itourist?

Keynote address / Tim Cole – Holocaust tourism: continuity and contestation

In some senses, there is nothing that ‘new’ about Holocaust tourism. German soldiers spent their days off visiting the ghettos of Eastern Europe and traveled to the east with cameras in hand. What has changed, and what has stayed the same, over the last sixty or so years of Holocaust tourism? Who have these tourists been, where have they traveled, and perhaps most critically why? And what have they, and we, made of all the other tourists we have met along the way, and the sites/sights we have encountered? Focusing specifically on ghetto and death camp sites in Poland, I want to pose questions of the shifting meanings and motivations of Holocaust tourism. Taking a range of guidebooks of Poland from the last few decades, I will explore what sites have been identified as tourist destinations, how these sites have been represented and how they have been visited. Ultimately, I wish to ask how useful the term ‘Holocaust tourism’ is in making sense of the shifting history of visitors to ghettos and death camps from 1940 to the present.

Tim Cole teaches history at the University of Bristol. His research interests focus on social histories of the Holocaust in Hungary, the spatiality of Holocaust ghettoization and Holocaust landscapes and the representation of the Holocaust in the post-war world. He is the author of Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust (1999) and Holocaust City (2003). He is currently completing a social history of the Holocaust in Hungary and embarking on a new project on Holocaust landscapes.

Tobias Brinkmann – Divided Memory: Visiting former Holocaust sites in post-Communist Eastern Europe

In my talk I will discuss Holocaust “tourism” in post-1989 Eastern Europe. Why are Germans, Israelis, Americans and others travelling to Holocaust sites in post-communist Eastern Europe and what and whom do they encounter; and how should we assess this encounter?

I will talk about the history of these sites and their visitors. Some of these sites were commemorated under Communism but with a universal and often distorted agenda, i.e. Jewish victims were either not commemorated or subsumed. A few Holocaust sites such as former concentration camps in East Germany were used by the Communists for crimes before they were turned into memorials. After 1989/91 the Communist agenda was replaced by national narratives. These often highlight national victimhood under German and Soviet occupation, separating the Holocaust from national history. Collaboration with the Germans in the Holocaust is played down; the Soviets are put on an equal footing with the Germans.

Contemporary visitors have their own agendas and perspectives. There is clearly a market for educated German tourists interested in Holocaust but there are also some Neo Nazis who organize trips to Auschwitz. Many American Jews in search of their own roots are tracing the history of their ancestors. The annual March of the Living illustrates close connections between Holocaust memory and Israeli identity. Russian war veterans and other victims of the Nazi persecution and their descendants are also visiting these sites. And they are joined victims of Communist persecution. All these visitors encounter increasingly “normal” tourists “without baggage”, locals and divided memory. There is clearly a market for Holocaust “tourism” and what Ruth Ellen Gruber has called a “virtual Jewish culture”.

I will describe this complex story of different layers of memory connected with one site but by different groups with differing even conflicting agendas by referring in particular to Poland (Auschwitz), Lithuania (Vilna Museum of Genocide, Ponari Forest, Fort VII in Kovno) and Hungary (Budapest, former Ghetto and Terrorhasza museum).

Tobias Brinkmann is Lecturer at the Department of History and the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, UK. MA Indiana University, Bloomington (1992); Ph.D. Technical University Berlin (2000). He has worked as researcher and curator for the German Historical Museum (Berlin) and the Leipzig City Museum; from 2001–2004 he was a research fellow at the Simon-Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. Since 2000 Brinkmann is a member of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, and since 2002 he serves as chair of the network Migration/Immigration of the Social Science History Association (ssha.org). His research focuses on Jewish migration in the 19th and 20th Centuries with a focus on American Jewish history and the Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe.

Victor Seedman – Sightseeing the Abyss: the enigma of Holocaust and Genocide tourism

A valuable theoretical framework for the study of tourism to Holocaust sites is provided by the related concepts of Dark Tourism and Thanatourism. “Dark” motivations may conjure up an image of London Dungeon-like sensation-seeking; however, both concepts can also be understood as reflecting the problematic of living under postmodernity; tourists may also be seen as attempting to make sense of the world and develop and maintain their sense of moral value. Conceivably “tourism” as an activity – contrasted perhaps with “pilgrimage” – is too easily stigmatized.

This paper offers an introduction to the insights provided by Dark Tourism and Thanatourism into visits to Holocaust and related sites. Much recent literature has particular salience for tourism management, in terms, for example, of developing the ability to segment the market in a variety of ways; for Journeys through – not just to – the Holocaust, however, the question of tourist motivations needs to be emphasized. A broader context is suggested, taking in socio-psychological and ethical factors.

As an aside in her article critiquing visual representation of the Holocaust, Griselda Pollock points to tourism as the antithesis of art, inauthentic and over-determined by power structures. It may be admitted that, while tourism is surely a critical site for the production of meaning, these meanings are always likely to be imposed as a form of public culture, reflecting national myths, and frequently commodified. Nevertheless, a recent prize-winning short film has indicated that it is possible, as the generation of Holocaust survivors fades away, to rely on the nous and affective identification of the tourist for the future of “Never Again!” Unfavorable contrasts with pilgrims aside, it is conceivably the tourist who offers the best hope for the future, for tertiary witness.

Victor Seedman is currently researching part-time into the representation of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum, as a PhD candidate at the University of Bedfordshire. His interest is long-standing, having been the recipient of a 1993 Tempus grant from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies to investigate how schools in – newly post-Communist – Poland might wish to expand their teaching of the Holocaust. This project led directly to what was probably the first seminar in Holocaust education in the former Soviet bloc, which he organized together with the Spiro Institute. 15 years as a tour manager took Victor all over Europe and beyond and gave him insider knowledge of the industry about which he now teaches FE and HE-level courses at Williams College in Central London. He has a PGCE and several specialist teaching qualifications, as well as an MA from the London School of Jewish Studies.

Elle Flanders (in conversation with Kay Dickinson) – Terrorism, Tourism and Documentary: A Consideration of Form in a Consumer-driven, Media-laden Minute

Documentary film has experienced a resurgence: “Ride the wave!” exclaim producers and distributors. A glut of ‘documentaries’ now floods festivals and the market. Digital television hunts to find ‘content’ and filmmakers crowd to comply. Or are they filmmakers?

In 2002, when I began my film, Zero Degrees of Separation, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I found myself amongst hoards of persons using digital video cameras. The second Intifada was in full swing, and the media, in ‘war-mode’, had stationed more journalists in the region than in the whole of Africa. These filmmakers were largely disaster-hardened activists there to tell the story of the conflict as they saw and experienced it. Many of these (often anti-globalization) video-laden do-gooders were subsequently off to tour the next battle in our terror-inflicted world, made even more popular by an ever more boldly visible American imperialism and media.

Pierre Bourdieu warns in his essay, ‘On Television’, of the media’s extensive reach and dominance over cultural – including artistic – production. So, is a new form of activist documentary emerging, one which is fatally compromised by the influence of dominant media institutions? Or are we actually witnessing the resurgence of a ‘Third Cinema’ as Michael Chanan suggests in his review of the work of radical activist Argentinean documentary filmmakers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino? Is this a new form of direct cinema that perhaps is not really concerned with cinema at all but rather with methods of dissemination in the information age? Are the filmmakers who are touring such conflict zones simply reproducing the rhetoric and ideologies of conventional reportage under the umbrella of an all pervasive mass media spectacle? What purposes are served by such films and what are their consequences? And, in particular, in what ways do they cement our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

In this context, Zero Degrees of Separation has been dubbed ‘experimental documentary’ for its having chosen to engage questions of cinema and the essay documentary form. By creating a meditation on home movies as historical document and contemporary stories as rooted in history, Zero Degrees of Separation creates an alternative context for understanding the occupation and the current realities of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. As such, I find myself asking in this context: Can we conceive of both a politically motivated film and a politically engaged filmmaker ? Or are we always destined to be simply tourists in contested zones of historical memory?

_Elle Flanders is a filmmaker, photographer, and critic based in Toronto and New York City. Her recent film, Zero Degrees of Separation, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and has toured extensively for the past two years, winning awards internationally. She was raised in Canada and Israel and holds both an MA in Critical Theory from Goddard College (Vermont) and an MFA in filmmaking from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). She has taught and guest lectured on both campuses as well as at numerous other universities. She is also an alumna of the Independent Study Program of The Whitney Museum. Her most recent film installation work: Bird on a Wire, a dual screen projection with a live music performance, also premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and is currently traveling to cities around the globe. She has served as Executive Director of the Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival in Toronto and sits on the Board of the Directors of the Images Festival and the Centre for Media and Culture in Education at the University of Toronto. She is also an advisory member for the Sexual Diversity Studies program at the University of Toronto._

Kay Dickinson is a lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has written several articles on Arab cinema and worked on both the Ramallah International Film Festival and The Shashat Women’s Film Festival in Palestine._

Richard William Hill – The Most Poetical Topic in the World

When I was a boy in the 1970s there were three significant narratives that were most influential in constructing my sense of justice. Two were at the time very public discourses – those related to the US civil rights movement and those related to the Holocaust. The third was the still marginal discourse of the American Indian Movement, which rarely, if ever, seemed to extend beyond conversations within our family or with other members of the Indigenous community. This essay sets out to explore some of the reasons why the attempts to eradicate Indigenous lives and cultures in the Americas have remained lost within romanticized discourses that often lament our passing without ever troubling to grapple with us a full human subjects. I am particularly interested in the ways in which assumptions about the Indigenous relationship to (or equivalency to) nature was both used directly as an argument for Indigenous extermination and as a ground for romantic laments at our inevitable passing. These ideas are tied to certain strands of primitivism that can be traced back to classical antiquity and served as conceptual models when Europe first encountered Indigenous North Americans. A number of images are crucial to the discourse of the “vanishing Indian”. James Earl Fraser’s sculpture of 1906, The End of the Tail, remains the most ubiquitously reproduced image of an American Indian to this day and is a significant focal point of this essay.

Lastly, and perhaps most disturbingly, are the ways in which this primitivist romanticism has made a mimetic return in the rhetoric of certain branches of the American Indian Movement itself, particularly with appeals to maintaining cultural “authenticity” through the avoidance of miscegenation.

Richard William Hill is an independent curator and writer of Cree heritage. As a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario he over-saw the museum’s first substantial effort to include North American Aboriginal art and ideas in permanent collection galleries. He also curated Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2004 and co-curated, with Jimmie Durham, The American West at Compton Verney, UK in 2005. He is currently curating The World Upside Down for the Walter Philips Gallery at the Banff Centre, which will open in fall 2006. Hill’s essays on art have appeared in numerous books, exhibition catalogues and magazines. He has a long association with the Canadian art magazine Fuse, where he was a member of the board and editorial committee and remains a contributing editor. Hill also teaches Aboriginal art history and contemporary art at York University, Toronto and is a PhD candidate at Middlesex University where he is researching the problem of agency in the art of Jimmie Durham.

Paul Antick – On itourist? and itourist? Notes on the Affective Economies of Holocaust Tourism

On itourist? reflects on the international billboard project, itourist?, a public art project that addresses the relationship between Holocaust tourism, the meaning of the Holocaust in contemporary consumer cultures and the relationship between images of the Holocaust and the constitution and articulation of Jewish identities. itourist? is developed in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery and supported by Czech Center of Contemporary Art, Middlesex University and the Parkes Institute (Southampton University).

itourist? Notes on the Affective Economies of Holocaust Tourism considers the ways in which the visitor to places like Auschwitz is constructed in a variety of media and institutional spaces and asks: how useful might such images be in presenting us with an adequate account of the identity, motivations and experiences of such visitors?

Paul Antick is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University, UK. He is currently working, in conjunction with John Hansard Gallery, MODA and the Prague Center for Contemporary Art, on itourist?, a billboard and web-based project that investigates the cultural politics of Holocaust tourism. He is also preparing a written and photographic work, Auschwitz: who goes there?, for publication in A. Kiendl (ed.) Informal Architectures (2006) and has recently published essays on photography and fashion advertising in A. Mac Namara (ed.) Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture and the Journal of Fashion Theory (2002). Recent exhibitions include: The Lighthouse Gallery, Scotland (2006); OMW Gallery, Dublin (2005); Walter Phillips Gallery, Canada (2004); Limerick City Art Gallery, Ireland (2003); MoDA, UK (2002).