Visualisations of Memory - Holocaust Commemorated in Museums

The authoress looks at the question of the presentation of the Holocaust in museums and monuments. The museums established on the site of former Nazi concentration camps and death camps are special places. They are sometimes referred to as historical museums of a new type, due to the fact that the topics they deal with do not concern history alone but also other areas, such as sociology, social psychology or anthropology. Apart from the moral and historical obligations to the victims and the survivors, they carry responsibility for shaping the consciousness and historical memory of contemporary generations. Even so, the past presented in the museums is not what actually happened, not is it an objective reconstruction of traumatic events. It is rather a product of the present times, reflecting the current assumptions and judgements of the authors of the display, their vision and concept of past reality. The authoress takes up the problem of building public memory in institutionalized forms and asks about the limits of representation of the Holocaust in museum space.