Although each of the theories of genre, schema, script, frame and prototype command individual respect, it is often the case that they are perceived not in terms of what they mean in separation but in terms of the close relationship that exists between them.
This, of course, leads to confusion about what each means and how each is different from another. After all, you know in your heart of hearts that, however hard you try, once you have gone beyond the 'restaurant' scripts and frames, the 'service encounters' genre, the birds, vegetables and colours prototypes etc., etc., and into the real world, there is only chaos.
That is unless somehow you can make time stand still, at least long enough for there to be a uniquely ordered world where everything is exactly what it claims to be and, just in case there is any doubt, has a label attached to it.
A museum is such a place, is it not? Well, yes it is and no it isn't, because before we can be confident about having established a theoretically safe foothold, we have to be sure that what we think of as a museum is in fact what it claims to be; for if the world itself has been constructed on false ideals, how on Earth can there be any truth inside it?
On the following pages, I shall examine what is meant by 'museum'. My first aim is to show that the definition of 'museum' can be achieved by demonstrating that there is a museum prototype, a museum script, a museum frame, a museum schema and a museum genre, each separate yet meaningless without the others.
By doing this, we can attempt to resolve the difficulties of interpretation involving the five listed theories. If this can be achieved, we can project our understanding onto a real-world stage where labels are less obvious but nevertheless there.
My second concern is to explore what happens when something which is explicitly presented as a museum deviates from the accepted definition and traditional purpose; in other words when a museum is not a museum. This kind of museum has an unambiguous function yet in spite of this it can often be many different things to many different people. The one I have chosen to illustrate this second feature of my argument is, I think, unique among museums because it exists not so much to inform but rather more to remind the world that the level of human experience can, if allowed, sink to depths which are so unfathomable yet, paradoxically, at the same time so very realizable. I shall argue why, on the basis of the five listed theories, it has ultimately failed in that design.
A common dictionary definition of a museum is, "an institution devoted to the acquiring, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value; also a place where such objects are exhibited", this one from the 1991 edition of the Longman Dictionary of the English Language.
But of course, the meaning of 'museum', to anyone who has a history of visiting them, far exceeds the dictionary definition. To me, 'museum', irrespective of its type (e.g. general, archaeological, natural history, art, clock, musical instrument, science etc.), means 'silence', 'echoes', 'stony-faced and uniformed custodians', 'polished wooden floors', 'marble stairs', 'glass cases', 'untouchable', 'sterile', 'moribund', 'extinct', 'breakable', 'valuable', 'tiring', 'aching legs and sore feet', 'boredom', 'wonderful', 'rubbish', 'souvenir shop', 'postcards', and so on, all of this a simple stream of consciousness triggered off by the word 'museum', generated within by my own personal culture-seeking experience which has seen me traipsing the countless corridors of those vast and not so vast temples of life -as-we-never-knew-it which litter the cities of Europe and beyond. And whether it be from Bradford to Bratislava, Manchester to Moscow, St. Albans to St. Petersburg, Wolverhampton to Warsaw, or Liverpool to Leeds, these are, I would contend, not unique perceptions.
A useful definition of prototype is 'a collection of non-unique perceptions in respect of some particular'. Prototypes are, of course, culture-specific, so one culture's prototype is not always another culture's prototype. For instance, if you take the often cited example of a bird (see, for example, Aitchison, 1987; Clark & Clark, 1977; Hurford & Heasley, 1983; and Rosch, 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1977), an Eskimo's idea of what stands for the birdiest of birds might be different from the Australian's idea of what stands for the birdiest of birds, and both of these will be different from what most Europeans would think of as typically representative of 'bird'. This is not difficult to understand since many features of Eskimo life are different from the comparable features of Australian society (and I should point out that, unless you are either an Australian who has lived in or has an accurate and intimate knowledge of, say, East Siberia or Greenland, or vice-versa, your understanding of the differences between the two societies is itself based on those societies' prototypes and stereotypes).
One of the most obvious features of the differences between all nations is language, and anyone who has even the scantest knowledge of a foreign language must know that word-for-word translation is a fairly unproductive kind of activity (see, for example, Nida's work on equivalence (1964, 1969) and also Newmark (1981)). In short, because different societies have different words or expressions for what is at best only approximately the same concept, the collective experiences of any culture, which, in mutual circularity, have not only been shaped by that culture's language and its prototypes but have also been responsible for the generation of both the language and its prototypes, are unique.
The word 'museum', however, is almost universal. It is probably because of this near universality that a museum, wherever in the world you go, is everything you would expect a museum to be, whether it be a 'museum' in Cardiff or Prague, a 'muzej' in Croatia, 'het museum' in Rotterdam or 'das Museum in Potsdam', a 'museo' in Madrid, Milan or Helsinki, a 'muzeum' in Poznan or Cracow, a Parisian 'musée' or a Portuguese 'museu', a 'múzeum in Budapest, a 'muzeu' in Bucharest, or in Istanbul a 'müze'. A museum, then, is a non-negotiable concept. The collective experience which defines a prototype in the first place is not unique in this regard, and therefore the prototype is the thing and the thing the prototype.
Script theory (see Abelson, 1981; Schank, 1972; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Hatch, 1992) seems to acquire 'reality' status when placed in a context of public places, where 'script' means knowing through experience how to behave and how to structure your behaviour according to conventionalized norms of chronological sequencing. The popular illustrative example of this is 'the restaurant script'. It is difficult, therefore, to separate the apparently descriptive notion of 'script' from the also apparently descriptive notion of 'situation' in language teaching, apart from the fact that 'scripts' place particular emphasis on the stages of the interaction whilst a 'situation' is more broadly concerned with a particular context of use.
The problem I have with the whole idea of scripts is that they may present the picture of a sterile uninteresting world of obsessive conformity to set patterns. Obsessive conformity to set patterns does, of course, exist. Religions, both real and quasi, and supposed cultural norms thrive on conformity to set patterns and it might be argued that many people are living out a script, that identities are scripts. Even for the staunch non-conformist, scripted activities are hard to escape, and something like the pseudo-religious world of the concert hall represents a temporary excursion into 'scriptdom'.
The world of scripts, however, is a static world. The world of scripts is a world of labels and glass-cased exemplars, a world of stony-faced custodians monitoring your moves to see that you do what you should do and don't do what you shouldn't do. The world of scripts is a museum world. Even today, in the post cold-war atmosphere of glasnost and peristroika, the museum world of the cold-war lives on, perhaps appropriately, in the museums.
It is not surprizing, therefore, that the museum should provide the exemplar (or prototype) script. You assume the 'museum' posture and attitude the moment you're through the doors. This attitude carries you round and round and up and up through pompous galleries of artefactual wonder until you can take no more, at least for that day, and this you will do again and again without variation in every city in every country.
We can think of frames as 'prototypical environments'. If this is the case, how are we going to make a distinction between a museum prototype and a museum frame?
Perhaps the stream of consciousness triggered by the word 'museum' (see section 1 above) offers a clue. Because the term 'prototype' is typically related to concrete entities (birds, vegetables, cups etc.), maybe we ought to classify the museum prototype as containing only the nominal features of the stream of consciousness (i.e. the structural and formal characteristics of any museum) and conclude that the museum frame includes the prototypical characteristics plus the adjectival features of the stream of consciousness, the abstract characteristics of any museum which reside not in the museum itself but rather in the heads of people.
A similar distinction between 'frame' and 'prototype' can be made in respect of other environments. For instance, in the following often quoted example from The Sunday Times of 30th May 1982, originally cited in Brown & Yule (1983:240):
The Cathedral congregation had watched on television monitors as Pope and Archbishop met, in front of a British Caledonian helicopter, on the dewy grass of a Cathedral recreation ground.
There is, according to Brown and Yule, potentially a 'cathedral' frame, a 'television watching' frame, a 'helicopter' frame and a 'recreation ground' frame. To these we can add a few implicit frames all suggested by the passage: an 'early morning' frame (dewy grass); a 'religious service' frame (congregation); a 'meeting' frame.
If we take just two of these, the 'cathedral' and 'recreation ground' frames, clearly there are also associated 'cathedral' and 'recreation ground' prototypes, so what distinguishes frame from prototype here? Without unnecessarily labouring the point, I would contend that while the cathedral frame contains all cathedral type objects (organs, pulpits, altars, lecterns, pews, chancels, naves, aisles, apses, chapels, confessionals (if Roman Catholic), effigies, stained-glass windows, memorial tablets, drifting befrocked clergy, guide books, postcards, gratuity boxes, etc.) and cathedral type abstractions (awe, magnificence, silence, echoes, coldness, death, etc.), the prototype contains only the former. Similarly, while the recreation ground frame includes all playground objects (swings, slides, see-saws, goalposts etc.), activities (playing, running, skipping etc.) and abstractions (laughter, fun, noise, etc.), the prototype includes only the objects.
The term 'schema' relates explicitly and directly to the less mysterious sounding 'background knowledge', and while it might be argued that one knows the meaning of 'museum' (or cathedral, recreation ground, concert hall etc.) because of a prior knowledge of museums, it is difficult to extract this knowledge from the definitions of prototype and frame.[1]
Key notions in a schema theoretical view of texts are 'bottom -up' and 'top-down' (see Carrell, 1983, 1984a, b & c, 1985, 1987, 1988a & b). Couched in the simplest possible terms, we are able to make sense of incoming information (applying our bottom-up facility) with immediate reference to what we already know (what we already know constituting our top-down facility). For instance, if you were to pick up a newspaper and read an article about Yasser Arafat and the PLO, it is sensibly and correctly argued that unless you already know something about the history of Israeli-Arab relations (and if you don't you probably won't know who Yasser Arafat is or what PLO stands for, both politically and in terms of the abbreviation) your comprehension of the article will be severely hampered.
This is crucial to the argument I shall be presenting in the second part of this paper. When you visit a museum, you are more likely to benefit from viewing the exhibits which relate to things you already know something about than you are from viewing those which you know nothing about. Of course, the whole idea of museums is to educate and so in a sense some of the relevant background knowledge which will allow everyone to benefit from the exhibits is mostly provided. Nevertheless, provision is made for facilitating only a limited background knowledge for those entering without a significant proportion of it, and I can state from my own experience that museums can be pretty tiresome places if you're not really already interested in what is on show.
With specific reference to museums, then, a 'museum' schema accommodates not knowledge about the term itself, but more properly the knowledge necessary to enjoy, or get the most out of, a visit to any particular example of a museum.
What is meant by genre? First, there is the traditionally understood meaning of 'sort', 'type', or 'category', especially in relation to writing, music and art. And then there is the theoretical notion of the schematic or generic structure of texts found in the work of e.g. Hasan (1989), Martin (1989), which has since spawned ideas relating to identifiable discourse types in both written and informal and formal spoken language.
The latter of these in its worst form is really a reprise or restatement of script theory (see, for example, Hasan's (1989) generic structure potential of service-encounters). The problem here is that the script analysis of the prototypical restaurant of Schank & Abelson (1977) and the generic structure analysis of Hasan's prototypical service-encounter (i.e. buying something in a non-self-service shop) ought to be susceptible to theoretical cross-dressing; i.e. where script = generic structure and generic structure = script and where Schank & Abelson's clothes hang equally well of Hasan and vice-versa. Whether or not there really is a case for diagnosing genuine transvestism in one or both - and first impressions suggest there is not - is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the same conformity to set patterns which was at the heart of script theory is not far from the centre of some understandings of genre analysis and the solid line separating description from prescription appears to be not so solid after all.
Of the theoretical components to background knowledge discussed so far, only schemata fall outside the boundaries of 'type'. It seems sensible to conclude, therefore, that the notion of 'type' is hierarchical. I have already argued that 'frame' includes 'prototype'. I shall also argue that 'frame' includes 'script', so that within the parameters of a frame, we have (i) what something is (prototype); (ii) what we do and how and when we do what we do in relation to (i) (script); (iii) (i) and (ii) plus the abstract characteristics of (i) and (ii) (frame).
Following this progression, we can speculate that 'genre' = frame + schemata.
Intertextuality quite simply refers to the traces one text leaves on another text (see, for example, Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981; Griffith, 1987; Lemke, 1988; Paltridge, 1994). This idea is perhaps best expressed by Umberto Eco's wonderfully uplifting article, 'Casablanca: cult movies and intertextual collage', in Travels in Hyperreality (1986). As Eco points out (page 209-10) you'd probably have to be a film-buff to appreciate Steven Spielberg in ET quoting George Lucas in The Empire Strikes Back as well as knowing something about the links between the two directors, but you'd probably have to have been living the last thirty-odd years in outer Mongolia not to get the humour unleashed in the virtual cascade of visual gags in such spoof delights as Airplane (aka Flying High) and Naked Gun. Of course, the mechanics of satire and much that we know as comedy are intertextual, but these are transparent examples of the phenomenon; indeed it is very difficult to conceive of a world where understanding is the result of anything other than constant cross -referencing.
Intertextuality, then, is a common feature of our lives. In relation to museums, and in fact to many public places (banks, post offices, libraries, police stations, courthouses, supermarkets, etc.), it would be hard to believe that there has not been some kind of 'borrowing' of motifs, consciously or otherwise.[2] The idea of intertextuality is an important one to keep in mind in establishing when a museum is not a museum, the subject of the rest of this paper.
Having tentatively established what a museum is in relation to the combined concepts of prototype, script, frame, schema and genre, can we now firmly claim that any so-called museum deviating from the norms we have set up is in fact not a museum at all? To answer this question, I shall use as my example the museum of Auschwitz at Oswiecim in South-West Poland.
Oswiecim is a small, dirty and unremarkable town about 60 kilometres west of the former Polish capital of Cracow (Kraków), but is famous for what happened there between 1940 and 1945 when it was known by its German name of Auschwitz. It is also famous for its museum. The museum of Auschwitz, where nowadays, however, tourists come not to remember but simply to see, is Auschwitz 1, the notorious war-time Nazi concentration camp. Two kilometres away in the village of Brzezinka (Ger. Birkenau) is Auschwitz 2, the largest and most 'efficient' of the former Nazi death-camps.
Today, both Auschwitz camps are self-contained tourist traps but, as any guide book will tell you, if you have to see one, you have to see both, and because it is only a short walk or taxi-ride from one to the other, most people do see both. It is also important to see them in the correct order.
Chronologically, Auschwitz 1 came first then and, for the discerning visitor, still does. Today, the façade is very much that of a museum. At the entrance there is, somewhat bizarrely, a café, restaurant, and souvenir shop, true to the genre. Then there is the cinema. If you haven't already seen the reels of film recorded by the Russian army liberators on television, if you haven't seen at least some of the many factionized dramas, if you haven't read William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, (or seen their Hollywood versions), Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved , the memoirs of Auschwitz's most notorious Kommandant Rudolf Höss or those of the many other former inmates who will always be known as 'survivors', indeed any of the great number of books which do their best to make believable something which simply isn't, in other words if you don't have an accessible schema, there is always the museum's cinema.
If you haven't prepared yourself for the closest you will ever want to come to evil, the experience is likely to be less shocking since comprehending what you see demands preparation. However, you also have to balance the myths with the reality because, callous and insensitive as it might seem, there is a danger you will be disappointed. Most tellingly, contrary to the often quoted maxim, the birds do sing at Auschwitz - birds have no sense of history, after all, and singing to birds is as natural as killing is to man.
So, it is with the demolition of this most popular of myths that you pass through the doors of the museum entrance hall and into the bleakness of a sorry past. It is here that you are reminded in several languages that you are in a place of remembrance. At this moment, glass-cased history seems entirely inappropriate.
Before the experiments, before the systematic destruction of lives, before the construction of the giant gas-chambers two kilometres away, Auschwitz 1 was a barracks-cum-prison where the ideologically unsound (dissidents, the mentally ill, homosexuals, etc.) and prisoners-of-war (mostly Russians and Poles) were forced to work for the Nazis. Later, as the number of those who opposed or who were extraneous to Nazi ideology grew, the number of inmates increased to include the nationals of many European countries, Jews or otherwise, until ultimately it became almost exclusively a place of genocide against the Jews.
The entrance to the camp proper is past a guard tower and through the famous wrought-iron archway which bears the legend Arbeit macht frei (various translations of this include 'work makes free', 'work liberates', 'work will set you free' etc., where, despite the variations, both the message and its accompanying irony remain the same) under which prisoners were assembled daily before being marched to work in the munitions factories, on the railways and roads, and on the construction of their own crematoria.
Externally, the former Polish army barracks which the Nazis adopted as the centre for their human experiments is pretty much the same now as it was before the Nazis moved in. Walking between the single-storey brick buildings, past the point of assembly where the camp band played to stay alive while their less talented and not so 'lucky' compatriots were systematically murdered, the genre is no longer 'museum' but 'army barracks'. Internally, however, the genre is once again restored to 'museum', to such an effect that by the time you have finished the tour, the idea that the place was ever a simple barracks has completely gone.
There is an unwritten principle in the West that the often private and mysterious mode of death takes on a public face when time has put a great enough distance between the corpse and today. The Egyptian mummies and other cadavers in various states of remarkable preservation in museums throughout the Western world are testament to that, and tucked away in Brno, the capital of the old republic of Moravia now in the Czech Republic, is the most gruesome yet fascinating display of grey statuesque corpses whose only fascination is being so notably dead.
However, when, a few years ago, the bodies of two sailors from one of the British explorer, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton's, transarctic voyages in the early part of this century were discovered preserved in ice, suggestions that the bodies be put on show in a museum were met with various emotions ranging from outrage, to distaste, to doubt. After all, their relatives were alive and their rights to 'ownership' and to give the men Christian burials were obviously tantamount. The fate of the remains of a British World War 2 RAF pilot discovered in a field in France in the corroded shell of his shot down plane in the 1990s, however, was never in doubt and any notions that he should receive anything other than a 'decent' burial were not even whispered.
As one 'does' Auschwitz 1, therefore, the feeling is that the deaths of the former inhabitants didn't really take place, that they went away leaving behind their pathetic suitcases, coats and hats, their twisted and smashed spectacles, their stained and worn out toothbrushes, shaving brushes and hairbrushes, their battered shoes, their artificial limbs, even the hair from their heads and the teeth from their mouths. It is wrong, but the impression as you stare into huge glass cases of a million-and-more murdered people's denuded dignity is an overbearing one that you are looking in on an acceptable part of history, sterilized and museumized, and, while the acceptability of the unacceptable might be recognized and mentally turned around by those who are well attuned to the irony that is life on Earth, the well-intentioned reminder that is the museum of Auschwitz, becomes horribly meaningless.
When the retreating German army fled from Auschwitz in May 1945, they attempted to destroy much of the evidence of the atrocities committed there, and indeed many of the crucial horror-chamber -like exhibits at the museum of Auschwitz, are reconstructions of the actuals.
In fact, the only truly authentic part of the whole experience of Auschwitz tourist-style is seen when viewing the cramped under -ground cells in which prisoners were forced four at a time, able only to stand until they died; it is also the place where the first experimental victims of Cyclon B perished. This part of Auschwitz has been left virtually untouched from how it was found by the liberating Russians - the only part of the museum that can boast this dubious distinction. Nevertheless, the experiences one feels here are simply those of a voyeur, and while it certainly conformed to my prototype of a prison, if I hadn't recently read Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the claustrophobic story of an eighteenth century Jew in Russia imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, there would have been no schema for me to access to try to understand the evil and terror which crawled out of the cracks in those grey walls. And how could I, or anyone else who makes this trip in the vain belief it will change one's perspective on life in the long term, expect to experience anything other than a level of disbelief so strong the whole bloody episode becomes the property of fictional unreality.
It is with these emotions that one emerges into the open air to be confronted by the brick wall against which a countless number of crimeless prisoners were executed by a single bullet to the back of the head. Of course, it is not the actual wall, but a reconstruction. The flawed vulgarity of this artefact is obvious. Where are the bullet holes? Where are the bloodstains? If they can't be there, what's the purpose of the wall? Asking someone to imagine how it looked is to ask them to imagine how it was to be stripped naked and placed brutally against that wall before being snuffed out, and that, of course, is its justification for being there. But does it work? In the final analysis, one really can't help comparing the gaggles of schoolchildren dancing around the wall, leaving it splashed not with blood but with a colourful display of flowers and candles, to children dancing around a Maypole, paying homage to a tradition they know nothing about and can't make sense of.
Similarly, the steel construction which looks like a goalpost on a neglected playing field is a reconstruction of the gallows from which those crimeless prisoners, not shot or clubbed to death, were hanged. The crematoria, so clean, so sterile, look like large bread ovens in an old fashioned bakery of the kind you might find in Greek villages and they could well be, because the smell of fresh baked bread is so much easier to recall than that of burning human flesh. This rolling avalanche of unauthenticity, therefore, threatens to take over until the whole Nazi machine is in danger of being rendered unauthentic. If that happens, it will come rumbling back down your road again. Some would argue it never went away.
This last sentiment, ironically presaged by the philosopher George Santayana whose warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it hangs ominously on the wall of the former concentration camp, is echoed by my lasting memory of Auschwitz, which is based not in the museum of Auschwitz in Oswiecim, but in its annexe, Auschwitz 2 at Brzezinka. Here, everything is mostly as the retreating SS army left it. It is a very derelict place. The most derelict part centres around the huge blown -up crematoria, those crippled giants whose recumbent forms have become assimilated with nature; grass and flowers grow on them like grass and flowers grow in parks and fields and in the quiet gardens of suburbia.
Not all visitors to this place are voyeuristic tourists; there are many to whom this is a pilgrimage, who come to remember those they lost, those they probably never knew. On the levelled roof of one of these crematoria, where signs request that you neither walk across nor stand on them, was a group of Jews on a pilgrimage from Israel. They were conducting some kind of ceremony in remembrance of their dead, their murdered relatives - some were crying while the others preferred silence. It was a very personal moment being performed in a public place. Somehow, one felt suddenly detached from the reality of one's location. I had no right to be there, was my feeling. And the Jewish mourners? In the context of that moment, attached as it was to a weeping history, they had every right to be standing where notices asked them not to.
Oblivious to, or ignorant of, the ceremony, a group of German tourists tramped over the dead (or sleeping?) ogre in what many might judge to be just another example of a nationally stereotypical act of insensitivity (how do modern-day German's respond to their history?).[3] Did they know they were doing it? Was it deliberate? The answer to both questions is almost certainly 'no', yet an indignant expatriate Englishman caught in that moment of historical irony couldn't resist making the audible observation that they built it, they blew it up, so why not walk all over it? And later, a less indignant expatriate Englishman was able to retrospectively conclude, well, yes, it is part of their history too.
Museums serve a very unique function in human society, not always adhering to, often contradicting, what that society considers to be in good taste, yet in the context of a museum anything and everything becomes acceptable. If we take into account our prototype of what we understand a museum to be, it is not easy to see why Auschwitz should be considered to be not a museum. After all, it conforms to the genre. So, while it is not my wish to deny the museum of Auschwitz its modern-day status as a museum, I feel we should question its status as a museum in the light of knowing that it is visited by the majority as a museum - not as a hallowed place of remembrance.
The very word 'museum' has all the wrong connotations for post -war Auschwitz to be considered one. The genre allows us to look disinterestedly at absolutely anything we would in any other circumstances turn away from with disgust. In a museum we can look at the human body's two most reviled and feared end-products - death and excreta - because in reality humankind's fascination with all things morbid and scatological are merely repressed outside the museum. Inside the museum, a glass membrane separates us and keeps us immune from our fears and our revulsions, it stops us from touching and from being touched. And we all need to be touched by the atrocities of Auschwitz if it is never to happen again.
It is perhaps because of the enormity of the events in Central Europe fifty years ago that first believing and then accepting they really did happen is so difficult for post-war generations. Neither the museum of Auschwitz nor any other well-intentioned 'reminder' (not even, or especially not, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List ) will have much meaning, probably no meaning at all, for someone not already familiar with Hitler's ideology.
Sadly, it is inevitable, as time goes on, the greater the irrelevance of the Holocaust will be and it will, one day, happen again. Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, writes of "our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others" which becomes "all the more pronounced the further these experiences are from ours in time, space or quality". Because of what Levi calls this difficulty or inability, but might as well be called reluctance, to perceive the experience of others, something horrible yet profound is confined to the memory of those who experienced it, many of whom are, still today, too traumatised to talk about it.
The memory is like a parasite, and like a parasite, it dies with its host. The memory of the Holocaust should never be allowed to die, and of all of what is left in the world to keep the Holocaust alive we ought to find hope in the museum of Auschwitz, because Hollywood has sanctioned violence to the extent that fiction and reality aren't that different. But without prior knowledge of what it is you're looking at, the museum becomes a collection of stray discarded personal effects that might as well have not belonged to anybody, just as Spielberg's film becomes an acted out drama of fictional insignificance depicting something that might as well have not happened (and even accepting that it did happen, how are we to perceive the events of fifty years ago against the contemporary backgrounds of Bosnia and Rwanda, which, for all their horribleness don't, to today's world, compare to the horrors of yesterday's?). It is not only familiarity, however, that is needed to appreciate the 'meaning' of Holocaust memorabilia. You also have to be absolutely and totally opposed to an ideology that said it was okay to exterminate an entire race of people. This might be stating the obvious, but there are too many in the world today who don't fit into this category.
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