Paradigm change in Holocaust memorialization. Lessons to be learned

In this paper I will argue that there is a major paradigm shift happening in Holocaust memorialization and this needs to be addressed in order
to avoid sleepwalking when planning a new museum about the Holocaust. The 2008 triple crises migration, financial and security crises
neoliberal global order had an impact on museology as well. This,
what I would call an “organic crises” to use the concept of Gramsci,
is not a backlash, as the world and the world of museology will not
go back to the good old business as usual mode, but will change for
ever due to the paradigm shift. Not all museums are good as the format
is easy to misuse and instrumentalise. First let me list the signs which
call for novel approaches and to urge us to think beyond the traditional museum as an educational institution paradigm.
First, a recent study shows that although education about the Holocaust is increasingly institutionalized, and there are more and more
relevant study programs, research institutes and museums are set up
about the Holocaust, but at the same time ignorance about the Holocaust has never been greater. Holocaust educators and researchers
must ask the painful question, what have we done wrong if, in spite
of all the funding that was put into Holocaust education and museums,
the result is increasing ignorance?
Second, there is also an increasing violence against results of Holocaust research and the researchers themselves which has not been the
A paradigm change in Holocaust memorialization. Lessons to be learned SOU 2020:21
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case in the past decades. Jan Grabowski was attacked in Paris. When
I received online anti-Semitic death threat, the Hungarian police and
the attorney’s office refused to investigate.
Third the certain states in the EU do not comply with European
norms and their governments are secretly setting up monuments and
museums that are whitewashing the past,1
and they pass legislation
to include war criminals in the mandatory reading list for secondary
schools.
These three factors are alarming for a very important reason. The
Holocaust narrative that was conceived during the Cold War elevated
the moral command of “Never Again” into a measure of universal
integrity. The memory politics of the European Union was built on
a positive normative notion, namely: that learning from the past is a
process through which a “bitter experience” may become a positive
force. International organizations, like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) have been supervising whether individual states are committed to these values. Now this consensus is in danger. Not by Holocaust deniers who are on the margins in most
countries. That would have made our work easier: we just have to
continue what we have done in the past decade, just better. But the
present situation is different: the more we believe that this us business as usual, the more we are losing in the long run, because of the
paradigm change in Holocaust memorialisation. Now state actors
are trying to challenge the previous consensus.
This challenge is different from revisionism. I analysed in a paper
the revisionist museology setting up the Museum of Trianon. However, these museums about the Holocaust are different in two ways.
First, as these museums play a key role not revisionising but hollowing or polypore museums which are emptying the meaning while on
surface they look like real museums and comply with the Holocaust
canon. Second, that the actor is the state, not NGOs or rich individuals. Therefore, in this paper I argue that due to the paradigm change
in Holocaust memorialization museums are becoming a site of simulacrum. The new concept of the state requires a new concept of a
museum