Dinamiche del ricordo e memoria della Shoah nei Paesi Bassi

Abstract

In this paper some recent and less recent Dutch Holocaust museums and memorials are presented and discussed against the backdrop of the evolving cultural memory from 1945 up to the present day.  In scholarship dealing with the cultural memory of the Second World War in the Netherlands the term ‘Dutch paradox’ indicates the gap separating the Dutch self-image as a democratic and tolerant people and the collaborationism of the Dutch people leading to the highest percentage among Western European countries (75% of the total) of Jews deported and exterminated in the camps. From the initial lack of acknowledgment of the dramatic proportions of the Holocaust of the Dutch Jewry, the Dutch approach to Holocaust memory in the following decades has undergone different stages, in response to a growing awareness in society of the weight of historical events in the present political debate, and of the importance of the Jewish legacy in Dutch culture. Anne Frank, her ‘house’ (the ‘Secret Annex’) and her writings play a paramount and controversial role in the shaping of both a (trans)national Holocaust memory and a globalized and marketable child-victim image (Hirsch 2012). The ‘dynamics’ of the recollection of the Holocaust in the Netherlands are discussed in this paper elaborating on the seminal studies by Frank van Vree (1995 and 2009), and using as benchmarks older and more recent physical places of memory such as Anne Frank’s House (turned into a museum in 1960) and the National Holocaust Names Monument on the Weesperstraat in Amsterdam, unveiled in 2021. Attention will also be devoted to the evolving narratives embodied in museums and memorials, to the curatorial ‘representation’ of absence and erasure in these sites and, in conclusion, to their digital counterparts.