Grief Tourism in a Theme Park World

It's been interesting to read the comments on my story on the San Francisco Chronicle's web site. Several people have scolded me for being cynical and said that I must be really ignorant of history if I thought the Anne Frank House was "a tourist trap."

So let me be clear: I'm a cynic, not a moron. My initial cynicism, before I entered the house, was not due to ignorance of history but to knowledge of tourism--and the ways in which camera-toting hordes can make even the most somber site feel like Disneyland.  Serious subject matter does not always make for serious visitors, and even if everyone is properly sober and thoughtful, the sheer size of the crowds does rather alter the mood.

In a great essay a couple of years ago on World Hum, Frank Bures noted that "dark tourism"--also known as "grief tourism"--is gaining popularity precisely because it is often feels so different from the cheerier, landmark-ier travel experiences to which we're accustomed:

... Dark Tourism also raises questions about Planet Theme Park and packaged, bundled, marketed and scripted entertainment experiences. I can’t help but think that the allure of the dark side is in part a backlash to the aggressive theming and constructing of the travel experience, which unfolds as others have determined it to unfold, where we feel things we’ve been told we’ll feel, and where our travels are not, on some fundamental level, our own. Because sometimes we want more than that. We travel exactly because we want to see and feel things for ourselves. We want to write the script to our own story, not just read someone else’s.

My fear with the Anne Frank House, though, was that it would be yet another stop on Planet Theme Park, or at least that my fellow travelers would view it as such--a place to visit not out of any sense of moral or historic obligation, not because of a duty to remember the past (and even to attempt the impossible task of beginning to make some sense of it), but because they saw it listed in a magazine article once, or in one of those books with titles like 1,000 Things You Absolutely Positively Must Do Before You Die, Unless You're a Total Loser.

I know that this is something that such sites grapple with, actually: How do we provide enough amenities and interesting interpretive exhibits to tell the story and keep people coming ... without opening ourselves up to the accusation of cheapening the historic importance, commodifying tragedy?

Journalist/blogger Darren Garnick e-mailed me a link to his story about visiting Auschwitz, which addresses this very subject. It's a fascinating, thoughtful piece:

As custodian of the camps, the Polish government is often in a no-win situation. If it promotes the camps too much, it will be accused of exploitation. If it stays too low-key, it could be accused of ignoring the Holocaust. According to Young, the most positive change was when the post-Communist government stopped renting out the camps as sets for movies and TV programs.

In 1989, the American producers of “Triumph of the Spirit” (a movie about a Greek-Jewish boxer forced to fight fellow inmates for Nazi entertainment) left papier-mache gas chambers propped up at Birkenau directly over the dynamited ruins left by the Germans. Says Young: “The last thing I’d want is to see a Holocaust denier show up and see a fake gas chamber.”

Finding that middle road is a pretty impossible task, though. I think a certain amount of effort has to be put into the presentation of a site--particularly one as large and horrifying as a concentration camp--for the simple reason that it's so difficult for us tourists to wrap our minds around the awful things that happened there. We need some guidance, some background information, to help us make sense of it all.  We need to know both the broad context and the specific stories for history to come alive.  We need some amount of exhibits or audio guides or other elements beyond the historic artifacts and structures (etc.) themselves. But adding those elements can sometimes overwhelm the authentic, elemental nature of the place. It becomes a museum, not a real place where real--and awful--things happened.

And that, in the end, is what's so effective about the Anne Frank House. Most of us already know the story, the context. The museum section on the lower levels of the house provides further background about both the historical moment and the Frank family in particular. But when you enter the hiding space, there are no whiz-bang distractions. It's starkly real. And the reality of it hits you like a tidal wave.

One last note: Lee and I also visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which Lee recently wrote about on his blog (my emphasis below):

Of all the depressing things in that camp, one of the few I could comprehend was this, a semi-circular track made of different surfaces ... which the Nazis made prisoners walk on all day to test shoe materials. I can’t really imagine a concentration camp, but I can imagine walking all day over a shitty track. The Nazis were assholes.

The Anne Frank House and the jaded backpacker

The Not-So-Grand Tour wasn't all getting lost and overdosing on tourist kitsch.

Case in point: our visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam (which I blogged about previously). You can read all about it in my new essay in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

During my first two days in Amsterdam, I walked past the Anne Frank House a half dozen times without going in.

Each time, there was a line down the block and a handful of tourists posing in front of the house with wide grins, casually leaning on the doorway as if it were Cinderella's Castle at Disneyland. My guidebook called the experience of visiting the house "searing, heartbreaking, infuriating beyond belief," but I was beginning to have my doubts. No matter how serious the subject matter, it seemed to be just another crowded, tacky tourist trap.

Still, I felt obligated to visit. So on the third day, I finally joined the line, along with my friend Lee. We braced ourselves for appallingly cheesy displays and loud, distasteful comments from our fellow visitors.

Read more

I still believe that tourists are really good at heart

[UPDATE: A slightly tweaked version of this essay appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in February 2010. Click here to read that version.]

Frommer gives the Anne Frank House its own section, under the heading "The Unforgettable." He calls the effect of visiting "searing, heartbreaking, infuriating beyond belief"; he then adds, "Let none of us ever pass through Amsterdam without making a pilgrimage to the Anne Frank House."

But I’d seen the line—out the door, down the block. And I’d seen the tourists posing in front of the house with wide grins, casually leaning on the doorway like it was Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland. No matter how serious the subject matter, the experience was bound to be rich with irony and cheesiness.

Lee and I joined the line just behind four British women in their early twenties. We watched them dig hungrily into their bag of potato chips and listened to their stories of drunkenness at various moments in their lives and, the preceding day, of getting stoned at one of the coffee shops here. It was, frankly, the precise type of vapid conversation you’d stereotypically expect of tourists of that age. One woman was particularly quick with the tales of debauchery. She had bleach-blonde hair, pulled into a ponytail with a small pink ribbon, and wore huge sunglasses, an astonishing amount of makeup, flip-flops and a tight black outfit that left little to the imagination. She was, in short, a tourist in all the stereotypical and pejorative meanings of the term.

So amusingly inane was the conversation that midway through our half-hour in line, I discreetly switched on my voice recorder. The topic switched to bad sushi, and the prevalence thereof in London and Amsterdam, then back to drunkenness. Lee and I exchanged looks of amusement and confusion.

"I bet there’ll be some precious comments inside the museum, too," Lee said.

I grinned. This was gonna be epic comedy.

Well . . . it wasn’t. Sure, the crowds were thick, and people said some silly things, like the woman cooing with delight at the bathroom in the hiding space—"Ooh, what a lovely toilet!" Yet even so, the house was so haunting, its story so jarring—even though I’d already heard it, knew it backwards and forwards—that all the snark drained from my body within a few minutes.

It was, as Frommer says, heartbreaking, infuriating beyond belief, even in spite of the crowds. There are quotes from Anne’s diaries on many of the walls in the lower part of the house, and they are of course lyrical and melancholy in equal measure. But once you climb the steep staircase beyond the famous bookshelf, you enter a place that just should not exist, that should not have to exist—and whose very existence tugs at your soul and makes you despair in some elemental way.

There were two things that struck me most. First was the section of wall, now covered in glass, on which the Frank family measured the growth of Anne and her sister, Margot. It’s such a mundane thing, which is what makes it so immediately identifiable—somehow, this detail can’t help but make you think of your own family, your own growth, your own youth. More disturbing, though, is your realization that they weren’t just in here for a few hours or a few weeks—there was enough time for the kids to grow, for the passing and loss of their youth to be documented inch by inch.

And then there was a line from Anne’s diary, dated December 24, 1943 and printed on the wall in the secret apartment: "I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free."

To read that quote in the midst of my own six-week, trans-continental journey—one that is, essentially, an expression of freedom and youth—is a jarring reminder that life is not always like this for everyone, not an endless stream of new discoveries and delights. For us tourists, the Anne Frank House is a destination to be checked off and posed in front of before we head on to the Heineken Experience or the Van Gogh Museum—it’s a place of fleeting interest in our journeys. We rarely pause to appreciate the fact that to see all these places is a luxury, that travel is a freedom not available to everyone. For Anne—and, more to the point, for way too many other nameless, forgotten individuals, then and now—travel wasn’t an option, not even a journey across the street. Home was prison.

That’s why it’s not the bookshelf that is most haunting, or Anne’s diary entries about having to be quiet and not open the curtains, "not even an inch"—it’s the mundane details, the ones so symbolic of our everyday existence. These are what make you realize that the Frank family passed their days and lived their lives—every aspect, every moment—in this space, in constant fear but also constantly trying to transcend that fear and create something akin to the humdrum happiness of normalcy. The concentration camps are not something that tourists can begin to fathom, so we really don’t even try. But this hiding space—this living space—is something we can relate to, which makes it, in a peculiar way, more real, more searing, more heartbreaking.

So while the house might start off as just another place to visit and check off, it ends up genuinely moving, chilling, enraging. History has come alive in the most unsettling way.

I know that some people leave somehow uplifted and inspired by Anne’s hopeful words, buoyed by their lyricism and introspection in the face of great evil. That’s not how I felt. I left disconcerted and upset by the ending of the story—I’m sorry, but no matter how positive Anne’s sentiments, and how admirable her ability to see the good in humanity, the fact is, she was a prisoner in her own house for years, and then she was captured and killed. Life’s pretty fucked-up: that’s my take-away message. It’s impossible to leave the house without being at least a bit pissed off and teary-eyed.

Near the end of the tour, I saw the British woman who had been in line in front of us, the Stereotypical Tourist with the flip-flops and tales of getting plastered all over the world. Now, her sunglasses were off and her makeup was streaked.

I followed her to the exit and we stepped out into the sunlight, young and free.