RESEARCH NOTES AND REPORTS 1175

Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 1175–1178, 2002

 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain
0160-7383/02/$22.00

Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation

and Darker Tourism

William F. S. Miles
Northeastern University, USA

In an era in which publics have become more demanding of their museolog-

ical experiences, visual “interpretation” has emerged as a new framework for
both museum curators and their scholarly critics (Noussia 1998). This trend
towards a more relevant and interactive museum pedagogy has become so
transformative that some have posited the “post-museum” as a successor form
to the 19th century institution (Hooper-Greenhill 2000). This emphasis on
museum interpretation is particularly sensitive when applied to “dark tour-
ism.” The latter entails recreational visitation to sites “associated… with death,
disaster, and depravity”, such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wash-
ington DC (Lennon and Foley 1999). However, there is a difference between
sites associated with death, disaster, and depravity and sites of death, disaster,
and depravity. If visitation to the former is rightfully characterized as “dark
tourism,” then journey/excursion/pilgrimage to the latter constitutes a
further degree of empathetic travel: “darker tourism.”
Based on visits to the Washington museum and the (open-air) museum at
the former concentration camp site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, this research note
intends to underscore the significance of the distinction between “dark” and
“darker” tourism (Miles 2000, 2001). Particularly with respect to authenticity,
but also in terms of site interpretation, it is a distinction that needs to be
recognized and internalized by those charged with commemorating the
Shoah. Key to this interpretive function are the differing motivations for Holo-
caust memorial construction and visitation. Such a paradigm, sensitive to
dimensions of authenticity and experience, may also help in assessing the
varied reactions by those drawn to such sites. “Darker tourism” is conceptually
and linguistically preferable to Young’s (1994) unintentionally reifying
polarity between “memorials removed from the sites of destruction” and “sites
of destruction” per se. By virtue of their opposite positions in the panoply of
Holocaust museums, the State Museum in Oświe
cim and the Washington
museum represent particularly appropriate case studies for comparison. On
account of what happened there, Auschwitz has become a notorious, universal
symbol of evil. That it is relatively undeveloped in terms of museum facilities
or methods of representation is secondary. The US Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington DC, on the other hand, can rightly claim to be the
epitome of technological sophistication with respect to Shoah memorializ-
ation. Yet, its location on the Washington DC mall bears no connection to
the events of the Holocaust per se.
It is useful to adopt a space-time framework in approaching the dark–darker
tourism paradigm. While there is little agreement over when the Shoah began,
it ended in 1945, whether it is conceived as a distinct event (the more conven-
1176 RESEARCH NOTES AND REPORTS

tional approach) or as a post hoc conceptualization of loosely tied atrocities

(Novick 1999). Therefore, any Holocaust memorial must bridge the existential
gap between the here-and-now of the tourist and the event (or events) of
more than half a century prior. It must convert the memorial thing into a live
memory. This is the major challenge for all dark tourism. More than evoking
historical knowledge, to be successful, any dark touristic “attraction” must also
engender a degree of empathy between the sightseer and the past victim.
Stimulating empathy is no less a challenge for darker tourism. However, even
if it claims no greater temporal distancing over dark tourism, it does possess
a critical spatial advantage. Darker tourism enjoys a locational authenticity
that its counterpart does not. Just being there imparts to the darker tourist a
uniquely empowering (if spectral) commemorative potential. From the
present perspective, the major difference between the Washington museum
and the one in Owi cim lies in the locational authenticity of the latter. Despite
the unrivalled technological and exhibitory superiority of the former, the
Oświe
cim museum, merely by containing the actual sites of Auschwitz and
Birkenau, evokes unparalleled emotion through name and location (Świeboka
1993). At Birkenau, in particular, locational authenticity informed the early
debate over installing any actual monument: “Why construct a monument at
a former extermination camp? Is not the historical site itself a monument?”
(Spielmann 1994:171). In chillingly incarnating the locus of death, however,
Oświe
cim does not provide the kind of historical contextualization that the
Washington museum does (Bollag 1999).
As destinations, both museums are enormously popular. Approximately half
a million persons visit the Oświe
cim annually, thus 25 million have visited
since the Holocaust’s end (extrapolated from Webber 1993:282). The
museum is Poland’s premier destination, especially for foreigners who consti-
tute one-third of the total. The Washington museum, for its part, which
received 2 million persons in its first year and hosts 5,000 daily, can boast
“the largest attendance figures in history for a national museum” (Flanzbaum
1999:96). In Washington, nearly two-thirds of people viewing the Holocaust
museum are not Jews; in Oświe
cim, the proportion of non-Jewish tourists is
likely to be even higher.
Is it proper to label both of these institutions “museums”? Technically they
both are; but Auschwitz-Birkenau is also something else. For sure, heritage
theme parks and other sites of historical significance also serve multiple func-
tions; they, too, have given rise to the question “What is a museum?” Yet on
account of the massive extermination that was conducted in Birkenau,
Oświe
cim takes the question to another level. Beyond being a museum, it is
also a mass graveyard. Yet, on account of the ruthlessly efficient manner in
which even corpses were eliminated (burning in the crematoria), this is a
cemetery without tombstones, a graveyard without graves. In this respect this
museum is unique, both by housing a museum-cum-exhibition and
encompassing the locations where the dead literally went up in smoke.
What lies beyond darker tourism? If its counterpart encompasses visits to
commemorative sites associated with death and holocaust, and darker tourism
constitutes travel to actual sites of barbarism and genocide, darkest tourism
would transcend both the spatial differences that distinguish dark from darker
type and the time gap that separates both dark and darker from the remem-
bered tragedy. Constraints to darkest tourism are less conceptual than techno-
logical. Electronically interactive media of Internet and new generation tele-
vision may pave the way to darkest tourism. Unmediated access to videotaped
and online Holocaust survivor testimony already constitutes a new mode in
connecting post-millennial youth directly to the disappearing generation of
Shoah eyewitnesses (Salvo 1999). Already, one can take “virtual tours” of
 RESEARCH NOTES AND REPORTS 1177

museums via the World Wide Web. In darkest tourism, museum cyberguides
and curators will take their virtual tourists on real time tours of active deten-
tion camps, killing fields, death rows, and execution chambers. The dark cyb-
ertourist is thus a mere click away from baudy (sic) participation in the
museum sites so “hit.” For sure, cybertourism does not physically bridge the
spatial distance which this researcher has argued distinguishes dark from
darker tourism. As sensory cognition evolves in relation to progressive com-
puterization, however, longstanding psychological distinctions between real
and virtual, here and there, subject and object may themselves loosen. If so,
then the dark cybertourist may not in fact sense a substantial difference
between walking and browsing through Auschwitz. Darkest tourism is a chill-
ing prospect, but one which museum curators (dark and not) will eventually
have to confront. In the meantime, the dark–darker tourism framework
should help sensitize museum creators, curators, and consumers about the
meanings and motivations of their respective missions, helping them all to
fashion, in the words of one Auschwitz museum scholar, their most appropri-
ate “philosophy of sightseeing” (Webber 1993:286). 왎 A

William Miles: Department of Political Science, Northeastern University, Bos-

ton MA 02115, USA. Email <b.miles@neu.edu>.

REFERENCES
Bollag, B.
1999 In the Shadow of Auschwitz. Teaching the Holocaust in Poland. Amer-
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Hooper-Greenhill, E.
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Lennon, J., and M. Foley
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1178 RESEARCH NOTES AND REPORTS

Webber, J.
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graphs, T. Wiebocka, ed., pp. 282–291. Oświe
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Submitted 4 April 2001. Resubmitted 11 July 2001. Resubmitted 15 September 2001. Resub-
mitted 30 January 2002. Resubmitted 22 March 2002. Accepted 28 March 2002. Final
version 19 April 2002

PII: S0160-7383(02)00054-3