‘Invocation' of ‘Europe' in Post-Communist Memorial Museums

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criteria for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (today IHRA) and the Holocaust-conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust during the process called ‘Europeanization of the Holocaust’. This is indicated by the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest opened almost empty only weeks before Hungary joined the EU although the permanent exhibition had not been ready until 2006. So how do post-communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform given those informal standards? Some museums stress being part of Europe, refer to ‘international standards’ of musealization and claim to focus on ‘the individual victim’. Is this a mere ‘inovocation’ of Europe or a proof that new, transnational forms of ‘negative memory’ are spreading? In other memorial museums narratives of Nazi occupation are predominantly used to frame an anti-communist interpretation of history. ‘Threatening’ aspects of the memory of Nazism are ‘contained’ so that it could not compete with stories of Soviet crimes. Yet both kinds of museums refer to the archetypical aesthetics of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. The House of Terror in Budapest has some kind of own “Tower of Faces”, yet here the photographs of the victims are used for a narrative of collective (Hungarian) victimhood.