Recently
there has been an increased focus directed towards how Britain remembers the
Holocaust - emphasised by David Cameron’s launch of the Holocaust Commission.
The pledge is that ‘the commission will work to ensure Britain has a permanent
memorial to the Holocaust and educational resources for future generations’. As
Andrew Pearce puts it - within the ‘last quarter of the twentieth century’ the
remembrance of the Holocaust has undergone ‘a profound transformation in
Britain’. However, Britain’s Holocaust consciousness is more complex than first
thought because teaching aims within schools and within exhibitions, such as
the Imperial War Museum, have adopted a national master narrative that limits
our ability to ask difficult questions.
The focus
at a recent conference “Between Obsession, Routine, and Contestation:
Remembering the Holocaust in Europe today” revealed how some publications have
suggested that ‘the Germans have had enough of Hitler and the Holocaust’. Harold
Welzer has stated that, “Hitler can be forgotten”. While Ulrike Jureit has illustrated that ‘the
Holocaust Memorial was more of the 1968 generation’s pathological
identification with Jewish victims than of anything else’. There seems to be a
contrast between Germany and Britain: is one forgetting while another is
keeping memory alive? However, this question is too simplistic because Britain
as well as other countries up until the 1970s experienced, as Barbie Zelizer
points out, the ‘period of amnesia’. This period saw an increased interest in
survivor’s memories that had largely been previously ignored. When we discuss
remembering to forget it could be that through the creation of many memorials
to the Holocaust we have grown to think more in-depth about their purpose and
who is doing the remembering and on behalf of what group?
The next questions to consider are -
will the current debates within Germany affect Britain and will Britain’s new
energy to memorialise and educate impact upon Germany? Here we will consider
the affect of transnational memory on these two countries, especially with
regard to Britain. Today, survivor’s memories are now at the forefront of
memory because we are able to watch them recount in documentary films, read
their memoires and listen to them speak at events, which are produced in many
countries. But with regard to memorialisation of the Holocaust has Germany
reached a moment of fatigue? As previously stated there are numerous memorials
in Germany but very few in Britain, although one memorial that is visible in
Britain is the memorial to the Kindertransport in Liverpool Street, London.
This memorial is physically imprinted onto Britain’s consciousness because it
is outside a busy train station but is increasingly having a mental impact due
to the national curriculum, the Holocaust commission and through the work of
Beth Shalom, The National Holocaust Centre and Museum.
‘While countries around the globe are moving the Holocaust to the centre
of their historical and memorial consciousness’, Britain has an opportunity to
ask questions that have previously been too taboo to ask or considered too
complex to address within schools and museums. However, Beth Shalom’s
exhibitions are making us think about topics that have previously adopted the
national narrative in a new way. It is important to keep this memory alive –
the topic of the 2015 Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain – but we have to ask
more challenging questions. For example, if we consider the Kindertransport how
do we reflect upon Britain’s role as both a rescuer and a bystander? How do we ‘commemorate’
the perpetrator – we remember their crimes – but how do we represent this in a
museum exhibition and in a memorial?
This post was written by Amy Williams. Amy is currently undertaking an internship at Culture Syndicates and studying for her MA in Holocaust and Related Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is blogging about her experiences with Culture Syndicates on their Linked In page: http://linkd.in/1Mqo46v
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