Unravelling Emotions in the Dark Tourism Experience: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Since 1996 the subject of dark tourism was gaining an increasing interest among academics and practitioners. That does not mean that sites of or connected with death did not exist in the literature before, but labelling it somehow allowed the wider public to understand and conform to that term.
Death was fascinating humans for centuries, and if the death occurred rapidly, or as a result of disaster, macabre, muss-murder, or in the other significant way then people for various purposes wanted to “see it for themselves” and participate in safe presence around death. What they took with them as an experience became an interest of the proposed research.
This thesis is aimed to explain visitors’ emotions within dark tourism experiences with the focus on two Holocaust locations. Extermination camps are treated by many authors as pinnacles of dark tourism; they demonstrate the biggest genocide that happened within living memories. In many cases they are able to display the authentic tools which enabled annihilation of the prisoners of Nazi regime.
Although brutal in a message they try to portray, the concentration camps are now museums with as many as 2 million visitors a year. As motives of visiting former concentration camps has been sufficiently covered in the literature, the issue of emotions and overall experience of visitors stays still uninformed. This thesis will attempt to define main emotions declared by visitors of two former extermination camps: Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The element of comparison between both camps is perceived as a valuable contribution to the knowledge of dark tourism emotions and may possess an important managerial implication for executives at both camps.
The research also attempts to display emotions in a wider scope of tourism experience, both concentration camps were able to carry high educational and transformational experience, hence looking at the experience solely through the lenses of emotions could be misleading.
Finally, the findings of this thesis also indicate that both positive and negative emotions are experienced simultaneously during the visit. In addition, both types of emotions were found to have a positive association with the quality of the experience.