"A life both destroyed and memorialized" : En studie om insamling, förmedling och säkerhet i arkiv om Förintelsen.

Sammanfattning

The subject of this thesis is acquisition, presentation and safekeeping in Holocaust archives. The archives studied are Sveriges museum om Förintelsen in Stockholm, Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas in Berlin and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The purpose of the thesis is to discover the possible differences in the work with acquisition of material, to see what the focus of the presentations are, and to discern if there are any specific security aspects regarding these institutions. Four aspects of the theme “archive and memory” were chosen as theoretical standpoints for the study: 1) Archives as a mirror of reality, 2) Archive and power, 3) Archive and identity and 4) Archive and canon. The source material consists of interviews with representatives from the institutions. The conclusions of the thesis are: 1) All the institutions emphasize the importance of the memory of the individuals who perished in the Holocaust, and they all use this as a red thread in the exhibitions. The emphasis on the individual memory is, however, questioned as the “eternal” canon of the Holocaust, since the memory of individuals is not usually the long-term focus of history. 2) The archives work differently with both acquisition and presentation of material, and one of the main reasons for these differences can be traced to the host country’s identity in connection to the Holocaust. 3) All the institutions aim to facilitate research on the Holocaust by offering access to material gathered from archives around the world. However, the accessibility of the material differs greatly between the institutions. 4) The security standards of the three institutions are very high, which in the Swedish and German contexts is exceptional, except from in comparison to other archives/museums on Jewishness or Judaism. The conclusion is that the high security standards are connected to antisemitism, which once again is on the rise in Europe. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science.