Can the Holocaust or Shoah be represented by conventional, museographic means?

This essay explores how museums, memorials and monuments exhibit the absence of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It will question whether absence can be represented solely by conventional museographical means of displaying objects, or if something more abstract is needed to represent the horror and void left when whole communities were wiped out. First it will describe and investigate how The Jewish Museum in Berlin conveys absence in the architecture of the building and the objects displayed. Next it will discuss the more conventional Museum of the Shoah in Paris. Finally it will consider how the innovative counter-monuments to commemorate absence aim to challenge and engage with the viewer.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind (b.1946) after winning a competition in 1988. The fragility of the political consensus over…(short extract)