Michael Hiltzik: Holocaust museums and the problem of imagery
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One issue that must be central to the designers of any museum devoted to a horrific event such as the Holocaust is tied to imagery: How does one depict graphic images to a general audience?
This was an important concern for the designers of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, as I was told by Michael Berenbaum, one of its founding officials and the subject of my Sunday column. ‘You have to present that imagery, but how?’
Most of our discussion on the topic dealt with how to accommodate the sensitivities visitors might have to images of violence or intimidation. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem that is in some sense the model for every such institution that has followed, the new history museum, opened in 2005, is closed to children under 10.
The Washington museum recommends admission to the main exhibit to those over 11, and has also installed ‘privacy walls’ shielding some material from the sight of children under 4-foot-7. Berenbaum told me he would take the walls down. For one thing, he says, they’re anachronistic. Since the museum’s opening 17 years ago, the public has come to trust it for seriousness and taste, and Americans have become used to horrific imagery throughout their culture. Moreover, he says, the walls ‘create a sense of the attraction of the forbidden.’
The emotional reaction to this imagery -- and to the very narrative of the Holocaust presented by such museums -- has been an issue for commentators since the U.S. museum opened. Here is the Harper’s essay by Philip Gourevitch referenced in the column. Berenbaum’s important essay, ‘The Nativization of the Holocaust’ can be found here.
The column begins below.
Michael Berenbaum had been a top executive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for about a decade when the burden of helping to run the place got to him.
It was not the time he spent among images and artifacts from this darkest period of human history, or the challenge of finding ways to explain unimaginable horrors to new generations. That was what provided the intellectual stimulation of the job.
No, it was the spending of days on end in budget meetings. The museum had been conceived, built and opened, and for him what was left was drudgery. “I realized,” he told me recently, “that it’s more fun to create something than to run it.”
That was in 1996. The realization set him on a path that led ultimately to his founding Los Angeles-based Berenbaum Group, which is in the business of creating museums devoted to the Holocaust and the history of persecution and genocide around the world.
Read the whole column.
-- Michael Hiltzik
