The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum

From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality

Stephan Jaeger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110661330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: History

The Second World War is omnipresent in contemporary memory debates. As the war fades from living memory, this study is the first to systematically analyze how Second World War museums allow prototypical visitors to comprehend and experience the past. It analyzes twelve permanent exhibitions in Europe and North America – including the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Museum of the Second World War in Gda?sk, the House of European History in Brussels, the Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester, and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans – in order to show how museums reflect and shape cultural memory, as well as their cognitive, ethical, emotional, and aesthetic potential and effects. This includes a discussion of representations of events such as the Holocaust and air warfare. In relation to narrative, memory, and experience, the study develops the concept of experientiality (on a sliding scale between mimetic and structural forms), which provides a new textual-spatial method for reading exhibitions and understanding the experiences of historical individuals and collectives. It is supplemented by concepts like transnational memory, empathy, and encouraging critical thinking through difficult knowledge.

Chapter 1: The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum

1.1 The Museum between History and Cultural Memory

The core question of this book is how Second World War museums and exhibitions can help prototypical visitors from diverse cultures comprehend or experience the past in the twenty-first century. As the prologue has shown by example of war toys, there are multifaceted ways to involve the visitor in an exhibition, whether it allows for historical understanding or for universal emotional reactions that bring the past closer to the present. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, the museum has become an increasingly significant medium to connect past and present (see e. g. Finney 2017). In other words, it has become a medium of remembrance (see e. g. Makhotina and Schulze-Wessel 2015, 8 – 9; Thiemeyer 2015). The German philosopher Herrmann Lübbe argues that the increasing musealization of the late twentieth century is a reaction to the acceleration of progress in human society (1982, 2000; see also Koselleck 2004 [1979], 258 – 263). That is to say, Lübbe argues that the quicker society changes, the more it creates forms and institutions to save artifacts and structures from the otherwise would-be-forgotten past. Consequently, the loss of familiarity with the well-known can be compensated for by musealization. The museum functions as one of the institutions that allow the present to be connected with the past, which for Lübbe enables the process of progress toward the future to actually occur. Even if one objects to the ‘progressive’ nature of this development,¹ the trend toward temporalization of the past, present, and future seems to have further intensified in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Jan Assmann’s distinction between communicative (social) and cultural memory (1992, 48 – 66) helps us to understand the role of the museum when communicative memory becomes increasingly ritualized, materialized, and institutionalized. Astrid Erll points out that memory occurs as both individual and collective processes: “[W]e have to differentiate between two levels on which culture and memory intersect: the individual and the collective or, more precisely, the level of the cognitive on the one hand, and the levels of the social and the medial on the other” (2010, 5). The collective level “refers to the symbolic order, the media, institutions, and practices by which social groups construct a shared past” (Erll 2010, 5). It is important to note that ‘memory’ functions metaphorically when used in collective concepts such as cultural memory or Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire; societies or groups cannot literally remember. In this way, the museum functions as a composite multisensory medium that assembles other media within the museum space. It can reinforce a ritualized or institutionalized form of memory, or it can challenge visitors to distance themselves from the historical material and narratives it represents. Consequently, the museum can mirror the stored cultural memory of its time, or it can shape the formation of new memory patterns. It can work to enhance the functional and storage aspects of cultural memory (A. Assmann 2016 [2006], 38 – 42). Visitors can either learn about the past, develop their own war memories, or be steered toward preconceived narratives that comprise master narratives and cultural memory politics.

Contemporary museum and heritage studies researchers as well as museum practitioners, have advocated for a social justice approach in museums based on dialogue and debate: “[a] courageously reflective practice […], based upon a radical transparency and trust, and practiced both inside and outside of the museum” (Lynch 2013, 11; see also Kidd 2014). For the representation of a historical theme such as the Second World War, this raises the complex question of how museums represent historical research, how they react to their influential role as carriers of cultural memory (A. Assmann 2007, 154), and whether they find ways to integrate pluralistic perspectives into their exhibition narrative. How have different communities constructed the cultural memory of the Second World War? Following memory trends in Holocaust (and later in Second World War) remembrance,² there has been an increasing convergence of history and memory in Second World War museums since the 1980s (A. Assmann 2016 [2006], 32). Visitors can certainly learn a lot about historical knowledge and facts; however, these museums also affect the visitors’ personal memory and the cultural memory of nations and other groups. Second World War representation in museums has partially followed Holocaust representation in emphasizing individual experiences and memories to express the authenticity of witnessing and the irreducible plurality and diversity of those experiences (A. Assmann 2016 [2006], 33). Here, memory studies enhances history writing within the museum by emphasizing emotion and individual experience, by highlighting the function of history as a form of remembrance, and by adding an ethical orientation (A. Assmann, 2016 [2006], 34).

Actual events are less relevant to memory studies than what people feel and think occurred. Consequently, today, most museums representing the Second World War are hybrids of factual and contextualizing historical research on the one hand, and carriers of perceptions and memories on the other. These museums often conduct research to understand the content of represented events and to argue in an evidentiary mode that certain facts are true and certain historical events happened. Ultimately, they reflect the historical knowledge and the cultural memory of their time. This study analyzes the semiotic, aesthetic, and narrative techniques of Second World War representations in permanent exhibitions. Every museum analyzed here would likely argue that they represent historical facts. Some stress methods of oral history – see e. g. especially the New Orleans WWII Museum – and therefore highlight the convergence of history and memory. At the same time, many museums increasingly exhibit and narrate individual stories and give room to multiple and diverse voices. Whereas some of these voices can develop individualized aesthetics for visitors willing to engage with them, most voices are used as examples for historical groups and arguments. Thus they function less as individual memory than as individual carriers of a collective consciousness, which is part of the museum’s memory construction.

Museums can mimetically simulate the past. They can either simulate historical perspectives of individuals, collectives (most commonly), or historical structures. Understanding and representing concepts and instances of violence, atrocities, death, genocide, trauma, loss, perpetration, victimhood, and guilt, among others, methodologically challenge museums to involve the visitor in the past reality of war as well as its current perception. This relates to the concept of ‘difficult knowledge,’ whereby museums challenge visitors to push beyond the preconceived boundaries of their collective selves (Lehrer et al. 2011; Simon 2004, 2011; Rose 2016; see also Macdonald 2008 for the concept of ‘difficult heritage’). This study explores the ways in which contemporary museums bridge the gap between the present and the past by employing the aura of authentic objects, the medium of text, techniques of reenactment, the creation of scenes (...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum
• Chapter 2: The Medium of the Museum
• Chapter 3: Restricted Experientiality
• Chapter 4: Primary Experientiality
• Chapter 5: Secondary Experientiality
• Chapter 6: The Transnational
• Chapter 7: The Holocaust and Perpetration in War Museums
• Chapter 8: Total War, Air War, and Suffering
• Chapter 9: Art in Second World War Museums
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Person Index