The Relative Quiet of KZ Memorialization
Chapter 5 examines the period of quiescence in KZ memory which prevailed from the mid 1960s through the 1970s across all three locations. It outlines how practices of remembrance became more routine, with anniversary years providing pops of spectacle and grandeur. It evaluates the locals’ roles and contributions to these standard rites and rituals, which were often national (or otherwise regional) in significance. Amidst the quiet, it examines occasions when locals at Vught and, for the first time, at Neuengamme evidenced a heightened involvement in commemoration. The chapter reviews growing public sensitivities to camp history by the end of the 1970s through the resurgence of an épuration counter-memory at Natzweiler, and the effects of the Holocaust miniseries, which was shown in all locations. The chapter closes with a reminder of the ongoing pragmatic reuses of the camp sites for alternative purposes at Vught and Neuengamme, and the means these provided to constrain and detract from memories of the Nazi camps.