Father, Goethe, Kant, and Rilke: The Ideal of Bildung, the Fifth Aliyah, and German-Jewish Integration into the Yishuv

Poetics of Memory: Aesthetics and Experience of Holocaust Remembrance in Museums

“Süß im Licht, Wach im Wind”: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Search for a Locus Amoenus in Paris

Disfigured Memory: The Reshaping of Holocaust Symbols in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin

Evoking the sacred: Visual Holocaust narratives in national museums

The Art and Science of Reading Faces: Strategies of Racist Cinema in the Third Reich,

Holocaust memorials and museums face a difficult task as their staffs strive to commemorate and document horror. On the one hand, the events museums represent are beyond most people’s experiences.  At the same time they are often portrayed by theologians, artists, and philosophers in ways that are already known by the public. Museum administrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid clichéd or dehumanizing portrayals of victims and their suffering.In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography and renewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, broken lines, and voids emphasize absence. Here exhibits communicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country’s current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy, and trying to overcome geographic and temporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap between viewer and victim.   Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum’s concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors’ experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.

Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation

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Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich earned a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Virginia in 2011. She published a book, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation, with Rutgers University Press in 2014, and has published a number of articles and essays on the topics of Holocaust museums and memorialization, German Jewish life writing, and German literature and film. Dr. Hansen-Glucklich has taught as visiting faculty at the Universität Wien and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, and has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

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