Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.
Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just "learners". Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as "agents of memory", endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.
Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.
Author(s): Diana I. Popescu
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 297
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Preface
Introduction: Visitors at Holocaust Museums and Memory Sites
PART I: Visitor Experience in Museum Spaces
1. Mobile Memory; Or What Visitors Saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
2. Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights: TripAdvisor Responses to the Topography of Terror (Berlin) and the Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen)
3. “Really Made You Feel for the Jews Who Went Through This Terrible Time in History”: Holocaust Audience Re-Mediation and Re-Narrativization at the Florida Holocaust Museum
4. Understanding Visitors’ Bodily Engagement with Holocaust Museum Architecture: A Comparative Empirical Research at Three European Museums
5. Attention Please: The Tour Guide Is Here to Speak Out: The Role of the Israeli Tour Guide at Holocaust Sites in Israel
6. The Impact of Emotions, Empathy, and Memory in Holocaust Exhibitions: A Study of the National Holocaust Centre & Museum in Nottinghamshire, and the Jewish Museum in London
7. The Affective Entanglements of the Visitor Experience at Holocaust Sites and Museums
PART II: Digital Engagement Inside and Outside the Museum and Memory Site
8. “…It No Longer Is the Same Place”: Exploring Realities in the Memorial Falstad Centre with the “Falstad Digital Reconstruction and V/AR Guide”
9. “Ways of Seeing”. Visitor Response to Holocaust Photographs: At ‘The Eye as Witness. Recording the Holocaust’ Exhibition
10. Dachau from a Distance: The Liberation during the COVID-19 Pandemic
11. Curating the Past: Digital Media and Visitor Experiences at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
12. Diversity, Digital Programming, and the Small Holocaust Education Centre: Examining Paths and Obstacles to Visitor Experience
PART III: Visitors at Former Camp Sites
13. The Unanticipated Visitor: A Case Study of Response and Poetry at Sites of Holocaust Memory
14. “Did You Have a Good Trip?”: Young People’s Reflections on Visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Town of Oświęcim
15. Rewind, Relisten, Rethink: The Value of Audience Reception for Grasping Art’s Efficacy
16. “The Value of Being There”: Visitor Experiences at German Holocaust Memorial Sites
17. “Everyone Talks about the Wind”: Temporality, Climate, and the More-Than-Representational Landscapes of the Mémorial Du Camp De Rivesaltes
18. Guiding or Obscuring? Visitor Engagement with Treblinka’s Audio Guide and its Sonic Infrastructure
Index
