Collect and Display! Exhibitions as a Medium of Holocaust Memory in the Immediate Postwar Period

Abstract

The proliferation of Holocaust museums over the last 40 years has brought popular and critical attention to how exhibitions reflect and construct the cultural memory of traumatic histories. However, most studies of Holocaust exhibitions begin with what Paul Williams described as ‘the global rush to commemorate’ in the late 1980s. This special issue of the Journal of Holocaust Research reveals a longer and broader genealogy of exhibitionary practices, one that took shape immediately after the war. Indeed, already on the day after Liberation, the process of ‘museumification’ was initiated, as impromptu, site-specific exhibitions were organized in the concentration and extermination camps, and impressive blockbusters, like ‘Crimes hitlériens’ (1945), were sponsored by governmental ministries and international organizations across Europe. Organized by the Allies as a medium of mass communication to broadcast Nazi crimes in order to ‘denazify’ public spaces and ward against future fascist tendencies, and connected to the Nuremberg trials, these exhibitions served a variety of functions: to convince and convict, to inform and educate, but also to fashion communal and national identities and legitimize political worldviews. Although scholarship has begun to attend to these antifascist exhibitions, those mounted by the She’erit Hapleita, the ‘surviving remnant’ of Jews in Europe, remain on the margins of academic attention. Jewish survivors not only ‘collected and recorded,’ they also collected and exhibited. Both individuals and collectives used exhibitions as a ‘medium’ of memory to foreground the Jewish experience of victimization as a result of Nazi genocidal ideology and policy. By collecting, representing, and transmitting information through images, texts, objects and technologies, they offered experiential and spatial narratives that forged new relationships between artworks, historical documents, and material artifacts, thus producing knowledge as well as framing individual memories. Some were aligned with the Jewish Historical Commissions; others with international Jewish aid organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) or Zionist groups. Whether organized in makeshift spaces in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps, or