Memory Made Manifest: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

There is a link which connects the collective memory of the American people with the horror of the Holocaust. When rain soaks the ground at the sites of Auschwitz, Dachau, and other death camps, shards of bone and layers of ash work their way to the surface. This same process is at work in our recollections of the Holocaust. Americans have been unable to suppress the guilt and horror that remembering the Holocaust engenders, and have slowly come to realize that events that occurred fifty years ago and thousands of miles away demand accomodation in our national conciousness. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a facet of offical American memory fitted into the iconography of the Mall in Washington D.C. This project explores the nature of the Holocaust in the American consciousness culminating in the formation and development of the President's Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, along with exploration of the physical and emotional parameters of the museum and the exhibit it houses.

Contents

The President's Commission on the Holocaust 1978-1986

The Architecture of the Holocaust Museum 1987-1993

The Permanent Exhibit

Literary Bibliography

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