A day in the camp: the ‘Auschwitz experience’ and its spatial politics of representation

The Auschwitz Memorial is one of the most well-known and significant heritage sites in the world. As visitor numbers have grown, the behaviour of visitors has generated public concerns about the meaning and purpose of the Memorial as a means of preserving the memory of the violence perpetrated at that site. In this article, we provide an autoethnographic account of the guided tour that Memorial authorities have developed to structure visits to the Memorial, and analyse how it offers a particular and relatively standardized narrative of the camp–an ‘Auschwitz experience’–through its spatial politics of representation. We then draw on literature from Holocaust testimony to discuss the unspeakable nature of the violence perpetrated in this concentration camp. The analysis developed here is intended as an opportunity to consider the sheer impossibility of adequately representing what is at stake in the name Auschwitz and what this means for the Museum’s politics and practices of representation.