event and spoken testimony. Rather than be satisfied with the idea that the Holocaust is beyond comprehension, Holocaust tourism—indeed, the Holocaust itself—demands room to acknowledge that there is a referent, an event that discourse points back to even if it cannot perfectly portray it. The point here is not to overcome silence and absence; rather, it is to point out the ways in which they are the very objects of witnessing the Holocaust.
If we insist on bearing witness to testimony as parallel with an analyst’s listening to a traumatized survivor in the context of therapy, then the contribution of tourism has to be qualified. While psychoanalytic theory may help elucidate survivor testimony, tourists do not engage in great depth with individual experiences. Instead, tourism at Auschwitz is a collective enterprise, presenting multitudes of victims and experienced with crowds of other tourists. The time will come when there are no living survivors, so it is only collectively and transgenerationally that we can still speak of tourism as listening to traumatic memory. In the context of a collective trauma (a term I use with caution so as not to equate individual experience with collective memory), tourism plays a salutary role inasmuch as the very presence of visitors affirms the reality of the past and thus resists the damaging voices of Holocaust denial. Tourism may function as a kind of collective therapy that answers a sense of collective trauma, an inheritance from the past that demands reckoning.
Over the history of Auschwitz as a tourist destination, the camp has come to represent the Holocaust on an international scale, reflecting the diverse ethnic and national origins of the victims and perpetrators. The stories of the Holocaust have dispersed along with the survivors around the globe, and tourism at Auschwitz involves speakers and listeners from many parts of the world. Tourists themselves travel to Auschwitz with their own stories about the genocide and its impact on their family or community, sharing this knowledge with other travelers and tour guides, who in turn become the mediums through which these stories are passed on further. As both primary and secondary witnesses, tourists encounter not only the direct evidence of the past but also its preservation and presentation in the present. They see the spatial remains of the Holocaust at the same time that they see its memorialization. Furthermore, they encounter one another. Tourism bears witness in a general sense to the memory of the Holocaust and, more specifically, to itself and its participants as stewards of that memory. While not all visitors may embody this realization, the tour to Auschwitz imposes an ethical imperative on visitors to remember, to acknowledge the crimes of the past and also the obligations that the past hands down to the future. The mirror that tourism holds up to visitors in the form of other visitors is a reminder of that commitment.
At the end of the tour, when visitors share their photos and impressions with friends or colleagues, tourism recirculates testimony about the crimes of the Final Solution heard on site. Tourists convey their travel experiences in words and in images, posting on travel sites or social media, writing in journals, or sharing photos and postcards. It is that ability to witness Holocaust remembrance through images that I wish to explore further in the next chapter.
2
Picturing the Camps
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.… It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along.
—Susan Sontag, On Photography (1973)1
Tourists can be conspicuous for many reasons, but nothing marks them more plainly than their cameras. The stereotypical tourist is a lens-wielding traveler on a mission to record anything that appears exotic, historical, or typical of the locale. Most of us who travel with a camera have probably found ourselves fulfilling this cliché, more or less self-consciously, taking pictures of buildings or monuments that have already been photographed a thousand times by other photographers, often with far greater skill than we possess. As the writer Susan Sontag observes, photography and tourism are so mutually enabling that they are hard to imagine without each other.
Picture taking plays a ritualistic role in tourism, so much so that the choice not to photograph something can be as deliberate as the choice to do so.2 Photography is one of the ways the traveler fulfills the journey’s promise of making new memories; it provides a purpose to travel and offers the sightseer a familiar, portable identity. In the midst of an unfamiliar location, photography is a reassuring activity, easing the tourist’s insecurity by helping to incorporate the disorienting experience of unfamiliar places into the practice of everyday life.3 While exotic pictures may reinforce the distinction between home and abroad, the act of pointing the camera, framing the image, and pressing the shutter button is a constant that bridges the experience of travel and home life— a fact made more evident today with the ubiquity of handheld devices with digital cameras. Photography lets tourists extend the travel experience beyond the period of the tour, easing the transition from a time of adventure to the routine of home and work. Whether through the assembly of photo albums, the editing of digital pictures, the slideshow before a captive audience, or self-produced videos, photographic practices posttravel permit a sense of mastery over unfamiliar places, promoting tourism’s gaze well beyond the actual time of the journey and giving tourists the pleasure of virtual travel.4 Sontag’s claim that photography provides the illusion of possession over an “unreal past” (in reference to the idealized representation of family photos) suggests that tourists seek that same sense of possession over place.
If tourists are capable of being sophisticated makers of meaning, as more recent scholarship in tourism studies increasingly contends, then surely photography is one of the means by which they do so. The fun of taking pictures as souvenirs need not obscure the more earnest characterization of tourists as storytellers, documentarists, and ethnographers; as the literary theorist Jonathan Culler has said, “Tourists are the agents of semiotics: all over the world they are engaged in reading cities, landscapes and cultures as sign systems.”5 Tourists are making sense of their travels and, in the process, of their own place in the world.
That is not to say that photography is innocent of its involvement in many problematic touristic behaviors. Think, for example, of the habit some travelers have of spending more time looking through a camera than directly at their surroundings; perhaps they (or we) do so out of a sense of insecurity about what to notice or out of fear of missing something “important.” More troubling, tourists with cameras can be culturally insensitive guests who reduce their hosts to exemplars of the exotic.6 No doubt photography is complicit in tourism’s pursuit of superficial pleasure, which its critics cite as evidence of tourism’s inherent frivolity.7
The sociologist John Urry has highlighted the ways in which the pleasure gained in tourism is deeply visual. For Urry, vision becomes a primary axis along which tourism, the invitation to gaze upon other people and other places without inhibition, rewards travelers with pleasure. In the most recent edition of his canonical book, The Tourist Gaze, Urry, together with the cultural geographer Jonas Larsen, characterizes the centrality of vision in tourism as follows:
Gazes organize the encounters of visitors with the “other”, providing some sense of competence, pleasure, and structure to those experiences. The gaze demarcates an array of pleasurable qualities to be generated within particular times and spaces. It is the gaze that orders and regulates the relationship between the various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visually out-of-ordinary, what are relevant differences and what is “other.”8
Urry, like Sontag, identifies seeing with pleasure, though he defines pleasure very broadly to include the intellectual gratification of competence, of having structured experiences; in other words, not simply as an emotional or libidinal response. At the same time, by including the contact between self and other as one form of visual pleasure that can accompany “various sensuous experiences,” Urry also acknowledges the possibility of libidinal—that is, voyeuristic—enjoyment in the tourist gaze, implicating vision as a means by which to exercise power over the other.9
However conceptualized, Urry’s and Sontag’s understanding of the tourist gaze as an exploitative pleasure is difficult to reconcile with the concept of Holocaust tourism as a kind of witnessing that