The Universal Victim – Representing Jews and Roma in a European Holocaust Museum (original) (raw)

Although the Holocaust is being commemorated throughout Europe, the idea that its memory has ac ommon European form is usuallyd enied. Scholars argueeither thateach nation state has its own formofnational commemoration or that national differences override anyc ommon European memory.H owever, the research on which this denial is basedr arely takes more than one nation state into account and,whereitdoes, it emphasizes the distinctiveness of national elements. Following DanielLevy and Natan Sznaider,Ibelievethat the memory of the Holocaust is comprised by local, national, European and even global elements simultaneously.¹ The binaryd istinction between an ational and European memory,h owever,p ositions one form of memory against the other so that the ways that they combine and interact are no longer visible. In this article, Iwill analyze the representation of Jewish and Roma victims as one crucial component within Holocaust representations.² Examining the permanent exhibition at the Holocauszt Emlékközpont/Holocaust MemorialC enter (HDKE) in Budapest,Iask how this exhibitionc onstructs an arrative about the victims through pictorial and textual representations and explore the extent to which these representations build on an imagined concept of victimhood.The HDKE is ap articularlys trikinge xample of museum representations, because it stands within the traditions of so-called Holocaust museums and references international Holocaust commemoration while also explicitlycountering the dominant right-wingd iscourse about the Holocaust in Hungary.