Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
in both German studies and Holocaust studies. To undertake an analysis of Holocaust-themed tourism, I have turned to work undertaken largely by anthropologists, whose questions about travelers have helped me immensely in framing my approach. Holocaust tourism is an unwieldy topic that challenges the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge while simultaneously challenging the boundaries of comfortable discourse. The topic fuses two realms of experience—that of the Holocaust as an unparalleled historical event, and that of tourism as a popular mode of intercultural encounter—that are generally kept separate. This book argues that anyone interested in understanding Holocaust tourism engages by necessity in a broadly interdisciplinary inquiry. It draws upon the numerous inquiries into both the Holocaust and tourism that, despite their abundance, have remained largely disconnected from one another. In connecting them, I also rely on personal experiences and observations shared by many Holocaust tourists, as well as my own. The goal here is not to “correct” either disciplinary or non-academic accounts of the Holocaust or tourism but, rather, to engage in a conversation about both the pragmatics and the ethics of Holocaust tourism, to identify problems, and to acknowledge possibilities for contributing to public memory.
The task of theorizing Holocaust tourism is daunting, not least because of the seemingly incommensurate loci of the Holocaust and of tourism in the imagination. The disciplinary developments of Holocaust studies and tourism studies have generated insights and methodologies that have made sense within certain disciplinary confines. Holocaust tourism, however, challenges both fields by exposing the lacunae between the academic theory and an emerging form of practice that neither field has been particularly eager to address.
“Tourism” and “Holocaust”: Disciplinary Responses
While the Holocaust has had a prominent role in defining intellectual life in the West since World War II, tourism has received more limited scrutiny within academia, having been marginalized until recently even by those fields where it now flourishes. The more limited interest in tourism studies no doubt relates to the cultural bias against tourism as a lowbrow form of cultural experience.11 Unflattering stereotypes abound both inside and outside academia, portraying tourists as uncritical consumers who exploit people marketed as Others from exotic places.12 The difference between the Holocaust and tourism in terms of their perceived importance presents an awkward situation for the student of Holocaust tourism. After all, what could differ more from tourism and its presumed triviality than the Holocaust, around which a complex array of philosophical, ethical, historical, and aesthetic approaches have evolved in response to a cataclysm so profound as to challenge the very foundations of knowledge? Consequently, if tourism is regarded chiefly as a problem, then Holocaust tourism must be a particularly odious form of the activity, grafting the hopelessly banal onto the utterly momentous.
But in regarding tourism, including Holocaust tourism, as a problem to be overcome rather than a practice to be understood, scholars preempt any analysis of this growing phenomenon. In order to address seriously the legitimate concerns one may have about the ethical value of tourism, one must first be willing to acknowledge that tourism is tremendously diverse, encompassing a vast range of motivations, topics, locales, and ideologies. Only by allowing for that variability can one hope to understand how—or if—one can distinguish visits to a death camp from visits to any historical museum, ancient ruin, or medieval cathedral. As we will see, casting a visit to Auschwitz as the ethical equivalent of a trip to Disney World flattens both kinds of travel into meaningless diversions, denying the potential for even a modicum of value in either instance.13 A dismissive stance toward tourism prevents more meaningful analysis in more than one way. First, it suggests that destinations themselves have no intrinsic qualities that resist tourism’s presumed superficiality. Second, it regards tourism as an undifferentiated practice based primarily on consumerism and entertainment rather than education or personal enrichment. But tourism is not simply an empty form into which one pours arbitrary content, nor are tourists itinerant automatons passively swallowing the latest marketing schemes from the travel industry—at least, not in all cases. Rather, tourism is a multifarious form of cultural encounter whose aims may or may not include entertainment and shopping, education about history, practice of a second language, appreciation of art and architecture, visits to sites of trauma, or pilgrimages to sacred places. Tourism has rarely been a matter of simple diversion.
The recent field of tourism studies arose in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the fields of political science, economics, sociology, and most prominently, anthropology.14 Whether focused on tourism to sites of pleasure (e.g., so-called 3S tourism—“sea, sand, and sun”) or to sites of disaster (as in what the business scholars Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon have called “dark tourism,” which could include Holocaust tourism),15 their point of departure emphasizes the gathering and interpretation of data through empirical methodologies and neutral terminology. Tourism studies defines tourism, differentiates among its various modes, and explains its significance to those who participate in it and are affected by it.16 It documents the flows of people and currency, catalogs the rationales for different kinds of travel, and categorizes the experiences shared by tourists. In these studies, tourism emerges as a differentiated field that encompasses the vacationer, the business traveler, the shopper, the sunbather, and the adventurer as well as the student, the researcher, and the pilgrim.
The wealth of information about types of tourism forms the basis for important ethical and ideological considerations, such as tourism’s role in the exhaustion or preservation of natural and human resources or the ways in which the tourist’s experience of foreign culture is authentic or staged.17 Feminist scholars address the gender politics of tourism, focusing, for example, on the intercultural collision of values about gender roles or the economic impacts of tourism on an indigenous population’s distribution of wealth along gender lines.18 A related area of tourism study explores the link between the exotic and the erotic, focusing on tourism’s potential for sexual exploitation of indigenous cultures, most obviously captured by the study of sex tourism.19 Marxist anthropologists portray tourism’s role in the spread of globalized capital, whereby locations become tourist markets and the labor of performance commodifies indigenous culture for the traveling consumer.20 An emerging area of tourism study takes up the question of tourism’s sustainability, concerning itself not only with the economic and cultural preservation of the sites tourists “consume” but also with the ecological impacts of tourism on the natural environment.21
Historians have also contributed crucial insights into the evolution of touristic practices, reminding us that tourism is both older and more varied than its most popular current manifestations. The origins of tourism in its modern form are a topic of some debate, but many argue that tourism has its origins in religious pilgrimage.22 In that sense, Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales can be regarded as early portrayals of a strain within tourism that continues to this day. (The distinction between the tourist and the pilgrim is a recurring motif in the study of Holocaust tourism and points to the risk of overly essentializing these two identities.) Tourism also has roots in commerce, as the development of trade routes produced tales of distant lands and cultures, luring others to embark on their own adventures. The word “tour” became more commonly employed in seventeenth-century Europe to refer to an organized form of travel to a “canon” of sites. This was the Grand Tour, the purpose of which was to educate the wealthy sons of aristocrats in the languages and arts of neighboring countries.23 Of course, both the pilgrimage and the Grand Tour participated in tourism’s commercial and entertainment aspects, necessitating lodgings, meals, and the usual diversions along the way. With the emergence of the middle class, particularly since the industrial era, and the development of mass forms of transit and communication, tourism began to display some of its more modern manifestations as a mass phenomenon—and gave rise to the inevitable complaints about the entry of the masses into a previously elite arena. With the development of tourism as a mass phenomenon, the more commercial aspects of tourism have tended to eclipse the social capital attributed to previous eras, but that should not imply the erasure of tourism’s educational value. The multiplicity of historical roles played by the tourist—pilgrim, trader, or student—has important implications for Holocaust tourism, where the tendency to distinguish between the pilgrim and the tourist can be problematic. Tourism resists stable forms of identity; indeed, some forms of tourism may bring about a profound destabilization of identity. That is especially the