Functional Specificity of the Guidebook to the Concentration Camp Memorial

Abstract

This article forms part of series of comparative studies dealing with tourist guidebooks to the memorials of various former concentration camps in Germany published years ago during the GDR era and today. The authors substantiate the need to consider the former concentration camp memorial guidebook as an independent kind of genre identifying both functions for the memorial guidebook and inappropriate functions and underlying the need to expand the usual genre functionality of the guidebook. A new group of tourist guidebooks has been introduced. These are guidebooks of so-called places of traumatic memory as the former Nazi concentration camps can be considered. These guidebooks form homogeneous group among a vast variety of tourist guidebooks.