Dark Tourism and Crime

Derek Dalton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136165528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

Dark tourism has become widespread and diverse. It has passed into popular culture vernacular, deployed in guide books as a short hand descriptor for sites that are associated with death, suffering and trauma. However, whilst books have been devoted to dark tourism as a general topic no single text has sought to explore dark tourism in spaces where crime - mass murder, genocide, State sanctioned torture and violence - has occurred as an organising theme.

Dark Tourism and Crime explores the socio-cultural contours of this unique type of tourism and explains why spaces/places where crime has occurred fascinate and attract tourists. The book is marked by an ethics of respect for the suffering a place has experienced and an imperative to learn something tangible about the history and legacy of that suffering. Based on empirical ethnographic research it takes the reader from the remnants of Auschwitz concentration camp to the tranquil Australian island of Tasmania to explore precisely what things a dark tourist might encounter - architecture, art installations, gardens, memorials, physical traces of crime - and how these things invoke and evoke past crimes.

This volume furthers understanding of dark tourism and will be of interest to students, researchers and academics of criminology, tourism and cultural studies.

1 Auschwitz dark tourism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203080153-2

Lure

Since my teenage years I have been entranced by Auschwitz-Birkenau and its legacy as the largest extermination camp in Europe. Despite my exposure to innumerable historic, literary and cinematic representations of the Holocaust, I was left with the nagging sense that Auschwitz-Birkenau was still something of an enigma to me, and that all my reading and viewing had really accomplished was to act as a powerful psychic lure. Perhaps this sense of enticement I felt is best captured in the closing scene of Louis Malle’s acclaimed, semi-autobiographical feature film of 1987, Au Revoir Les Enfants (Goodbye Children). In the concluding scene, a Jewish boy in a small village in France, Jean ‘Bonnet’ Kippelstein, is dragged through an opening in a wall by a German soldier, having been denounced to the Gestapo along with two other Jewish students and a priest, Father Jean. The camera lingers, framing the empty doorway recently occupied by the boys – a potent visual metaphor for the vanishing the audience has just witnessed. Where did they go? What was their fate? In the French voice-over (and accompanying subtitles), we are informed a few seconds later that ‘Bonnet, Negus, and Dupré died at Auschwitz’. The film’s final image beckons the viewer to imagine the place where the boys had been taken; a place located outside the cinematic frame and outside our realm of experience (unless, of course, one happens to be a survivor). The final cinematic frame in Au Revoir Les Enfants – an image that stands in for death – has long haunted me. In March 2007, I visited Auschwitz to experience it mediated by the exhibits and sights one sees in the camp complex, and the memory of filmic and literary representations that are evoked by being there.

Crime event

The search for a geographical, verbal or symbolic locus of the crime signals a need to locate the epicentre of the earthquake.

(Ezrahi 2003)

Whilst the genocidal logic of the Final Solution emanated from the infamous 1942 Wannsee Conference held at a lakeside villa in Berlin (Roseman 2003), the epicentre of the exterminations was located in the landscape of occupied Poland at Auschwitz-Birkenau. ¹ To offer a summary of Auschwitz’s role in the Holocaust is redundant and potentially offensive. ² Olivier (2001: 181) astutely observes: ‘there is no need to recall the considerable importance that attaches to the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the history and consciousness of the twentieth century’. To invoke the very name of the camp complex is to evoke a tide of memory that floods over each individual, rekindling impressions of the camp garnered through exposure to documentaries, cinema, history books, novels, art, survivor testimony and even Spiegelman’s comic art Maus (Doherty 1996).

Overview of dark tourism at Auschwitz

Partee Allar (2013: 198) points out that visiting a Holocaust site, like Auschwitz, has ‘become one way in which tourists can learn about or vicariously experience atrocities and death’. She notes that these sites: ‘allow the visitor to form their own memories and interpretation of the site beyond what text books have explained or what Hollywood has promoted’ (ibid.).

The ruins of the former concentration camp are on UNESCO’s list of world heritage monuments (Thurnell-Read 2009), and have been open to the public since 1947: ‘both to bear witness to the horrors of the Nazi system, and to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust’ (Olivier 2001: 181). The site appeals to a wide variety of people. In 2012, 1.43 million people visited Auschwitz, a record number in its 65-year history. ³

Kidron (2013: 175) uses the term ‘dark family tourism’ to describe descendants of Holocaust survivors who set out on ‘family roots trips’ to visit sites of atrocity accompanied by their survivor parents. As important as this niche form of dark tourism is, the vast majority of tourists at Auschwitz encompass people who are simply curious or drawn to the site due to its historical importance. A wider category of tourists encompasses high school students from all over the world, backpackers and general holidaymakers visiting Poland. These visitors may not consciously identify with the term ‘dark tourist’ and their motivations are challenging to pin down. Biran et al. (2011: 823) note that: ‘not all tourists to sites presenting death are indeed engaged in a dark experience’. Additionally, Cohen (2011: 195) notes that: ‘the same site will be experienced differently depending on the degree to which the tourist is psychologically and emotionally involved with the events memorialised’. So whilst this chapter explores how the site evokes the genocidal crimes that took place here, it does not seek to claim that a dark tourism prism is the only lens through which Auschwitz is experienced and understood. This qualification aside, it must be acknowledged that Auschwitz is generally described as the ‘epitome of dark tourism’ (Stone 2006; Lennon and Foley 2000), and the ‘pinnacle of European dark tourism’ (Tarlow 2005: 58). Indeed Knudsen (2011a: 63) argues that: ‘when it comes to thanatourism, Auschwitz-Birkenau has unquestionably become the most symbolic and mythological site in Europe, signifying the absolute nadir of European civilisation’.

Auschwitz’s role as the archetypal Holocaust dark tourism destination does not come without controversy. Many survivors and their families bemoan the so-called ‘industry of Auschwitz’ that sees Poland derive financial profit from Holocaust tourism (Cole 1999; Podoshen and Hunt 2011). Cole (1999: 113–14) scathingly construes the museum/memorial as a ‘Holocaust theme park’ or ‘Auschwitz-land’, declaring that it is ‘created for tourist consumption and [is] the end product of Holocaust tourism’. Invoking comparisons to Disneyland seems simplistic and facile given the lack of rides, characters and opportunities to purchase food and drink that exist within the camps. Auschwitz struck me as the antithesis of a Disney-branded experience during my visit.

Encountering Auschwitz

Lentin (2004: 7) states: ‘[w]e are compelled to keep excavating the meaning of the Shoah’. Heeding this call, I came to Auschwitz-Birkenau to dig in the fertile soil of my imagination – my memories of the Holocaust. Tyndall (2004: 114) has argued that people who visit Holocaust museums ‘bring to such sites mental images from books, education, movies, television, personal memories, and fantasies’. As this chapter will reveal, the mental images that shaped my personal historical consciousness of the Holocaust were powerfully invoked and evoked by new sights and exhibits that I encountered in the camps.

Not all visitors approach the experience of visiting the camp complex with as much respect as is warranted. A visitor observed that he witnessed a young man entering the camp wearing a T-shirt imprinted with the name of a heavy metal band, ‘Megadeath’ (Ronson 2004: 80). Such a careless and profane gesture seems unimaginable in such a sacred place. Yet Knudsen (2011a: 65) detected ‘a high degree of solemn mourning’ among the tourists that she observed during her visit, remarking: ‘visitors speak in low voices, no mobile phones can be heard, nobody runs around or uses the site for typical outdoor activities’. My experience was similar to Knudsen’s. I saw no behaviour that disrupted the decorum and solemnity of the space.

I approached the camp complex with great sensitivity, having come here to ruminate on the suffering and loss entangled in the landscape and exhibits. Some have questioned the right of non-survivors and those without relatives who perished to dare to write about the Holocaust. Whilst I am sensitive to this issue, I take solace in LaCapra’s (1998: 22) reminder that:

It is … important to note that the study of the Holocaust has now passed beyond the confines of Jewish studies or as a sector of German studies and has become a problem of general concern. One need provide no autobiographical or other particular motivation to account for one’s interest in it and the important consideration is what results from that interest.

Arrival: Auschwitz I

I arrived at the town of Oświęcim having travelled by train from Krakow, a journey that took some 95 minutes. A short bus trip later, and I was deposited at the entrance to Auschwitz One (I) (as it is now formally referred to). Here I faced the first paradox of my experience of visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. Having spoken of the role film has played in shaping my sense of knowledge of and familiarity with Auschwitz, it is poignant that the first thing one literally sees (prior to entering the camp proper) is a short documentary film – Chronicle of the Liberation of Auschwitz – detailing the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops in 1945.

One is assailed with the archetypal catalogue of horrors: skeletal figures with vacant stares; bales of human hair; bodies being tipped into mass graves; twisted piles of metal spectacles; and prisoners teetering on the brink of death. The black and white film, with its 1940s documentary conventions and voice-over narrative, provides a vitally important imaginative conduit. And whilst many visitors will have seen these images before in Holocaust documentaries, the film is a reminder that the spaces the visitor will encounter in the museum were once crammed full of prisoners. This begs the question: what is the purpose of the film at the beginning of this dark tourist experience? Is it to introduce people who don’t know its history to the story of Auschwitz? This seems unlikely given the decision to seek to visit the camps. One hardly stumbles across them. Is it to offer us, those who know about the events, a reminder: remember this! Is it a device to instil in the visitor a reverential frame of mind to suitably prepare them for the place they are about to enter? The film variously functions as a lesson, a demand and a request. It is a fitting precursor to stepping over the camp threshold.

One enters the original camp through the former reception centre where, in the 1940s, new prisoners entered the camp. I was immediately confronted with the entrance gates with their famed inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Makes One Free’). As I walked through these gates, listening to our tour guide’s explanations of their symbolic importance, my overwhelming feeling was one of profound dislocation. The archetypal red brick buildings of Auschwitz I were familiar from literary and cinematic representations of the camp, but it felt like I was entering a surreal empty film set and I half expected some extras dressed in striped prison garb to materialise. Of course, the very suggestion that this would occur seems flippant – and yet that is what it felt like. Perhaps this is because in most historic, literary and cinematic depictions of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camps are teeming with bodies. The lack of inmates in the modern era, whilst perfectly logical and expected, jars with these remembrances. I recall Keil’s (2005) fitting metaphor equating dark tourism to ‘sightseeing in the mansions of the dead’. The dead inhabit every inch of this place, so it is no wonder that we anticipate seeing them here.

The tour group to which I was assigned followed a standard route that was designed to take in the principal sights of the camp. Knudsen (2011a: 65) writes: ‘at Auschwitz the visitor is offered a more ordinary museum experience with material traces, plenty of information, photos and texts’. The rows of three-storey red brick barrack buildings have been converted into exhibition rooms. These rooms (housed in the former blocks) are divided into three categories: ‘general exhibition’; ‘national exhibitions’ and ‘places of special interest’ (Smoleń 2007). It is not my intention to explore all the exhibit rooms as their number and diversity is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Rather, I shall explore those corporeal exhibits that invoke intense, visceral reactions in visitors. Many of these exhibits are piles of confiscated objects like spectacles, shoes, luggage, hair and clothing. Clark (2009: 11) accounts for their meaning: Similarly, Crownshaw (2000: 23) has remarked on the importance of artefacts in Holocaust museums: Reflecting on how memorial museums work, Muniak (2009: n.p.) observes that: It is, to borrow Muniak’s term, the ‘emotional texture’ of the artefacts I encountered at Auschwitz that will inform much of my discussion of the power of the exhibits to evoke powerful sensory reactions.

Once a space [of dark tourism] is made accommodating as a tourist facility other forms of identification (personal objects, photographs and recorded testimony) are added to make the suffering of the prisoners more readily available, giving the prison greater historical context and emotional texture.

They invoke memory work in the spectator that can never fully realize the museum’s intentions, given the nature of artefactuality, leaving space for the spectator’s more personal interpretation of artefacts, memories of events they did not necessarily experience, an intervention in a collective memory.

Because the Nazis harvested and stockpiled these artifacts, their resonance is multiple, as they represent not only human loss but also the industrial quality of that particular genocide. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: encountering the remnants and reminders of crime through dark tourism
• 1 Auschwitz dark tourism
• 2 Oradour-sur-Glane dark tourism
• 3 Cambodia dark tourism
• 4 Argentina dark tourism
• 5 Chile dark tourism
• 6 Tasmania dark tourism
• 7 New York dark tourism
• Conclusion: towards a taxonomy of worth for crime-related dark tourism
• Bibliography
• Index