Embodying the Past: Locating the Body in Sites of Destruction Turned Museum

Abstract

This thesis is a challenge to me and my readers to envision a site of destruction turned museum as a location for actualizing potential connections between the past and the present, between the bodies who passed on the site and the bodies who visit this site. My desire is to examine how my three case studies, Auschwitz, Birkenau, and the Anne Frank House, can be regarded and experienced as an embodied sites of affect (to use a Deleuzian term): sites of exchange between bodies that fulfills the saying, Never Again, Never Forget. How can we begin to create a history, influence the act of remembering, and, in the process, practice a “pedagogy of hope” (Brown 2004, 249), especially when constructing museums to memorialize a period in history marred by genocide?