Emotions in Holocaust Studies: An Introduction

Abstract To say that emotions play a central role in past and present references to the Holocaust is to state the obvious.1 Strong emotional experiences constitute much of how people encounter the topic through moving testimonies and melodramatic representations. Many popular depictions of the Holocaust, along with museum exhibitions and memorials, make explicit use of personal objects that belonged to the victims, as well as photographs, individual accounts, and artworks made of and by Holocaust victims. They give viewers, readers, and visitors a sense of personal and emotional connection that elicits empathy for the suffering of unfamiliar people from the past.2 In doing so, such artifacts and sites of commemoration also aim to regulate what feelings are “appropriate” and what behavior is expected from members of a particular society and group.3 For example, as Esra Özyürek has shown, a guide in a German concentration camp memorial felt uneasy about visits of students from Turkish and Arab families, who “start to feel they will be sent there next.” Rather than display the requisite public performance of empathy toward Jewish victims and accepting historical responsibility as part of the German “nation of perpetrators,” the students expressed their own fears of becoming victims in a society that had witnessed an increase in Islamophobia over the last decade.4