The Holocaust Template – Memorial Museums in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

In this article, I discuss how memorial museums in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina reference trends set by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. Museums, which have tried to prove their Europe-fitness in the course of EU accession talks by highlighting the Holocaust, and those, which have sidelined the Holocaust to prevent its memorialization from competing with that of communist crimes, both incorporate elements from "western" Holocaust memorial museums, indicating how universalized Holocaust remembrance has become. I argue that these museological trends have also "travelled" to museums dedicated to the post-Yugoslav wars. In the last part I analyze how the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo and the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center reference trends stemming from Holocaust memorial museums.

Keywords

• Memorial museums
• Hungary
• Croatia
• Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Jasenovac
• Srebrenica