Courage,resistance and vulnerability in memory culture: Swedish Museum education and the representation of the Holocaust survivor at the turn of the twenty-first century

Self-critical memory culture

Aleida Assmann (2019: 48–53) has argued for the need of a self-critical memory culture in Europe. She argues that a self-critical memory culture has five fundamental traits: (1) it deals with negative episodes, like serious crimes, in the society’s own history (Schwerwiegenden Verbrechen in der eigenen Geschichte), (2) it is self-critical, (3) it uses historical research, (4) it reinterprets testimonies and (5) it is dialogical.

Assmann (2019: 49) defines self-criticism in terms of a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with negative episodes like crimes and other actions considered to be evil, shameful, or wrong. With reference to Johan Huizinga (1963) she argues that self-criticism is the intellectual form in which a civilisation renders account to itself of its past (p. 9). Self-criticism is necessary to avoid that national pride takes control over national memory and it facilitates the process of coming to terms with shameful episodes without ignoring them (Assmann, 2019: 52). This is connected to an underlying hope that all that is not talked about will dissolve itself over time, and society will move on to a better future by forgetting what has happened. This way of coping with the past bears resemblance to what Assmann (2019: 53) terms as a final line (Schlussstrich) – a ‘strong border’ separating the present from the past – which she contrasts to a ‘hyphen’ (Trennungsstrich), a weaker separation which demonstrates that there is a relation between present and past, too. A ‘hyphen’ is more complex than a final line, since it implies that one takes responsibility for the past while at the same time distancing oneself from it through reflection, historisation and ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (reassessment of all values) (Assmann, 2019: 54). Thus, underlying the concept of the ‘hyphen’ is an understanding of historical time in which the past is not ‘dead’ and all over with, but is a lasting influence, which in relation to difficult history demands responsibility of the present.

Maintaining that also historical research is important to a critical memory culture, Assmann (2019: 51) refers to how it has contributed decisively to raising a debate in European societies, not least when, after the fall of the Berlin wall and ‘die Wende’ (the turning point) in the 1990s, the eastern European archives were opened and new documents, sources and historical insights appeared. Historical research has called into question the unambiguousness (Eindeutigkeit) and exclusiveness (Ausschliesslichkeit) of prevailing national narratives. Furthermore, in cases where there have been no archives and no documents, the voices of victims, Assmann (2019), are important to a self-critical memory culture: oral testimonies of eyewitnesses have found their way into historical research and ‘bear witness to the wounds of history . . .’ (p. 51). ⁸

Assmann (2019: 52) emphasises that a critical memory culture is based on dialogue and not on the monological kind of communication associated with traditional national memory culture. In national remembrance where pride played the main role, the society’s guilt was ‘forgotten’. Thereby, national memory was reduced to a ‘respectable’ narrative, where the collective was allowed to play but three different roles (Assmann, 2019):

When facing a traumatic and guilty past, there were only three acceptable roles for the collective: that of the victor who has triumphed over evil, that of the resistor or martyr who has fought evil, and that of the passive victim who has suffered evil. What remained outside these sanctioned roles could not enter the narrative and was on an official level ‘forgotten’. (p. 9)

Assmann’s concept of self-critical European memory culture is part of larger trends in memory studies, which views memory as ‘travelling’ rather than just ‘contained’ within the boundaries of the nation state. Transnational or transcultural memory, then, is perceived as rooted in concrete locations, but also as travelling across boundaries, geographical spaces, media and communities, and as being actively transformed in the process (De Cesari and Rigney 2014; Erll, 2011; Törnquist-Plewa 2018; Wüstenberg 2019).

Museum education on difficult history

Assmann’s notion of self-critical memory culture has a parallel in museum studies on difficult history which addresses the need of museums to move away from monological education aimed at presenting cultural heritage as admirable, as something society can celebrate as a positive marker of collective identity. Studies in difficult history argues that museums should discuss society’s difficult history – the shameful, painful and unwanted themes (see, for example, Cameron and Kelly, 2010). The turn to difficult history in museums deals with the question: What happens when the invisible is made visible, when knowledge related to society’s margins otherwise swept under the carpet is suddenly inserted into the public domain? (Lehrer and Milton, 2011: 2). This turn to difficult history is rooted in New Museology and the critique of the Modern Museum for being too closely tied to the nation state and its objectives, for example, to highlight national triumph in historiography (Bennett, 1995; Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991). It takes inspiration from critical museum education and the demand for an inclusive and dialogical museum (e.g. Hooper Greenhill, 2007).

Roger I. Simon (2006, see also Simon, 2014) has termed difficult history ‘a terrible gift’ – a gift in an educational sense because we can learn from it in ways which raise ethical awareness and inspire a future of inclusion, democracy and solidarity, but also a terrible one because it shows dark sides of human life, which touch the visitor and arouse strong emotions we normally see as something negative, for example, disgust, sadness, fear, contempt, or anger. Eva Silvén and Anders Björklund (2006: 249), writing about ‘difficult matters’ in Swedish museums, find these matters difficult because they disturb and affect the audience: when artefacts, images and narratives are related to painful and violent stories of the past, they give rise to strong emotions, which can be difficult for visitors to handle. Difficult history is about a knowledge that does not fit and ‘induces a breakdown in experience, forcing us to confront the possibility that the conditions of our lives and the boundaries of our collective selves may be quite different from how we normally, reassuringly, think of them’ (Lehrer and Milton, 2011: 8). Thus, difficult history is troublesome because ‘it threatens to break through into the present in disruptive ways’ and disturbs ‘public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirmative, contemporary identity’ (Macdonald, 2009: 1).

In the context of museums, learning from the Holocaust is perceived as a possibility for ethical awareness and for critically analysing moral dilemmas, including considering one’s own responsibility to the lives of others as implied by the ‘Never Again’ imperative underlying much of Holocaust education in museums (Williams, 2011).

Vulnerability

The vulnerabilities of historical witnesses to how their stories are passed on in the present as well as students’ vulnerabilities to what they are asked to learn from the past are central issues in critical museum pedagogy on difficult history (Tinning, 2018). ⁹

The article discusses vulnerability in the double meaning of precariousness and precarity acknowledging the intersection of the concepts and the difficulties of differentiating between them. Judith Butler (2010) captures this double meaning:

Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious. Except of course in fantasy. . . Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. (p. 25)

Vulnerability is inherent to the human condition: humans are interdependent and all human life is vulnerable. Yet, vulnerability is not only an existential condition, but also a social condition: ‘Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure to those we know and to those we do not know’ (Butler, 2010: 14).

While all humans are vulnerable, some are more than others. Asymmetrical power relations and unequal socio-economic positions, which characterise social relations and social contexts, make people vulnerable in different ways depending on their resources and capacities. Vulnerability has important normative dimensions, too. People are vulnerable to social norms, including norms of vulnerability, which define them, and vulnerability itself is according to social norms often perceived as something negative – something related to victimisation, weakness and risk and therefore something that should be avoided.

However, Erin Gilson (2014: 31) finds that vulnerability is not only a ‘condition that limits us, but one that can enable us’ too, and, in the same vein, Alison Cole (2016: 274) has said that vulnerability should not only be seen as something negative because it defines our human openness to a relation with the other, and a search for invulnerability is actually dangerous because it may affect an ethical closure or insensitivity to the other human being and her needs.

Adding to the understanding of vulnerability as enabling rather than only being a barrier, Butler (2016) argues that vulnerability occupies an important position in regard to resistance: while vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the normative assumption that vulnerability is a kind of passivity or incapability, which performs a hindrance to engagement, vulnerability, actually, may be what instigates collective resistance and motivates commitment to an on-going engagement in resistance. Therefore, vulnerability should be acknowledged as a force that operates in resistance movements, too.

Producing narratives in memory culture without the inclusion of vulnerability entails a risk of ignoring the existential, social and psychological significance of vulnerability in resistance. Turning a blind eye to vulnerability may prevent us from seeing how vulnerability is a driving force in history. Consequently, attention to vulnerability is needed in museum education and memory culture to gain a richer historical understanding of resistance.

Furthermore, vulnerability is important to consider in relation to how museum education frames and mediates history and memory, for example, in their educational resources. Butler (2010) calls attention to the social frames, the discursive structure or pattern, which individuals, groups and societies use and develop to make sense of the world and which manifest themselves in, for example, communication. Butler (2010) finds that these social frames, which ‘seek to contain, convey, and determine what is seen’ (p. 10) are always related to social norms and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion to which human life is vulnerable: ‘the frame . . . decides which lives will be recognizable as lives and which will not’ (p. 12). The frame does not simply exhibit reality, rather it actively participates in a strategy of selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality and ‘it remains structured by the aim of instrumentalizing certain versions of reality’ (Butler, 2010: xiii). Furthermore, the frame ‘must circulate in order to establish its hegemony’ (Butler, 2010: 12), that is, it must be passed on from person to person, place to place, time to time.

Assmann (2019: 9) in parallel to Butler, relates collective memory to Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) concept of the social frame and speaks about frames of memory: just like a picture frame, a memory frame includes something and excludes everything else. Memory frames work like filters that organise the selection of memories and confirm their relevance. The question of the frame is: what can, should and may be articulated and what should be left out and remain silent? Which memories can be revived, and which ones should better not be communicated and why?

Courage in resistance

The dramatic arc providing the backbone of the narrative of resistance told in the Guide follows a path which defines Holocaust history as a history of surviving and resistance based on a notion of courage. In the very first lines of the introduction to the Guide (Marcus and Forsell, 2006), the authors state, ‘Now you will hear a different story about the Holocaust. It’s about courage’ (p. 5). Throughout the Guide, courage is the single most important concept used to interpret and frame the history of surviving the Holocaust as a history of resistance.

The narrative of resistance told in the Guide appears as an implicit response to a contemporary historiographical debate in Sweden taking issue with the country’s involvement in the Second World War (see below). In the very first lines of her preface to the Teacher’s Guide, museum director at that time, Margareta Alin (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 3) refers to this on-going debate asking, ‘how involved were we?’.

The Guide tells about Swedes’ resistance as well as the ways in which the victims of the Nazis resisted. In the first part of the Guide, Swedish resistance is personified by Lakocinski and Bernadotte. In the second part of the Guide, the story of the women from Ravensbrück is emphasised and incorporated into Swedish Holocaust historiography.

The first part of the Guide focuses on Lakocinski. It tells about Lakocinski’s love story: he met a Swedish girl and moved to Lund. His journey to Lund reflects the journey of the survivors and implements the theme of resistance to Nazism – and the image of Sweden as bright and enlightened. A large photo shows Lakocinski and his wife in full figure strolling down a quiet street in Lund. She is wearing a white dress and holds a handbag and a bouquet of flowers in her hands. The couple walks in step as they move forward towards the viewer (leaving a dark background behind). Sunlight shines in on them from above. This picture captures an idyllic atmosphere, which may have a pedagogical point: students who are emotionally vulnerable to learning about a difficult story are reminded of the bright sides of life. It may also bring out contrasts and illustrate that the historical narrative told breaks with the usual stories of the Holocaust. Yet, it should be questioned whether such an image risks overshadowing the recognition of ‘negative episodes’ as being inevitably negative?

Furthermore, it is interesting that the museum chooses to begin the history of the women who survived Ravensbrück with a story about a man, Lakocinski. Fjelkestam (2018: 113 with reference to De Lauretis, 1984) has argued that historical time is very often turned into masculine time as it ‘draws up the course of events based on an active male agent who sets the story in motion and moves it forward’. The narrative of resistance in the Guide works in a similar manner. It starts with an introduction of Lakocinski, and it presents him as the incarnation of courage and resistance (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 3): ‘thanks to a man’s drive and foresight, objects and fragments were saved when the white buses arrived after the end of the war with survivors of the concentration camp’.

When the Guide continues with a historical review of Sweden’s reaction to Hitler’s takeover – again with a focus on Lakocinski (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 5–7) – the problem becomes emphasised. Also, Folke Bernadotte is introduced in the story: he negotiated with Himmler with the result, the Guide tells, that the white buses’ rescue action came about. Bernadotte was a representative of the Swedish government – this is stressed by the Guide. Thus, the Swedish government is included into the narrative of resistance and is associated with the positive image of male agency and courage.

Vulnerability of survivors

The fact that the Guide highlights Lakocinski raises the issue of vulnerability in relation to the survivors. Lakocinski was not himself a survivor like the other members of PIZ. Yet, he is the only member of PIZ, who is mentioned by the Guide. He occupies a central position in the introduction to the Guide, and the introduction to a story is an important factor in determining how the readers continue to read the story (it sets a scene and introduces central persons and dilemmas). The PIZ collection is the result of a collective effort by all of the members of the PIZ group and their joint effort to collect evidence of the crimes of the Nazis can be viewed as an act of resistance. Therefore, it is a paradox that the group members – and their stories of survival and resistance – are invisible in the Guide.

The neglect of the PIZ members in the Guide demonstrates that survivors are vulnerable to how their stories become interpreted, framed and mediated in museum education and memory culture. Thus, survivors’ vulnerability must be considered not only in relation to the historical circumstances under which they lived, but in relation to the circumstances under which they become remembered – or forgotten.

Vulnerability effaced

When illustrating the rescue action, the Guide shows a large picture of the white buses queuing and people standing outside the buses in small groups. Particularly two young women in the foreground catch the eye. They are wearing skirts, smiling and hugging. The picture is like a counter-image to the terrible photographs of the wagons, which were used to transport victims of the Nazis to the concentration camps. The accompanying text tells that, when the white buses arrived at Malmö, Lakocinski was present to interview the survivors, and the text again represents him as the very incarnation of courage and resistance (Marcus and Forsell, 2006): ‘he succeeded through his courage, his stubbornness and also through his contacts to save some (of the objects) from being burned’ (p. 7). Again, Lakocinski is represented as an incarnation of resistance and courage – and, again, he is the only member of PIZ, who is mentioned.

Furthermore, the picture of the white buses works through exclusion: it shows no suffering or exposure and references to vulnerability are left out from this picture. The accompanying text supports the image of survivor subjects as passive objects of Sweden’s rescue action. The picture mediates a very particular understanding of Sweden’s involvement in the Second World War, which is based on the notion of resistance and courage.

The following chapter tells the story of life in the Nazi camps. This part offers a review of a more general story of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The tone of the language is objective, describing facts: ‘It was the Nazis’ largest concentration camp for women only. Women from all over Europe were brought here for various reasons’ (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 8). When describing the inhuman conditions to which prisoners were exposed, the language and form is explanatory and detached (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 8): ‘about 132,000 women and children were imprisoned in Ravensbrück. Many of them died of malnutrition, abuse, coercion, disease, and medical experiments’. According to the historian Hayden White (2016: 64, 71), this way of communication is a kind of a ‘middle-voicedness’ which mediates the narrators seemingly passive objectivity and ‘blocks the impulse to narrativize’ and ‘the emplotment of events’ to ‘let in a bit of reality’ in the representation of reality. This may block impulses in historiography to fictionalise, aestheticise, or relativise the event and mediate between facts known about the Holocaust and the various meanings that educational or ethical interests may demand of them (White, 2016). However, estrangement and disbelief may also provoke an experience of a final line and a feeling of a distance of this particular past from the present.

The museum has chosen to exclude photos of human victims in this section, and this strategy is pervasive throughout the Guide; for example, in the section named ‘Dehumanization and Sorting’, a full-page photo shows a board of symbols used by the Nazis to categorise the prisoners in the camp (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 9). The human face of vulnerability is not shown in the picture. Another picture, which shows prisoners’ dresses, works in the same way: it shows dresses neatly folded, carefully placed in three rows, colour and pattern coordinated, but no living human beings appear and no human faces are visible (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 11).

The museum’s use of historic photos is consistent with the Guide’s general approach: images with negative connotations to vulnerability, victimisation and suffering are excluded throughout the Guide. The photographical strategy erects a ‘final line’ between past and present. Vulnerability is excluded as something which is ‘over’, while resistance is included and shown and, thus, characterised as timeless.

A hyphen and a final line

If the narrating voice of the first section of Chapter 2 seems remarkably untouched and distant, the voice of the second part of the chapter, which concerns the women’s resistance represented by the many small objects that they brought along to Sweden, stands in contrast to it. Here the tone is lively, engaged and personal, speaking directly to the reader. The language is characterised by short sentences and easy words and invites conversation. A number of small photos of the objects are used to illustrate the women’s resistance and the accompanying texts tell (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 12): ‘Look at these socks. They are called sabotage socks’ or ‘look at these lipsticks. They were used to save lives’ (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 13). In contrast, the story of the violence of the Nazis in the previous section was illustrated with only a few and larger pictures. This connotes a ‘larger’, more general and abstract story. All of the small stories of resistance (in texts and photos) give special importance and value to positive episodes of courage, moral strength and the ability to withstand difficult situations, thereby shedding a positive light on resistance.

The use of language and form in the Guide even conveys a moral: memories of courage should be emphasised with and kept alive – they are worth closer engagement – while stories of vulnerability should not be detailed, but kept at a distance. The moral is supported by the use of testimonies in the Guide. In general, testimonies of female survivors from Ravensbrück are used in the Guide to give flesh and blood to the story of the women’s resistance, yet any references to ambivalences, conflicts and vulnerabilities are excluded. The Guide (Marcus and Forsell, 2016) quotes from the testimony of a woman named Maria: ‘when you are deprived of your individuality, every object becomes important’ (p. 15). However, this passage is followed by another quotation from a woman named Apolonia (Marcus and Forsell, 2006): ‘. . . and also this: that someone had taken a risk for your sake. It felt great’ (p. 15). Thus, the whole passage ends on a happy note (‘It felt great’) and in this way the museum prevents dialogues about ‘negative episodes’ related to vulnerability. ¹⁰

When telling about medical experiments in Ravensbrück, the Guide uses a large photo of a grey wall with barbed wire (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 12) and, thus, it represents suffering and pain in a way used so often in connection to the Holocaust – a grey wall and barbed wire – that one has become almost blind to it. In effect, the image rather stereotypes the violence by the Nazis ¹¹ and trivialises the victims’ suffering. Also, this representation is drawing a final line between the past (suffering) and the present.

The dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of the story of surviving in the Teacher’s Guide follow a curve: first, it introduces the story of surviving as a story of courage to resist by characterising Lakocinski, who (together with Bernadotte and the white buses) embodies Swedish involvement in the Second World War. Then, it continues to the story of the violence of the Nazis and the suffering of their victims. Finally, it presents a ‘happy ending’: the tale of the women’s courage to resist.

The last chapter of the Guide is the ‘Ethical Workshop’ (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 16). Here, the museum invites teachers and students to discuss the question of ‘What is courage?’. Again, the moral of the Guide is that courage is (and must be) the driving force of resistance, while, again, the connection between vulnerability and resistance is neglected. The ethical workshop can be viewed as a method of democratic education, but implementing the overall frame of ‘courage’ puts constraints on the students’ dialogues. Not only does it circulate a frame that interprets vulnerability as something negative, something to be avoided and explicates courage as the normative ‘good’ – and of particular ethical import – but it also risks removing students’ discussions from negative episodes and the ambiguity of the history of surviving.

Biographies of resistance

In an appendix to the Teacher’s Guide (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 18–21), ¹² biographies of six female survivors are presented. In accordance with the overall framework of the Guide, the survivors are here presented as role models of resistance and courage. The museum has edited the biographies so that all of them begin with a quote that emphasises positive episodes. Zofia Didzik’s biography (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 19) starts with an account of her experiences of freedom in Sweden, which emphasises the bright side of things: ‘At least we were happy that we were free. . .First, we came to Malmö and the same evening we were sent to Ystad. And I was so surprised. There was light everywhere’. The biography of Apolonia Högestatt (Marcus and Forsell, 2006) begins with her memory of courage: ‘In 1945 there was chaos in camps. I stayed back in the barracks for sick prisoners. When I heard about the transport to Sweden, I jumped out of the window and lined up in the queue’ (p. 18).

The appendix (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 18–21) primarily describes the women’s resistance with a focus on the time before and after their internment in the concentration camps, generally avoiding memories from the camp. For example, Anika Bremell’s biography is characterised by descriptions of her participation in the French resistance and how, in 1949, she testified against camp commanders and others who worked for the Nazis in Ravensbrück with the result that all of the accused persons were sentenced to death. In Inger Gulbrandsen’s biography, the primary story is about how she smuggled weapons for the resistance despite great danger. Alice Wolfshörndl’s biography describes how she hid in the Czech forests, survived a death march and, when she later settled in Sweden, went out to schools to tell students about her experiences. Maria Kurowska is characterised as an active agent in the underground resistance movement in Poland (today Ukraine), and the museum has added the following interpretive remark to her biography (Marcus and Forsell, 2006):

Many people who survived the war felt gratitude for the rest of their life. Maria was such a person and after the war, throughout her life, she saw other people’s need for help and was in different big and small ways able to support people who were having difficulties. (p. 18)

The quote exemplifies how the museum selects and interprets the survivors’ memories by use of words with positive connotations and in this way conveys moral lessons.

Homogenisation

Annette Wieviorka (2006) has developed a theory of developmental stages in the reception of the survivor-witness. In her view, the first phase, the years following the war, was characterised by lack of attention to witnesses, while, in the second phase centred on the Eichmann trials (1961–1962), which foregrounded victim testimony for its pedagogic and emotional value, the neglect of survivors’ voices was replaced by an increased attention to survivors and their experiences. In a third phase, which Wieviorka has labelled ‘the era of the witness’, the survivor became a significant voice in contemporary memory culture. ¹³

In Sweden, too, a thesis of evolution from silencing to attentiveness has established itself. For example, an exhibition catalogue for the collection entitled ‘Jewish Remembrances in the Nordic Museum’, the assumption was made that Jewish Holocaust survivors, who came to Sweden in 1945, had been met with a silence which continued for years (Lomfors, 2000). ¹⁴

Yet, the developmental thesis has been substantially modified by, among others, David Cesarani (2012), who shows that in the post-war period, publishing survivors’ memories was much more widespread than previously thought. Also, Novick’s (1999) assertion that Jewish-American society ignored Holocaust survivors after the war is refuted by Hasia R. Diner (2009), who shows that the Jewish-American communities were far from silent about the Holocaust and that survivors played key roles as witnesses in the years before the Eichmann trials. ¹⁵

At the same time, survivors are also used as witnesses in very particular ways. Waxman (2007) confronts the use of the survivor as a witness in the collective memory of the Holocaust:

the accepted concept of the Holocaust and the role of collective memory place two demands on the survivor. First, they seek to homogenise the survivors’ experiences, and secondly, they assume that, in adopting the role of the witness, survivors will adopt a universal identity. But, in negotiating the hegemony of accepted Holocaust narratives, some survivors’ experiences are either pushed towards the margins or neglected altogether. (p. 158)

The Teacher’s Guide illustrates this situation as well. It ‘demands’ that the women from Ravensbrück embody the virtue of courage and become the very incarnation of resistance. It seeks to homogenise the survivors’ experiences and to present them as a universal role model, a resistance heroine.

Gendering

In the early 1980s, Katz and Ringelheim (1983) claimed that female Holocaust survival was different from that of male survival because it was characterised by female solidarity. This statement led to a heated debate, where the idea of a special ‘female path to survival’ was rejected. ¹⁶ Scrutinising female Holocaust witnesses’ authorship, Zoë Waxman (2007) writes that ‘research on women’s experiences is generally presented as an addendum, or corrective, to existing androcentric work on the Holocaust’ (p. 124). ¹⁷ The Teacher’s Guide is a case in point considering both the positioning of Lakocinski as the main character of the narrative of resistance and the structure of the narrative: first Lakocinski is introduced, then the larger story of Nazi violence is told, and then, in the end, the objects made by the women from Ravensbrück are shown. Finally, as an appendix, a supplement in the end rather than included in the main body of the text, is the section on the women’s biographies.

Furthermore, telling the story about the resistance of the survivors, the Guide primarily names the survivors ‘the women from Ravensbrück’. This is consistent with the fact that the majority of the survivors who came to Sweden after the Second World War were women coming from a concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück. However, the label ‘the women from Ravensbrück’, which puts an emphasis on the gender of the survivors, implies a risk of stereotyping women’s experiences, if these experiences become structured within memory frames linked to conventional gender norms (Tinning, 2016). This risk is apparent in the Guide’s description of the survivor named Inger Gulbrandsen (Marcus and Forsell, 2006): ‘Inger was very beautiful, blond and upright, and spoke perfect German. All this made her very useful in the resistance movement . . .’ (p. 20). The risk can also be observed in Bremell’s biography (Marcus and Forsell, 2006) as the museum chooses to quote the following passage from her testimony: ‘When we saw the stylish Swedish boys with their red crosses on their arms, we felt for the first time in a while as women’ (p. 23). Here, survivors’ experiences of resistance are framed in a way, which is closely associated with social norms and gender stereotypes about what it means to be a woman.

The Teacher’s Guide is complex in that sense, as it both falls under this criticism and serves as a counterweight: highlighting the survivors as ‘the women’ is exactly to gender the survivors and it counteracts how the guidebook (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 4, my accentuation) writes that the stories relate to ‘existential matters’ (not specifically concerning women), and students should learn by ‘listening to stories about how other individuals lived and live their lives’ (p. 4). The museum presents its story of the Holocaust as a ‘different story’ because it is about courage, and in its portrayal of the courage of the women from Ravensbrück, the museum does challenge conventional gender norms about women as ‘the weaker sex’. However, the Teacher’s Guide is also conventional in its approach to gender roles and power relations, for example, as illustrated by the structure of the narrative, which begins with Lakocinski’s story and by the emphasis on conventional gender norms in the women’s biographies.

Survivors as martyrs and moral witnesses

Framing the historical narrative of the Holocaust as ‘a story of courage’ the Teacher’s Guide alludes to a kind of heroic tale: it depicts the Holocaust survivor as a heroine figure known also from martyrology, where the martyr (of Greek: μάρτυς, mártys, ‘witness’, or μαρτυρία, marturia) is a witness who suffers persecution, oppression – and death – for refusing to support a religious belief or cause. Normally, the title ‘martyr’ is used to describe people who died because of religious beliefs, but the term has also been used to portray people killed for political reasons.

The figure of the martyr is central to a society’s ‘boundary work’ as argued by Olmo Gölz (2019): in ‘society’s collective memory, heroes, martyrs, victims, and villains are of the same kind: they are figures of boundary work’ (p. 2). By relating to the martyr, a society defines its ethical, political, or social boundaries – and this is done through a memory culture that remembers the martyr in public space through various practices (Gölz 2019: 27). Martyrs’ stories are used to establish moral codes and construct symbolic boundaries that structure society and categorise people. Martyrs become created as social agents by their particular societies, and the ‘imaginary field of the heroic’ also reflects the real-life power relations in a particular society(Gölz 2019).

Such a trend can also be seen in the Teacher’s Guide, where the women from Ravensbrück, as a collective, appear as martyrs, figures in a kind of ‘boundary work’ related to moral codes and real-life power relations. Their story establishes ethical boundaries (the border on dehumanisation), political boundaries (the border on neo-fascism), religious and sexual boundaries (e.g. the border to Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia), as well as geographical boundaries (borders between local, national and European memory culture).

Assmann (2016a) speaks of martyrdom in relation to a ‘radical inversion’:

Martyrdom is not yet exclusively constituted in terms of a violent death but is first constituted as a report on the death. The report first divests the persecuting authority of the power of definition over the event in that it reinterprets a moment of the utmost lowliness and obliteration in physical death into an act of testimony that goes well beyond this death. This radical inversion of political inferiority into religious superiority, of trauma into triumph, also requires a doubled witness: the one through the dying martyr and the one through a secondary witness to the martyr. (p. 69)

This ‘radical inversion’ is manifest in the Teacher’s Guide, too. It turns the suffering of the women from Ravensbrück into moral superiority and presents them as moral witnesses who, like the religious witness, bring the roles together, not in the way that the women become witnesses by dying, but rather they become witnesses by surviving death. Positioned as martyrs in Swedish memory culture, they appear as role models for Swedish students.

According to Assmann (2016a: 69), the moral witness is similar to the historical witness as well as to the partisan religious witness, who, making her voice heard on behalf of ‘the annihilated names’ also testifies on behalf of those who did not survive and whose voices have been made silent. The moral witness differs from the religious witness in that it reveals a violent crime and testifies to ‘negative episodes’ experienced firsthand (Assmann, 2016a: 70). However, in the Teacher’s Guide, this interpretation of moral witness becomes moderated through a transmutation: a vulnerable and powerless sacrificial witness becomes transfigured into a courageous survivor-witness.

Like the religious witness, so too does the moral witness need a witness who hears her voice and receives her message: if the witness’s message is not heard, then her survival becomes meaningless (Assmann, 2016a: 70). Throughout the period in which the witnesses are persecuted, humiliated and attacked, they have no faces, no voice, no place and no history in memory culture; a broader community that extends beyond the perpetrator–victim dyad, which consists of an uninvolved ‘third party’, must first be developed. This is the community, which listens to the testimony and gives the victim status of witness.

The classification of the ‘witness’ is not a natural category; rather it emerges first and foremost as a social construct in a moral community in public space (Assmann, 2016a: 70). The Teacher’s Guide exemplifies an attempt to evoke such a moral community in the context of the public educational space of the museum. Representing the voice of the women from Ravensbrück, giving them a voice, the Teacher’s Guide, also attempts to position the students as ‘third parties’, as witnesses, who are witnessing these silenced stories (Lehrer and Milton, 2011). Constructing a moral community of witnesses in the museum, the Teacher’s Guide presents the women from Ravensbrück as having a particular status as witnesses in collective memory because they were witnesses to courage and resistance.

The moral witness as a cultural icon

Carolyn J. Dean (2018, 2019b), in her discussion of the cultural significance of the witness, argues that the witness to genocide has become a central trope of contemporary Western moral culture. While in the beginning, the concept of the witness to genocide was used to describe the survivors of the Holocaust of European Jewry, it was later broadened to encompass witnesses to other mass killings, too. In the course of this process, the ‘survivor-witness’ was developed into a cultural icon of suffering humanity symbolising that mass killing is an attack on human morality (Dean, 2019a).

The Eichmann trial called public attention to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust – it was only after the Eichmann trial that the image of the Jewish Holocaust survivor-witness got its full shape (yet it did not reach its peak till the end of the 1970s) – and the trial marked an influential effort to formulate the moral norms, which became leading in the second half of the twentieth century, Dean (2018) argues, and she continues,

The trial dignified victims’ lives and deaths, especially in the post-trial reception of its import, not only because it offered them an opportunity to testify, but also because its rhetorical fashioning of victims, cleansed them of blame and rendered them worthy of recognition. It developed a narrative about the experience of mass murder that eventually transformed victims’ abjection into a redemptive force, placing their suffering center stage. (p. 9)

The public acknowledgement of the victim of the Holocaust, however, came with a price: it was transformed into the cultural icon of the ‘survivor-witness’ and became a universal symbol of darkness and hope with an ideological and memorable function, which erased some realities and distorted others. Dean (2018: 5), researching courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s, maintains that these battles played a crucial role in the development of the survivor as a moral icon:

the courtroom scenarios transformed the speakers into figurative witnesses, each a variation on a narrative about mass murder that ascribed moral meaning to victims’ experiences of pogroms, of concentration camps, and of extermination. Brought into being by the act of testimony and the symbolic solidarity it constitutes, the witness possesses similar features across different trials that makes victims’ experience of extreme violence culturally legible. Moreover, the witness figure negotiates the dual poles of the universal violence inflicted on humans and the particular violence imposed on certain ethnic groups.

Dean (2018: 35) maintains that the process in which the witness became a ‘symbolic mainstay of a Western-inspired, global discourse’ is inextricable from the dispersion of the symbolic power of the survivor-witness among different actors in society, and thus, the survivor-witness lends her symbolic powers to the institutions, which document, memorialise and mobilise concern about her experiences. The museum Kulturen is a case in point: invoking the moral status of the women from Ravensbrück (as resistance fighters) to pursue an agenda on their behalf – and on behalf of victims of neo-fascism in contemporary Sweden – the museum also lends symbolic power to interpret, frame and mediate collective memory in Sweden.

The development of the figure of the survivor-witness, according to Dean (2018: 29), represents a sacralisation of the survivor which melts suffering into heroism and offers the witness a status as the possessor of ‘a luminous truth’. Thus, the survivor has become the very image of human conscience and responsibility towards future suffering and a ‘model of social solidarity’ (Dean, 2018: 30).

According to Dean, the contemporary witness-figure is the ‘activist-witness’, who invokes the political and moral status of the traumatised victim to pursue an agenda on behalf of the victim (Dean, 2018: 34). Witnessing is a dialogical process, which is increasingly undertaken not only by a witness, but also by various other actors, who construct a universal ‘witness’ to pursue a particular agenda (Dean, 2018):

If the Eichmann trial redeemed the wounded humanity in the image of the Jewish Holocaust survivors, a steady parade of politicians, lawyers, policy makers, and human rights’ activists mobilizing against various political regimes or genocides now invoke a universal, generic victim. (p. 34)

The Teacher’s Guide reflects this development: it shows how a museum, to mobilise students against neo-fascism, transforms victims of the Holocaust into courageous resistance heroines, moral superior witness and role models

Living history

In the first lines of her preface to the Teacher’s Guide, museum director at Kulturen Margareta Alin (Marcus and Forsell, 2006: 3) associates the exhibition and the guidebook with ‘the Swedish Government’s major campaign 1997’. The campaign she refers to was a nationwide educational campaign entitled Levande Historia (in English Living History), which was launched in 1997 by the Swedish government with Prime Minister Göran Persson at the forefront. The aim of Living History was to inspire children and young people in Sweden to resist neo-Fascism and racism by teaching them about the Holocaust. Similarly, in her preface to the Guide, Alin (Marcus and Forsell, 2006) argues for the need of the exhibition and the Guide:

Among millions of objects in our rich collections of cultural history, we now choose to highlight these fragments. We do it because it’s needed. In Sweden – right now – racism has grown. Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and homophobia are on the rise. Have we not learned from history? Today we see what developed then! Do we see what happens now? (p. 3)

The Living History campaign was promoted by Persson in a party leadership debate at Riksdagen (the Swedish Parliament) on 12 June 1997, and as shown in the following passage, Persson emphasised the need for resistance (Sveriges Riksdag, 1997, my translation from Swedish, my emphasis):

We who were born after the war have been told this by our parents. We have carried the images from concentration camps into our adult lives. Have we in our generation, born after the war, passed this on to our children?. Have we made sufficiently clear that this should never happen again? We must ask this question after the signals we are now receiving. In fact, this is not just one signal. Rather several people are pointing out that perceptions based on racist ideas are spreading in Swedish society. The swastika is visible again, Sieg Heil echoes in our streets, neo-Nazis march. . . We must resist.

The official reason for the campaign was rooted in a major study conducted by Brottsförebyggande Rådet (the Crime Prevention Council) and Stockholm University, which showed that one-third of children and young people in Sweden either had limited knowledge of or denied the existence of the Holocaust. ²⁰

In 1998, as part of Living History and commissioned by the Swedish government, the book entitled . . .om detta måste ni berätta – En bok om förintelsen i Europa 1933–1945 (English edition Tell Ye Your Children: A Book About the Holocaust in Europe 1933–1945, 1998) authored by Stéphane Bruchfeld and Paul A. Levine (1998) was launched. It was free of charge and sent out to teachers and others who were interested.

In the same year, 1998, a committee was set up to investigate how the Living History campaign could be continued in a more permanent form. An expert panel, which should advise the committee on the matter, was chosen, and Alin became part of it. As a person closely associated with the governmental campaign, it is therefore reasonable to assume that Alin found inspiration from her work in the expert panel and used it at Kulturen. The focus on resistance in the Teacher’s Guide and Alin’s introduction to the Guide indicates this.

Furthermore, also in 1998, steps were taken to link the Swedish educational campaign to a transnational network. The Swedish Prime minister invited the president of the United States and the British prime minister to a meeting in Stockholm, which was also attended by historians and diplomats. As a result, 1 year later, in 1999, the so-called International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF) ²¹ was founded in Washington with additional participation by Germany and Israel. A number of experts, among others Jehuda Bauer, were involved as advisors, and a governmental action network was set up, which should develop a programme for Holocaust education in various countries. In her outline of this development, Assmann (2010) concludes: ‘it was the aim of the Swedish prime minister to transform his national memorial activities into a transnational policy’ (p. 101).

In the year 2000, ITF met in Stockholm and was reconfigured on a new and larger scale. On this occasion Persson invited representatives of 16 nations (among them 13 present and future members of the European Union) to a Stockholm meeting to further develop the common framework for the remembrance and education of the Holocaust (Assmann, 2010: 102). As a result of the meeting, the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, the so-called Stockholm Declaration (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 2000), was born, and a central part of it was that the Holocaust should become a shared European collective memory, which should sustain shared values in the European community. The last article of the Stockholm Declaration (article 8), presented at the Living History homepage (Levande Historia, 2022), states,

It is appropriate that this, the first major international conference of the new millennium, declares its commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past. We empathise with the victims’ suffering and draw inspiration from their struggle. Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity’s common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.

In the light of this, the educational campaign Living History may be interpreted as a political attempt to glue Swedish society together and connect Swedish national memory culture to a transnational (Western European) memory culture. ²² The Swedish state played an active role in its development, and Alin, by virtue of her key position in Living History, became involved in the formulation of the state’s objectives, which she could subsequently pass on to the museum, Kulturen.

Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner (2016: 26, with reference to Novic, 1999: 200–201), discussing Holocaust memory as a ‘civic religion’, argue that ‘the confluence of political interests and entertainment patterns helped establish Holocaust memory as a “civic religion” expressed in many official museums and memorials and for instance in the Stockholm Declaration of 2000’.

In the context of museum studies, Lehrer and Milton (2011: 6) have expressed worries that museums become ‘crafted in strategic attempts by state, international, or community institutions to engineer (or simply proclaim) a desired social outcome’ because it may delimit the museums’ critical potential to confront difficult history and raise a public debate about controversial themes. There is a dynamic between remembrance and forgetting which applies here. ²³ In the context of the Teacher’s Guide, aspects of the stories of survivors seem to have been forgotten, left halfway in the archive, and while victimisation, suffering and pain are described, they are never fleshed out, but rather overshadowed by stories of courage as exemplified in the characterisation of survivors as heroines.

A central educational aspect of the Teacher’s Guide is how it teaches students about the Swedes’ ‘victories’ – the successful rescue actions, which are important to recollect and save as historic evidence. The guidebook includes the story of surviving in Swedish history as a positive story to be admired; it renders an optimistic image of Sweden and a hopeful account of the survivors that the country received. The story of courage told by the museum may appear ‘unconventional’ in comparison with darker images of the Holocaust, and yet, the story of courage and resistance in the Teacher’s Guide also reflects the traditional national historiography of the Modern Museum (Bennett, 1995), which aimed at highlighting national triumph and pride, while defeats, failures and weaknesses were veiled and forgotten.

Historiographical debate in Sweden

The historiographical debate among historians about Sweden’s involvement in the Second World War, which takes place in the period leading up to the governmental campaign Levande Historia and the publication of the Teacher’s Guide, takes another direction. It takes a self-critical stance to Swedish involvement in the Holocaust and confronts the Nazi persecution of Jews as a problem for Sweden, too.

In 1988, the American historian Steven Koblik published his book The Stones Cry Out (1988), which discussed whether Swedish historiography had turned a blind eye to Swedish refugee policy during the Second World War under a ‘screen memory’ of Swedish neutrality. ²⁴ A few years later, the journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius in her book entitled Heder och Samvete (1991) joined the critique of the prevailing notion of Swedish neutrality during the Second World War in historiography. ²⁵ This new approach counterbalanced the so-called ‘small-state realism’ perception and the view of Sweden as a non-involved bystander nation, which has been summarised by Klas-Göran Karlsson (2016):

Although neutral, non-belligerent Sweden had a particular position in Europe as one of few bystander states in the Second World War, its postwar attitude to the Holocaust did not differ much from a general European one. The general interpretation was that, as a small state, Sweden had luckily, but also through realistic and skillful political adjustments to the warring parties in general and the Nazis in particular, managed to avoid being dragged into the war. Thus, Swedes had responsibility for neither the military operations nor the tragic destiny of the European Jews. (p. 80)

The historiographical debate breathed new life into a ‘moral counter narrative’, which could also be observed during the early post-war-period. The leitmotivs of the counter-narrative were that ‘the coalition government, with its concessions to Nazi Germany, had pursued a morally irresponsible policy’, ‘leading Swedish politicians acted in a cowardly manner and were nationally narrow-minded, bargaining with the fundamental values of democracy’, and the Government had been ‘incapable of seeing the Second World War for what it really had been: a moral struggle between democracy and dictatorship’ (Östling, 2011: 132–133).

The debate on Swedish involvement continued in the 1990s, proved tenacious and is still haunting historiography. For example, it appears again in Swedish historian Klas Åmark’s (2016) discussion of how Sweden gave in to German pressure in 1940 and allowed rail transport through Sweden of German soldiers on leave from Norway – and how German trains passing through Sweden were merely the beginning of numerous controversial concessions to Nazi Germany, including the development in Swedish trade with the Nazis and Sweden’s support to the Nazi’s war machine through the shipping of iron ore to Germany. ²⁶

The neutrality-engagement debate also manifests itself in a recently published book providing an overview of Sweden’s history. Here, the authors emphasise that Sweden was one of the countries rejecting refugees and asylum seekers who fled from the Nazis, and they mention the conclusion of the commission set up by the Swedish government after the end of the war in 1945 to examine Swedish refugee policy (Larsson and Marklund, 2019: 319, my translation from Swedish):

The final report showed in concrete examples that refusals and deportations of asylum-seeking Jews had resulted in deaths in the Nazi gas chambers. Therefore, it was the Commission’s assessment that Jewish refugees and other persons fleeing from the Nazi terror were, unfortunately, being admitted into Sweden too late. In recent years, this thread has been taken up, among others by historian Mattias Tydén, who even believes that Sweden should be regarded as being co-responsible for the Holocaust.

The actions of the Swedish coalition government and Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson during the Second World War have, Åmark (2016) argues, led to a moral trauma in Swedish society:

Per Albin was always talking about the ‘war of the great powers’. Certainly, it was the great powers that were the driving forces on both sides of the war, but also a number of small states were drawn into the war with or against their will. Defining the war as ‘a war of great powers’ was therefore clearly misleading. But it was a prerequisite of the appeasement policy pursued by the coalition government. With that definition, the government avoided being confronted with the political and moral aspects of the war . . . If Hitler had won the war, it would have led to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and terror on a large scale. But Per Albin and the coalition government as a collective did not want to focus on such aspects of the war. That is why Swedish policy towards Nazi Germany has also left behind a moral trauma, which the Swedes are still living with and return to over and again. (pp. 154–155, my translation from Swedish)

Likewise, the questions of what Swedish authorities knew about the Holocaust and whether Sweden could have acted to prevent the extent of the Holocaust continues to be burning issues (Åmark, 2021).

Prime Minister Persson’s educational campaign, Living History, may be seen as an implicit response to the moral trauma, where the story of Sweden’s involvement in resistance, including the rescue action, counteracts a self-critical memory culture taking issue with moral dilemmas. ²⁷ It contributes to a ‘resistance myth’, which was emerging after the war and which was rooted in the assumption that if the Germans were guilty then ‘we’ were innocent and, thus, ‘to be innocent a nation had to have resisted’ (Judt, 2000: 298).

The Teacher’s Guide illustrates the risk that the past is used in present-day museum pedagogy as an instrument for politics of remembrance in both political and moral ways. This is the risk which Henrik Berggren (2018) has aptly termed a narcissistic colonisation of the past, where what has happened and the people who have lived and their memories are re-created so that they can be used to shape and evoke stories of ourselves in the present rather than illuminating the reality of the past on its own terms and seeing it through the eyes of the people who lived it.

‘Forgetting’ negative episodes in their own history, the Teacher’s Guide sets problematic limits not only to students’ participation in the ‘ethical workshop’, but in particular to its own contribution to the creation of a dialogical and self-critical memory culture in Sweden in the years around the turn of the millennium. The historiographical debate, inspiring self-critical scrutiny, links contemporary Swedish society to its responsibility for historical injustice. It shows the imperfection, moral fallibility and fragility of Swedish society, but this vulnerability, which is contained in a self-critical approach, is not welcome in the Teacher’s Guide.

This being said, the Teacher’s Guide does counteract tendencies in the historiographical debate to neglect victim’s experiences, focus on what Swedes knew, what they did and what they could have done better, and treat Holocaust victims as passive objects that could have been rescued but were not. The Teacher’s Guide tells the story of non-Swedish survivors of Ravensbrück – something that is an addition to Swedish Holocaust historiography. It shows how museum education not merely constitutes reflections of historical research, but also contributes to it by creating new historical knowledge about the artefacts that they display.

Heroine narratives

The Holocaust has developed into a landmark of a Western European memory culture in which the notion of the survivor plays a prominent role. ²⁸ The Teacher’s Guide (Marcus and Forsell, 2006), published by the Swedish Museum of Cultural History in Lund named Kulturen in relation to its exhibition entitled Att Överleva. Röster från Ravensbrück, demonstrates how museum education on difficult history participates in transnational memory culture, incorporates memory politics and contributes to on-going historiographical debate.

Teacher’s Guide is connected to two contemporary phenomena in Sweden: a governmental educational campaign to raise young people’s awareness of the Holocaust (which was part of transnational efforts of IHRA) and a historiographical debate taking issue with negative and difficult aspects of Sweden’s involvement in the Second World War. Its narrative about resistance and characterisation of female Holocaust survivors as heroines of resistance also reflects a moral trauma, which the Swedes are still living with and return to over and again.

The Teacher’s Guide constitutes a significant contribution to memory culture and shedding a light on the history of female survivors within Swedish historiography is arguably the most important contribution of the Guide. However, its one-dimensional narrative of survivors as heroines of resistance and its emphasis on courage is problematic: it fails to address the role of vulnerability in resistance. This neglect of vulnerability is problematic because it puts constraints on students’ dialogues. Furthermore, it demonstrates how survivors are vulnerable to the ways in which they are represented and used in museums.

The history of surviving the Holocaust is a history of ambiguity: it is about both courage and vulnerability. It is important to acknowledge this ambiguity. By connecting Assmann’s (2019) concept of self-critical memory culture and Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability, the article suggests a new approach to museum pedagogy on difficult historyt. It directs attention to the need for acknowledging the vulnerability of the survivors and acknowledge and work through the vulnerability of the witnesses to difficult history in the museum, in this case the audience of the exhibition and the Guide. Dealing with one’s own vulnerabilities in relation to accepting and working with difficult history is essential to the work of self-critique in memory culture.