Visitors to the House of Memory

Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin

Victoria Bishop Kendzia

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785336409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

As one of the most visited museums in Germany's capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum's evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.

Chapter 1

FOCUS OF THE RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

The Research Question

THE ISSUE I WANT TO EXPLORE IS HOW DO YOUNG GERMANY-BASED VISItors approach this memorial museum and the history and culture it displays? From the preface, it should be clear that my own positioning is crucial in situating this study, the material collected, the questions asked, and the conclusions drawn. The issue to address then is not if I am part of the study and therefore co-constitute the material and ideas I have about it, but rather how this constellation—myself—young visitors—museum, and all that surrounds it, informs and forms the study as a whole and in particular situations. This is a challenging endeavor, but one that I hope to adequately explore throughout the work. In some cases, however, it is more clearly visible than in others: such as what I chose to study, how I view the museum, and the questions I found worthy of contemplation. Consequently, I begin here with my own first impressions of the museum and show, from there, the direction I chose to follow. Before deciding on the specifics of the research question, so quite early in the process, I conducted a perception walk in the JMB,¹ and noted my impressions in a field diary.

Choreographed Remembrance: A Perception Walk through the JMB

As I approach the entrance to the museum, it is warm and the sun is shining. The two police officers standing by the curb and the large bold-print security sign, forbidding the stopping of vehicles outside the museum, are hard to miss. Still, the atmosphere outside the museum is relaxed. Several teenagers are sitting on the warm stone of the railing, or lying on the pavement. They are chatting in a language I do not quite catch, but guess to be Scandinavian of some kind. They joke with one another, laugh; a cola is shared among the group.

Once inside and through security, I observe a good many young people congregating in groups, about to begin their visits. The chatter continues, although more hushed (again not in German). The two ushers at the top of the steps to the underground axes take the tickets. Here, the visit is meant to begin. The stairs lead down to the Axis of Continuity [see Figure 3.1]. Here visitors, among them a number of youths, quietly view the artifacts displayed inside glass-fronted cases built into the walls. There is virtually no talking here. A group of high school–aged teenagers is being given a tour in Italian. Their faces betray no specific emotion. They do not smile or laugh. A whispered comment is occasionally exchanged. The mood is somber, respectful. A turn takes us along the Axis of the Holocaust at the end of which is the Holocaust Tower (see Figure 3.2). Display cases, housing possessions of victims, and captions about their fate are here too embedded along the walls—very personal artifacts, very personal stories. An attendant staffs the door to the tower. After a short time, she opens the door to let a small number of people out. Only then are we, myself and a small group of other waiting visitors, among them two young men, I would estimate being aged about sixteen, ushered in. The room is dark, narrow, and high. There is silence. The boys feel the walls and then squeeze themselves, one after the other, into the narrowest corner of the room. They look up and make hushed comments to one another. Are they looking for a specific aesthetic experience, I wonder? Then the door is opened and we exit. The Italian group are about to come in. They are told by the tour guide to be silent in the tower: “Silencio!”

I double back and find myself in the Axis of Exile (see Figure 3.3). Here the floor slants upward. Quietly, teenagers look at the displays. One takes notes. A text directly at the exit to the Garden of Exile: “asks us to think about the disorientation that exile brings.” The Italian-speaking group are sitting outside in the Garden of Exile (Figure 3.4). The tour guide puts questions to the group, and the discussion is animated, but still without smiles, and still hushed. It is indeed somewhat disorienting, this going first uphill, then down, then through the pillars. The feeling of unsteady ground beneath one’s feet makes one tread carefully. It is a very directed experience. Although I am focusing specifically on the younger visitors, I cannot help but notice an older woman, aged perhaps between fifty and sixty, crying at one corner of the garden.

Walking back along the Axis of Continuity, this time toward the stairs that lead to the permanent exhibition, I am again struck by how choreographed the visit is. The visitor is compelled to begin the visit with the aesthetic-memorial sections just described. The rest of the museum as such, then is put into this context of Holocaust remembrance, even though the permanent exhibition space displays a range or artifacts from “Two Millennia of German Jewish History,” as the caption on the wall tells us. This is sure to have consequences for the overall experience. It may not be feasible to separate the effect of the aesthetic-memorial sections from that of the exhibition sections, as the former are preludes to the latter, and as such, set the tone and become the context for the entire visit. I wonder if this memorial-museum distinction though is consciously perceived as such by the other visitors.

The mood in the permanent exhibition space is much more casual. A group of German schoolchildren (estimated ages: between six and eight) play under and around the Wish Tree (Figure 3.5). Some are laughing. Some climb up and down the stairs that entwine the tree. This goes on for several minutes until their teacher scolds them, telling them to come down and be quiet. Some small children watch a film about the diaspora, some seem interested, some bored. A young boy ducks in and out of the exhibition, handling some of the didactic display-drawers, which help to explain the artifacts housed behind glass.

Arrows along the floor direct the visitor through the exhibitions. I would estimate that 90 percent of the people I observed followed this given path. Clearly, the visitor is meant to experience the museum along a particular, defined route.

I come up to a section with many interactive gadgets. The younger viewers are especially interested in these, pushing buttons, picking up earphones, etc. Next, a group of German high school students listens to an instructor/guide within the section dedicated to the rise of National Socialism. They listen intently. The mood though is perceptively more relaxed than in the axes underground. They discuss points in a conversational tone, not so hushed. Their body language is more at ease. Some slouch. Some squat. My walk throughout the rest of the museum goes quickly as there are few visitors to be seen. The busiest parts of the museum, by far, during my walk, were the underground axes. Once outside, I observe more teenagers lounging outside, talking casually among themselves. Whether they are pre- or post-visit, I cannot tell. The police officers, cheerful, are still keeping guard. The sun is still shining.²

Based on these early visits to the museum and observations of visitors, certain questions occurred to me: what is the role of emotional engagement in this remarkable building? How does it work as a memorial? Or as a museum? Or both? The working title of the study was then “The Jewish Museum Berlin: Memorial, Museum, Forum?” I thought it important not only to ask people what they felt and thought, but also crucially, to observe what they did. How do they carry out their visits?

Methodological Approach

These sorts of how questions, and the tools required to address them, convinced me early on to carry out this study within European ethnology. I needed to work with the tools of empirical field research to see and explore the “how.” Further, reflexivity—the examination of one’s own position including how one is positioned by the participants in the study—is given central placement within European ethnology. This is a point that I found crucial from the onset, not as something to be overcome (as all research is necessarily positioned and the readings always partial) but rather as something to be made visible, given space, and explored as data proper.³ This endeavor may well involve a danger of falling into a trap of intellectual narcissism, but I would argue that self-reflexivity is necessary, not for its own sake, but rather as when and how it pertains to the material (or data) and analyses in the study.⁴ In other words, I need to think and write about “me” when it is relevant to the research situation generally and to how the participants perform “themselves,” specifically.

I mentioned that I come out of a different scholarly tradition—that of history and museum studies. Indeed, in 2006 European ethnology was new to me. My main academic influences within museum studies came from the field of education. It was here that I became interested in the work of pragmatists like John Dewey.⁵ Aesthetic experience and the primacy of interactionism then were at the back (or front even) of my mind as I began to approach the topic. This I think is visible in the text recounting my initial preoccupations in the museum. I was also influenced by colleagues of mine in other fields (most notably sociology), and it was here that I first became interested in grounded theory (GT; Glaser and Strauss 1967). When it came time to prepare my own study, it was to this more familiar territory that I also turned.

GT is widely recognized within the social sciences and is based on the idea that themes and categories should emerge from the empirical data,⁶ rather than testing a pre-formed hypothesis.⁷ This also entails a systematic approach to analyzing qualitative data in order to arrive at original theory or a basic social process that can be applied more generally.⁸ Further, and fully applicable to my aims, GT has been aptly described by practitioners as beginning with a research situation, the researcher’s task being to understand what is happening there, and how the players manage their roles (Dick 2005). This situational starting point is appropriate to ethnological research, which considers the museum, in this case, as a field site. Wolfgang Kaschuba reminds us “the theoretical and methodological considerations do not end when one enters the field site; on the contrary, it is here where they often really begin” (2006: 205).⁹ He also notes that the planned methodology rather than being fixed, is taken as “a provisional working plan into the field, which can still be substantially modified there” (Kaschuba 2006: 205).¹⁰ This approach informs both the collection and the analysis of the material. I developed my methodological tools and general research questions, as well as the specific questions I would later include in the questionnaires, only after several visits to the museum, during which I observed visitors over stretches of time.

I carried out research with senior high school students from seven Berlin area schools, three being in the former West and three in the former East, and one in a region of the former West with a majority population of Turkish background. The choice to seek out these specific schools was based on a number of factors. The East-West comparison presented itself to me as a possible source of variation since there were striking differences in how the Jewish topic had been handled by the two Germanys during the Cold War. In very simplified terms: the leadership in East Germany represented World War II as a battle against fascism, in which the anti-Fascists (German Communists and their Soviet allies) were victorious. Here, the Jewishness of victims was suppressed in favor of anti-fascist credentials. The West German government, in contrast, eager to be seen as a good ally of the Western powers, thematized the past in terms of institutionalized expressions of remorse and public attempts at wiedergutmachen. (This term is commonly used in discussions about responsibility for the Nazi past. It translates literally as “to make things good again”).¹¹ With these issues in mind, I wanted to include students from both former East and West Berlin. I should point out though that generationally, they were all born around the time of the fall of the wall, so more precisely they indicated that they were children of former East or West Germans. It was important for me also to include participants, still in the mainstream school system, mostly with non-German backgrounds, also as a source of potential variation. These participants indeed have a stake, as residents of Berlin and in many cases also German citizens,¹² and in all cases present and future museum visitors, in how this topic is thematized.

Access to the Field

While on the one hand, initial access to the museum as a field site was very easy: since the museum is a public institution, I could visit it as often as I liked, observe, speak with staff and visitors informally, and take plenty of notes.¹³ On the other hand, reaching the specific visitors in whom I was most interested posed a challenge. With this in mind, and after discussions with museum visitor research staff at the JMB and my colleagues, I endeavored to contact all the high schools in Berlin, with senior levels, to propose my project to them and ask if any of the history/political science teachers and students might be interested in taking part in this study. This was a long process, which initially was met with little success. I did not receive any replies to my letters after several weeks, and even after the regular follow-up calls, it seemed the principals to whom I first addressed the correspondence were far too busy to deal with this request. Letter post and contacting principals was clearly not the way to go. I should mention that for much of the organizational work I am very much indebted to my husband who was born and raised in West Berlin. In conversations on the problem of gaining access to the schools, he had mentioned his own senior political science teacher, whom he remembered as having been a very effective teacher, engaged in the topic. We decided to try to seek him out personally and ask his advice on how to find the interested teachers and students. It turned out that his former teacher was still teaching and could recommend colleagues of his (teachers and one principal), who would likely be interested in this project. This contact started the ball rolling. In addition, it became clear that one had to contact the teachers first and inform the principals afterward. Four of the seven sessions then were facilitated this way. This included:

1. A Gesamtschule (comprehensive school) in a region of what was once in the West, which could be considered a lower–middle class area (the general range of professions of the parents in this area ranged from clerks, health-care assistants, and other comparable positions).¹⁴

2. A Gymnasium (academic high school/grammar school) in a similar area in former West Berlin.

3. A Gymnasium in an area of the former West in a region that could be considered upper middle class. (In the specific school, the parents of the participants practiced professions such as teachers, historians, sociologists, and medical doctors.)

4. A Gymnasium in a comparable central city region of what had been East Berlin.

Direct letters and visits to heads of history/political science departments resulted in the sessions with the remaining schools:

5. A Gymnasium in a region of the former West with a mostly immigrant population of predominantly Turkish descent. This area also suffers from particularly high unemployment.

6. A Gymnasium in an upper–middle class region in an area that was once in the East.

7. A Gesamtschule in the former East with a lower–middle class population.

The regions of the city in which these schools were located then spanned different socioeconomic categories (from what might be termed lower–middle class to upper–middle class). Each session included a pre-visit questionnaire, participant observations while the students visited the JMB, a post-visit questionnaire, and a focus group interview lasting between forty-five and seventy-five minutes with each student group, with 128 respondents. The groups participating in this study are specific in that they are all high school students who might be likely to continue to be active in historical matters (perhaps as future teachers, museum staff, or “history workers” as such, and certainly as museum visitors) and thereby might influence the future of this field. With this in mind, the individual participants are all senior high school students, grades eleven to thirteen (ages sixteen to twenty), who are completing or plan to complete what is called the Abitur.^15...