The U.S. Holocaust Museum as a Scene of Pedagogical Address

Introduction

Soon after it opened to the public in 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was hailed as “one of the late twentieth century’s most profound architectural statements.” It houses a permanent exhibit that Leon Wieseltier has called “a pedagogical masterpiece.” He declares: “The building itself teaches” (20).

Under any circumstances, the making of profound architectural statements and the achievement of pedagogical masterpieces are no small feats. But the accomplishments of the architect and exhibit designers of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum seem all the more profound given the philosophical and pedagogical problems that challenge any attempt to teach or memorialize the Holocaust.

In a recent analysis of the museum, an architectural critic listed some of those challenges. How might exhibit designers “elucidate without lapsing into entertainment?” How might they “give form to the act of memory?” How might their designs hold the lack, the absence, of millions of European Jewry even as the museum is filled by artifacts, text, photographs, films (Dannatt 6)?

The challenges for teachers and students of “traumatic historical events” are similar to those faced by the museum’s designers. Teaching and representing such traumatic histories brings educators up against the limits of our theories and practices concerning pedagogy, curriculum, and the roles of dialogue, empathy, and understanding in teaching about and across social and cultural difference. If, as Michael Berenbaum asserts, “children have to learn about the untrustworthiness of the world as they learn to trust the world,” how might teachers teach distrust (Goldberg 319)? Such questions have become more urgent in the wake of recent anniversaries of events connected with the Holocaust, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the attacks of September 11, 2001. Just how should teacher educators respond to mandates such as the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s requirement that student teachers learn about slavery, genocides and the Holocaust?

As a concrete materialization of a particular pedagogical approach, the permanent exhibit of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum provides a rich context for studying key challenges and opportunities involved in teaching the Holocaust in particular, and in teaching about and across social and cultural difference in general.

An analysis of specific moments and scenes of pedagogical address in the Museum’s permanent exhibit provides strong support for the following assertion: the power of the address of this museum’s pedagogy lies in its indeterminacy. This museum, with its primary objective of education, paradoxically embraces the ways that histories of the Holocaust throw the pedagogical relation between teacher and student into crisis. I suspect that the usefulness of the pedagogy of the Holocaust museum to teachers lies in the ways that it embraces the dilemmas and impossibilities that confront teachers and witnesses of the Holocaust. Far from leading to paralysis or despair, an analysis of this museum’s pedagogical address reveals concrete instances of how the paradoxes of teaching and learning can be productive, and can assist teachers and students in accessing moral imperatives without absolutes.

The Pedagogical Problem

In cultural studies, literary criticism, and philosophy, scholars debate theoretical aspects of the seemingly insurmountable dilemmas faced by designers of the permanent exhibit. Some argue that the Holocaust exceeds representation, it is unrepresentable (Linenthal). Others argue that the Holocaust exceeds understanding, it is unteachable (Felman and Laub, Copjec). According to some teachers of the Holocaust such as Claude Lanzmann, director of the film Shoah, any attempt to “understand” the Holocaust is “obscene” (Lanzmann 1990). Writing about the production of Shoah, Lanzmann declares that the question “Why have the Jews been killed?” reveals right away its obscenity. He writes: “. . . not to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah . . . . [it was] the only way to not turn away from a reality which is literally blinding” (Lanzmann 1990, 279).

A teacher of literary responses to the Holocaust, Shoshana Felman, argues that the paradox of knowledge is that there are only misunderstandings. The testimonies contained within the museum do not consist of “understandings” of the Holocaust. Rather, they are “bits and pieces of a memory that has been...