United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Articles

Breaking Historical Silence through Cross–Cultural Collaboration: Latvian Curriculum Writers and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellows

In response to the need for Holocaust curricula in Latvia, Latvians and Americans worked collaboratively to overcome the historical silence surrounding this event. During their project, Latvian curriculum writers worked with teachers and scholars at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This descriptive analysis of the Latvians' experience with Museum Fellows revealed opportunities to learn from each other the complexities of teaching the Holocaust in a country viewed by some as collaborators and still somewhat anti-Semitic. Findings included depth of guidance, values, and limits of innovative teaching methods, cross-cultural benefits, and continued collaboration. Recommendations for future efforts by post-Communist countries and American partners to develop curriculum on teaching a most complex and contentious aspect of history such as the Holocaust conclude the study.

Photography and memory in Holocaust museums

Recent trends in Holocaust studies have addressed how forms of memorialization might transmit a cultural memory of genocide to those who did not witness the event. In particular, the theorization of memory's transmission has attended to the traumatic reverberations of the event that might be felt by those who did not witness it and which might actually provoke remembrance of a kind in this generation. In turn, this tendency within (some) Holocaust studies has led to critiques of the universalization of trauma, and of the way that this dehistoricizes and displaces the specificities of the witnesses' experiences, memories, and identities. Nevertheless, the disruptiveness generated by this secondary witnessing and trauma is useful for its interruption of redemptive forms of memorialization. For example, the traumatizing potential of artefacts exhibited in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), particularly photographic ones, could in fact be harnessed for their affect and ability to disrupt the nationalist narrative of which they are a part. The argument that follows investigates a seminal moment in Holocaust studies, in which secondary witnessing and trauma was conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch under the name of postmemory. Hirsch's reading of the USHMM is scrutinized in order to illuminate its potential of displacing the memories and identities of the Holocaust's witnesses. By problematizing the originary concept of postmemory, this argument hopes to make more robust the idea of memory's transmission that still commands the attention of Holocaust studies.

Book Reviews: Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. By Wendy Lower. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2005. xviii + 307 pp. $49.95 (hardback). War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans. By Ben Shepherd. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2004. vi + 300

Book Reviews: Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. By Wendy Lower. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2005. xviii + 307 pp. $49.95 (hardback). War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans. By Ben Shepherd. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2004. vi + 300

Deadly Medicine Today: The Impossible Denials of Racial Medicine

This essay offers a critical review of Deadly Medicine, a special exhibit staged at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is dedicated to clarifying the role of medicine and the human sciences in the racist policies and genocidal practices of the Nazi regime. Throughout, the discussion uses the content of the special exhibit to reflect on the relationships between ideology, racism, and medicine in the past and the present. Probing the broader context surrounding the staging of Deadly Medicine, it reflects on the ongoing relevance of its key themes, namely race, exploitation, and destructiveness, as well as the articulations it silences, particularly those among Whiteness, medicine, and power. In the end, it concludes that the special exhibit, like prevailing discourses about medicine more generally, problematically distances medicine from the creation and consequences of racism.

SUZANNE BROWN-FLEMING. The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2006. Pp. xiv, 240. Cloth $45.00, paper $20.00

SUZANNE BROWN-FLEMING. The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2006. Pp. xiv, 240. Cloth $45.00, paper $20.00

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany. By Suzanne Brown-Fleming. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006. xiv + 242 pp. $45.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany. By Suzanne Brown-Fleming. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006. xiv + 242 pp. $45.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

Łódź Ghetto: A History. By Isaiah Trunk. Trans, and ed. Robert Moses Shapiro. Introduction, Israel Gutman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006. lxii, 493 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. Maps. $35.00, hard bound.

Łódź Ghetto: A History. By Isaiah Trunk. Trans, and ed. Robert Moses Shapiro. Introduction, Israel Gutman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006. lxii, 493 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. Maps. $35.00, hard bound.

Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938 1944, Wolf Gruner (New York: Cambridge University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006), xxiv + 322 pp., cloth $75.00

Wolf Gruner argues for four basic theses in Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis. First, forced labor was a central feature of Nazi persecution of Jews—one that most historians have strangely neglected or underestimated.1 It was not only a dominant feature of the Jewish experience prior to deportation, but also sufficiently important to the economic interests of the persecutors that it affected how they implemented their other policies of racial persecution. Second, the enforcement of Jewish forced labor was not primarily the prerogative of the SS. Rather, it was a striking example of the broad division of labor and widespread participation in the exploitation and persecution of Jews by various state institutions, regional and local authorities (especially labor offices and municipalities), and myriad private employers. At times, relations between the various beneficiaries and practitioners of forced labor were characterized by conflicting interests, but just as often there was compromise and cooperation. Third, a comparison of forced labor policies in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, Silesia, the Warthegau, and the General Government reveals that forced labor was imposed on Jews in various ways in different places and at different times within the German empire. It is a complex historical subject that demands a nuanced and differentiated approach and cannot be characterized by sweeping and simplistic generalizations such as “destruction through labor.” Fourth, Jewish labor was exploited primarily for economic reasons, not just as a means of harassment and enervation paving the way to destruction. Systematic forced labor began long before the decisions were taken for a policy of extermination and, despite that policy, continued until the end of the war. Paradoxically, Gruner concludes, “Tens of thousands of Jews survived the Holocaust because they were exempted from genocide due to economic interests and labor shortages” (p. 294).

Deadly Medicine

This article discusses the methods the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used to make an exhibition on the complex history of Nazi eugenics accessible to the museum's mass public and at the same time, provocative for special audiences consisting of professionals and students from the biomedical fields. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race showed how both eugenics and related "euthanasia" programs in Nazi Germany helped pave the road to the Holocaust. The exhibition implicitly evoked the present-day appeal of biological explanations for human behavior and of new visions of human perfection. Educational programs used the exhibition as a springboard for discussions of bioethics and medical ethics.

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany, Suzanne Brown-Fleming (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006), xvi + 240pp., cloth $45.00, pbk. $20.00.

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany, Suzanne Brown-Fleming (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006), xvi + 240pp., cloth $45.00, pbk. $20.00.

The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance, Adam Rayski (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005), xvi + 388 pp., $35.00.

The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance, Adam Rayski (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005), xvi + 388 pp., $35.00.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems From the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 by Volavkova, Hana and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Editors

I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems From the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 by Volavkova, Hana and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Editors

Sublime Lessons: Education and Ambivalence in War Exhibitions

This paper examines how experiences of the sublime are regulated in the war exhibitions of modern museums. Ambivalence is a key feature of the sublime because subjects are forced to negotiate simultaneous feelings of terror and awe in the face of something unrepresentable like war. This paper analyses how war exhibitions dispel ambivalence by resuscitating a Kantian sublime full of resolution, catharsis and transcendence. In this context, potentially destabilising encounters with horrific objects (e.g. guns, bombs, shrapnel) are neutralised by didactic `Lessons of War' and celebratory narratives of victory. Using examples from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution, this paper illustrates how conventional war exhibitions reproduce a politics of consensus by carefully managing the experience of the sublime.

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience. Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany (review)

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience. Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany. By Suzanne Brown-Fleming. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2006. Pp. xiv, 240. $45.00 clothbound; $20.00 paperback.) Suzanne Brown-Fleming's short study of the post-1945 career in Germany of Bishop, later Cardinal,Aloisius Muench seeks to rectify some shortcomings she finds in F. Colman Barry's biography written in the 1960's. In particular, she examines the Cardinal's record on the question of German guilt for the crimes of the Holocaust, and the underlying anti-Semitic attitudes shared by so many Germans. In her view, Muench, as the Vatican's leading representative in Germany from 1946 to 1959, contributed to the lack of self-examination and the perpetuation of anti-Semitic prejudices among German Catholics. In this way, he was emblematic of the Catholic Church's failure in this period to confront its own complicity in Nazism's anti-Jewish ideology. Brown-Fleming is quite right-even though not the first-to note the peculiar mentality which prevailed among the German established classes in the post1945 years. Many foreign observers, including this reviewer, recall very clearly the repellent mixture of self-justification and self-pity, based on a still vibrant nationalism, even racism, which concentrated on the Germans' suffering and aEeged mistreatment and ignored entirely the fate of others. Only a few stalwart voices called for acknowledgment of, and repentance for, the crimes committed in Germany's name. Bishop Muench was not among them. Instead, as an American envoy, he swallowed uncritically the Germans' self-assessment and did his best to promote his philo-German and anti-guilt ideology, based on his own deeply conservative and often anti-Semitic world-view But Brown-Fleming runs the risk of exaggerating Muench's influence. The regrettable attitudes she deplores were not his invention and indeed owed little to his advocacy. In fact, this German mood was founded on several fundamental points.The German elite had been badly scarred by the humiliations suffered in 1919; they now expected that their second defeat would lead to a super-Versailles. All shared a deeply-entrenched dread of Russian Communism, and many believed the Western allies' policy would also be based on revenge. German Catholics sought to defend their new-found national position as exemplified in the Concordat. When the Cold War broke out, the Western allies needed to recruit the west German population to their side. They therefore accepted the selfserving apologias proffered by this group and the accompanying amnesia about their Nazi past. Muench's views nicely fitted into this political reality. Why was Muench appointed, not only as the Vatican's representative but also as liaison adviser on Catholic affairs to the U.S. military government? He was born and brought up in the Catholic diaspora in Milwaukee, taught in the seminary, and was promoted to the small rural diocese of Fargo, North Dakota, in 1935. …

Exhibiting the Holocaust

Exhibiting the Holocaust

ADAM RAYSKI. The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance. Foreword by FRANCOIS BEDARIDA. Translated by WILL SAYERS. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2005. Pp. xvi, 388. $35.00.

ADAM RAYSKI. The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance. Foreword by FRANCOIS BEDARIDA. Translated by WILL SAYERS. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2005. Pp. xvi, 388. $35.00.

A History of the Dora Camp, Andre Sellier, translated by Stephen Wright and Susan Taponier (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003), 547 pp., cloth $35.00.

A History of the Dora Camp, Andre Sellier, translated by Stephen Wright and Susan Taponier (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003), 547 pp., cloth $35.00.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Darfur

Introduction to the Special Issue on Darfur

People in Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein, translated by Harry Zohn, foreword by Henry Friedlander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), xvi + 568 pp., $39.95.

People in Auschwitz, Hermann Langbein, translated by Harry Zohn, foreword by Henry Friedlander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), xvi + 568 pp., $39.95.

Holocaust Tourism in Berlin: Global Memory, Trauma and the 'Negative Sublime'

<section class="abstract"> This essay argues that the construction of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial constitutes a paradigm shift in Holocaust commemoration in Germany. The structures architecturally resemble their US counterparts and particularly the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum more than they do the other memorials and museums in Berlin’s complex commemorative landscape. American responses to the European catastrophe have significantly impacted European commemorative forms. Indeed, an internationally recognizable memorial architecture seems to be emerging, one emphasizing gaps, voids, incongruities and the personal relation to what theorists and commentators have begun to call ‘negative’ or ‘evil sublime’. Contemporary memorials and museums are not designed to ‘merely’ house collections; rather, they draw attention to themselves as symbols and symptoms of traumatic memory. They act out the trauma of the Holocaust as architecture; walking through them is supposed to be a step towards working through that trauma as feeling and experience. </section>