ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the learning programme, its functions, purpose, and relationship with the exhibition, memory, and British Holocaust consciousness. It explores connections between personal memories and how they are shaped, negotiated, and challenged in a museum setting. The Holocaust Exhibition at IWM London, part of Imperial War Museums, is an award-winning, highly acclaimed, and yet also contested space. In order to contextualise the learning programme, the chapter first considers the role of museums as places of memory. This necessarily requires to consider the nature of memory, and instructive here is the work of Alon Confino. Returning to the concepts of memory and remembering, in the mid-1990s The Holocaust Exhibition’s then director, Suzanne Bardgett, spoke about plans for the new exhibition. On a practical level, Bulgin’s interpretation of the broadly contemporaneous narrative approach to The Holocaust Galleries means the Auschwitz model is unlikely to feature in 2020.
