I spent the weekend in Washington D.C. Since it was my first time there and the amount of interesting museums is overwhelming, I decided to invest my time in only one: the
Holocaust museum. It is not my goal here to reflect on the design itself of the museum, which is excellent, nor about its rhetoric -which I also found extremely effective for such a delicate subject. There are mainly two remarks that I brought with me in the plane. The first one is about the part of the exhibit that is designed for children:
Daniel's story. I found that the designers did an outstanding job by combining both accuracy and respect to the young attendant's intelligence. Visitors follow Daniel's story starting in Daniel's house, and then following his journey through the city under Nazism, the ghetto and finally the concentration camp. It's a perfect example of what some authors call "spatial narrative", even if I do not think that such term is accurate and not particularly useful. The detail that caught my attention was a little bakery shop in a street corner that displayed some very yummy cakes. Since it is a "feel-free-to-touch" kind of exhibit, I tried to open the bakery's door. It was locked. At that moment I saw the sign saying that no Jews were allowed. I found that little example of simulation quite effective, even if it might not have been the designer's original intention. The fact that you experience first-hand the inability to get to the bakery delivers an experience that could hardly be attained by all the written texts on the exhibit. Simulation also has its tropes -metaphors, hyperboles, etc-, and this locked door is just an example of it.
About the main, permanent exhibit, I felt it manages to accomplish a titanic task: to gather so many different facts and players into a single experience. Nevertheless, I felt that somebody was missing. Surely, the victims, the criminals and the by-standers were all there. It wasn’t until I started looking at the visitors that I understood. The exhibit did a fantastic job by dealing with actual, historic fascism, but the person who was missing was me–and all the other visitors. In other words, as most museums, the exhibit relies on narrative, on what actually happened. But what about a museum who also explores the potential fascism, what still may happen? What about a museum that delivered not only the fact of an actual genocide, but also the personal and social clues that currently may allow something like this to happen again? What about a museum which put the visitor into the uneasy position of trying to think how she would have behaved in such an extreme situation – and how she is currently behaving towards current social issues? The famous quote from a priest was written in a wall –the one that goes like this:
First they came for the Jews/and I did not speak out/because I was not a Jew[…]. Right there, you have the rules for a simulation that analyses how your everyday actions affect the system, the big picture. In such a complex system like the Holocaust, the key element for understanding is how minimal discrimination may allow the emergence of the ultimate horror. And that’s where simulation can be an excellent rhetorical tool. Museums generally deal with the past, but just because we want to look forward. A simulated museum would help visitors to experiment with the future in order to understand how the worst nightmares from the past could emerge as a consequence of my and your everyday behavior.
Oh, by the way, Washington D.C.'s subway is not your usual train with Safeway and Cosmopolitan ads. The most disgusting thing I saw was this advertising for Boeing’s Apache helicopter, right on the subway billboards. First time ever that I see advertising for killing machines in a public place. Pure pornography, certainly, but it reminded me that D.C. is a city where certain people decide who lives and who dies.
