The Rise of 'Dark Tourism'

Gitta Sereny has an interesting passage on the misleading history once offered during German school trips to Dachau which can be found in her book 'The German Trauma' (now 20 years old). It is dated but it becomes relevant today as we see the rise of a peculiar form of elite tourism that has concerned and reasonably well-heeled middle class tourists travelling to locations that saw terrible suffering in the past only to come back with a skewed version of the history of that suffering and prey to contemporary special interest groups with an 'angle'. I'll come to her insights in a moment.

The starting point for 'historical horror porn' - calculated outrage and pity in now sanitised places with horrendous past narratives - has to be the complex of concentration, labour and extermination camps exposed in the wake of the defeat of Nazi Germany although the story probably starts with the Coliseum in Rome. No such tourism exists for the Gulag (yet) because the Russian Government has no current interest in exploiting the foreign exchange opportunity and the Chinese certainly have no intention of exposing their past. But the tourist can get on a carbon-emitting jet and go see slave trading posts in Africa or the place where Pol Pot did his dreadful and possibly insane experiments in class war before relaxing at a beach in nearby Thailand. There are memorial museums of war, terror and genocide (some with a very dubious interpretation of history) across Eastern Europe and Africa and in Indo-China. One can 'memorialise' at Auschwitz and Hiroshima or visit Robben Island to 'share' the experience of Mandela or one can 'experience' Chernobyl ... the list goes on and every aggrieved minority is either palmed off with a museum (as with the Ainu in Hokkaido) or demands one as the price for a vote (slavery being the preferred option in the Anglo-Saxon world). We are building ourselves a culture of regret and keening.

The justification is always 'never again' - a form of 'conscious-raising' by which the visitor is transformed in an analogue to religious experience and is assumed to become a better person so that such crimes can 'never happen again'. It seems to pass most people by that the people who visit are self-selecting as relatively well resourced people who would never have the incentive to do anything bad in the first place, while those who demand some form of memorialisation are actually seeking contemporary cultural or political advantage based on 'ressentiment' or the drive for resources. I have yet to see a Museum of the Harrying of the North (eleventh century) being proposed or one to educate us in the Early Medieval Slave Trade (scarcely mentioned in the British Museum) but you never know what may happen. It will depend on future political conditions.

In the most high profile sites, the young, through school trips, are particularly targeted as an exercise in psychological and cultural conditioning to inoculate them against 'bad ideas'. Given just how bad some of those ideas were and the results of letting those ideas rip in the world, it is hard to argue that it is not a good thing to do this and yet one may be allowed one's doubts. Since totalitarian psychological and cultural manipulation were at the very root of the crimes resulting from 'bad ideas', are we really so very sure that educative manipulation - the totalitarianism of the 'good' - is such a great idea if the process is not accompanied by a commitment to radical critical thinking? Surely we need to understand fully what is being seen and to have complete honesty about what is going on, especially so insofar as 'dark tourism' creates its own interest group of financial and political beneficiaries.

Sereny's main complaints in her observations about how Germany tried to assuage its war guilt at the Dresden site and elsewhere can be summarised in three parts. First, that the narrative confused concentration and extermination camps (it lacked truth-telling). Second, the total account of the war over-emphasised the Jewish component and underplayed the totality of the horror, especially of Germans on Germans (so giving her some cause to sympathise with Russian resentments although, of course, there is another Gulag tale to tell there). Third, everything was 'physically' sanitised so that kids never got a sense of the squalor and often reacted, perfectly legitimately under the circumstances, by saying things like 'that room was like the one we had on our skiing holiday' (referring to a shared barracks room).

She has a point on all fronts: a) places are presented within simplified narratives that give no sense of the process of history and its complexity and confusion, b) special interests and contemporary ideology quickly seize control of the approved narrative and c) the reality cannot be understood without understanding the material and psychical assault on all senses of the experience (the squalor of the slave ships is usually well presented verbally and intellectually, probably because we cannot visit a slave ship and have it sanitised with clean decks not covered in excrement). The experiences are in danger of becoming a 'day out' without context and with an emotional response being triggered that denies the actual historic meaning of the site and then converts it into something more convenient to contemporary authority (more lately into foreign exchange dollars in the emerging world).

If none of these aspects (full historical context, detachment from contemporary concerns and some sense of the physicality of the experience which may be extremely hard for any child or tourist to bear) are adequately done, the visitor gets a worse than false impression - they simply get a chance to feel a secretly pleasurable emotional horror or outrage for a brief period of time (like the first attenders at Hitchcock's 'Psycho') which then serves the purpose of culturally engineering them into a narrative of social use but without true understanding or individual benefit. They are secured against the horror with the implication not only of 'never again' but 'it can't ever happen to me because it happened to others in a time and place far away from my experience'. It literally becomes, in the cliche, 'unimaginable' because, while it can be analysed, the actual experience can never really be imagined as it was but only as it is imagined to be in the experience of the visitor.

This becomes, without any intention of it being so, 'historical horror porn' if it is without a correct and truthful narrative, without a questioning of the social narrative the site is intended to impose on the 'tourist' (any alternative or more nuanced view is faced with a sort of 'tut-tut' of emotional blackmail lest it 'insult the memory' of those victims who can never speak for themselves) and without an imaginative recreation of the actuality of the average existence on the site at the time. There is a lot of speaking for people who are not in a position to speak for themselves and, where there are survivors, it is actually not axiomatic that survivors can speak for the dead.

The signal example of 'mauvaise foi' at Dachau that Sereny refers to was to present a crematorium oven, one that was never used for extermination but only for the disposal of bodies who had died under other circumstances (bad enough), as if it was part of a specific extermination story when the real story is that there were actually four deliberate extermination camps, all in the East and none on German soil, and that Dachau was never one of them. Perhaps that interpretation has changed since she wrote her piece in the last century. I hope so because it was a lie and lies are the things that lead to horrors.

German visitors at that time did not get the full sense of a programme of extermination in the East that was going on while Germans were being incarcerated under brutal conditions by other Germans but simply had every site jumbled into another as a simple and useful generalised narrative of Nazi evil in which they were supposed to impute an equally generalised guilt on their near ancestors when that 'guilt' should perhaps have been parsed out far more sparingly on those who were either the actual murdererss and brutalisers of fellow Germans or who had directly participated in extermination and brutality as an act of conquest beyond the 'rules of war' (in itself a slightly absurd notion in the age of Dresden and Hiroshima).

The general implication becomes that we should tolerate a sort of weak 'we are all guilty' mentality, potentially if not actually, for having had a wrong thought in the past (as in unthinking passing antisemitism amongst Germans in the 1930s) or for simply and only possibly having the wrong ancestors (paradoxically reproducing the very genetic arguments of the Nazis themselves). The individual guilt of specific perpetrators is somehow diminished in favour of a general condemnation of our own human weaknesses shared by all or most humans everywhere. It is as if the idea of a general original sin is abandoned only to be replaced by sin derived from past dominant hierarchies (although you never hear of sin applying to Cherokees whose ancestors raped, kidnapped and scalped white settlers).

A generalised anti-semitism in the past (which in the mildest of forms even Graham Greene was 'guilty' of in 1931) becomes the crime of a nation (even if a majority actually did not ever vote for Hitler). We are all apparently now implicitly guilty of the slaving exploits of British merchants despite the fact that such slavers were a minority of the population and the majority of Britons lived under conditions of rural and industrial penury and misery that were certainly better than that of the plantations but were still no bed of roses, with minimal freedom except to be employed or starve. Britons were being enslaved by Moroccans right up until the early seventeenth century while the British Isles of the Celtic, Roman and Early Medieval eras involved a whole slave raiding and trading economy. Slavery is something that dies out with cultural development.

We appear to live in a culture of generalised guilt where you are supposed to feel bad just because you were a German or white or had a distant ancestor (presumed) of people who are judged to have connived in horrors (without proof of wrong-doing) simply for having existed contemporaneously with the horrors. And this despite having had no material power to do much more than survive themselves! Forgive me but I will not feel bad about anything for which I do not have full responsibility with full information and I certainly cannot take responsibility for the actions of dead people whether related to me genetically (and there is no proof that they were) or not. Guilt deadens the soul and it weakens men without cause.

Analysis of the complexities of the war of the few against the few on German soil, the malign dictatorial exploitation of German human resources and the strategy of conquest and exploitation of non-Germans (as well as all those equivalent questions arising out of the origins, perpetration and ending of slavery, imperialism and communism) are pushed aside in favour of the promotion of a low level generalised guilt in which generation is often to be pitted against generation. New mythologies, as absurd as the ones that are to be condemned, while certainly not evil, are equally filled with lies. They simply replace old lies with new more convenient lies. A benign lie may seem to be a necessary antidote to a malign lie but a lie remains a lie.

Such a new lie might imply that the ordinary German had far more power and knowledge than it was possible for them to have, no more than it was possible for the average Briton to have understood or known or done anything about the crimes of Empire. If a belief in national socialism or imperialism is a crime under national socialist or imperialist conditions then so is a belief in American international beneficence under the American dominance of the world economy ... our beliefs are not crimes unless ignorance is a crime and if ignorance is a crime then we are all criminals. In fact, a surprisingly small percentage of the British or German people were ever engaged in running the machines of empire and exploitation from a position of power. German 'holocaust guilt' has become a model for other forms of guilt - imperial guilt, the guilt of 'white privilege', male guilt, none of which take into account the essential meaning of guilt which derives from responsibility for the autonomous choosing of a course of action because autonomy and full information were available in the first place.

There is, in short, legitimate guilt - I did something wrong that I regret which I can reasonably know to be wrong and about which I had the power to do otherwise - and illegitimate neurotic guilt - something was done that someone else has imputed to me as wrong and which I now believe I am responsible for although I had no personal responsibility for that wrong. I am not my nation. I am not history. I am not my 'race'. I am not my Government. I am not my boss.

One set of lies gets to be replaced by a more benign set and so on ad infinitum in a culture that despairs of offering us a balanced and fair truth. Our mainstream media acts as testament to this inability to 'tell truth' (the full and complex truth of things). Its role in the farce that is late liberal capitalist culture is now to construct the ideology of the 'worse lie' (fake news) as if the original lie was somewhow justified by the fact of the worse one. Everything in our culture seems to be about inventing narratives to let ourselves off the hook of being responsible for what we can reasonably be responsible for - our own behaviours within power structures we did not choose. The presence of 'worse lies' always seem to be available to justify what are deemed acceptable lies (accepted social narratives of action and comfort). 'Historical horror porn' is just one of the latest iterations of this immense structure of myth-making thar defines us as socialised humans.

Past crimes are thus made usefully contemporary, for narratives that neither victims nor perpetrators could ever have comprehended, in a desperate attempt at an impossible retrospective justice. This is dangerous precisely because if past horrors are only to be seen in terms of their contemporary narrative value then they can eventually be replaced by new narratives that will create new crimes - always in as good faith as the thuggery of the past. Narratives replace thought. Literature replaces science. After all, a narrative of liberation underpinned the dreadful horrors of a destabilised Middle East as recently as two decades ago. And have the specific criminals who triggered that horror ever been brought to justice as wilful actors? No, they have not and we know in our hearts that they will die in their beds and not in prison.

Horrors must be seen in their correct light - as a functional consequence of human nature under certain conditions so that we can concentrate on not permitting the recreation of those conditions rather than on claiming 'holier than thou' status today because our 'ideas' are kinder and are allowed to play out in a resource-rich society. If we see resources disappear, even our nicest ideas will become tools of terror. Imagine the potential reality of radical environmentalism under such conditions and those terrors may become all too true.

Contemporary ideology concentrates on ... ideology (ideas) ... and it neglects those conditions of institutional breakdown, weak administrative capacity, war, gangsterdom and functional ignorance in which 'bad' ideas can seize hold and in which 'good ideas' can become bad very rapidly. Our culture obsesses about 'bad' ideas when any idea can be bad (try the Gospels for size or the Buddhist sutras) under certain conditions and under the rule of certain personality types. 'Horror tourism' is thus in danger of linking a place to an idea poorly understood, ignoring the massively integrated network of events that unfolded in time under particular resource pressures and where people were individually out of control of their own destinies. Chaos and collapse create opportunities for psychopaths but also traps for people who would do nothing normally but be kind to dogs, care for their families and maintain useful jobs.

Sereny's interview with Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka for a year in which perhaps 900,000 were processed to their deaths, is instructive in this light and is worth digging out. Although her conclusions are not always my conclusions, she provides the invaluable raw material for an understanding of the Holocaust that goes beyond just teaching kids to accept simplified received narratives to try to stem any serious critical thought about the human condition. Our terror of frightening kids and tourists with the real truths about what we can be as a species is at the root of narratives of terror that are just a few steps up in sophistication from what we might once have read in 'Weird Tales'.

Stangl's story is one of an ordinary Austrian copper, a family man. who is trapped by circumstances, fear and history into a role in which he could only survive by switching off and seeing those he was responsible for, ultimately, as processed 'cattle'. His profile, self-serving though his account is and clearly hiding important aspects of his case and with all the confabulation involved in human memory, nevertheless is that of any over-promoted middle manager in the hands of a corporate structure far bigger than he is.

To ask for personal morality from such a man is to ask the same of a man who is middle manager of a corporation selling tobacco long after it was proved to be cancerous or an executive in the sugar industry or the arms industry ... I doubt if any one in the liberal middle classes has entirely clean hands when it comes to morality. It is just that frightened family men in most such situations are rarely if ever likely to be faced with responsibility for processing 900,000 humans into gas chambers because their corporation demands it. Eighteenth century slavery businesses represent a neat half-way house between the corporation operating under the modern rule of law and the Nazi gangster state. Stangl is marked, above all, by his weakness in the face of power and it is power that is the thing that we need to understand when trying to understand extremity. Who actually holds it, by what means and what is its chain of command.

The sheer scale of the Nazi horror does not take away the need to understand this functional aspect of the case, common to all necessary minor scale administrative and managerial amorality ... entrapment through fear, the natural preference given to survival and that of the family (Stangl may have found himself pricing in his mind's eye his ignorant wife and two children's comfort and survival at 300,000 dead Jews each), the easy way out and being the average human being pre-chosen for a series of tasks that did not derive from much any pre-set ideology (Stangl was not even a Nazi at the Anschluss) but just as baby steps into depravity from circumstance.

Many a re-assigned corporate manager would recognise Stangl's fear of being assigned back to a bully of a manager with the power not merely to fire him but in this case potentially kill him. Fortunately, most modern managers can, at the end of the day, resign and risk the anxiety of a wife or partner without that implied threat hanging over them. But how many upper middle managers even today hang on, doing things they would know to be 'not good' if they thought about it because a) they do not think about it and b) they cannot bear the consequences on their families of resigning. In practice no person who did resign from extreme duties under the Nazis was ever executed but we should not underestimate the ambiguous relationship of duty and fear under such a regime - in a highly attenuated form, all functioning systems rely on some form of duty and fear to keep going. And children of the July 1944 plotters actually did end up in Dachau.

That more complex story is never told in 'historical horror porn' - we must just be outraged and engage in performative acts of sorrow and despair about victims that are to be forgotten except as a given social narrative to be considered when we get home, if we ever think about it very much at all afterwards. I disagree with Arendt on the 'banality of evil' since her thesis concentrated on still quite low level figures in the game such as Eichmann rather than on the higher level of gangster - on the upper middle manager rather than the director class. It is a general rule that upper middle managers and below tend to get it in the neck and the directors tend to survive in most probable difficult situations. Below the level of the Nuremburg trials, very few if any Nazi administrators faced trial for serious crimes in a way that threatened their long term position (assuming they are not the ones who had committed suicide in the immediate aftermath of defeat). Once denazified, some pretty vile amoral pen pushers found themselves back in positions of authority and untouchable.

It turns out that the German Government was bound by its final Peace Treaty with the Western occupiers not to revise sentences granted under an inadequate denazification process even when it clearly wanted to do so in order to ensure justice. Trials tended to be of mix of mere functionaries and minor ideologues of which Stangl was probably the highest ranking (and he was really no more than a factory or plant manager for a year or so). These were banal people but those who led the system from the top were far from banal - they were ideologically highly creative. They knew how to use their power to exploit the weakness, vulnerability, dependence, emotions and, above all, fear, anxiety and instinct for survival of those they needed to deliver the booty, the profit, or the mission, the ideology, that really drove them.

Stangl, at one point, said that he only got pleasure in his job when he was being a policeman again - hunting down corruption by officials. There is some credibility in that part of his account. It is the cry of over-promoted operatives everywhere. He had arrived at Treblinka to find a 'Dante's hell' of rotting bodies and piles of goods that were destined to enrich a sort of organised crime operation within part of officialdom. His view of the regime was of a disorderly criminal enterprise thieving from the Jews, prepared to murder them to get the loot and using 'ideas' to cover up their methodology. Other accounts give credibility to this model. This was, of course, not always the view of Himmler at HQ and the top officials some of whom were arguably incorruptibly murderous (like Robespierre or Dzerzhinsky) but it was how the system 'functioned' on the ground. Stangl was proud of having cleaned up the corruption (how like many modern responsible managers!) and of creating a humane process of death rather than a shoddy amateur abattoir.

It is this 'functioning' of horror that we should concentrate on and not the 'ideas' beloved of intellectuals. Ideas have no hold over anyone until power is acquired and human weakness can be exploited. It is the human condition that needs understanding - the darkness in most of us under certain conditions - whereas 'historical horror porn' generally evades this by telling a tale of perpetrators and victims as monsters and martyrs. The true horror is, first, that, given certain conditions, the martyr may become the monster and the monster the martyr and, second, that there is no justice to be had after the crime is committed because the crime's enormity eats its perpetrators long before they can come to any form of 'justice'. Justice is largely a performative act that cannot aid the dead. Perhaps best just interview the perpetrators for the facts of the story and then take them out and shoot them like the Russians did ... it would still not be justice but it would be closure. Due process is there to make us feel better about ourselves, to make us feel we can rewrite the story so that it can have some meaning, that civilisation can be restored.

For no fault of the authorities (mostly thanks to that daft treaty clause), most of those who administrated the death camp system from office in Germany never came to trial. It could never be proved that they knowingly killed a German (the 'murder rap') amidst the lack witnesses (murdered) while crimes outside Germany were put down to 'war'. It was always important to prove that a perpetrator was responsible for the death of German Jews. This is, of course, mafia territory - offering us a culture that, in giving priority to the rule of law, is unable to bring mobsters to justice because the right law cannot be framed to do so.

So, you won't get me wandering around the camps of the dead and slave-trading posts feeling the pleasurable grim 'outrage' of the well-heeled middle class visitor. I would rather read the histories of reliable historians ... and ponder how to ensure that it cannot happen again in reality instead of deluding myself that feeling the right emotions about anything, whether genocide or climate change, is going to be enough to change anything in the long run of history. To pay tribute at these sites cannot do anything for the dead and may fail to create the very mind-set required to ensure that there are no more dead in the future. Better perhaps to spend the time looking at how we may be complicit in current crimes - sending armaments hither and thither, selling junk food or telling lies to increase sales - and deciding whether the crime is the lesser evil to our own survival and that of our families and why we have to put up with a system that tolerates such choices between evils in the first place.