“Adapt or Resist?” Narratives of Implication and Perpetration in the Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam

The main goal of this chapter is to investigate how the Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam, using micro stories of ordinary people, thematises Dutch responsibility and implication in the violence committed by the Nazis during the occupation of the country in the Second World War. In particular, using the category of the “implicated subject” as proposed by Michael Rothberg in his seminal work on this topic in 2019, I consider the “meaning-effect” that the museum proposes by narrating not only the lives and the anti-Nazi actions of resistance fighters but also the ones of those who made different choices, directly or indirectly helping the Nazis. In the first part of this contribution, I discuss the “interrogative tone” adopted by the museum, aiming to emphasise the ethical and moral dilemmas (e.g. “Adapt or Resist?”) that preoccupied the Dutch people during the Nazi occupation. In the second section, I deal with how the museum exhibits micro histories and personal lives to represent and discuss a collective event. In the last part of the chapter, I consider the way in which the perpetrators are represented in the museum and what kind of risks are involved in “quoting” the perpetrator when his life is told in the same space of the victim.