Alan Marcus: Dachau - the concentration camp as tourist attraction

Presented By: Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

In Place of Death, a stunning new 30-minute documentary on the former Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, today one of the chief tourist attractions in the Munich area, will be the subject of this special evening. Director Alan Marcus, Head of the Department of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, will introduce the film with a brief lecture and lead a post-screening question-and-answer period.

An experimental work that avoids archival imagery, commentary, or conventional interviews, the film focuses on the present, showing streams of visitors to Dachau, which draws some 600,000 tourists annually. Many pose in front of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work makes you free") entrance gate. Others like to have their picture taken by the crematorium's ovens. Both the talk and the film examine the way people interact with an iconic place and its inherited and stigmatized meaning, transfiguring past events and leading to a reinterpretation of both history and the present, thus demonstrating how the passage of time repositions our sense of the past.

The films, which have been shown at numerous universities in Europe and North America, are part of Professor Robert Rosenstone's "History on Film" course, but everyone in the Caltech community and members of the public are invited to attend.

Marcus' appearance is sponsored by the Frank Capra fund, donated to Caltech by the late director's family. Capra, winner of six Academy Awards, graduated from Caltech in the class of 1917.

Learn More:
      In Time of Place