Holocaust museums strive to stay relevant

Holocaust museums have to find ways to ensure that they remain accessible in this rapidly-changing world to stay relevant.

Because the Holocaust ended 75 years ago, there are no brand-new stories. However, it’s essential to make sure that the museums resonate with people to keep their lessons alive.

This issue was discussed in an online presentation last Wednesday, 30 September, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps. More than 1 000 viewers from across 30 countries participated in the event.

“The history of genocide has to some degree been a story of forgetting,” said Paul Salmons, exhibition curator and Holocaust education consultant.

“Human societies have always told the stories that they want to tell about themselves, and the stories of the atrocities we commit are too often suppressed. The Holocaust has entered popular discourse, and stimulated the recognition of other genocides since.”

The atrocities committed by the Nazi regime remain an integral part of global discussion, said Salmons. Many millions visit sites of the Holocaust, mark memorial days, visit museums, watch films, and otherwise engage with the subject of the Holocaust around the world.

“It shouldn’t be taken for granted that on continents other than Europe it has also become an important part of memory and education,” Salmons says. “Reports by UNESCO [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation] in 2014 found that the Holocaust is taught in about 135 countries around the world.

“And yet, when we look around the world, how satisfied can we really be that Holocaust memory has helped to secure the liberal values that we have promised? We see the resurgence of far-right nationalism, shameful responses to refugee crises, rising xenophobia, and increasing antisemitism.

“We see threats to liberal, democratic values around us. This is the context in which we need to take stock.”

Dr Michael Berenbaum, a renowned developer of museums and historical films, stressed that the lessons we draw from the Holocaust remain unfortunate necessities in 2020.

“I have a dream that the Holocaust becomes irrelevant,” he said. “We live in a world in which the issues the Holocaust raises are looked upon as something of the barbaric 20th century that has no relevance to the world in which we live.

“The problem we face is radically different. The Holocaust has abiding relevance because it raises many of the critical issues central to the world in which we live.”

In spite of significant leaps in Holocaust education, much hasn’t changed, laments Berenbaum.

“The slogan ‘never again’ cannot be uttered with a straight face because we have seen genocide rear its head again and again,” he said. “Even antisemitism, which for a time was depressed by the events of the Holocaust, has reared its head again in a new series of formats. Germany, which defines itself as anti-Nazi, has seen Nazis once driven underground now morphing and coming above ground.

“Tragically, the Holocaust has relevance. I wish it weren’t the case.”

It’s for this reason that museums remain central to the discourse, Berenbaum said. However, if they are to be effective, they need to define their goals and remain relevant to modern audiences.

“A museum is a story-telling institution,” he said. “Where film has moving imagery and a captive audience, a museum has captive imagery and a moving audience. You visit a museum by the way in which you enter it. People can change, but a museum doesn’t.”

Visitors continue to bring their own experiences to bear on museums, a fact which museum curators need to take into account.

Berenbaum provided an example. “[After COVID], everyone entering a Holocaust museum from now will be interested in how people lived in hiding,” he said. “We’ve all experienced six months in which we’ve seen fewer people, and done fewer things. The question of how people lived in hiding will intrigue people.”

Museums must also grapple with the issue of transition, and the loss of Holocaust survivors.

“All of us understand we’re living in a transitional time”, said Berenbaum. “We are living at a distance from the Holocaust, yet one of the ironies is that the Holocaust grows in influence year on year since the actual event. It was more powerful in the 50s than the 40s, the 80s than the 70s.

“It has become a mainstream of world culture, but we are at a moment of transition between the lived memory of survivors and historical memory given to us by them. For many museums, the question is: what will take place of the survivor, the living voice of the experience?”

The idea expressed by famed Nazi hunter, Elie Wiesel, speaks to part of the problem, said Berenbaum.

“Wiesel had a notion that only those who were there will ever know, and those who were there can never tell,” said Berenbaum. “We’ve had to learn to accept the former, and reject the latter. There is something that survivors know that we can never know.

“I will never know what it was like one day in Auschwitz, but I can certainly listen to testimony of those who were there and I can go back to that world though I will not know some of what they knew.”

Berenbaum said museums are being asked not only to deal with the Holocaust, but issues beyond it.

“They have to deal with other genocides, human rights, and more,” he said. “We had that issue in Dallas, Texas. We created a museum which dealt with the Holocaust and concluded with the double dimension of the Nuremburg Trials and the International Declaration of Human Rights, and then transitioned into the United States today to show the relevance of such issues.

“We didn’t diminish the Holocaust or move away from it, but began to interact with its full implications. It has to be addressed.”

It falls to museums to strike this balance, Berenbaum said.

“It’s about moving with the Holocaust, not from it,” he said. “We must find ways to include other genocides and consider issues that are part of and implicated by the Holocaust without moving away from it, applying it to the world in which we live.”