In Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, Andy Pearce argues that “during the last quarter of the twentieth century thinking about and thinking with the events now commonly termed ‘the Holocaust’ underwent a profound transformation in Britain” (1). Pearce shows how the Holocaust became a widespread and highly visible cultural and educational presence, analyzes key actors and their respective objectives, and dissects the forms and effects of the unique Holocaust consciousness. As Pearce convincingly argues, some of the foundations for contemporary Holocaust consciousness may have been laid in the late 1970s and 1980s, but real momentum was generated in the mid-1990s, when its popularization began in earnest.
Pearce defines Holocaust consciousness as “thinking with and about” the genocide for the purposes of orientation and making sense of the world (1). On the basis of this definition, he contends that there was no Holocaust consciousness in the early postwar decades. As Pearce explains, the Cold War, the dominance of what Tony Kushner has called the “liberal imagination” struggling to grasp the irrationality of extermination, and the experiential and geographical distance between Britain and the events of the Holocaust proved long-standing hindrances (24–25).
Pearce's argument would suggest that it is all the more remarkable that the persecution and extermination of the Jews under Nazism has attracted ever more attention since the 1970s and has found more identifiable representational forms in non-Jewish society. Pearce posits that a key engine for change was cultural and political institutionalization, which accelerated in the late 1990s and reached its apex with the introduction of the Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. However, despite tracing elongated, complex, and momentous shifts, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain is far from describing a journey of realization. Instead, it reveals a cultural construction with paradoxes and contradictions.
In the first part of the book, Pearce examines how and why educational interest in and activity around the Holocaust grew. In chapter 2, for example, he specifically explores the condition of Holocaust teaching prior to the United Kingdom's introduction of the National Curriculum in 1991. In chapter 3 he turns to events after this seminal event, which, together with the War Crimes Act of the same year, he calls the “dawn of institutionalization” (60). From there, the Holocaust became a focus within the National Curriculum for secondary schools—a fact that Pearce links to broader developments in the sphere of Holocaust education. However, as he pointedly observes, what was going to be taught and learned about it was “shrouded in ambiguity and accompanied by absolutely no guidance” (59).
In the second part of the book, Pearce deals with how these politics and practices manifested themselves elsewhere in British culture and society, especially in memorial efforts of various kinds. Over the course of three chapters, Pearce shows how a spate of memorial, monument, and museum construction from the 1970s embodied some of the key tensions and contradictions of the wider memory culture. For example, in chapter 4 he looks at the cases of the Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial Garden, the first “official” national memorial dedicated to the Holocaust, and the Holocaust Centre, the first memorial center of its kind in the United Kingdom. Reviewing the history of these sites and evaluating their representational practices, Pearce offers rejoinders to the idea that Holocaust consciousness has been an almost exclusively “top-down” process. Chapter 5, by contrast, focuses on the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust exhibition. It discusses the history of Holocaust representation in the museum, reconstructs the road from the initial proposal of 1994 to the opening of the permanent exhibition some six years later, and reflects on its final form. Pearce views the museum's Holocaust exhibition as marking the arrival of Britain as having a major role in international Holocaust memorialization. As the exhibition recorded nearly three million visitors over the next ten years, it also signified a new phase in the history of Holocaust consciousness. Pearce also assesses the exhibition as a fitting lieu de mémoire for British Holocaust consciousness, not least because it wishes to be regarded as a site of education and not of memory without being able to realize this ambition (132).
In chapter 6 Pearce outlines the process by which the Holocaust Memorial Day was launched in 2001 and touches upon its reception. Pearce presents the introduction of the day set aside for commemoration as “the culmination of the institutionalisation of the Holocaust into British cultural memory” and also as “the apex of its politicisation to date” (134). He sees in its establishment the arrival of a “canonical interpretation” (134) through which a rather problematic form of Holocaust consciousness was sanctioned and disseminated. As Pearce explains, many voiced reasonable and valid concerns regarding Holocaust Memorial Day, particularly in relation to the hypocrisies it implied. No less importantly, he argues that the process of establishing Holocaust Memorial Day “rehearsed the failings of modern historical thinking” (159) and thereby contradicted much educational research.
In part three, Pearce looks beyond the dominant development of institutional cultural memory to survey what he calls the British cultural hinterland, offering a more nuanced appreciation of the ways Holocaust consciousness has developed. In this section, Pearce surveys the representation of the Holocaust in significant artistic and literary works, showing how Britain has become a key site of production, discussion, and dialogue for global Holocaust discourse. Chapter 7 covers the period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. Focusing primarily on television and film, Pearce diagnoses a gradual and sustained growth in cultural interest and activity, a process that contributed to the recalibration of political culture as “a ‘historical system of meaning’ in which Holocaust memory was held to carry obligations and restrictions” (184). Chapter 8 covers the years from the early 1990s through to 2001, exploring the increasing number of agents and agencies focused on the Holocaust and the growing tensions which resulted.
Pearce concludes that consciousness about the Holocaust has never been as prevalent nor as divisive as it was at the beginning of the twenty-first century: more than merely differing views over its meaning, significance, and relevance, genuine fault lines emerged, “liable to whip up political storms, cause schismatic divisions, and inspire intensely emotive reactions” (209). In a postscript, Pearce sketches principal developments since 2001, offering observations on ongoing changes. Pearce sheds critical light on the continued politicization of the Holocaust, the removal of historical context, the reduction in human complexity, and the ever-greater presence of kitsch characterizing many newer depictions.
As this multidimensional and nuanced account of Britain's turn to the Holocaust argues, Holocaust consciousness has substantially grown, but the process now requires matching breadth with depth. As Pearce emphatically affirms, instead of helping to develop a ritualized form of historical consciousness, engagement with the Holocaust ought to probe moral dilemmas and make us review and refashion the ways we think about the past, the present, and the future.
