Commemorating in Place

Abstract

What makes historical tourism so compelling? The author reflects upon her personal experience of Holocaust tourism to tease out its meaning and appeal. The paper considers the making of meaning through the in-situ experience, including through association, sensory perception, and imagination. The paradigm of dark tourism, traditionally associated with superficial consumption, is dismissed as being too naive a rendering of the visitor experience. Instead, the author commends the tourist’s inherent capacity to make connections between the past and the present, and thereby generate meaning. Ultimately, however, the author finds her most authentic response to “being there” is one of commemoration, since she knows that what she is visiting in the present is not history itself, but merely a memory of it.