Author Description

Argues that "musealization" means removing objects from their living context, most often after the destruction of that context. This is especially clear in the case of the "Central Jewish Museum" in Prague, whose collections all came from liquidated Jewish communities whose members had been sent to the concentration and death camps. The Jews and the SS cooperated in this project, each for their own ends. The Jewish specialists who administered the collections hoped to save at least the memory of Jewish life in Czechoslovakia; the Nazis wanted this too, but as testimony to future generations of the adversary that they had vanquished. They did not want to obliterate that memory, but to manipulate it. Today, this musealization persists: the Jewish quarter of Prague and the Jews now living there have been turned into tourist attractions.