The Neutral Gaze: Women’s concentration camp experiences and Swedish remembrance of the Holocaust

Since Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of le regard des autres in 1943, ‘the gaze’ has taken on many manifestations. The male gaze, the white gaze, the imperial gaze, the postcolonial gaze. All imply a power to objectify, to define an Other, usually from a distance or even, as Donna Haraway described objectivity, from 'nowhere.' Museums have always held the power to define Others while claiming objectivity. Today, although the myth of the neutrality of museums is all but shattered, Haraway’s “god trick” is arguably still embedded as ordinary practice in many museums. We take these concepts as our starting point to analyze how women’s experiences of Nazi concentration camps have been represented over the past thirty years in a Swedish local history museum, Kulturen in Lund. We seek to gain insight into how a supposedly ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ view from nowhere – which is, in fact, always a situated perspective – has defined Holocaust history in Sweden, a nominally neutral country during the Second World War, through the material culture brought to the country by female former prisoners of the Nazis.