a bridge between the lost past and the present. Many Jewish museums have been established throughout Europe since the 1980s. The National Hungarian Jewish Religious and Historical Collection in Budapest has a prominent place in this sequence. Like the one in Prague, it has operated continuously since its foundation in 1909.
Holocaust exhibitions and museums in Hungary
The first exhibition entitled Holocaust in Hungary that received great publicity was held in the Budapest History Museum in 1994. The “memory political breakthrough” in Hungary took place on the 60th anniversary when a number of new exhibitions opened: the Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz was restaged, the Holocaust Memorial Centre opened in Páva Street, Budapest, and the Hódmezővásárhely Memory Point was established with assistance from the Terror House Museum. Óbuda is a highly significant place of memory in Hungarian Jewish historical consciousness. The Zichy family granted permission to the former Jewish community to settle in the area. Yet, the permanent exhibition in the Óbuda Museum housed in the Zichy mansion practically does not reflect this fact. The town’s Jewish face remains hidden from visitors to Óbuda – The Three Faces of a Town.
Dilemmas concerning the representation of the Holocaust
Local museums, specialist museums and Jewish com-munities are among those planning to stage exhibitions. Their approaches clearly differ, the place and role of Jewish history and the Holocaust are different in their identities. The picture is further modified in terms of whether the Holocaust appears in exhibitions embedded in the long history of anti-Semitism as a somewhat logical consequence, or quite the contrary as a backward step following a peaceful period of coexistence. The chronological end of an exhibition narrative is an expressive reflection of a view of history a community and/or curator holds. The above issues are sharp and it is impossible to avoid facing certain problems and issues.
The problem of documentation
The real tension of Holocaust museum specialism is represented by the fact that there is no image of the de-struction itself. There are photographs and film se-quen-ces that have become iconic and which satisfy the demand for authenticity of museum practice, yet they cannot fully present the horror of the Holocaust comprehensively. The death of the defenceless in the gas chambers cannot be represented in any way.
The method of an exhibition
Exhibitions about the Holocaust require a museological approach that is not interpreted by objects in a traditional manner, but can be rather interpreted as memory (re)construction. The structure of exhibitions does not start off from objects; the aim is to construct the story that has been defined in advance in a museum context. An ex-hi-bition in a museum is a multimedia platform, in which the media are objects, texts, lighting and use of space, in addition to which new interpretations gained by placing objects next to each other also receive a role.