Commonly associated with kitsch and mindless consumerism, souvenirs may seem incongruous with, or even trivial to, the solemnity of a concentration camp memorial. This essay contends, however, that in the context of traumatic events, which by definition are immemorial – beyond figuration in language and remembrance – consumption functions as an appropriative mechanism in the symbolic construction of, and embodied engagement with memory. Analysing a collaboration between the Buchenwald Memorial in Weimar, Germany and a design class at the nearby Bauhaus University, I posit that so-called ‘Remember-Signs’ (Gedenkzeichen) provide a means of mediating trauma. The incongruity between a former concentration camp, specifically the historical atrocities marked thereby, and a domestic object like a candle or a button is itself a heuristic, grounding the unintelligible in the symbolic. Memory-makers, who in other spheres of life participate effectively in consumer culture to communicate symbolically, engage in consumption-as-remembrance, indeed as a form of vernacular historiography.