Past Lessons: Holocaust Conservation and Education in Robert Thalheim's And Along Come Tourists

Robert Thalheim's 2007 film And Along Come Tourists (Am Ende kommen Touristen) is a critique of a contemporary Holocaust pedagogy geared to generating emotion rather than to critical engagement. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno's essay “Education after Auschwitz,” this article argues that Thalheim offers an alternative approach to the Holocaust through an innovative aesthetic treatment of the space of Auschwitz as both a historical and a contemporary site. Yet in his zeal to avoid duplicating iconic images of the camp, Thalheim fails to generate a new representational scheme when he not only makes no mention of the Jewish population persecuted at the site but also relies on the highly conventional and objectifying symbol of the suitcase to represent metonymically Auschwitz's victims.