Revised Abstract

This paper will take Hartnell’s figure of the tourist and reposition him/her as media tourist, specifically in relation to the consumption of the recent canon of contemporary Holocaust films. Colored by artistic intent, individual and cultural vantage points, and the degree of distance from the event itself, reflection and subsequent representation of the Jewish Holocaust are mediated by distinctly particular lenses and ideologies. Consumed uncritically, films which use the Holocaust either centrally or peripherally run the risk of eclipsing historical specificity in favor of a universalizing and decontextualized moralizing tale. I will take Ritzer and Liska’s idea that the modern tourist wants a predictable, efficient, calculable, and controlled vacation and apply it to the tourist-viewer’s desire for an easily understood, easily digestible film narrative, one which will favor comprehensibility. I will explore this desire, incorporating the practice of Holocaust tourism and “musealization,” by placing each text within its particular historical moment, and drawing upon Huyssen’s ideas on the culture and politics of memory in the way the Holocaust has come to function as a transnational trope. Films to include Schindler’s List, The Reader, and Shoah.

Sources to include:

Ash, Timothy Garton. “The Life of Death: Shoah—A Film by Claude Lanzmann.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays. Ed Stuart Liebman. Oxford, 2007: 135-148.

Bartov, Omer. “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries Evil.” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schlinder’s List. Ed Yosefa Loshitzky. Indiana University Press, 1997: 41-60.

Bach, Jonathan. “The Taste Remains: Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany.” Public Culture 14.3 (2002): 545-556.

Cole, Tim. “Prologue: The Rise (And Fall?) of the Myth of the Holocaust.” Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold. Routledge, 1999: 1-19.

Hartnell, Anna. “Katrina Tourism and the Tale of Two Cities: Visualizing Race and Class in New Orleans.” American Quarterly. 61.3 (2009): 723-747.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Public Pasts: Media, Politics, and Amnesia.” Public Culture 12:1 (Winter 2000): 21-38.

Liebman, Stuart. “Introduction.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays. Ed Stuart Liebman. Oxford, 2007: 3-24.

Ritzer, George and Allan Liska. “‘McDisneyization’ and ‘Post-Tourism’: Contemporary perspectives on contemporary tourism.” Touring Cultures. Eds Chris Rojek and John Urry. Routledge, New York 1997: 96-109.

Wieseltier, Leon. “Shoah.” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays. Ed Stuart Liebman. Oxford, 2007: 89-93.