Beyond Auschwitz? Europe’s Terrorscapes in the Age of Postmemory

“Orange visits Auschwitz!” reads a Dutch newspaper headline on June 6, 2012, shortly before the start of the Union of European Football Association’s (UEFA) Championship in Poland and Ukraine, referring to the visit of the national football team to the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The young, international sportsmen were deeply moved when entering the gate of Auschwitz I and walking along the ramp of Birkenau. Some players called it an “unbelievable” and “indescribable experience,” an impression confirmed by photographs made by invited press agencies.1 Interestingly, only a month earlier during the commemorations of the Second World War in the Netherlands on May 4–5, a comparable media hype occurred when the well-known deejay and artist Ruud de Wild went to Auschwitz with his crew. The idea had come up shortly after Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, with a “spontaneous” call-out during his weekly radio broadcast. While chatting with one of his sidekicks, De Wild told his listeners that his nine-year-old daughter had asked him what he knew about Anne Frank. Never having visited the Amsterdam Anne Frank House, this made him think: “Shameful, I’ve not even been in a concentration camp. And I’ve done really everything!” Explaining his own ignorance by an unwillingness to share his emotions “with an old mister with 200 medals putting down a floral wreath,” he made a decision.