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Bibliography

Albert, Zachary. 2013. “Exhibiting the Holocaust, Exhibiting the Self: Museum Tour Narratives and Post-Holocaust American Identity.” Museums & Social Issues 8 (1-2): 47-58.

Berger, Ronald J. 2003. “It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Politics of Memory and The Bystander Narrative in The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Humanity and Society 27 (1): 6-29.

Bolinger, Kylee. 2021. “Methods of Memorialization: Holocaust Commemoration in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Master’s thesis., Portland State University

Cole, Tim. 2004. “Nativization and Nationalization: A Comparative Landscape Study of Holocaust Museums in Israel, the US and the UK.” Journal of Israeli History  23 (1): 130-145.

Crownshaw, Richard. 2000. “Performing Memory in Holocaust Museums.” Performance Research 5 (3): 18-27.

Chrysler, Greig and Kusno, Abidin. 1997. “Angels in the Temple.” Art Journal 56 (1): 52-64.

Diner, Hasia R. 2009. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Flanzbaum, Hilene. 1999. “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1): 91-104.

Hasian, Marouf Jr. 2004. “Remembering and forgetting the “Final Solution”: a rhetorical pilgrimage through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (1): 64-92.

Linenthal, Edward Tabor. 2001. “Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum.” New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Messham-Muir, Kit. 2004. “Dark Visitations: The Possibilities and Problems of Experience and Memory in Holocaust Museums.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5 (1): 97-111

Rotem, Stephanie Shosh. 2013. Constructing Memory: Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums. Bern, CH: Peter Lang Verlag.

Seymour, David M. and Camino, Mercedes, eds. 2016. The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contesting/Contested Memories. New York, NY; Oxfordshire, UK: Taylor & Francis.

USHMM. n.d. “About the Museum.” Accessed April 23, 2022. https://www.ushmm.org/information/about-the-museum.

USHMM. 2022. “Fact and Figures.” Accessed April 23, 2022. https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-kits/united-states-holocaust-memorial-museum-press-kit/.

Young, James E. 1994. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Winkel, Rachel Elizabeth. 2018. “Schools of Identity: Rhetorical Experience in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University

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Conclusion

To be sure, recognizing and not diminishing the violence committed against Holocaust victims, USHMM still serves as a space of catharsis for Americans - particularly White Americans - to air other historical traumas or sufferings that occurred on American soil. As the scholar Richard Crownshaw (2000) affirms, “USHMM positions the Holocaust as a kind of ur-trauma for the USA, which displaces” the historical violence done to Indigenous and Black Americans, so that “the USA can remember its liberalism and tolerance but forget it past intolerance” (18). Put another way, the Holocaust allows for attention to injustices perpetrated by Americans as “bystanders.” But, unlike attention to the violence done against Indigenous and Black Americans that directly incriminates White Americans in power, USHMM ultimately keeps intact the core American values and ideals of freedom and democracy. Indeed, it provides a space in which Americans occupy the roles of liberators, witnesses and victims.

Even more, the opening date of USHMM further confirms such dynamics. For instance, while it did take nearly fifteen years for USHMM to officially open, the fact remains that the museum still opened far earlier than either the National Museum of African American History or the National Museum of the American Indian. Indeed, USHMM opened twenty-three and eleven years earlier, respectively (Bolinger 2021, 43). Thus, despite its more peripheral role in American history, USHMM opened far before museums dedicated to peoples whose experiences are central to and intertwined with America’s broader story. This discrepancy points to a critical conversation about how museums, especially in national spaces, elaborate and enshrine certain narratives and definitions of America and Americanness within the public sphere. While certainly not the reason for the later opening of the National Museum of African American History and the National Museum of the American Indian, USHMM still intervenes and represents wider discussions and negotiations over what are “normal” and “acceptable” forms of citizenship in America (Crysler and Kusno 1997, 64). And, with its reassertion and preservation of more “traditional” - read White - values of democracy and freedom, USHMM helps maintain a narrative more comfortable and less threatening towards White Americans.

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Americans as Victims

However, in conversation with Americans as witnesses and liberators, the permanent exhibition also extends the Hall of Witness’s positioning of visitors as victims. For instance, at the beginning of the museum tour, visitors enter information about their sex, age and job into a computer. Afterwards, they receive an identification card of a person like themselves who was a victim of the Holocaust. The visitors simulate and take on the identity of the victims as they pass through the museum (Chrysler and Kusno 1997, 57). Likewise, mirroring the museum’s architecture, they create visceral and embodied memories of the Holocaust that can be utilized and categorized for their own identity and meaning-making.

But, perhaps even more importantly, the identification cards give agency back to the Holocaust victims. Indeed, as Young (1993) writes, “such a device…for a moment, at least” rehumanizes the victims as they are “invigorated with the very life force of the visitors themselves” (342). Put another way, as they occupy the victims’ identities, the visitors can empathetically reimagine and re-experience their realities, personhood and agency. Yet even while this is true, such re-embodying of Holocaust victims is not without its issues. For instance, as the scholars Crysler and Kusno (1997) explain, through this identification, focusing especially on Jewish victims of the Holocaust, they become “abstracted from Judaism, and are thus able to act as a metaphor for all human suffering” (56). To be sure, although the majority, Jewish people were not the sole victims of the Holocaust. However, such a fact does not negate how the identification cards spectacularize and objectify Jewish victims of the Holocaust as they become empty receptacles onto which visitors can project their own pain and suffering within a universalistic framework. Thus, while not explicitly grounded within an American perspective, such dynamics still allow for the museum specifically and the Holocaust more generally to become a “universalistic” template of human suffering on which Americans and others can freely project their own meanings and significances.

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Americans as Bystanders, Liberators and Witnesses

As another dimension of USHMM’s American framework, the museum also positions Americans as bystanders of the Holocaust that are ultimately redeemed through their actions as liberators and witnesses of the concentration camps. Specifically, according to Berger (2003), the museum criticizes America for its restrictive and draconian immigration policies towards Jewish refugees, failure to pursue wartime rescue efforts, and unwillingness to bomb Auschwitz or the rails leading to the camp (8). Looking specifically at the first indictment of America, attention and criticism towards America’s immigration policies are present in USHMM’s permanent exhibition. For instance, at the close of the exhibition that outlines America’s role in the 1938 Evian conference and its refusal to accept any more Jewish refugees, a final panel states: “some bystanders sought to exploit the situation of the Jews for personal gain, but most merely stood by, neither collaborating nor coming to the aid of the victims” (Seymour and Camino ed. 2016, 101). Yet despite this critique, the “bystander” narrative of Americans further extends and reinforces the museum’s ultimate goal of grounding the Holocaust in American ideals and virtues. By forefronting America’s lack of intervention in the Holocaust, the museum seeks to justify the U.S’s more aggressive foreign policy since the early 1990s (Berger 2003, 13). The attention to America as bystanders serves to offset the ideal of America as the sole superpower in post-Cold War international politics and, thus, the “police officer” of the world that necessarily must aggressively protect and preserve democracy at home and abroad.

Further, while it is true that the museum focuses on them as bystanders, it also connects Americans to the Holocaust in another manner. Significantly, from the onset, the museum foregrounds Americans as witnesses and liberators of the concentration camps. For instance, in the opening section of the permanent exhibition, visitors view footage of shocked and unsuspecting American G.I.s liberating concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau (Young 1993, 345). Thus, regardless of the museum’s criticism of America’s  attitudes toward Jewish refugees, these critiques ultimately become secondary. Indeed, in the end, the museum absolves Americans of being bystanders by forefronting them as innocent witnesses and liberators of the camps. To provide a specific example of this dynamic, I turn to the beginning of the permanent exhibition. As soon as visitors enter, they “confront a photograph of a pile of half-burnt corpses at Ohrdruf Concentration Camp” and “form the other half of a circle, joining the servicemen caught by the camera on the other half of the pyre, staring with disbelief” (Cole 2004, 140). Thus, similar to the visitor’s embodied and emotional experiences as victims in the Hall of Witness, the picture also frames the visitors’ point of view within an American reference point. However, moving away from the Hall of Witness, the picture reinforces America’s historical connection to the Holocaust as innocent and unaware liberators. Even more, the visitors’ embodied performance as liberators who complete the service people’s semicircle also positions them as witnesses well within a redemptive narrative that absolves Americans’ previous role as bystanders.

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Nazi Germany as the Antithesis of America

I will first focus on the organization of the museum’s space as buttressing the narrative of the Holocaust as the antithesis of American ideals of freedom and democracy. Central to this conversation is USHMM’s placement in the National Mall. Its placement was, at first, met with skepticism. Indeed, as noted by James Young (1993), both Americans and local survivors worried over the relevance of the Holocaust in a place central to the elaboration and shaping of American identity and national narratives (338). Yet, as seen in USHMM’s mission statement, this positioning was, in reality, fundamental to reaffirming American identity and narratives. As the USHMM website explains, the museum is “located among our national monuments to freedom on the National Mall” because it “provides a powerful lesson in the fragility of freedom, the myth of progress, and the need for vigilance in preserving democratic values” (USHMM, 2022). Put another way, as placed within and juxtaposed to the National Mall, the museum can sanctify and glorify those American values of freedom and democracy by centering on their precariousness. Likewise, the museum teaches how to be a good American citizen today and in the future (Crysler and Kusno 1997, 52). That is, as the museum magnifies these virtues of freedom and democracy by locating their antithesis in Nazism, it can serve as a vanguard in which American citizens, learning about the Holocaust, see the necessity in protecting and uplifting those ideals.

Upon entering the museum, the Hall of Witness further reinforces the narrative evoked by the museum’s exterior. As the scholar Linenthal (2001) writes, “it is not a comfortable space to inhabit…there is a sense of a space that is twisted and tortured in the effort to contain the story of the Holocaust, a space that screams as it seemingly strains to rip itself apart” (94). The museum’s attention to fragmentation and disorder directly contradicts the overwhelmingly symmetrical and neat architecture of the other structures in the Mall. For instance, as Stephanie Rotem (2013) argues, while the exterior of the museum blends into the landscape of the Mall with its federal buildings, the interior is fragmented, disorienting and foreign to its environment. As such, this disturbing and fragmented interior reinforces the idea that the Holocaust could occur in Europe but is out of place in the democratic and free United States (10). Thus, the museum’s interior extends the narrative reinforced by its placement on the National Mall. It peddles a narrative that further highlights the virtues of America and its ideals as delineated and designated by what it is not. That is, to reiterate, as the antithesis to or offset by the absolute evil of Nazism and the Holocaust.

A view of the Hall of Witness in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2015. 

Yet, to complicate such discussions further, visitors coming into the museum are not static receptacles of the museum’s narratives. Instead, visitors enter with their own prior knowledge that shapes and influences how they respond to and interact with the museum. That is, there is a dialectical relationship between the visitors and the museum in which the visitors’ prior knowledge and experiences are either confirmed or reframed and challenged by the museum (Winkel 2018, 19). As applied to USHMM’s entrance hall, its organization brings discomfort to the visitors, allowing them to have an embodied and simulated experience of being a Nazi victim. For instance, as Crownshaw (2000) affirms, “the architectonic features of the museum’s vestibule, the Hall of Witness, recall those of concentration and death camps and also act as memory prompts” (20). Likewise, USHMM does not just spatially remove visitors from the National Mall and American ideals. The museum also physically and emotionally removes them as it reframes and realigns visitors’ experiences to those of Nazi victims. Through this performance and simulation spurred by the architecture, the visitors’ emotional and intimate experiences render them co-authors in the production of Holocaust meaning-making  (Messham-Muir 2004, 100). Visitors create their own personal set of memories about the Holocaust and victimhood, despite never having lived through it, as incorporated into their lived experiences with the museum. Thus, the dialectal relationship between the architecture and the visitors reinforces the juxtaposition between the Holocaust and American identity. Both frame the Holocaust, contingent upon clear definitions of Americanness and its values, as foreign to the visitors’ previous lived experiences

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Introduction

Opened in 1993 and placed adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, DC, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has become a cornerstone of the United States’ remembrance of the Holocaust. According to its website, more than 47 million people have visited the museum (USHMM, 2022). However, the importance of the museum, specifically and the Holocaust more generally for Americans, may not be immediately apparent. Indeed, the Holocaust, whose major killing sites were in Poland and Eastern Europe, was far removed from the realities and lives of Americans. On the other hand, Jewish-Americans spurred by the increased ethnic and racial identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s were certainly instrumental in the opening of the museum. Backlashing against the assimilationist impulse of the 1950s, these Jewish-Americans increasingly structured Jewish identity around the Holocaust as a watershed event (Diner 2009, 6). Even more, as these Jewish-Americans were often economically and socially privileged, they served as a significant impetus behind the museum. For instance, it is unclear whether it came solely from Jewish-Americans, but when USHMM called for individual donations to create the museum, they received 168 million dollars (Flanzbaum 1999, 101). Given their increased attention to the Holocaust and their mainstreamed and privileged economic status since the mid-20th century, these donations probably came largely from Jewish-Americans. Yet this provides only one explanation of why a Holocaust memorial museum was constructed on the National Mall, where the virtues and ideals of America are extolled, for example, by the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Nor does it explain why, since its founding, ninety percent of the museum’s visitors have been non-Jewish (USHMM, 2022).

Thus, for this blog, I turn to the broader American acceptance of USHMM - those ninety percent of non-Jewish people who have visited the museum. Focusing on the role of USHMM as a public site of memory that produces particular narratives and representations of the Holocaust, I will argue that the museum largely frames the Holocaust through American ideals and values. Indeed, the museum centers on how America is the antithesis of Nazi Germany and attempts to reproduce the Holocaust with Americans as witnesses, liberators and victims. However, complicating this argument, I will also show that USHMM is not a static site. Instead, it is also imbued with the meanings of individual and collective people as they actively and agentively interact with the museum to negotiate and reproduce their own understandings of the Holocaust as grounded in their lived experiences and backgrounds.