{"id":193,"date":"2016-09-19T14:30:51","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T12:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/?page_id=193"},"modified":"2017-09-26T17:48:52","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T15:48:52","slug":"wp-4","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/work-packages\/wp-4\/","title":{"rendered":"War Museums"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent decades, history museums have emerged as key venues of history education and history entertainment. History museums and heritage sites have multiplied and enjoy record visitor numbers across Europe and the West (Arnold-de Simine 2013). The success is part of the collective turn to memory but it also reflects specific innovations and accomplishments in the museum world (Vergo 1989, Message 2006). The history museum has become the premier site of negotiation about official historical narratives which enjoy the backing of important institutions and are launched for public consumption, education and entertainment. It is therefore not surprising that the institution of the museum represents a central element in the purposeful and self-reflective construction of European identity (Kaiser, Krankenhagen, Poehls 2014). The important subgenre of the war museum is part of this development raising particularly pertinent questions about the ethical limits of the representation of violence for mass consumption (Muchitsch 2014).
\nThere are other pressing reasons to take a close look at official, state-sponsored histories of the European wars of the 20th Century. A number of prominent protagonists of memory studies and heritage management \u2013 Pierre Nora (2011), Henry Rousso (2011), Harald Welzer (2012), and Volkhard Knigge (2010), among others \u2013 are disenchanted with contemporary memory practices (see also Assmann 2013). Having made formidable careers in memory studies, they warn about the negative political effects of pervasive, undemocratic ethics of respect, redress, and reverie. In their opinion, the focus on past suffering is absolutely essential when it comes to caring for survivors. But it threatens to turn into a self-gratifying and self-defeating fantasy when we deploy social resources on a vast scale to provide symbolic restitution to generations of victims long gone. They insist that the duty to remember was the only appropriate battle cry when so few people were willing to remember after WWII. But in an all-pervasive culture of remembrance we have to raise and answer the questions of why we should remember, how we should remember \u2013 and, even more important and more sacrilegious – how we should forget responsibly.
\nThese questions are at the heart of UNREST. There seems to be a real danger that our official institutions of cultural memory \u2013 our schools, universities, museums, memorial sites and public broadcasting institutions \u2013 ply students, visitors and consumers with comfortable, ready-made cosmopolitan narratives imbued with a cult of authenticity, a vague yet insistent duty to remember, and a corresponding, easily maintained positive collective self-image. This trend appears to be exacerbated by the disappearance of the generation of survivors who played such an important role in self-reflective history education since the 1980. In the end, we might have managed to turn even the most harrowing events, including two world wars and the Holocaust, into intellectual and emotional comfort zones. These homogenously structured comfort zones cannot deal with alterity. They repel the sceptics, critics and provocateurs who play a key role in a functioning democracy.
\nThese pointed concerns reflect some of our own questions about the efficacy of cosmopolitan memory and deserve to be put to the test. For that purpose, the scholars collaborating in WP4 launch in-depth analyses of the history, reception, narrative, aesthetics and political-cultural contexts of five World War I and World War II museums, which are representative of the \u2018cosmopolitan\u2019 approach to history, although they may well include elements of what we call the \u2018antagonistic\u2019 or \u2018agonistic\u2019 approach. All selected museums were established after 1990 or have newly remade permanent exhibitions. Being fully aware of the vast infrastructure of European world war memorials and museums, we have decided to focus on the following five institutions:<\/p>\n


\n1. The first analytical focus is the Historial de la Grande Guerre<\/a> in P\u00e9ronne, France. Located near the battlefields of the Somme, the Historial is an integral part of the extensive French memorial landscape and World War I tourism scene. In fact, the museum is often referred to as the unofficial king of World War I museums in France because of its unusual architecture and comprehensive vision. The Historial opened to the public in 1992 and has attracted 80,000 visitors per year on average. It offers visitors a comparative, bottom-up perspective on the experiences of the ordinary soldiers fighting on different sides of the western front and champions an unabashedly pacifist interpretation of the war years.<\/p>\n

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2. The second focus of WP4 is the Kobarid Museum<\/a> in Kobarid, Slovenia. Like the Historial, the Kobarid Museum stands in close proximity to infamous World War I battlegrounds. The city was almost completely destroyed in World War I and a series of battles along the Isonzo front cost the lives of over half a million Italian and Austra-Hungarian soldiers. The museum was established in 1990 by a local association and is still run by a not-for-profit company. It pursues an explicitly pacifist agenda and highlights the theme of transnational European reconciliation. In explicit recognition of its cosmopolitan accomplishments, the museum received the European Council\u2019s museum prize in 1993. The museum has round 70,000 visitors per year.<\/p>\n

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3. The third institution we have selected for analysis is the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst<\/a>, Germany. Like the two previously mentioned museums, it is located on an historic site of the surrender of the German Army on 8th May 1945. In the years 1967-1994 the building hosted a Soviet Museum of Surrender. The new German-Soviet Museum opened in 1995. It is the only such bilateral institution funded by both the German and the Russian governments. Its Board of Trustees is composed of representatives of both countries as well as other cultural and scientific institutions from Germany, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. In 2013 the Museum opened a new permanent exhibition. It focuses on the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the subsequent war of annihilation. The exhibition strives to document this history from multiple perspectives focusing to a large extent on the victims and their suffering. The museum has around 40,000 visitors per year.<\/p>\n

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4. The fourth focus of our study is the exhibition in Oskar Schindler\u2019s Factory<\/a> in Krak\u00f3w, Poland entitled \u2018Krak\u00f3w under Nazi Occupation 1939\u20131945\u2019. The exhibition – a branch of the Krak\u00f3w City Museum – is also situated on an historic site, the former Enemel factory owned during World War II by Oskar Schindler and well known from Steven Spielberg\u2019s film Schindler\u2019s List. It was opened in 2010 as a response to the growing touristic interest in this site. However the exhibition focuses not solely on the history of Oskar Schindler and the people he rescued but it tells the fate of Krak\u00f3w\u2019s Polish and Jewish inhabitants under German occupation, allowing for a more multi-perspectivist approach to history. This is the first such museum in Poland which tries to combine both the Jewish and Polish war experience in one narrative. The exhibition focuses not only on the occupational terror but also on everyday life in Krak\u00f3w during the war. The museum has around 240,000 visitors per year.<\/p>\n

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5. The last case study is the Military History Museum<\/a> in Dresden, Germany. Established as an army museum already in 1897 it served as such from then on, most recently as the Army Museum of the German Democratic Republic. After long lasting and extensive reconstruction works including a new, highly symbolic annex designed by the renowned Polish-US architect Daniel Libeskind, it re-opened to the public in 2011. Rather than focusing on arms and war tactics, the new exhibition strives to put military history into a broader political, cultural and anthropological context. In fact, it has been sometimes described as a \u2018peace museum\u2019 rather than a military history museum. Making use of its huge collections, it tells the story both in a chronological way and from a thematic viewpoint. The museum has around 175,000 visitors per year.<\/p>\n

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UNREST will generate new empirical data for testing, revising, and fine-tuning the key concepts of antagonistic, cosmopolitan and agonistic memory. For that purpose, the experts collaborating in work package “War Museums” will provide a thick description of the mentioned European museums.
\nFirstly, on the basis of archival research and press analysis, the researchers will examine the history of the origins of these museums seeking answers to the questions: What were the circumstances of their establishment and\/or of the set-up of the new exhibitions? Which local and central state authorities, associations, historians and museum practitioners have played a decisive role in the founding process and the architectural and exhibition designs? What controversies have occurred during the planning stages and thereafter? How has the public responded to the plans and the resulting strategies of remembrance? How do the institutions fit into regional, national and transnational memory discourses? The researchers will also conduct in each case 5-10 semi-structured interviews with main stakeholders: museum directors, curators, scientific advisers, politicians and other representatives of important organizations and institutions involved in the process of creating the new museums and exhibitions. They will ask about their aims and theoretical assumptions and about the practical and theoretical challenges the museum makers faced during their work. In this way, the empirical analyses pursued in work package “war museums” also serve the purpose of building relationships of trust that will play a decisive role for the successful implementation of the additional impact activities described in work package “Creation of Cultural Events”.
\nIn the next stage, using a set of guidelines developed on the basis of the theoretical framework, the categories and criteria elaborated in work package “Theory and Methodology”<\/a> of the UNREST project, the team members will conduct a detailed analysis of the museum exhibitions to learn about their narrative and how it is being delivered. They will examine the extent to which the selected museums actually follow a cosmopolitan approach to history and heritage of war and include also elements of an antagonistic or agonistic narrative. All the exhibitions will be visited together and discussed by the whole team. The material from the discussion will then be included in the reports and the articles written by the researchers. Such an approach will not only ensure the coherence of the whole work package but it will also make the analysis richer, more balanced and versatile. Moreover, the minutes from the discussions will form interesting material promoting a self-reflective analysis among the researchers and their different, also nationally conditioned approaches to history and historical exhibitions.
\nFinally, at each of the museums, the research team members will conduct 20 semi-structured interviews with museum visitors asking them about their initial expectations and their perceptions of the exhibition. The questionnaires for these interviews will be prepared on the basis of previous research. The researchers will interview visitors from the country and abroad, from different age cohorts and having different educational backgrounds. The interviews will help in defining the strong points and deficits of such cosmopolitan museum narratives from the visitors\u2019 perspective.
\nWe expect that the teams assembled in work packages “Mass Grave Exhumations”<\/a> and “War Museums” will approach the goal of agonistic memory from different vantage points. The scholars of work package “Mass Grave Exhumations”<\/a> focus on contemporary controversies about new sites of memory; they approach agonistic memory from the vantage point of unsettled, \u2018hot\u2019, antagonistic memories. In contrast, their colleagues in work package “War Museums” study the history of well-established institutions of cultural memory; they reflect about the feasibility of agonistic memory on the basis of a critical analysis of settled, agreed upon memory compromises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent decades, history museums have emerged as key venues of history education and history entertainment. History museums and heritage sites have multiplied and enjoy record visitor numbers across Europe and the West (Arnold-de Simine 2013). The success is part of the collective turn to memory but it also reflects specific innovations and accomplishments in … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":136,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/193"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":789,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/193\/revisions\/789"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}