63 - University of Alberta

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Space and Culture 10

Museum Auschwitz

Deborah R. Staines

The age ‘after Auschwitz’articulates a public visibility of Auschwitz into the present. Inthis essay, I will consider the ways in which the site-museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau con-stitutes a visibility of Auschwitz. Holocaust museums now function as essential infra-structure for the public perception of Auschwitz; the prominence of Auschwitz at theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum – where an entire half-barrack is installed,alongside audio-visual exhibits devoted to testimony, photography, and records ofAuschwitz – exemplifies the significance of Auschwitz in museum narratives of theHolocaust. Unlike the Washington museum or Israel’sYad Vashem Martyrs’and Heroes’Remembrance Authority, the State Museum of Auschwitz- Birkenau (Pastwowe Muzeumw Owicimiu) is a site-museum bound by the particular histories of its location and thematerial artefacts in its collection. The site-museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with itsemphasis on artefacts, especially human artefacts, can never be only a narrator of histo-ries as it can never be alienated from its subject to that degree.

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While the Washington museum has raised debates regarding itspolitical significance and its contemporary exhibition practices, debatesaround the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau have focussed onquestions of what evidence it provides, on its conservation of artefacts,and on its reclamation of national identities. There is a lack of broad-based, critical discussion on the policies, practices, and effects of theAuschwitz-Birkenau site-museum. As such, the commodification ofknowledge that Eilean Hooper-Greenhill perceives (above) in contem-porary museums has, to a certain degree, been disavowed in relation tothe State Museum of Auschwitz- Birkenau. My critique of this museumintroduces questions about its strategies of knowledge production andits relations to the space and culture of museum practices, especially theantecedent of anthropological museology. This museum has the effectof contributing to the articulation of Auschwitz as public culture, and Ishall go on to theorise what museum strategies can usefully offer to thepublic constitution of Auschwitz.

The museum is a public voice of knowledge. Its pedagogicalinstrumentality is well accepted into contemporary culture. Ye tHolocaust museums, despite being popular, are generally not analysedfor their adherence to the staples of museology like art, anthropology,and archaeology. Holocaust museums are generally described as insti-tutions with two main functions – educational and memorial; they serveas knowledge providers to the public, and offer a locus for culturalm e m o r y. These centres contribute to the ongoing visibility ofAuschwitz, often reproducing the same generic texts – an historicalsequence, a set of photographic images – while utilising a limited vari-ety of museum display techniques. The work of such centres is, there-fore, crucial to the production of the meanings that circulate about theHolocaust. However, even in the context of a gradual globalisation ofHolocaust remembrance centres and a stabilisation of the narrativespresented in such institutions, many differences remain between them.As a site-museum the Oswicim museum is the interlocutor ofAuschwitz-Birkenau for visitors who arrive to view ‘the place where ithappened,’with expectations that this will aid their understanding of theHolocaust.* The site-museum is the storehouse for unique materialremains, as well as housing a research institute that works to interpretthose remains. This museum therefore has the capacity to engage sub-jects in a relationship to its unique spaces and the artefacts it houses,and is multi-valenced as site-museum and tourist facility, research cen-

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Man for the human sciences … is that living being who, from within the life to whichhe entirely belongs and by which he is traversed in his whole being, constitutes repre -sentations by means of which he lives, and on the basis of which he possesses thatstrange capacity of being able to represent to himself precisely that life (Foucault1994:352).

The birth of the museum is coincident with, and supplied a primary institutional condi -tion for, the emergence of a new set of knowledges – geology, biology, archaeology,anthropology, history and art history – each of which, in its museological deployment,arranged objects as parts of evolutionary sequences (the history of the earth, of life, ofman, and of civilisation) which, in their interrelations, formed a totalising order ofthings and peoples that was historicized through and through (Bennett 1990:43).

Knowledge is now well understood as the commodity that museums offer (Eilean Hooper- Greenhill 1992:2).

Knowing Auschwitz

*For example, ‘Weshould think overwhat happened here,and share our conclu-sions with others,’German youth tourist,Miklaszewski 1994.

tre, cemetery and built memorial. Despite the specificity of this museum’s past, it facesthe same questions that today’s cultural critics and museologists are addressing to all con-temporary museum facilities. One of the more important questions is, quoting Hooper-Greenhill (1992:199): ‘How do spaces, material things, and individual subjects, at the endof the modern age, articulate with the primary themes and structures of knowledge’in themuseum context? A museum can be seen to operate as a kind of knowledge machinethrough its structuring of representation and reception.

How does this museum address its public and how does it articulate Auschwitz?These are questions about its public role. The imperative to rethink this site-museum hasbeen highlighted by the popularity of the Washington museum, where the labour of nego-tiating a complex set of ‘inclusive’ images and texts and the use of multi-media museumtechniques to address its mass of visitors have produced a highly consumable set of texts,along with institutionalised practices of Holocaust remembrance that serve as a furtherlayer to the strata of Auschwitz (Linenthal 1995, Berenbaum 1993). The State Museum ofAuschwitz-Birkenau has the role and responsibility of articulating Holocaust remem-brance into Eastern Europe’s public culture, drawing the museum into a vibrant relationwith the kinds of culturally diverse publics that it annually attracts. I shall argue that theexisting museum needs to reorient its strategies to achieve a detailed representation of therole of Auschwitz in the ‘Final Solution’; with specific emphasis on the genocide of theJews that was mobilized and carried out at the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. Thisrequires a renegotiation of exhibit styles away from extant parochial motifs and narrativestowards an embracing of the diversity of histories layered in the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau. My analysis of the practices of the museum at Owicim proceeds in terms ofhow the museum mediates Auschwitz through the modes of exhibition deployed, and thepositioning of subjects in relation to the artefacts of Auschwitz. I argue that the cardinalaim in structuring knowledge at a museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau should be the publicarticulation of the singularities embedded in Auschwitz-Birkenau in all of their complex-ity. This opens up the possibility for different arrangements of the Auschwitz artefacts,and different received meanings of the events that took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau, andincludes unambiguous representation of the role of Birkenau in the genocide of the Jews,within a culturally sensitive approach to the representation of the multiple crimes and per-secutions perpetrated in the spaces of Auschwitz- Birkenau.

This process of renegotiation is already underway, and some aspects of myargument may soon appear obsolete. Nonetheless, my theoretical approach pursues issuesaround the material conditions that museums may bring to the proper name of Auschwitz.Therefore, my argument also contributes to the critique of the power located in museums,and to the recognition of the publicness of the proper name of Auschwitz – a crucial con-junction that this site-museum foregrounds. My analysis of the State Museum ofAuschwitz-Birkenau is initiated with this question: What can be known of an Auschwitz

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that is open to the public? My analysis is concerned with the culturalwork that this museum performs in its public articulation of Auschwitz.At stake in this discussion are the limits and possibilities of visitor rela-tions to the unique artefacts at Auschwitz. These relations have alreadybeen brought under scrutiny; Gillian Rose, invited into the debate, haswritten about the moves to reconsider framing the museum experienceof Auschwitz as a:

balance of cognitive, political, emotional and spiritual experi-ence, which might be induced by the way a visit to the camp isorganised. This reflection needs to be translated into the exhi-bitions at the museum at Auschwitz I and into the way visitsare routed through Auschwitz II Birkenau (Rose 1996:29).

While advocating new exhibition strategies, Rose also reflects critical-ly on the knowledge-power relations that beset the ‘culture industrywhich Auschwitz has become’, using her own role as a ‘consultant’ atAuschwitz for illustration (1996:30). The ‘balance’ of ‘experience’required in the museum that Rose is gesturing to here is not only aboutpresenting an accurate historiography of the camp, particularly becausethe public being addressed is annually over 500,000 people. The rela-tions emerging between these publics and Auschwitz are much morecomplex.

The occasion for opening Auschwitz as a museum to the public wasframed by the intention of creating ‘a Polish museum to preserve thephysical remains of the Germans’ crimes and designed to educatefuture generations’ (Dwork and van Pelt 1996:373). On the last dayof 1945, Auschwitz was designated a place of Polish martyrdom;*and eighteen months later ‘the Polish parliament resolved to preservefor all time the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp,together with all its buildings and installations’ ( w e i b o c k a1993:261). This legislation concentrated on the remaining structuresof Auschwitz I, and not on Auschwitz II – the 1942 extension of thecamp that is also known as Birkenau. As the policy statement indi-cated, Auschwitz would not open as a museum to the ‘Holocaust’ ( a

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An Auschwitz Open to the Public

*Poland lost one fifthof its population inWWII, of whichapproximately halfwere Jewish.

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(Bauer 1998).* Primarily however, this research has made explicitthat the site of Birkenau was central to the operations of the ‘FinalSolution,’ and that 1.1 million Jews are known to have been murderedat this site (Piper 1996).**

In such a context, how can a museum frame its representationsof Auschwitz, as both historical record and as cultural remembrance?Webber has observed that ‘the difficulty is that it means many differentthings at the same time’(1993:282). There is a multiplicity of historiesattached to Auschwitz-Birkenau, given the camp’s numerous functionsand extended destructive effects across many different communities.This museum cannot, therefore, pursue a single narrative at the expenseof many others. However, the complexities of Auschwitz historiesshould not be confused by an ambiguity of meaning in the museuminstallations. What happened at Auschwitz resists easy description, andthe museum has a responsibility to explicate these histories at everyturn. The subject matter demands an anchored set of meanings – alreadywell established – to be conveyed through a deft negotiation of the mul-tiple, intersecting, and sometimes oppositional social histories of thissite. This would enable a fuller exposure of the strata of Auschwitz-Birkenau to contemporary visitors. The representational strategiesutilised by such institutions are instrumental to the ways in whichAuschwitz is understood and remembered. Yet they need not, andshould not, be identical across the board. I will now turn to questionsabout the museumification of ‘Auschwitz’.

Museums today are still generally governed by the modern,secular regimes inherited from the nineteenth-century museum (Bennett1995). Museums emerged from a mixed set of practices of collecting,and they embody the collating, discursive, and conservative functionsof the archive. Contemporary museums tend to organise their collec-tions with an archival mode that is informed by the power of spectacle,working to organise the gaze around the sets of objects on display.Unifying orders of meaning have thus structured museum displays.They often produce historical narratives stabilised by the narrative forceof what Michel Foucault has called ‘the great unities’– such as the evo-lutionary paradigms of science (genus, species), or the social unities ofnation and state. The impact of the natural sciences was both advancedby and productive of modern museums. The human sciences have alsohad a highly productive relationship with museums. The human sci-ences are arguably not a distinct field but are located in the ‘interstices’

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term which gains visibility only after the televised 1961 trial ofAdolf Eichmann) and especially not as a museum dedicated to inter-preting the operations and effects of ‘the final solution of the Jewishquestion’. Instead renovations were undertaken at Auschwitz I toprepare it as a museum of Polish martyrdom under occupied forces.The educational role of the State Museum of A u s c h w i t z - B i r k e n a uwas established at the same time as the preservation order, articulat-ing this dual function (Dwork and van Pelt 1996: 373). However, themuseum fell short of clarifying those processes that producedAuschwitz-Birkenau as a death-camp. Little attention was paid atthis point to the Birkenau site, where the operations for the genocideof the Jews are known to have been primarily carried out. It wasinside its gates that the frequently invoked train transports eventual-ly terminated – with cattle-cars of Jewish deportees to be killed at thefour purposely-built gas chambers and crematoria.* Birkenau is nowmarked out to consist of twenty-one acres, the selection ramp,women and men’s barracks, and four demolished crematoria/gaschamber buildings. There is no doubt that for Jewish memory,Birkenau ‘is by far the more important site’ (Rose 1996:30).

In 1990 the Polish government established theCommission for the Future of Auschwitz, intended to advise thegovernment of possible museum restructuring and ‘to advise onthe organisation of visits to Auschwitz II Birkenau’ ( R o s e1996:29). Jonathan We b b e r’s work on the site, in collaborationwith the international commission, has produced some timelyquestions. He observes that ‘Western visitors to A u s c h w i t z ,particularly Jews, have expressed surprise – and have been alittle offended – that although 90 per cent of those who weremurdered in Auschwitz were Jews, the Museum paid scantattention to this in its exhibitions’ (1993:283). The physicalremains of Auschwitz are all the more significant because ofthe eradication of traces of the mass murder of Jews from othersites, such as Treblinka and Chelmno.** Since the 1960s, anenormous amount of research has become available that makesclear the g e n o c i d a l operations of the Birkenau death camp(Piper 1998). The emphasis on genocide makes clear the racialpersecution involved and the singular visibility of the Jews atAuschwitz-Birkenau. It has also shed light on the impact ofAuschwitz upon the Romany and Siniti (Gypsy) communities

*There are in fact twoselection ramps; it isnot clear whether the

museum intends toarrange for the ‘old

ramp’to be opened totourists. It lies outside

of the gates ofBirkenau.

** In this regard, theState Museum of

Auschwitz-Birkenaufalls short in compari-

son with theWashington museum,

where a highlyfocussed narrative

structure presents tothe museum visitor a

richly historicisedunderstanding of Nazi

persecutions of theJews, although repre-

sentations of thegenocide of the Jews

are not entirely absentfrom the Auschwitzmuseum. There aresome exhibits that

elaborate on it,including a plaster

model tableau depict-ing the operations ofthe gas chamber, and

the InternationalJewish pavilion.

*Comparatively,Jewish survivors havehad a voice in domi-nant cultural institu-tions that the Gypsieshave not, and the visi-bility of Gypsy lossesis only now beingmobilized. Untilrecently, their experi-ence has been disen-franchised by anincreasinglyentrenched set of dis-cursive practices thatelide their persecu-tion. The persecutionof gays was alsounderscored by a lackof histories on theirexperiences. Butthese histories areemerging morestrongly now and canbe drawn into newexhibits at Auschwitz.

**However, the cate-gory known as‘durchgangs-juden’(unregistered prison-ers) and other glitchesin the Nazi recordkeeping mean that aprecise statistic is elu-sive and will likelyremain so, Piper1996:24 and 37.

of other knowledges, in the volume of their dimensions (Foucault 1994:347). As an ‘ana-lytic of man’they form an ‘epistemological configuration’with models and concepts bor-rowed from other sciences and terminologies (Foucault 1994:340, 365). The human sci-ences register a figure of ‘man’ in these interstices, constructing ‘man’ as the object ofpositive knowledge (Foucault 1994:386). This anthropologisation of knowledge hassharply redirected the practices of museums. According to Hooper-Greenhill (1992:198)the development of the human sciences substantially contributes to how today’s museumsarticulate their collections (with varying results). Conventionally, this results in museumcodes that frame the collections as a set of objects in relation to the subject ‘man’.

Tony Bennett (1990:42-3) agrees that the modern episteme brought changes tothe hermeneutic systems available to the articulation of collections; artefacts located inmuseums under earlier regimes of classification became re-articulated in the nineteenth-century, organised by the ‘modern sciences of Man’ into ‘relations between the evolu-tionary series’. The main themes of these configurations then ‘are people, their histories,their lives, and their relationships’ (Hooper-Greenhill 1992:198); this is what guides thedescriptive instrument of a contemporary museum in telling the stories that it tells. For the‘analytical and descriptive mapping of experience is the basis for the formulations ofideas, problems, and concepts in the human sciences’ and this systematic approach pro-duces the ‘themes and structures’ of developing a total knowledge of human culture andexperience that ‘underpin the shifts and changes in museums and galleries that can beobserved today’ (Hooper-Greenhill 1992:197-8). This approach bears out Foucault’sobservation (above) that the human sciences produce representations of man by whichman lives. In the context of these practices, some very significant issues about the muse-um representation of Auschwitz must be raised – which histories will be told at Auschwitz,how will these experiences be described, and what configuration can be given to thesehuman relationships?

The Owicim museum’s collection could not fit the hierarchies and orders of thenatural sciences. The heterogeneous materials organised under the proper name ofAuschwitz pose curatorial problems that the human sciences may be more capable ofaddressing. That, however, is also a fraught proposition. In representing our cultural his-tories contemporary museums are not free from the constitutive knowledge-power of theanthropological analytic. The effect of these dominant paradigms is that museums tend toaddress their publics in particular ways, constituting them as ‘both the culmination of theevolutionary series laid out before it and as the apex of development from which the direc-tion of those series, leading to “modern man” as their accomplishment, was discernible’(Bennett 1990:43). This indicates the crux of the problem for opening Auschwitz up to thepublic as a museum. The histories and personal experiences of Auschwitz sit uncomfort-ably with the conventional museological rubrics for presenting the stories of civilisation.If Auschwitz places modern civilisation under critique, then museums, the bastion of our

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civilizing narratives, are also exposed. Auschwitz poses a challenge tomuseums, for museums are also the instruments of their own histories(Crimp 1993:44-5); and as such find it difficult to escape the knowl-edge-power regimes they are founded upon. How can the human sci-ences be used to ‘explain’Auschwitz, if these are the same sciences that‘explained’ the inferiority of the Jewish race? Eugenics manipulatedaspects of sociology, medicine, and biology to perpetuate a notion of amaster ‘Aryan’ race. The apex of civilisation was ‘Aryanisation’so faras the Nazis were concerned, and this was incorporated into their strate-gies for articulating the Jews as subhuman and therefore the ‘proper’subjects of genocide. The proposed museum of the Jews, mooted byHimmler as a concluding statement to the ‘Final Solution’, would nodoubt have reproduced this evolutionary paradigm. A museum ofAuschwitz-Birkenau clearly has an ethical burden to critique the scien-tific discourses that supported the destruction of the Jews, and representprecisely what man constituted here.*

In this context it is worth recalling Vincent Pecora’s(1992:160) insistence that Westerners recognise that their culture sus-tains itself ‘by destroying its others’. This is a position of understandingthat should not be overlooked; it is one from which to critique the geno-cide and its sources in our modern society. It is a position from whichto raise the crucial issue of accounting for the effects of Auschwitz onWestern relations to Western civilization. This is a position that an insti-tution is responsible for presenting in the form of a reflexive critique toits publics, whose subjects are always-already embraced by the descrip-tive details of nations, races, and men. A museological articulation ofAuschwitz is inevitably haunted by the logics of the human sciences,even where they are not openly invited to speak; and thus what is visi-ble in the space of this museum is an understated anthropology. But areits managers prepared to negotiate the inherent contradiction of pre-senting a museum of man’s greatest crimes as though it had nothing todo with a history of museums of man – with all those decaying storiesabout our fabulous civilization, and its marvellous machines ofprogress? Interventions in the knowledge- power regimes of modernitymay have to rely on contingent positions, to produce shifts in thinkingand counter-action. With these concerns in mind, I now turn to a fullerconsideration of the museological practices of the State Museum ofAuschwitz-Birkenau, with reference to how conventional museumpractices of knowledge production are problematised by the unique sit-

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* Just as some muse-ums have begun tocritique the racism oftheir own local, colo-nial discourses inNorth America andthe Asia-Pacific.

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site- museum differs from museums that use simulated items in their exhibits (such as atthe Washington museum). The reproduction – or not – of the barbed wire may effect whatclaims to authenticity, and to knowledge can be derived from ‘authentic’museum materi-als. In terms of the construction of meaning, a museum’s authentication of its claims dependsto a great degree upon the deployment of its material collection (Frow 1991). This is ofconcern to the Owicim museum, because the authenticity of its objects helps to maintainthe authoritative position of this institution. Just as Holocaust texts are usually authenti-cated by the inclusion of material evidence (for instance, a survivor’s memoir or a dossierof camp atrocities) so too the Auschwitz visitor ’s relation to ‘Auschwitz’is authenticatedby an ‘experience’of the museum’s collection and the sites of industrial killing. The claimto an authentic environment as well as artefacts is common to all site-museums, for a site-museum works as an entire complex of materials, and pasts. This site-museum also doesnot import additional, supplementary artefacts for illustrative purposes: it houses only thearticles of clothing, personal effects, domestic goods, and some human remains that werefound at the site when Soviet troops liberated the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This means that the authenticity of the artefacts are indisputable, and theirsignificance inseparable from the histories of the site (Lipstadt 1993). However, towhat extent is an authenticity of Auschwitz artefacts central to the articulation ofHolocaust remembrance a t Auschwitz? I would argue that, whilst these artefactsremain, their authenticity and their presence are vital to the constitution of remem-brance. They are the singular specificities of this unique site, and remembrance prac-tices are experienced in relation to them. However, there is a large ethical responsi-bility in determining how these singularities are presented to the public, and that mayrequire a greater degree of finesse than the museum currently deploys. The museummakes claims that its presentation of these authentic items gives a form of unmediat-ed access to the reality of the camps. This is a claim that flies in the face of contem-porary museological debates and practices. Although a museum is quite clearly a tech-nology of mediation, in an in-house video production Jerzy Wroblewski, speaking atthe time as Director of the Museum, re-asserts the institution’s policy that only minorinterventions are made in the arrangement of artefacts, as part of a process of pre-senting the ‘reality’ of the camp:

We’re only protecting what was left here, we don’t add anything, we don’t decoratethe place. All we do is protect what remained of KLAuschwitz. We protect it to makeresearch on the place and its history possible (Miklaszewski 1994).

In this statement the disclaimer that nothing has been altered sidelines the positioningof the artefacts behind glass, the selection and arrangement of garments, and the

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uation of Auschwitz. Can museological modes of representation bemobilized in useful ways for describing Auschwitz? What are their lim-its and their possibilities?

Museum practice generally centres on the conservation of materialremains. The protection, preservation, and exhibition of the materials atAuschwitz-Birkenau are accorded a high priority at the museum, andalso by many historians who have raised concerns about how Auschwitzis to be represented when these items do eventually, as they must, per-ish (Dwork and van Pelt 1996:373). The museum’s policy articulates anobligation to preserve and protect these remains through the establish-ment and continuation of its archival role; and the museum’s strategiesfor the exhibition of materials is a direct outcome of the educative strat-egy of the founding policy. The exhibition of remains is therefore themost public role that the museum plays, although its document archivesand research facility are also significant (staff are available to assist ingenealogical research about the victims of Auschwitz). The museumregulates how the conservation demands are to be balanced with callsfor the exhibition of the artefacts. For the preservation of the remainsposes difficult technical problems, and decisions about how to preservethem may also affect how public audiences perceive the artefacts.

The conservators are faced with practical difficulties in thepreservation of the artefacts in situ. This issue is exacerbated by theyear-round display of the objects, which may be seen to accelerate theirdeterioration. However, preservation is not the only problem that thedisplay of these remains produces. The issue of what to do with theremains held at Auschwitz intersects with a range of conflicting socio-cultural values: Jewish, Polish, German, American, Russian, Catholic,capitalist, communist, rural and urban.*There is the concern about howto treat human remains when they are bound by the modern secular dis-courses of museum and state.** The display of what is preserved bringsall of the objects into the range of decisions around maintaining the‘authenticity’of the items. Questions such as ‘should the disintegratingbarbed wire in Birkenau be replaced?’ are not simply questions aboutconservation (Dwork and van Pelt 1996:373); they raise issues aboutthe kind of work that the museum does in representing Auschwitz. Thispoint highlights the way in which the visual perception of artefacts at a

Artefacts of Auschwitz

* The present designof the museum, in

terms of its writtentexts, photographs,and memorial ele-

ments, as well as itssmattering of con-

sumer culture in theform of a kiosk and

bookstore, interruptswhatever ideologicalhomogeneity it mayhave had under thecommunist regime.

** The museum’savowed custodial

relationship impliesthat it acts as a vessel

for the preservationof relics possiblysacred in nature.

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speaking after the event, as a product of that event. In this context, themuseum can be guided by its commitment to continuing research of thehistories of the site, but it cannot offer un-reconstructed or ‘unmediat-ed’history. Indeed, mediation is vital to the museum’s role of historici-sation and critique.

The situation at present, then, is that the museum proclaims (inan English-language sign over the entrance to the collection) that themeaning of the remains is that they are ‘Material Proofs’. The museumlocates the artefacts as self-evident in their materiality – yet that mate-riality is mediated by institutional discourses of the museum.** Thiskind of contradiction arises because the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau is endowed as both institutional archive and archaeologicalpreserve. Furthermore, some museum staff do not appear to share theassumption that the collection’s meaning is transparent – for instance,Franciszek Piper (Miklaszewski), says: ‘Without this research, withoutthese publications, the camp would have become a lifeless backdrop tothe events that took place here – objects, after all, cannot speak’. Now,in an age of Holocaust denial, it is vital that this museum explicate theevidence that it preserves. The significance of these artefacts to futureHolocaust remembrance cannot be overstated, and alternative methodsof museum exhibition will be the basis for articulating their ongoingsocial and cultural relevance, precisely because they do not, and cannot,speak for themselves. The relative absence of detailed labels accompa-nying the exhibits at Auschwitz, while a strategy deployed by some gal-leries and museums to force a visual process, is difficult to validate inthis context.

In a museum, labels are instrumental in ‘marking out the space’of thearchived knowledge (Tagg 1995:293).

While labels themselves pose limitations and would also be subject toreview and critique, it is insufficient to rely on artefacts as ‘self-evident’statements of the history of the death-camp, and it can mystifyAuschwitz as entirely inarticulable. This can defer a public’s criticalengagement with the socio-cultural agencies responsible for genocide,and with the processes of subjection that were involved.

The artefacts that are held at Auschwitz-Birkenau form a col-lection that lies across several different material strata (machine,human, domestic), of which I can consider only a few instances. Thecollection is large, but ultimately delimited in number; and many of the

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repainting of rooms.* In other ways too the museum claims an unre-constructed ‘reality’of the camps and the camp experience. At the StateMuseum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the museum’s policy is elaborated byits staff an as aim to collect and to ‘assemble’ materials in order to‘reach an image as close to reality as possible’ (Miklaszewski). JamesYoung argues that the material remains embody a crucial link to ‘pastrealities, which are not merely re-presented by these artifacts but pres-ent in them’ (Young 1988:174). With recourse to these materials themuseum reasserts the status of material evidence, and fits within anestablished mode of representation. Young goes on to add, however, thatthe way that these qualities are presented, and how they are understood,constitutes another set of issues:

Claiming the authority of unreconstructed realities, the memorial campsinvite us not only to mistake their reality for the death camps’actual realitybut also to confuse an implicit, monumentalized vision for unmediated his-tory (1988:174).

The massive spread of the two camps can add to the misapprehensionthat mediation is not taking place. I would like to draw attention to the‘non-interventionist’position claimed, as a typical instance of the muse-um’s principle rhetoric. The statement cited (‘we don’t add any-thing…’) expresses a basic strategy of the Owicim museum, which con-cerns the display of remains in their ‘authentic’conditions. It exempli-fies an operating assumption that a ‘silent’dialogue takes place in view-ing the museum collection, between the museum visitor and the arte-fact, where the artefact is understood to function as the sole ‘vehicle’ofmeaning for the viewer (Vergo 1994:152). This places the viewer in arelation to the artefact in which it is anticipated that the artefact willhave self-evident meaning. Attributing a self-evident status to the arte-facts represents them as containing a manifest, pure, undiluted, essen-tial truth, claiming them as somehow detached from the systems of rep-resentation that have located them in a museum. The mute truth of theartefact is supposed to be conveyed to the visitor as an unmediated qual-ity – the thing in itself requires no mediation because it is assumed tohave essential qualities that transcend the limits of language and othercultural institutions. Yet, as is clear from the museum’s publicationsarm, histories of Auschwitz are produced ‘after Auschwitz’. It is impos-sible for the museum to return to the camp’s ‘origins’ – it is always

*And, in the style ofa cemetery, new gran-

ite markers andmemorial signs have

been added atBirkenau.

*In relation to this, itis worth noting thatthe museum providesguides, and visitorsare strongly encour-aged to hire them.The guide is anextension of museumconventions, func-tioning as a ‘proper ’vehicle to the mean-ing of the artefacts ondisplay.

items are slowly disintegrating. The items collected from the ‘Canada’ storehouses werestripped from those marked for death in the extermination camps, and make up a largeproportion of the artefacts on show. A full description of the confiscation program and ofthe storage facilities that came to be known as ‘Canada’ is given by Andrzej Strzelecki(1998). For instance, Strzelecki shows that ‘during the early years of the Second WorldWar, prisoners in Auschwitz were the target of systematic but limited plunder. In 1942,however, when annihilation replaced incarceration as Nazi policy toward Jewish prison-ers, all Jewish possessions were thoroughly plundered … As early as April 1941, theReich issues specific instructions concerning the appropriation of valuables [of] deceasedJewish prisoners … Jews arriving at Auschwitz and other death camps were scrupulouslydeprived of their personal belongings and material property,’(1998:246-51). The lootingstrategy benefited ordinary Germans, as when ‘in July 1944, 2,500 watches were allocat-ed to Berlin residents...Many German organizations, institutions, and economic enterpris-es received textiles, leather products, and assorted utensils confiscated from Auschwitzvictims,’ (1998:254-5). Details of gold, silver, and jewels dispatched specifically fromAuschwitz are also noted (1998:248). The expansion and relocation of the storage facili-ties (1942-44) coincides with the introduction of ‘Operation Reinhard’ and the use ofBirkenau as a killing centre.

These artefacts, many of which remained at the camp, may be valenced differ-ently to some of the other kinds of objects on view in other Holocaust museums, forinstance, the handiwork of inmates, and the weapons of resistance fighters that are dis-played at the Washington and Israeli museums. The ‘Canada’artefacts are attached to his-tories of the process of deportation. The ladles, hairbrushes, and pans are present as theshadows of the human communities now annihilated. They remain as emblems of thejourney of destruction from life- world to death-world (Gigliotti 1999). In their familiardomestic shapes, they are reminders of the ordinary and everyday domain of the culturallife of the Jews of Europe, destroyed in the Holocaust. Everyday life might present a firstpoint of identification for the visitor, an entry-point to the subject matter of the museum.The pots and pans, toothbrushes, shaving brushes, shoes, evoke all that was torn awayfrom these people as they entered Auschwitz. But the everydayness of the enamel pots,the leather suitcases, the dresses, is supplemented by strangeness. They are not contem-porary, and therefore not ‘everyday’ to most museum-goers; nor could the genocide’seffects be described as ‘everyday’. The artefacts have been defamiliarised, and they areuncanny, with genocide as the disturbing explanation for why their everydayness is nowlodged at Auschwitz.

Jacques Derrida (1992:211) has said that these singularities are due for recogni-tion as such, and not only as metonymic referents to all events and effects of theHolocaust. To elaborate on that suggestion, I would argue that the specificity of theremains is highly significant, as they are singularities located in a fragile array of

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Auschwitz artefacts. These singularities have no line of descent, and do not easily fall intoa linear trajectory; instead they form a ‘constellation’of specially related historic artefacts.Metonymy is not a suitable representation when it fails to recognise that relation of theartefacts to each other – that each exists with the others of its strata. To describe them, anarchaeological approach is more appropriate. This means that the analysis must workclose to the ground and attend to the entire area. It must define the field; it must ask, asarchaeology does, what are the relations between these things; it will if necessary deter-mine the series into which the artefacts fall. With reference to Auschwitz, it should beborne in mind that hoarding, storing, maintaining, and preserving are practices, not rea-sons. The significance these remains can have for contemporary publics is required to beexplicated by the museum. The artefacts have a history of relations to each other and theserelations could be explored. Representational strategies are vital in articulating and com-municating the relation between women’s dresses, hair, and gas chambers, and betweenash, Zyklon B, and rail tracks. These disparate materials can be made coherent by the nowwell-known exegesis of the deportation of European Jews that concludes with the victim’sdeath in a gas chamber and disposal at the crematoria.

The room of suitcases is an exemplary instance of the strategy of mute rep-resentation employed by the museum. Sectioned off from other items in their own dis-play bay, the suitcases are surfaces across which the gaze moves, registering thenames and addresses scrawled on the leather and registering their emptiness. T h einscriptions intersect and the message is relayed that people from all over Europe hada common fate here at Auschwitz. If a redundant suitcase signifies the murder of itso w n e r, a room full of such suitcases is asked to metonymically index the destructionof six million. Visitors stand and look at them. They take photographs. Yet themetonymy is probably not the only significance to be realised here. Do the visitors seehow these objects form a map, of sorts? They are fragments of the mosaic of the ‘FinalSolution’, pieces from the map of Europe rewritten by the L e b e n s r a u m p o l i c y.Narratives drawing on ethnographies of the specific conditions of the deportations toAuschwitz could be provided and deployed to guide the visitor in relation to such mul-tiple and disparate surfaces. While the suitcases are situated within the ‘Canada’stores, they have a significance that both precedes and follows from that siting. Iwould argue that the suitcases are located in a larger field: of the sets of events andthe artefacts of the deportations of the Jews. They therefore could be represented notonly e n m a s s e but also within specifically arranged series, to elucidate a particular his-tory (perhaps of an individual, perhaps of group, and always with a multiple of arte-facts). To display them anew, a rigorous indexation and careful assemblage would becalled upon, for these series could not be described as ‘evolutionary’in nature; rather,they are pieces recovered from the midden of the concentration camp ‘experiment’.

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relations to the hair that could be explicated by the museum. Thesehuman remains have been articulated by the post-war setting into rela-tion with cultural categories of crime, evidence, forensics, but divorcedfrom the social values of family and individual that were a part of thepeople whose hair this is. At this point, could the museum include in thisroom the personal stories of the Jewish women whose hair was takenfrom them and used as industrial materials by the Nazis, stories of thewomen who were murdered as soon as their hair was shorn? Could itinclude the story of the prisoners made to cut the hair? A considerationof how the treatment of the hair is linked to experiments upon theJewish body carried out at Auschwitz is essential here. The display atpresent relies on these matters to be self-evident.

Without careful design, all of the ‘Canada’ artefacts willappear on the same plane, as though they were of the same order of cul-tural production, be they clothes or hair. At Auschwitz, the artefacts ondisplay are both ‘man-made’ and man (human remains) in some cases.The hair, because it is a part of the victim’s actual body, is the atrocityin the way that ladles and pots are here only signs of atrocity. Nearby,there is a smaller case that shows hair that the Nazis had orderedprocessed into useable cloth, hessian-like in appearance. The juxtaposi-tion in the side cabinet of two rolls of woven hair is highly affecting. Inthis display the Owicim museum manages to distinctly convey the rela-tion between the two versions of the hair, because it does not leave theartefacts stranded in isolation from each other. Yet the texts accompa-nying these exhibited artefacts fail to distinguish the modern culture ofgenocide that produced them. The hair was not produced in an aberranthistorical moment of German atavism. The exhibition design at theOwicim museum, set up in the early 1950s, does to a degree promotethe idea that the acts that produced these remains were in fact ‘atavis-tic’ (Douglas 1998:45).* The texts and displays tend to lean towardsinterpreting the Nazi crimes evidenced by the artefacts as ‘barbarism’and ‘primitivism’. There are very few contemporary scholars whowould regard the Nazi crimes in this way. Rather, the dominant histori -cal and theoretical/critical discourses now regard the genocide as amodern event, not a regressive set of behaviours that appear as a glitchon the civilizing continuum.**The bundles of hair are neither typicallyor foundationally European, nor typically anti-Semitic, and they there-fore cannot be atavistic, which implies regression to an earlier culturalmode or moment.

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Very different to the suitcases, yet displayed in a similar fash-ion, is the only mass exhibit of human remains at the site.* Seven tonnesof human hair were recovered from the camp storage in 1945. The hairis currently arranged as an exhibit where one side of a large room isenclosed in glass and the hair rests behind it in a mountainous, largelygrey, mass. The hair is displayed in the same building as shoes and suit-cases and children’s clothes. At present, then, it is located by the en blocclassification of the preservation order as ‘physical remains of theGerman’s crimes’ (see above). There is an important continuity estab-lished between the artefacts and the human remains, the connection ofthe life-world – yet, I would argue that what is specific to the collectionof hair may require additional explication in the museum context. Thehair could, arguably, constitute an entirely separate stratum, deservingof a significantly separate space of display. Further, the Nazi order forthe collection of the hair explicitly states that only women’s hair was toused for the production of materials – men’s hair was considered onlyif its length was over 20 cm. It is therefore generally understood thatthis room exhibits women’s hair, immediately drawing the issue of gen-der difference into the Auschwitz crimes that the museum is exhibiting.Differences in gender did produce vastly different experiences of thepersecutions and the torture and killings (Browning 1992, Goldenberg1998) and the museum could highlight these.

Nazi anti-Semitism produced discourse on hair colour, asJewish hair and Aryan hair were registered as distinguishable by colour(dark and light, respectively). The museum’s arrangement of the hairsituates a blonde tress near the front, at the top of the pile, clearly visi-ble to the visitor. Is this offering a critique of the binary, by contestingthe categorical statements made by the Nazis about the use of distin-guishing racial characteristics to segregate ‘Jews’ from ‘Aryans’? Themuseum proffers no explanation for why it has arranged the hair in thisway. Is the museum stating that some Jews had blonde hair – or thatnon-Jews were also killed? One problem with the current method is thatit returns the hair to a binary of blonde and dark, as if a display of vic-tims’ hair could never escape this division. The Nazi’s division of haircolour is famously highlighted by Paul Celan’s poem ‘Death Fugue’,with the refrain: ‘your golden hair Marguerete / your ashen hairShulamith’ (1980:53). Historically, the division has to be noted – andadding text to illustrate the racial indexes used by the Nazis could pro-vide this information – yet it seems insufficient. Surely there are other

*An Italian memorialdisplays several inch-

es of ash in a glassurn in Block 4. It is

heavily sealed.

*My attention to theatavistic emphasesplaced on some dis-plays by theAuschwitz museum isinformed by the cri-tique of representa-tions of theBuchenwald humanremains given byDouglas (1998).Invocations ofatavism were popu-larised by the highlypublic NurembergTrials, during whichthe prosecutorsdeployed concentra-tion camp remains asspectacles of atrocity.In particular the trialfocussed attention onthe shrunken head ofBuchenwald. Douglasargues that the version of atrocitythat the trial mobi-lized was the ‘atavis-tic’act of atrocity.Indeed, the shrunkenhead was, he claims,registered as ‘themost tangible repre-sentation of Nazicrimes as atavistic,’(1998:45). However,at Auschwitz, visitorsare not looking at‘typical’objects of atradition of Germanculture.

**The commonEnglish-languageinterpretation of the‘total war’ practicesof 1939-45 as aprocess of ‘barbarisa-tion’has no doubtinfluenced the museum’s texts.

These human remains are now attached to the proper name of Auschwitz, andexemplify the relation of that name to the discourses of the human sciences. The museumhas an obligation to explain and explore this. The conditions of the Owicim museumreproduce the rhetoric that Rose alerts us to, where Auschwitz figures as the ‘demonicanti-reason’to modernity’s civilizing progress. This not only returns the category of Nazicrimes to an atavistic aberration, but also necessarily positions the museum and its visi-tors as ‘outside’of this category. Therefore it is necessary to critique those museum strate-gies that complacently represent Nazis as ‘others’, and more particularly, as primitive orbarbarian others. This museum is precisely the place to expose these problems of repre-senting Western civilization. To imagine that Auschwitz can be made public through theaegis of a museum of Auschwitz is to engage with the conditions of possibility, and of lim-itation, for the public culture of museums. For now and in the future, Auschwitz museumswill need to bring an ethical sensibility to the presentation of their collections. They willneed to grasp their artefacts differently. For the public, there is the burden of taking up aposition in relation to these artefacts, and of thinking through Auschwitz.

Museum analysts are questioning the modern epistemes (natural sciences, human sci-ences) that strategically organise knowledge. They are also taking up the challenge aboutwhat kinds of stories can be told in museums. The challenge for a museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau is to perform useful museological work when the available strategies of repre-sentation are highly coded by disciplines that do not address, in the course of their usualdescriptions, the conditions of genocide and other modern atrocities. Yet, as theWashington museum has shown, there is a popular acceptance of institutional forums dis-tributing critical knowledge of genocidal histories. The aforementioned AuschwitzCommission’s work addresses these requirements and its results will speak as muchabout the limits and possibilities of atrocity site-museums as it will about the Holocaust.The educative and memorial aims of the Owicim museum could benefit from further def-inition, so that independent assessors could evaluate how it is meeting those aims in itspractices and effects, in relation to changing publics. Recent Holocaust museum studiesmark this emphasis that the institutional visitor receive a ‘right’ message as a goal ‘toheighten awareness, educate about the Holocaust, and most importantly stimulate ques-tions and issues that will remain with the visitors and hopefully be incorporated into theirunderstanding of the world they live in’(Mais 1989:1780). A work of reconstruction isprobably required now to both dis- articulate some of the existing arrangements, and tore-articulate the collection in different ways. I would argue that if the museum includedwithin its primary agenda its role as a site for remembering the genocide, through its con-stituent and associated elements, this could usefully reorient the direction of its repre-

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sentations. It would assist in uncovering, rather than concealing, socialresponsibility for the decisions that produce a culture of genocide.

The techniques employed by museums, the evolutionaryregimes presented, the types of displays, the relations that the museumarticulates between its collection and the public (and always the ques-tion returns of ‘which public?’), and the political statements of muse-ums, are all areas of increasing debate. But it is not unusual for muse-ums to have a less than reflexive approach to their own practices ofarchiving. Recent research has indicated that museums operate ‘withoutidentified objectives…and in the context of received opinion’(Hooper-Greenhill 1992:3). A museum of Auschwitz has the responsibility to setclear objectives in organising and structuring its representations ofAuschwitz, to construct its public messages about Auschwitz, as well asto preserve the remains of the site. Techniques for the constitution ofmuseum ‘messages’have been highlighted by Peter Vergo’s work on therhetoric of museums, as being as much to do with context as informa-tional text. Museum space can thus be exploited to produce particulareffects.

Vergo recognises the institution’s role in enabling the ‘multi-valent’ effects of cultural artefacts to be articulated (Vergo 1994:150).The meanings that may be attached or brought to an artefact, he argues,are organised by a museum through its representational strategies, and‘the same object can be used in different contexts and exposed in dif-ferent ways in order to tell radically opposite stories’(Vergo 1994:157).The design of an exhibition – its structural framework – establishes,organises and communicates particular meanings.*Amuseum’s ‘didac-tic’structures, Vergo states, are instrumental in bringing particular mes-sages to the public, and in ensuring that the ‘right’message is imparted(1994:157-8). Calling for an expanded examination and redirection of‘ c o n t e x t u a l ’ structures that situate artefacts in museums, Ve rg odescribes the function of the ‘adjunct material, the content of captionsand information panels as well as the paraphernalia of marketing andpublicity’ as significant factors in ensuring that publics receive theintended message (1994:158). As with press captions, the public’s rela-tion to the artefact is not to an autonomous object but to a structuredcommunication.

Can this site-museum work to expose and explore the prob-lems of Auschwitz ‘after Auschwitz’? The provision of more elaborateaccompanying texts would be one development that could be made to

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Towards a New Assemblage

*Vergo highlights theeffect of juxtapositionin the spatial relationsbetween objects, andthrough the simul-taneity or separationof artefacts cominginto view, where atemporal level ofmeaning is also creat -ed (such as a relationof historical eventsand periods).

restructure the pathways to knowledge that this museum sets up for visitors. Many stud-ies are already available as to the impact of institutionally managed ‘Holocaust education’and its relevance to different publics (Baron 1997, Culbertson 1997). As a memorialmuseum, the site-museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau can also address the difficult questionof what can be recovered from the destruction, and how visitors can constitute relationsto its artefacts. Audience diversity also has to be addressed and responded to because ofthe large number of visitors. Factors in museum management now include knowledge ofaudience profiles, catering to audience diversity, addressing areas where minorities mayfeel excluded by extant museum texts, and what the actual benefits to participants are forgiven exhibitions. Catering to a mass, diverse public does not however necessitate relin-quishing a critical edge. Miriam Hansen (1995:146) has emphasised that it is preciselythrough alternative modes of reception and appropriations of public cultural forms that theidea of the public retains its edge, and pushes the boundaries of dominant regimes. As Ihave made clear, the appropriate aim for this museum is the critique of this, our own his-torical era.

The rationale of a museum arranges and narrates, addressing visitors with itsexhibition strategies. At Auschwitz, although the material artefacts have been organised,and narratives continually intersect with them, these narratives have not yet been organ-ised into a stable set of historical understandings reflecting the depth of historical researchavailable: they still betray the complex and often contradictory effects of the catastrophicrupture in European society that they attempt to describe. Admittedly, it could be difficultto register the forced disappearances, the cultural losses, and the sign of absence thatmarks the Holocaust. The Holocaust is difficult to narrate because most narratives dependupon closure – and as survivor testimony demonstrates, and continued public visibilityensures, there is no closure to the effects of the Holocaust, and there cannot be a singlenarrative or history available for consumption at Auschwitz. Because of the ‘mastery’thatnarratives offer, and the closure that they fulfil, narratives may cover over the rupture, thehuman destruction and displacement, that this genocide effected. Therefore, narrative thatis reflexive enough to articulate some of the aporias attached to the proper name ofAuschwitz would be required in the construction of new representations at the site-muse-um of Auschwitz. Further, if there is an imperative for the museum to offer strategies forremembrance, this may require a significant shift in approach to encompass techniquesdifferent from those of conventional museum strategies, for the mobilization of the mul-tiple cultural motifs, objects, and images of Auschwitz as memorial culture.

The volatility of knowledge paradigms and the necessity to update exhibitionssuggests that no complete and transparent version of Auschwitz-Birkenau can be expect-ed from the museum. Nonetheless, a strategic narration could be designed to articulateAuschwitz to publics now and in the future. A museum representing Auschwitz couldwork towards recovering and articulating the stratified elements that remain at the site of

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Auschwitz into a new assemblage. It could provide a critical perspective for visitors to thesite, a frame of reference using the descriptive techniques that draw relations of culturebetween artefacts and people, without totalising its presentation of knowledge ofAuschwitz. The capacity of museums to organise, and indeed to totalise, the terrain of his-tory, is located in its deployment of the power of assemblage. An Auschwitz museuminformed by questions, such as Hooper-Greenhill raises in another context (1992:11),regarding how a series might be established, how strata may be isolated from other stra-ta, and how periodisation might be differently understood, could show these strategies tobe useful to amplifying the complex and contradictory meanings of the materials withinits own grounds. In general museums tend to ‘present modes of exhibition-making [that]pretend, tacitly or explicitly, to an objective standpoint’ (Vergo 1994:158). The Owicimmuseum is no exception. The low-tech glass display cases that contain the material arte-facts straightforwardly organise the gaze and legitimate a perspective of ‘objective’knowledge for the viewing subject. This has significant effects for the visitor’s position inrelation to viewing the artefacts – the ‘objective’ position authorizes the viewing of theobjects as somehow neutral. Similarly, the museum makes statements that claim a neutralposition in relation to its knowledge production. An alternative mode of exhibition mightbe one that requires a reflexive engagement from the public with the museum presenta-tions, refusing the assumption that the meaning of an artefact is self-evident.

Crucial to the critique of disciplinary knowledge is the modern subject’s invest-ment in a practice of reflexive critique. Yet, as Rose has argued, this museum’s responsi-bilities to explicate ‘how’ agencies of genocide are mobilized and to invite the audienceinto reflexive critique are not easily resolved:

To provoke a child or an adult who visits the ‘site’of Auschwitz not only to iden-tify herself in infinite pain with ‘the victims’, but to engage in intense self-questioning:‘Could I have done this?’, would be to reinforce the same conscience-strickenInnerlichkeit that counts for one half of this diremption in our socialization. Exhibitionsat Auschwitz, which are at present divided, lamentably and apparently unnegotiably, into‘national’pavilions, might instead initiate discussion ‘How easily could we have allowedthis to be carried out?’Are we German ‘or’ German-Jews, French ‘or’ French Jews, Polishprofessionals ‘or’ Polish Jews ‘or ’ Polish peasants? This might contribute to a change inawareness and a questioning of our sentimentality as modern citizens, protected in all‘innocence’ by the military might of the modern state…James Young assured me that nomuseum curator could permit such a radical questioning of the visitor’s identity andagency (Rose 1993:35-5).

As these observations attest, a genocide museum’s greatest failure is where itsmode of address shies away from challenging its publics about the conditions of subjec-tion that enable genocide. A ‘permanent critique of our historical era’requires subjects toengage themselves as the axis for critical reflection (Foucault 1984:42) – it is to be hoped

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‘Auschwitz’, and locates how the Jewish ‘loss of community has been decisive, irre-versible’(Hartman 1994:2). Therefore, the focus must be on the site’s multiplicity of rela-tions between Germans, Jews, Poles, and many others, as practices that were present andactively constituted in the genocide of the Jews. This is the historical narrative that super-sedes national and other partisan interests because it is bound to the singularities ofAuschwitz. The appropriate museum strategy is to anchor and to relay the valences ofthese singularities with regulated reference to a central tenet – the genocide of the Jews atAuschwitz, whose artefacts and remains these primarily are.Walking in the death-camp reveals that unlike a cemetery, the uneven and varied land-scape of Birkenau resists presenting mass death as something symmetrical and groomed.The reflexive subject walks Auschwitz-Birkenau to enunciate its strata; to bring them tovisibility; to bring their discursive agency into actively constituting a mapping and a read-ing of the map. This is not pious. This is a use of modern, secular technologies of the sub-ject – bringing their body to a place and engaging in a relation with that place. What I havedescribed herein is a subject-knowledge- power nexus around the visibility of Auschwitzonly as it is currently articulated and therefore my argument remains largely contingent.However, this is the nexus that shapes the public culture of the Auschwitz museum. Theseare the practices that the institution of the museum at Auschwitz is required to address. Somany ethnicities, so many different experiences, so many lives, are required to be repre-sented at Auschwitz. But as there can be no homogeneity to Auschwitz – only sites ofintensity such as the ‘Canada’collections, and the ruined in situ gas chamber and crema-toria – it cannot be organised into a homogenous rubric and the labour of a critique ofAuschwitz at Auschwitz continues to unfold.

Department of English with Cultural StudiesUniversity of Melbourne, Melbourne Australia

I would like to thank Tomasz Basiuk, Jonathan Webber, and Marek Kucia, all of whom were key respondents to this material. Special thanks go to Catherine Driscoll, with whom I had

many inspired conversations about this project, not the least of which were held on the busbetween Kraków and Owicim.

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that a museum of Auschwitz could elicit this response. Hence the imper-ative for a museum of Auschwitz to be rethought, in terms of how itaddresses it publics. This is a museum that requires a flexibility of prac-tice to stay in touch with its publics, and maintain visitor relations withthe unique artefacts that it preserves, and to provide critical engage-ments with the problems of Western civilisation that Auschwitz pres-ents. Some of the codes of representation in place at Auschwitz restrictquestioning – yet it is not only possible but also an imperative for thismuseum to use representational strategies to bring questions back to thepublic about their own possible complicity with, and implication in, fas-cist cultural conditions. The site of ‘Planet Auschwitz’ is troubling notfor being far away and apart – but rather, for how present and near theconditions of its practice can be.

If this museum were to be reconstituted as a memorial centre,then the main consideration would be to construct practices and posi-tions for remembrance for the visitors. Museums are at the hub of thisinstitutionalisation of memorialisation, for collecting is a practice of

remembrance too; as a modern machine for writing history the museumstructure always offers not only an archive but also a memorial. Younghas suggested these parameters for Holocaust memorialisation, perceiv-ing both limits and possibilities in the production of meaning: the simultaneous preservation and limiting of memory, the types ofmeaning and knowledge of events that are generated, the evolution ofthese meanings in time, the manner in which viewers respond to memo-rial reifications of memory, and the possible social and political conse-quences of Holocaust memorials (1988:173).

To act as both a preservation and also a ‘limiting’of memory,means that the museum uses its power to shape remembrance practicesin its public forum. The distributions of collected artefacts can deter-mine the kinds of ‘meaning and knowledge of events’ produced atAuschwitz and the ‘memorial reifications’ which inform the museumvisitor about Auschwitz. These practices of remembrance may be seenas articulated between representation and reception. A site-museum ofAuschwitz-Birkenau would always be a crucible for Jewish remem-brance. Auschwitz-Birkenau is also uniquely situated in relation toEastern European heritage interests. The material evidence ofAuschwitz destroys old Europe, and reshapes a new Europe.*Owicimcan never again be just a small town in Poland, for now it is marked as

*Not least throughthe ascension of

American influencein Europe after their

involvement in theAllied victory, and

their presence in the‘liberation’of concen-

tration camps inGermany.

Acknowledgements

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Deborah Staines

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63 - University of Alberta