“What will people get out of their visit?”

A “global center for the fight against extremism” is to open on January 27 in the former house of an SS commander, near the extermination camp. Jean-Charles Szurek, researcher specializing in Poland, gives us his feelings.

Eit constitutes the central subject of The Area of ​​InterestJonathan Glazer’s film, which won an Oscar in 2024. This three-story villa and its vast garden backing onto the Auschwitz camp housed for four years a certain Rudolf Höss, SS commander at the head of the concentration camps and extermination of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as his wife Hedwig and their five children. Now owned by the Counter Extremism Project, an American NGO, the Höss house is preparing to reopen its doors, this time to house a “global counter-extremism center” and welcome tourists from all over the world. This will be from January 27, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Was it really necessary to transform the villa of one of the main organizers of the Nazi death machine? We interviewed Jean-Charles Szurek, emeritus research director at the CNRS, specialist in Poland and Jewish-Polish relations.

Does making Rudolf Höss’s house a “global center for combating extremism” seem like a good idea to you?
I have mixed feelings. This initiative is part of the ongoing “fictionalization” enterprise around the genocide of the Jews, and in particular the memorialization, museification, of the site. I’m thinking in particular of Jonathan Glazer’s film The area of ​​interest, which is a work about indifference but shows the Auschwitz camp via a fictionalization enterprise, not too poorly done, of the Höss family. And it was precisely this choice of fiction that made me uncomfortable – the original house was only partially used since the film was also shot in another building. For my part, I share Claude Lanzmann’s position: messages relating to the history of the camp and that of the Shoah must remain documented elements. No need for fiction, no need for fake gas chambers, fake showers, a fake garden. However, I have the impression that this project to transform the house is an extension of the film, in addition to making it a museum object. That said, it must be remembered that this building is located outside the camp, it does not belong to the museum.

On a trop «muséfié» Auschwitz?
Those responsible for the Auschwitz museum, when they designed it in 1947, succeeded in collecting objects that belonged to the deportees, which will captivate any visitor who discovers the mountains of glasses, prostheses, hair – I remember the shock during my first visit, in 1964, when I was a Polish high school student. There is also the space itself, the simple fact of going from Auschwitz 1 to Auschwitz 2 is very strong… Do we really need to “recreate” something more?

But I am not dogmatic, the museum has developed significantly, visitors come in droves, and this new project is part of the implementation of this “museumification” of the site, which has gone through different stages. For decades, some of the museum’s buildings were, for example, residential houses. The former director, as well as employees and researchers, lived there. The museum had a functional use – in communist Poland, there was a serious housing crisis – as well as being an exhibition space.

Rarely has a museum been so exploited throughout its history. Where are we today?
It is a complex museum because it bears witness to the various layers of post-war Polish history. And this is precisely what makes it more interesting than other memorial museums, such as Belzec for example, in the south-east of Poland, which is an ultra-modern multimedia museum. Auschwitz, with its museological layers, tells the complexity of the eras during which they were built. First there was the Stalinist, anti-fascist layer, who made it a Polish and communist memorial. Then, as the regime lost legitimacy, the presence of the Church was strengthened there, and the memorial took on a Polish and Catholic dominance. When I returned there in 1989, at the end of the communist regime, to investigate the museological system of the camp-museum [Jean-Charles Szurek, La Pologne, les Juifs et le communisme, éd. Michel Houdiard, 2012]Polish memory prevailed, at the expense of the fate of the Jewish deportees, which was obscured – that is to say, it was buried under the memory of Polish martyrdom.

Then things changed, slowly but surely. Part of the original display has been preserved, new exhibitions have been created. The Catholic presence is always very sensitive, but Jewish memory is totally respected, the deportation of the Jews from Hungary is well shown, the messages are clear. Today, the museum welcomes 2 million people, making it the most visited place in Poland. You are offered headphones when you enter, it has become something else, and the project around Rudolf Höss’s house is part of this evolution, which can sometimes give the impression of walking through an amusement park.

Do you deplore it?
I don’t know, mass tourism is a reality. What will people get from their visit, for example, to this house of Rudolf Höss, which will house period objects, perhaps the chairs of the commander of Auschwitz? It is the job of sociologists to measure, to study, the effects of the discovery of a martyrological museum, in particular that of Auschwitz. Of course, seeing tourists being photographed in front of the Birkenau ramp then going to one of the fake Jewish restaurants in the Kazimierz district of Krakow provokes a feeling of unease, but that does not mean that these same people do not will remember nothing other than a selfie, or that they will not come back upset.