Exhibiting Europe in Museums

Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives, and Representations

Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen, Kerstin Poehls

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782382911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Studi museali

Museums of history and contemporary culture face many challenges in the modern age. One is how to react to processes of Europeanization and globalization, which require more cross-border cooperation and different ways of telling stories for visitors. This book investigates how museums exhibit Europe. Based on research in nearly 100 museums across the Continent and interviews with cultural policy makers and museum curators, it studies the growing transnational activities of state institutions, societal organizations, and people in the museum field such as attempts to Europeanize collection policy and collections as well as different strategies for making narratives more transnational like telling stories of European integration as shared history and discussing both inward and outward migration as a common experience and challenge. The book thus provides fascinating insights into a fast-changing museum landscape in Europe with wider implications for cultural policy and museums in other world regions.

Chapter 1

MUSEALISING EUROPE

Compensation, Negotiation and the Conquest of the Future

ODO MARQUARD (2001: 50) HAS NOTED THAT IT WAS ‘SHORTLY AFTER 1750 that the modern concept of progress and the first museums’ were formed. Like Hermann Lübbe (1989), Marquard understands the development of the idea of the museum to be a compensatory history. The turn to the old, that is, to the observation of past times, materials and practices, is a form of compensation for the loss of a lifeworld overwhelmed by industrialisation, economisation and the progressive acceleration of life. According to Lübbe (1989: 25), the museum is, ‘to begin with, a means of salvaging cultural remnants from processes of destruction, a mechanism exposed irreversibly to whatever the present process of reproduction selects out in the process of cultural evolution’. The turn to history in general, and to the museum as its cultural institution in particular, is thus understood as a response to the paradoxes of progress. Hence the institutional history of the modern museum has been embedded within the production of history and historicity since the eighteenth century. As Niklas Luhmann (2000: 131) notes in respect of the museum, ‘one needs institutions of mourning, of the “nevermore”’.

In this way musealisation stands revealed as a social process that reaches beyond the museum as an institution (Zacharias 1990; Baudrillard 1983). This is one reason for the continuing actuality of the museum. What was true for German-speaking countries during the 1970s (Lübbe 1989) is confirmed by present-day research that talks of an ‘astonishing rate of growth’ (Korff 2007a: ix) and of a ‘general museum boom’ (Baur 2010) across Europe (Merritt 2008; Macdonald 2006; Towse 2002). For example, the European Group on Museum Statistics has identified almost 20,000 museums in the twenty-seven European states it covers.1 This quality of preservation and conservation in museums has remained, right up to the present, one driving force behind their social success, as Simon Knell observes (2004: 11, italics in original): ‘Museums were invented to capture and keep against a background of change, not to change’.

Historically speaking, museums played a decisive role in the course of national integration during the nineteenth century because every instance of preservation involves selection. Museums are part of a standard repertoire in the creation of national identity, alongside memorials, monumental architecture and national contributions to world exhibitions. Their narratives are intended to form a collective memory, reinforcing the social and political sinews of nation and state building. As Sharon Macdonald (2003: 3) writes: ‘Museums, already established as sites for the bringing together of significant “cultural objects”, were readily appropriated as “national” expressions of identity, and of the linked idea of having a history’. Ernest Renan (1994 [1882]) referred to the ‘spiritual principle’ of the nation, and Benedict Anderson (2000 [1983]) has argued that it must be understood as an ‘imagined community’. In these terms it becomes decisive for a nation and its history to be materialised and made actual. Museal collections concretely express the idea that nations possess a common history, and that this history is significant and worth exhibiting.

The idea that history is possessed and can be displayed (Kittsteiner 1999) has many implications. According to C.B. Macpherson's analysis of possessive individualism (1964), since the Enlightenment the idea has spread that a free self is primarily a possessing self. A person is thought to be free to the degree that that person is in possession of him- or herself and others, or other things. James Clifford (1994: 259) draws a clear parallel to the act of collection: ‘Macpherson's classical analysis of western “possessive individualism” traces the seventeenth-century emergence of an ideal self as owner: the individual surrounded by accumulated property and goods. The same ideal can hold true for collectivities making and remaking their cultural “selves”’. In the early phases of modern museums, cultural and historical property was laden with national significance and made into a common heritage. Culture and history were condensed into a thing, the museal object (Handler 1988; Pomian 1987; Stewart 1984). This ensured the museum’s preserving and simultaneously canonising function into the twentieth century, as Flora Kaplan (1994: 4) and others (Pearce 1995; von Plessen 1992; Karp and Lavine 1991) have shown: ‘Museums and museum systems are treated as instruments in defining self and nation’. National museums were composed of national collections and at the same time created them, as shown by recent studies of the foundation of European museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Knell et al. 2010; Raffler 2007). The collection and display of these nationally defined objects operated as a catalyst for identity and an apparent civilising superiority (Baur 2010: 26): ‘that which had at one time documented the power and passion for collecting on the part of princes now became evidence for the “inner depths” of the nation’.

Hence the prospect of the alien – alien property, alien people and alien objects – was an important factor in the nationalisation of the museal perspective, as is clear from Anderson’s classic study of the function of cultural objects in the processes of nation-building and colonialisation during the nineteenth century. Using the case of British colonial policy in South-east Asia, Anderson (2000 [1983]: 181f., italics in original) highlighted cultural tactics of European rule that were primarily strategies of categorisation and classification: ‘The old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their ancient prestige (which if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers. … Museumized this way, they were repositioned as regalia for a secular colonial state’.

The concept and process of musealisation can therefore be thought of in two ways. The act of preservation involves a ruling disposition over the object. James Clifford (1994: 265) held that in the course of centuries, this symbolic rule over (alien) culture and history became an expression of Europe’s cultural superiority: ‘The value of exotic objects was their ability to testify to the concrete reality of an earlier stage of human Culture, a common past confirming Europe’s triumphant present’. For example, Berlin’s ethnological collection, created at the end of the nineteenth century, had not a single object from Europe; its director (cited in Laukötter 2005: 200) commented that ‘the “primitive” … was only to be found outside Europe’.

This disposition over alien objects expresses a rationalistic human dominion of culture and history. Right up to the present, this works through the scientisation of museal collecting and its techniques of representation (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). This process of musealisation has been summarised by Lynn Maranda (2009: 257) as follows: ‘Musealization, therefore, is undertaken to serve and satisfy knowledge, and the museum is the repository for the knowledge of objects’. Thus equipped with symbolic dominion, the museum is no stranger to the concrete hegemonic practice of subordination. This Janus-faced stance of musealisation is most clearly apparent in the so-called Jewish Central Museum in Prague, whose collection consisted of private valuables and possessions of the murdered Jews of Eastern Europe (Rupnow 2000). This museum, housed between 1942 and 1945 in a deconsecrated synagogue, performed a task no different from that of most cultural-historical museums: it was intended as a record of a vanished world, that of East European Judaism. In this case, however, the collectors themselves had murdered this world into oblivion. The museum (also) developed through the process of destruction, as in the nineteenth century, when, as Krzysztof Pomian (2007: 18) has put it, it acquired ‘its objects with the help of the army’.

Understood in this way, the museum as a ‘place of modernity’ (Laukötter 2005: 218–27) has, right up to the present, made its way ‘to the centre of … civilized society’ (McClellan 2008: 1). The social success of this bourgeois invention (Fliedl 1996) prompted Jean Baudrillard (1983: 15) to refer in the mid-1980s to the museum as being everywhere now, ‘like a dimension of life itself’. To have a history has become an individual experience, and history itself has become a commodity produced by the culture industry, weaving through the field of public history among theatrical re-enactments of history (Bagnall 2003), a bazaar of contemporary eyewitnesses (de Jong 2012) and popular feedstock for television programmes (Korte and Paletschek 2009; de Groot 2009).

Nonetheless, the modern museum has at the same time performed an important function of democratisation (Carrier 2006; McClellan 1994) and popularisation (Moore 1997; Bennett 1995). The latter has led to increasing public participation in the creation of new museums and promoted new discourses imbued with ‘massive moral claims’ and deeply embedded in ‘a governing structure that secures the political correctness of exhibitions’ (Imhof 2008: 60). In the winter of 2009, for example, the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin and Minister of State Bernd Neumann at the German Chancellery, who was also so-called Representative of the Federal Government for Culture, were accused of censorship when a critical explanatory text relating to European immigration policy was revised shortly before the opening of the exhibition Strangers? Images of ‘Others’ in Germany and France since 1871. Critics (Schulz 2009) drew attention to the way this historical museum was developing a service function, becoming dependent on politics.

Not only is controversy over the relationship between museums and politics rooted in the structural transformation of the public sphere (Habermas 1962), but since the late 1980s it has also assumed a much greater discursive and politicised presence thanks to the cultural turn in museum curation. Peter Vergo’s New Museology (1989) lent this a programmatic basis, and the ‘politics of museum display’ (Karp and Lavine 1991) has marked academic discussion of the museum as an institution ever since (Baur 2010; Nayar 2006; Message 2006; Beier-de Haan 2005; Preziosi and Farago 2004; Bhatnagar 1999; Macdonald 1998). The prime objective of every museum – to collect, conserve, investigate and exhibit objects – lost its innocence at the time of the publication of The New Museology, at the very latest. As Pramod Nayar (2006: 137) wrote: ‘The museum … functions as the space of guardianship and first interpreter. The issue of authority – and of power and the politics of interpretation – is thus never far from the very idea of a museum’.

The field of social power within which museums move has become the dominant interpretive framework, first introduced into writing on the theory and praxis of museums by Tony Bennett (1995), drawing on Michel Foucault’s critique of representation (1974). Conn (2010: 4) has properly emphasised that Foucault wrote little about museums, and that the parallels drawn between museums and domination, culture and politics are in some cases overblown: ‘That there is a relationship between culture and politics is a truism, but much of this scholarship makes the two virtually synonymous. They are not’. Especially in the case of history in museums, representation involves an act of legitimation on the part of political and social elites, and is perceived as such (Wahnich, Lášticová and Findor 2008; Pieper 2006; Krankenhagen 2001). More than ever, the museum today is a central site where imagined communities present themselves. It occupies a neuralgic position in the public negotiation of historical and cultural identity, given the increased awareness of the way museums and exhibitions foster identity politics. Moreover, state institutions play a far greater role in the creation of new museums than they did in the nineteenth century (Hartung 2010; Maddison 2004). The museum today occupies a position it had already begun to assume in the nineteenth century as a ‘central power of the cultural economy’ (Kravagna 2001: 7).

So far we have deliberately talked of ‘the museum’ in the collective singular. This was not a failure to discriminate between the various types, forms and traditions of museum that perform different functions and thereby lend broad diversity to the museum landscape (Baur 2010; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998); rather, the purpose was to highlight the functional parameters of the museum in the history of ideas. The different impact these parameters had on each museum generated a particular path dependency in the form of a memory trace. ‘The museum’ can hence be conceived as a site in which the social order of modernity is constantly renegotiated under changing conditions. ‘The museum’ secures the visibility of this order. It publicly conveys and represents ideas of culture and knowledge; individuality and identity; past, present and future. ‘The museum’ is thus located at a fracture point in the politics and culture of modernity, whose dialectic shapes these institutions’ strengths and weaknesses.

Whether or not museums’ impact is exaggerated nowadays, the foundation and legitimation of museums plainly constitute a political forum for reacting to the present that should also point to the future. The compensating function of the museum does not alone explain its sustained prominence as an institution. Today museums react to new structures of education and leisure. They position themselves as learning and social spaces capable, in principle, of responding to the growing heterogeneity of society. They occupy new areas of public space, and are constrained to keep up with an ever-shrinking attention span by introducing popular special exhibitions, designing striking new buildings, or even simply arranging new hours of operation. The current rhetoric and practice of museums has detached itself from the image of an institution oriented to the past and has instead become a catalyst of cultural transformation.

Here we are interested less in the reasons for this shift than in its consequences. Although the museum boom has had its casualties (Sola 2004), perceptions of the institution as a whole have altered. The museum has transformed itself into a successful social agent, an abstract ‘model of the twenty-first century museum’, which Simon Knell described, not without irony, (2004: 8) as ‘focused, businesslike, friendly and pluralistically-funded, yet preserving its collection and research identity’. Marquard, as already noted, observed that the idea of progress and that of the museum emerged at precisely the same time. Nonetheless, the theory of compensation describes the museum in terms of a search for a lost time and hence as a backward-looking reaction, whereas here we treat the museum as an active arena for the negotiation of current and future social themes. Kurt Imhof (2008: 49, italics in original) sums this up nicely: ‘Museums are as institutions a contemporary instrument for the realisation of the present, but oriented to the conquest of the future’. The idea of a common Europe involves the question of a common conquest of the future, now being posed with increasing political urgency.

Today, every museum or exhibition that deals with Europe, and especially with the post-war integration of Europe, contributes to the renegotiation of Europe by both representing and reproducing the historical and current common properties and frontiers of the Continent and of the EU. Krzysztof Pomian (2009: 10) has emphasised that ‘A historian can say what the identity of Europe is in the descriptive sense of the term, a cluster of stable distinct features. … The real controversy, however, lies elsewhere. It concerns identity not in its descriptive but in its prescriptive sense. The debated question is: given who we are, what of our past and our present is worth preserving?’ Pomian treats European identity as a given, although in fact this identity is continuously negotiated, and Europe as the EU and its institutions, in its current political form, is deficient in symbolic representative power (Imhof 2008; Schmale 2008). It therefore looks as though those few museums that have sought explicitly to orient themselves to the representation of Europe and its history remain unsuccessful.

In the following, three of these projects will be presented: the Musée de l’Europe in Brussels (Musée), the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseilles (MuCEM) and the Bauhaus Europa in Aachen. All three have either sought in the past, or still seek, to employ the formula of Europe for differing approaches to the future. In Brussels, Marseilles and Aachen, this formula proved relatively unpersuasive for various reasons. Examining these failed processes of attempted Europeanisation has potential to contribute meaningfully to the study of Europeanisation as a cultural practice.

The Musée de l'Europe: A Teleological Narrative…

In 2001 at a conference in Turin, Secretary General of the Musée de l’Europe Benoît Rémiche (quoted in Mazé 2008: 119) stated: ‘We want to be entirely clear about our intention: our aim is to create a museum capable of shaping identity’. The plan for the Brussels Musée, which to date has not actually been realized, had long been the most visible project in the musealisation of the history of Europe. To begin with it was only a general association, founded in 1997, that organized four exhibitions in conjunction with the exhibitor Tempora. The first two, in 2001 and 2006, had clear cultural historical intent, being devoted respectively to the Europe of the nineteenth century and the World’s Fairs (La Belle Europe. Les temps des expositions universelles, 1851–1913) and to European religious diversity (Dieu(x), modes d’emploi). The third exhibition (C’est notre histoire!) was held in Brussels in 2007–08, and then in Wroclaw in 2009. The fourth exhibition (America – it’s also our history!) was staged in Brussels in 2010–11. The Musée association was headed by prominent members of the Belgian and EU social and political elites. The founding members included the socialist Karel van Miert, then competition commissioner in the European Commission, and the liberal Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Antoinette Spaak, daughter of one of the so-called founding fathers of today’s EU, Paul-Henri Spaak.

The Musée association planned a museum in and for Brussels as Europe’s informal capital city. Rémiche (2001) gave three reasons for the initiative: the absence of interest in shared democratic debate in Europe, the limitations of a political Europe confined to the EU framework, and the growing importance of tourism for Brussels. From these aims of the museum’s planners, it was clear that they sought to negotiate the political crises of European integration in a cultural domain and, possibly, compensate them. The funding sources for the association and its exhibitions remained both private and public, with both the Belgian state and the Brussels municipality contributing. The European Commission never itself directly supported this plan for a museum, but Tempora nonetheless applied for support to the EU and in this way gained some EU financing (Interview Benoit). In addition, since 2000 the Musée association has been a member of the European Network of Museums (ENM), in which more than twenty national museums exchange information and plans about themes and forms of exhibitions with a European perspective. The planning of the museum and its exhibitions is coordinated by an academic board headed by the Franco-Polish historian and museum academic Krzysztof Pomian.

The Musée association is quite openly pro-European, reflecting the composition of its founding members, its combination of private, national and European funding, the museum network it helped found and the perspective it takes on the history of ideas. The planned museum should become a European ‘place of memory’, as was the case with the exhibition C’est notre histoire! whose opening in Brussels in October 2007 commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome. The exhibition on the history of integration was intended to form the core of the planned museum. Generally, the museum is conceived as presenting the history of Europe as a widespread process of integration, characterised by both ‘periods of unity’ (centuries of shared religious belief, the humanist epoch and the Enlightenment, and political integration after 1945) and ‘periods of schism’ (the Reformation and religious wars, nationalism, totalitarianism and ...