Awkward Objects: Expanding the Boundaries of the Holocaust Archive

For the last thirty years, Holocaust Studies has grappled with “the limits of Holocaust representation.”1 Yet despite a range of impactful formal experiments to visualize genocide2 and expand the accepted categories of Holocaust witnessing,3 the realm of Holocaust testimony is still neither impartial nor fully encompassing. While the field has paid substantial attention to some forms of witnessing and celebrated them as valuable sources of knowledge, it has marginalized other forms; discarded them as unreliable, unworthy, incidental, and bizarre; and overlooked potential domains for systematic scholarly scrutiny even when they existed in full public view. Holocaust representations that appeared during the war or were produced in its aftermath—such as folk or “naïve” art, hand-drawn maps, three-dimensional dioramas, sketches accompanying oral testimony, graffiti and wall-markings, as well as vernacular camp verse and laborers’ often coarse chants—exemplify “awkward” documents that scholars have disregarded as oddities and thus relegated outside of mainstream Holocaust discourse. This special issue reconsiders the boundaries of the established Holocaust archive by exploring sources that occupy the blurred edges of acceptability. While the progressive inclusion of a widening array of testimonial forms has characterized the development of Holocaust Studies4—as has the expansion of the witness category,5 most recently extending even beyond human subjects6—researchers have yet to fully exhaust the landscape of potential source materials. Unacknowledged Holocaust curiosa and varia challenge us to further consider what counts as a legitimate historical document or representation. By fostering more complex and fully plural perspectives, such nontraditional documents can also serve as vehicles to critically assess the ethics of how the history of the Holocaust is written. Recent calls to reassess power relations and partialities in Western epistemology and parallel efforts to reclaim marginalized knowledge inspire our approach. By illuminating overlooked voices, genres, and objects, we aim to expand and further democratize the Holocaust archive, pushing back against the “epistemic injustice” of systems and institutions that neglect or discredit knowledge created either in ways that do not adhere to established methodologies or by groups disregarded as knowledge producers.7 We also attempt to move beyond the “comfortable horrible” of the twenty-first century's institutionalized, and at times commodified, global Holocaust memory.8 This memory is often built on modernism's elitist truisms and sacralized community taboos, which shape the appropriate approaches to, and boundaries of, the apprehension of inhumanity. While not easily translated, the term “awkward” has been emerging as an analytical category in cultural studies for at least a decade. Precursors that inform our engagement with the social function of awkwardness include discussions from multiple disciplines. In Awkward: A Detour,9 literary and cultural theorist Mary Cappello emphasizes the physical dimension when confronting the awkward, where bodily tension and spasms inform encounters with things to which one does not know how to respond. Cappello delves into the term's etymology, determining that awkward comes from the Old Norse stem ofugr- (later awk-), connoting something that has gone wrong and which is against the social order. The term's second half, -ward, derives from the Proto-Indo-European root -wer, meaning something that moves in a certain direction or bends. “Awkward” thus connotes confusion, disorientation, inconvenience, or being caught between different directions.10 Religious scholar and philosopher Adam Kotsko approaches awkwardness rather as a communal phenomenon.11 “[A]wkwardness moves through the social network, it spreads,” he notes. The experience of awkwardness thus reveals the existence of shared, internalized, naturalized rules, but concurrently exposes their instability and variability, as “people are drawn to awkwardness, that strange social bond that takes place outside the realm of normal social constraint.”12 Nearing our own field of inquiry, in Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond, Sharon Macdonald uses awkward as a synonym for her book's fundamental category. Difficult heritage is “a past that is recognized as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity.”13 Macdonald highlights the consequences of surrendering to the difficult, awkward, or contentious. She argues that controlled curation of unsettling pasts by dominant cultural actors could be a pragmatic choice to avoid reopening wounds or hindering reconciliation in a given society. Building on her work, researchers associated with the Center for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at Humboldt University in Berlin—a center Macdonald founded and directed—have asked what might count as awkward cultural objects, and what forms of intellectual inquiry could result from the challenges these objects pose. As affiliates of CARMAH, our work grows from these discussions. In 2016, in the project “Awkward Objects of Genocide,”14 Erica Lehrer, Roma Sendyka, Magdalena Zych, and Wojciech Wilczyk examined Polish folk art representations that bore witness to the events of the Second World War, but had been forgotten, misclassified, or ignored by Holocaust scholars and museum curators because of the vernacular character of their artistic expression.15 This project—and its subsequent 2023 publication, to which Magdalena Waligórska also contributed a chapter—defined awkwardness as a relationship between the object and its diverse, often conflicting communities of viewers. From 2018 to 2019, the project's exhibition Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust underscored these objects’ multidirectional connotations.16 Through the genre's simultaneous sympathy for and exclusion or denigration of the Holocaust's Jewish victims (e.g., by Polonizing or Catholicizing their framings, or by subtly including antisemitic tropes), it expressed its fundamental awkwardness. The curators refrained from defining awkwardness for visitors. They proposed instead several other notions arising from their research, expressed by individuals in relation to the objects on display: “Uncomfortable. Uncanny. Unfitting. Undesirable. Unshowable.”17 Yet the exhibition showed that awkward objects are both ambiguous and transgressive, and that adopting a different perspective elicits a slightly (or sometimes radically) different meaning. Consequently, the curators attempted to present diverse vantage points to illustrate the relational, social quality of awkwardness: an object is not awkward for everyone in the same way or for the same reason, because historical events have generated social and emotional conflicts that present-day narratives and memory cultures have not adequately integrated. In his 2018 work “Awkward Art and Difficult Heritage: Nazi Collectors and Postcolonial Archives,”18 CARMAH-based anthropologist Jonas Tinius analyzed the high-profile archive made public in 2012 of some fifteen hundred paintings discovered in the apartments of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of the official marshal of the Third Reich, Hildebrand Gurlitt. Tinius viewed this magnificent collection of modernist and “degenerate” art as a prime example of awkwardness. Like a prism, it confronted the public with uncomfortable questions and problems. Unlike improper or unacceptable objects, such as “trophies” that perpetrators collected from victims, which may be rejected as fundamentally unethical, awkward objects force ambivalent affective reactions, which (ideally) mobilize critical reflection. With the Gurlitt collection, this reflection would mean grappling not only with Germany's involvement in cultural genocide, but also with the postwar involvement of West German galleries and museums in reclaiming artworks looted from Jews. For Tinius, the category of awkward comprises “practices, institutions, objects, and discourses whose status as art is contested, and which … embodies relations considered problematic.”19 As Lehrer and Sendyka argue in “Arts of Witness or Awkward Objects? Vernacular Art as a Source Base for ‘Bystander’ Holocaust Memory in Poland,” awkward objects cause anxiety because they violate preconceived expectations.20 They thus also provide a useful call to question assumptions and mobilize self-critical cognitive work. In “Material Kin: ‘Communities of Implication’ in Post-Colonial, Post-Holocaust Polish Ethnographic Collections,” Lehrer emphasizes that awkwardness may be particularly characteristic of objects entangled with violent pasts. Such objects have often changed ownership in violent ways, their biographies marked by their passing through many hands. They thus “bear traces of forgotten or suppressed social histories that both index, and link across communities in ways that raise questions about both ‘source’ and ‘heritage.’”21 These characteristics make these objects unsettling, constantly poised to disturb the stories and clean categories employed by their new owners, whether individuals or museums. Encounters with awkwardness challenge established identities and signal the possibility of remodeling systems of social meaning, values, and rules. Awkwardness takes place in public, yet it also concerns the personal and intimate. It is therefore associated with processes that are unpleasant and painful for their discomfited subjects. Researchers point to the need for safe spaces to confront the awkward, and the exhibition gallery has proved useful: as a laboratory for problematizing the discomforts of awkwardness (Tinus);22 as a place for less-threatening encounters with awkward objects (Lehrer);23 as a space to view them from different angles, in relation to various communities, and tied to different pasts (Sendyka, Lehrer, Wilczyk, and Zych).24 Awkward objects stimulate reflection, resistance, and debate beyond what is socially accepted and integrated. As Lehrer stresses, the challenge of a troublesome starting point can lead to reworkings and exploration of new possibilities, leading visitors to move beyond established rules and customs.25 “Awkward” is therefore a category that can serve as an embodied cue. It can suggest the existence of social norms that need to be discussed anew, or social issues that have never been addressed and must be prompted to resurface to enable public discussion. A feeling of awkwardness can thus be understood as an epistemic solicitation to critics. This physical-emotional “trigger” is an impulse to inquiry, a call to confront, deconstruct, and unearth hidden historicities, nonexclusivities, and pre-established assumptions. We have invited scholars who engage with silenced or overlooked categories of Holocaust witnessing, and disregarded, marginal, as-yet-uncategorized documents and testimonial forms to join with us. Together, we reflect on the novel epistemological approaches and methodologies these sources require if they are to reveal their testimonial value and be integrated into mainstream debate. A wide range of disciplinary experts, including anthropologists, art historians, architects, historians, and scholars of literature, culture, museums, and media, have taken up our provocation. They have helped us map a broader spectrum of documentary materials and have highlighted the value of investigating the Holocaust archive's uncharted periphery. This special issue's contributions address objects and material representations of the Holocaust. We have divided the articles into three rough categories: objects that Jewish survivors created in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah, dispersed material traces of the Holocaust preserved in private custody or institutional collections, and objects created by Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders and/or those relating to, depicting, or narrating Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Each class of objects presents a different set of “awkward qualities,” which may overlap yet generate distinct tensions and challenges. Rachel Perry examines memorial albums made by Holocaust survivors in the immediate postwar years, duplicated in limited series, and presenting victims’ traumatic experiences via visual conventions that are difficult to classify, go against expectations, and at times produce jarring aesthetic effects. Aleksandra Szczepan and Eliyana Adler look at hand-drawn maps of former shtetls reproduced in yizkor books, which, just like Perry's vernacular “Holocaust mementos,” were long overlooked as visual Holocaust testimonies. Agata Pietrasik and Tomasz Łysak each analyze more formal genres created by survivors—early Holocaust exhibitions and models of death camps and crematoria, respectively—intended to document the Holocaust, provide evidence of atrocities, and narrate events for the first time. These early genres of visualizing the Holocaust generated a sense of awkwardness in that they evaded established categories and classifications (Perry, Pietrasik); caused affective unease (Szczepan and Adler), challenged existing expectations related to representation and representability of the Holocaust (Perry, Łysak), remained marginal in the Holocaust archive (Perry, Szczepan, and Adler), or opened vantage points that contradicted mainstream Holocaust narratives (Szczepan and Adler). Natalia Romik, Aleksandra Janus, and Luiza Nader's contribution examines the materiality of hiding places and ponders the limits of their testimonial potential. Based on a case study of hand-drawn inscriptions and drawings inside a wardrobe that likely served as a Jewish child's hiding spot, the authors undertake an interdisciplinary effort to decipher these visual clues and identify the individual in hiding, while also reflecting on the ambivalence and impenetrability of such material sources. Tahel Goldsmith, in turn, analyzes similarly “opaque” material traces of the Holocaust, but in the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Pondering a category of objects situated in between the “mass” and the “personal object,” she finds that the private belongings of Holocaust victims exhibited en masse, such as shoes, remain silent and stubbornly inaccessible as forensic evidence. Both the actions of perpetrators and time's passage rendered such material objects left behind by Holocaust victims unintelligible. They are “awkward” inasmuch as they resist interpretation, yet also evade complete erasure. They continue to testify and may serve as subjects of forensic scrutiny. But, in their overwhelming multitude, they yield only fragmentary insights into the past and remain “unknowable.” Paweł Michna looks at propagandistic albums depicting the productivity of the ghetto Łódź, which the Graphics Office of the Jewish Council created as material testimonies of their survival strategies. Examining the obvious manipulation and aesthetization of ghetto life that these materials embodied, he also points to the materiality of their production, which simultaneously reveals the harsh conditions under which they were made. Objects created by Holocaust victims in the context of their coercion and persecution, and serving their oppressors’ ideological agendas, are “awkward” testimonies because they both distort historical experience and constitute fictional Holocaust narratives. At the same time, they offer a glimpse into the day-to-day tactics of Jewish endurance, resourcefulness, and resilience. While objects that originated in or gained their identities due to the Holocaust (such as victims’ possessions or creations), or those generated and curated by Holocaust victims in its aftermath (such as artworks, exhibitions, or mementos), are typically recognized as Holocaust objects par excellence, objects produced by perpetrators and bystanders, as well as objects that changed hands as the result of the Holocaust provide another class of “material witnesses,” whose ontological and epistemological status is particularly complex. By examining the curatorial strategies of displaying objects related to National Socialism, Sharon Macdonald shows how such exhibits not only cause discomfort and irritation in viewers, but also remain “unruly” and can potentially be “experienced in unintended ways.” In her discussion of Polish folk art depicting the Holocaust, Roma Sendyka suggests that such vernacular objects challenge the acceptable norms of Holocaust representation and decorum, but remain crucial, if overlooked, testimonies of bystanders of the Shoah. Tracing Jewish personal belongings transferred into non-Jewish hands in the context of hiding and aiding Jews, Erica Lehrer draws on archeologist Dan Hicks’s call—developed in relation to colonial loot in European collections—to document the “necrographies” of such dispersed and mythologized objects.26 Magdalena Waligórska, in turn, looks at private collections of Holocaust objects in Belarus, Poland, and Germany and reflects on the social roles they play in these postwar communities as they come to terms with their own implication in the Holocaust. The awkwardness of objects related to the Holocaust, but produced, owned, or curated by non-Jews, is constituted by such objects’ potential to bring to light anxieties about a social group's past (Macdonald, Lehrer), their capacity to “work against the norms” of Holocaust representation (Sendyka), but also their changing valences and the aura they may generate, or the fascination with violence or Nazi aesthetics that they may enable (Macdonald). Our goal in this special issue is to illustrate both the existence and the evidentiary value of what has been relegated “beyond the pale” of Holocaust knowledge production. Created not only to function as evidence, the materials we draw attention to testify to unspoken forms of knowledge: they may have served to process trauma, to create community, or simply to improve survival chances. Such objects may be perceived as inapposite or lacking in authenticity. They may offend today's sensibilities. Yet precisely in their enduring power to trouble, unsettle, and provoke, we argue for the importance of remaining open to what we may learn from each era's inevitably awkward objects. This article as well as the whole special issue produced as of a project Art and the Memory in the National and Humboldt

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