Swedish Remembrance of the Holocaust: Museums, Politics, and Materiality

The instigation of a new Holocaust Museum in Stockholm provides a unique opportunity to investigate the role of museum materiality in public memory production, and how the Holocaust is being incorporated within the Swedish history.

The main objective is to generate knowledge about Swedish Holocaust memorialization, by studying museums with collections connected to the Holocaust. Swedish museum collections bearing witness to the Nazi-genocides are under-researched.

In addition to investigating the process of building up the Swedish Holocaust Museum, the study compares how museums with existing collections connected to the Holocaust - Malmö Museer and Kulturen in Lund - frame, exhibit, and use their collections.

The aim is to explore how the Holocaust is being defined and remembered and how the collections gets incorporated into the museum´s communities of values, while also paying attention to how the museums frame the Holocaust history within a national, regional, and local context.

A basic premise is that the history of the Holocaust is of universal importance but take on specific meanings depending on geographic context.

A hypothesis is that the museums, located in Stockholm, Lund and Malmö, need to negotiate issues of identity (national, local, ethnic) differently in working on the Holocaust.

Using theoretical perspectives on materiality, critical heritage analysis, and cultural memory, the project focus on the role of museum materiality in public memory production.