Poetics of Memory: Aesthetics and Experience of Holocaust Remembrance in Museums

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Holocaust commemoration in three museums: The Jewish Museum Berlin; Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In particular, the essay examines exhibition techniques, architecture and the visceral, physical experience of the visitor in each museum. My argument focuses on the way that museums draw on aesthetic technique, design and the manipulation of visitor experience to create Holocaust narratives that resonate with and reflect each country’s dominant Holocaust discourse. In Yad Vashem, this narrative is a distinctly Zionist one that relies on the symbolism of autochthony and redemption in contrast to Jewish suffering in exile. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust narrative, in contrast, is rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism and democracy as the antidote to Fascism and anti-Semitism, while the Holocaust narrative of the Jewish Museum Berlin, as developed in its architecture, memorial spaces and select exhibits, draws on the symbolism of the void to emphasize the loss of Germany’s Jewish communities as irreparable rupture and self-inflicted wound.