Recent Holocaust scholarship has investigated the relationship between Holocaust memory and Holocaust tourism, particularly as it pertains to questions of what constitutes appropriate behavior at memorial sites. Sergei Loznitsa's 2016 documentary, Austerlitz, which focuses on the actions and reactions of masses of visitors who stream through the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, raises provocative questions about the tension between these camps’ commemorative intentions and tourists’ experiences. This essay examines Losznita's film in several overlapping contexts, including: the shift in memorial practice in the last few decades defined largely by an emphasis on subjective sensory experience; the rise of “dark tourism” and its relationship to historical memory; and the continued shift toward understanding not just history but also the present through images, whereby even lived experience appears to require visual mediation for its affirmation.

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's 2016 observational documentary, Austerlitz, chronicles the behavior of crowds of tourists as they wander through German concentration camps—primarily Sachsenhausen and Dachau—on what appears to be a midsummer day. Consisting entirely of a series of black-and-white long takes from fixed camera positions throughout the camp and lacking any narration, captions, or on-screen text, Loznitsa's film focuses not on the history of the camps or the events that took place within them but on the actions and reactions of the masses of visitors who stream through the camps: tourists whose demeanor and dress, whose incessant use of cameras and cell phones to snap pictures of details of the camps and pose for selfies, conveys a manner perhaps more suited to a theme park than to visits to places where the systematic torture, dehumanization, and murder of hundreds of thousands took place. In doing so, the film raises provocative questions about the tension between these camps’ commemorative intention and what the tourists actually experience.

In a brief director's statement, Loznitsa frames the increasing popularity of visiting concentration camps and death camps as a tourist experience as a mystery to be solved. Describing his own experience at Buchenwald while researching an upcoming film on Babi Yar, he explains how he came to make the film: “This is the place where people were exterminated; this is the place of suffering and grief. And now, I am here. A tourist. With all the typical curiosities of a tourist.