ABSTRACT
The confrontation on the platform at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) presents in stark relief the inherent tension of the memorial and educational imperatives that reside in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Meleuvre’s point is that museums, even at their most didactic, also have the capacity to decontextualise their own narratives. They have the capacity to call up for the visitor something other than historical understanding: an ‘auratic emergence of memory’. The Hart surveys– taken between 1988 and the years following the museum’s opening – suggested that the educational trajectory of the USHMM was thrown into turmoil by what the visitors saw and remembered. The Centre was charged with providing both a narrative accounting of the Holocaust – a knowledge or history – as well an opportunity for visitors to remember the dead, or the survivors, or the catastrophes of the present.
