The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre is proud to share Volume 2 Issue 2 of Eastern European Holocaust Studies, the Themed Issue: Museum. Guest edited by the director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Tali Nates and Mirjam Zadoff, the Director of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism.
The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. These days, it is largely forgotten that it was not followed by an immediate surge of memorials and museums remembering the Holocaust and the crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators all over Europe and beyond.
For this thematic section, we have invited contributions to discuss Holocaust museums in a lesser-known context, such as Eastern and Southern Europe, Africa or Japan. The articles and contributions in this issue employed qualitative methodologies such as in-depth interviews with government officials, bureaucrats, museum personnel (curators, museum directors, tour guides), direct observation, photographs, audio and visual elements and more. All articles and interviews will provide original contributions to the field of Holocaust studies and memory, investigating the architecture, history, and politics of the museums and memorials in the countries and context mentioned above.
They describe the challenges that institutions face, as fewer survivors and witnesses can contribute to their work, and right-wing politicians and populists glorify the legacy of perpetrators and aggressors. Collaboration with Nazi Germany as a taboo or blank spot often reflects how complicated the political realities are in which these museums operate. Sometimes these realities are new, but in other cases they go back to a long tradition of avoiding any shared responsibility for the crimes. As the various contributions reflect, museums and memorials are facing similar challenges and often learn from each other’s work and approaches. At the same time, the respective local and national contexts pose different challenges to their work.
The Issue is open access and can be found at https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/eehs/2/2/html