Museum Transformations

Decolonization and Democratization

Annie E. Coombes, Ruth B. Phillips, Annie E. Coombes, Ruth B. Phillips

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119796596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Amministrazione museale
• Index: Business

MUSEUM TRANSFORMATIONS DECOLONIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION

Edited B y ANNIE E. COOMBES AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS

Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratization addresses contemporary approaches to decolonization, greater democratization, and revisionist narratives in museum exhibition and program development around the world. The text explores how museums of art, history, and ethnography responded to deconstructive critiques from activists and poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists, and provided models for change to other types of museums and heritage sites.

The volume's first set of essays discuss the role of the museum in the narration of difficult histories, and how altering the social attitudes and political structures that enable oppression requires the recognition of past histories of political and racial oppression and colonization in museums. Subsequent essays consider the museum's new roles in social action and discuss experimental projects that work to change power dynamics within institutions and leverage digital technology and new media.

PART I
Difficult Histories

1
THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN AND ITS INFORMATION CENTER
Concepts, Controversies, Reactions

Sibylle Quack

On May 10, 2005, 60 years after the end of World War II, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and its underground information center officially opened in Berlin (see Figure 1.1). Located prominently in the center of Berlin close to the Brandenburg Gate and the Federal Parliament, the memorial has attracted millions of visitors from all over the world. The huge sculpture was designed by architect Peter Eisenman (originally conceptualized in cooperation with sculptor Richard Serra) and consists of a large field of 2711 greyish blue concrete slabs (or stelae) of different heights, some of them reaching up to 4.7 meters. It is accessible from all sides. The slabs are set at different angles and arranged in a grid pattern. They stand on uneven ground and in tight rows so that it is too narrow for two people to walk side by side between them. The deeper one gets inside, the more the noise of the surrounding city is muted. The memorial is rather abstract. It does not carry any information; it does not give a direction; and it leaves one alone with one’s feelings. Only the underground information center, which is located at the southeastern side of the Memorial and is not easily visible from above, provides a focus. Here, an exhibition of the Holocaust informs about its historical context, traces the personal stories of Holocaust victims from all over Europe, and tells the visitor what the memorial is about.

“The unforgettable and the memorable are not the same,” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben pointed out in a chapter about the memorial in 2005. As he beautifully put it, the ensemble of the memorial with its underground center stands for two very heterogenic dimensions of memory: the visitor who walks through the memorial “step by step leaves behind the memory that can be recorded and archived, and enters the unforgettable.” The center underneath, which documents the history of the Holocaust, embodies the “memorable.” It is the “immaterial edge” between both levels which in the writer’s eyes is the essence of the site (Agamben 2005). This chapter will explore the special relationship between the memorial and the center, and include some of the reactions of visitors.

FIGURE 1.1 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, facing the Tiergarten in the evening sun.

© Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2012.

The long process of debating and building the memorial was part of Germany’s attempt to come to terms with the country’s Nazi past. Discussions surrounding it intensified after Germany’s reunification and the reconstruction of Berlin as the capital of the reunited country. They took place against a backdrop of violent racist attacks against foreigners in the 1990s, including arson in several cities (Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Mölln, Solingen, and others). The memorial debate was accompanied by theoretical discussions and controversies that touched on basic questions of German collective identity: What role does remembrance of the Holocaust play in the collective memory of a reunited Germany? How can a country deal with an atrocious past such as Auschwitz? How should the victims be remembered? Who should be included? Should a national memorial be built apart from the original places where the killings took place? Will history and active memory be “disposed” once the memorial has been built? Is the debate itself actually a more lively memorial than a huge stony sculpture can ever be? This chapter will not describe all facets of these debates which have been documented elsewhere (Cullen 1999; Heimrod, Schlusche, and Seferens 1999; Jeismann 1999; Reichel 1999; Young 2000; Niven 2002; Stavingski 2002; Kirsch 2003; Thünemann 2003; Carrier 2005; Leggewie and Meyer 2005). Instead, after providing a brief summary of how the divided country dealt with the Nazi past over the decades, I will focus on the making of the underground center exhibition and its reception. While many studies have focused on the controversies surrounding the memorial and its opening, as well as its impressive artistic design, they have not paid enough attention to the subterranean exhibition. Not much has been published about the complicated process of its making which was also accompanied by high sensitivities and contention, in part carried over from the decade-long debate about the memorial itself. Divergent interests and demands regarding the design and content of the information center often seemed irresolvable. It is a fascinating story about how controversies and fights can be overcome and can end in an astonishing result: a highly regarded and exceptional site of Holocaust remembrance in the heart of Berlin. The information center at the Holocaust Memorial has become one of the most visited exhibitions in the German capital. Only recently have scholars come to recognize its importance and begun to analyze it more seriously (Dekel 2008; 2011; Sion 2008; Baumann 2011; Klein 2012). This chapter deals with important steps and developments during the process of making the exhibition.

After the Holocaust

After the end of World War II, with its tremendous crimes and the atrocities of the Holocaust committed by the Germans, Germany was defeated and divided. In 1949 two states the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west were founded. Both states tried to gain legitimacy from what they considered to be the lessons of the past. Their dealing with the Nazi past was embedded in the politics and ideologies of the Cold War. While East Germany became a communist state and shrugged off responsibility by construing itself as the successor of the resistance against the Nazis, West Germany built up a democratic society with the help of the Allies and tried to reintegrate itself into the Western world. Part of these integration efforts was to accept responsibility for the Nazi crimes, to pay restitution, and to work on the reconciliation with Jews and the state of Israel.

But besides restitution efforts, which were mainly viewed as an issue of governmental and especially foreign policy, West German society was largely unable or unwilling to talk about Nazi crimes and the murder of European Jewry. The first chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s policy was to integrate former Nazis including bureaucrats and judges into the political system and into society rather than punishing them. The building of a democratic state and market economy was the main emphasis of his policy, which was in line with the Cold War policies of the Western Allies (Herf 1997; Frei 2002). If there were feelings of guilt in the population, they were often projected onto the demon Hitler, especially since almost everybody had suffered through war, hunger, and the loss of family members. Then there was the question of how to integrate the millions of ethnic Germans who had been expelled from their former homes in central and eastern Europe. Their fate was similarly seen as a great injustice and provided another reason for Germans to feel that they too were victims.

Becoming aware of the fate of individuals

With the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), and the worldwide publicity it attracted, Germany was forced to face the country’s past as perpetrator again and, during the following years, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt also helped to keep the subject in the public consciousness. The student movement of the 1960s publicly challenged the older generation and raised difficult questions. This eventually changed the political culture of West Germany, where undemocratic and authoritarian attitudes had survived. Many members of the younger generation responded with anger and protest while still remaining under the influence of an older generation that had often successfully hidden their participation in National Socialist policies and crimes. Consequently, their protests were often carried out without much knowledge of historical detail and with little interest in the fate of individuals. A real “processing” of the Nazi past had not yet taken place.

Mainly because of the American TV series Holocaust (1978), which brought to light individual stories of victims, younger people in Germany became aware of the fact that millions of individuals – Jewish families, children, men, and women – had been persecuted and murdered by their parents’ generation. This TV series helped give a face to what had until then been known only vaguely, mostly in terms of anonymous numbers and symbolized by pictures of dead bodies so horrible that one did not know how to deal with them. Beginning in the 1980s, a new generation of Germans formed citizens’ groups and initiatives. Grassroots historians appeared and students researched what had happened to Jews in their own home towns and neighborhoods. Often together with victims and survivor groups, they eventually succeeded in getting more public and governmental support to preserve historical sites, put up plaques on buildings, change street names, and to build memorials. Their efforts were accompanied by growing research on the Holocaust and by the famous controversy among historians, the Historikerstreit (Maier [1988] 1997; Evans 1989). A new generation of teachers and politicians also became more aware of the necessity to develop special curricula for the teaching of the Holocaust. These changes in West Germany were embedded in a larger context of perspectives on the Holocaust, and their presentation in the United States, Israel, and the countries of western Europe (Köhr and Lässig 2007; Lässig and Pohl 2007).

However, the commemoration and teaching of the Holocaust in West Germany differed from state to state because of the federalist structure of the FRG. On unification, West Germany’s “landscape of memory” was characterized by a great heterogeneity, and by the various activities of members of civil society.

Dealing with the past in the former GDR

In the former GDR, the situation was different. There was no long process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past); instead, the government initially pursued radical “de-Nazification” measures. After that, it appeared as though all Nazis had either moved to the West or turned into communists. In reality, the official antifascist ideology made it easy for former Nazis and their descendants to project their feelings of guilt onto West German society. In contrast to the commemoration culture that had developed over decades in West German society, East Germany had a centralized state policy of public commemoration that did not change much until the fall of the regime. In the GDR, Holocaust commemoration was linked to the ideological image of the communist resistance fighters; therefore the sites of former concentration camps like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were regularly used for ceremonies and rituals to strengthen state ideology. But the fate of the murdered Jews was hardly remembered. In addition, the perspective of teaching the Holocaust only within the theoretical framework of class struggle did not leave room for understanding the special nature of the racist Nazi ideology that had targeted the Jews first and foremost. The antifascist and anticapitalist ideology encompassed anti-Semitic stereotypes, and fostered hostile feelings toward the state of Israel. This changed only ...