Representation of Cultural Trauma: The Museification of the Holocaust

Abstract

The article analyzes the problem of the representation of one of the greatest cultural traumas of the twentieth century — the Holocaust — in various Jewish museums (Washington, Berlin, Moscow). Although they are united by the important social function of perpetuation and edification, each museum has its own context and creates its own form of representation and rhetoric, as well as the measure of memory performance about the events of Jewish history. The concepts and exhibitions of these museums are embedded in a context of general social debate about the trauma, its principal expressibility, mediatization and visualization. The research field of trauma contains an internal contradiction. On the one hand, the field employs the psychoanalytic idea of the inexpressible injury (Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth et al.), while, on the other hand, subscribing to the concept of its globalization and mediatization (Wulf Kansteiner, Ann Kaplan, Jeffrey Aleksander, Andreas Huyssen). The discourse about the Holocaust is globalized, but the memory of the Holocaust victims is functioning glocally, taking into account the specific local context of traumatic events. Consequently, the museification of the Holocaust generates a diverse field of aesthetic representations. The article stresses the peculiarity of these museums, such as their focus on sensual work with the past, their call for the exchange of experiences and emotions in addition to rational knowledge, their invitation to identify with the experience. In comparison to museums, it becomes evident that modern museum exhibitions and performances variably provoke the visitor to identify with the collective subject of history through a simulated experience of the suffering of others. This is impossible without emotions, sympathy and working memory. However, the therapeutically simulated traumatization through acquaintance with the phenomenon of the Holocaust is not justified in any socio-political and cultural context.