ABSTRACT
The author's contribution to Challenging Histories' is to consider the problematic nature and precarious vicissitudes of representations of the Holocaust. Tracing the ways in which the Holocaust is and has been represented and understood is a continuous project. A recurring issue is how to memorialise the Holocaust. The mode of display, the nature of representation, in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is problematical and demands critical scrutiny. Here history is promoted as an experience of identification. Inevitably the Holocaust Memorial Museum has produced diverse responses, and has created, as Young argues, a competition between the various cults of victimization'. Each of nature and precarious vicissitudes of representations attempts to expose the disastrous events and educate you by providing explanations for this human-inflicted horror. Each provoke you to question the ways in which the Holocaust is mediated and circulated in the institutions, discourses and the memory of contemporary culture.
