ABSTRACT
Trying to define the common core of our knowledge about the Holocaust may be a formidable task. After all, there are numerous individual accounts-collected memories-which do not necessarily add up to a collective memory shared by everyone. However, there does seem to be a group of images and narratives that form the common core: a cultural representation shared globally. As many such ‘global’ representations today, this one is to a large extent influenced by the American image of what the Holocaust was like (cf. Zemel on atrocity photographs by Lee Miller and Margaret BourkeWhite1). Typically, the Holocaust is seen as a mass murder of Jews, and in terms of imagery, it evokes barbed wire, trains and tracks, watchtowers, gas chambers, crematoria, Zyklon B, Eichmann as the paragon perpetrator and Auschwitz as the prototypical example of a death camp.
