2024-05-07T05:36:28-04:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/113367275/proposal-for-the-future-of-auschwitz-birkenau Amelia Taylor-Hochberg 2014-11-11T14:51:00-05:00 >2018-01-30T06:16:04-05:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/6u/6ujttfmy8dhzzr9b.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><p>When a well-intentioned Alabama teenager tweeted a smiling <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/07/22/the-other-side-of-the-infamous-auschwitz-selfie/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">selfie taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau</a>, she attracted a deluge of hatred and outrage from across the internet. Lambasted as disrespectful, insensitive and inappropriate, the selfie was later explained as a means of memorializing her visit to the camp for her father, who had passed away exactly a year prior to her visit. Her gesture was <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/should-auschwitz-be-a-site-for-selfies" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">by no mean the first or last of its kind</a>, and represents an inevitable schism in memorial politics &ndash; as traumas recede from lived-past into historical contexts, how should cultural inheritance be balanced against personal experience? And how can this balance be articulated in the memorial space?</p><p>Currently, Auschwitz-Birkenau is memorialized in a variety of ways, but the structures themselves are not being actively preserved. In 1947, the Polish government established a memorial to all victims, and opened an exhibition of prisoner paraphernalia at Birkenau in 1955. Auschwitz I, the original death ca...</p>