Understanding Controversies over Memorial Museums: The Case of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum, Potsdam

Emerging from the extremely violent 20th century, memorial museums are a new form of commemoration, created to both commemorate and educate about past genocide, human rights abuses and other injustices with the goal of instilling in their visitors an ethic of “never again.” However, these ambitious goals are often compromised by the politics behind the creation of memorial museums. The focus of this paper is on the ways in which memorial museums produce history according to the dictates, needs and desires of the regimes that build them, using the example of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda. Despite the fact that the Kigali Center commemorates the 1994 Rwandan genocide using the increasingly familiar, global memorial museum form, it reveals much more about current Rwandan politics and the government’s hopes for the future of Rwanda than it does confront the terrible past.

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Prosthetic trauma and politics in the National September 11 Memorial Museum

Memory Studies ◽

10.1177/1750698017720257 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 117-129

Author(s):

Amy Sodaro

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Cultural Identity ◽

September 11 ◽

Personal Memory ◽

Bearing Witness ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

Political Implications ◽

Good And Evil

The National September 11 Memorial Museum opened in New York City in May 2014. Like other memorial museums, it uses affect and experience to produce in visitors what Alison Landsberg calls a “prosthetic memory” of 9/11: an individual, personal memory of 9/11 whether or not the visitor actually experienced the event. However, the museum also constructs 9/11 as an event that is collectively, culturally traumatic. Thus, the prosthetic memory might be better conceived as a “prosthetic trauma” that, in recreating for visitors the trauma of 9/11, encourages strong identification with the victims as embodiments of the American cultural identity that was targeted by the ideology of the terrorists. In this article, I examine how the 9/11 Museum constructs 9/11 as cultural trauma and uses the act of bearing witness to create “prosthetic trauma” and a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications.

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National Identity, International Visitors: Narration and Translation of the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum

Museum and Society ◽

10.29311/mas.v15i1.662 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 56-68 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Chia-Li Chen ◽

Min-Hsiu Liao

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

Chinese Text ◽

English Translation ◽

Historical Perspectives ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Taiwanese Identity ◽

Sensitive Topics ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

International Visitors

Although many museums nowadays provide multilingual services, translations in museums have not received enough attention from researchers. The issue of how ideology is embedded in museum texts is translated is particularly underresearched. Since museums are often important sites for tourists to learn about a nation, translation plays a pivotal role in mediating how international visitors construct the host nation’s identity. The translation of national identity is even more important when sensitive topics are dealt with, such as exhibitions of the past in memorial museums. This paper takes the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum as a case study to examine how Taiwanese identity is formatted in the Chinese text and reframed in the English translation. The current study found inconsistent historical perspectives embedded in both texts, particularly in the English translation. We argue that, without awareness of ideological assumptions embedded in translations, museums run the risk of sending unintended messages to international visitors.

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Role of S. V. Korolenko in Evacuation of the Poltava Literary and Memorial Museum of V. G. Korolenko to Sverdlovsk in 1941

Nauchnyy dialog ◽

10.24224/2227-1295-2020-10-368-383 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (10) ◽

pp. 368-383

Author(s):

A. S. Mokhov ◽

K. R. Kapsalykova

Keyword(s):

Cultural Values ◽

Initial Period ◽

Cultural Property ◽

Front Line ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

Great Patriotic War ◽

History Of ◽

The Creation

The article is devoted to the problem of the evacuation of cultural values during the Great Patriotic War. The relevance of the research is due to the fact that in historiography insufficient attention is paid to the salvation of the treasures of provincial museums in 1941—1942. The question is raised about the lack of a unified plan for the evacuation of museum collections from the western regions of the USSR in the initial period of the war. The novelty of the research is in the introduction into scientific circulation of a unique document — a report on the evacuation of the literary and memorial museum of V. G. Korolenko from Poltava to Sverdlovsk. The question of the history of the creation of the museum and its work in the pre-war period is considered. The authors dwell on the history of the creation of literary and memorial museums in the USSR in the 1920s-1930s. The composition of the archive of V.G.Korolenko is characterized. It is shown that the graduates of the higher female Bestuzhev courses played a significant role in this process. Particular attention is paid to the activities of the museum director, the writer’s eldest daughter, Sofya Vladimirovna Korolenko. It has been proven that she is credited with saving the museum collection from the front line. According to the authors, the history of the evacuation of cultural property during the war is a poorly studied issue, the solution of which depends on the publication of sources.

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‘I feel like I can’t do a lot’: Affectivity, reflection and action in ‘Transformative’ genocide education

Journal of Adult and Continuing Education ◽

10.1177/14779714211061590 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 147797142110615

Author(s):

Kim Sadique ◽

James Tangen

Keyword(s):

Transformative Learning ◽

Critical Reflection ◽

Affective Learning ◽

Perspective Transformation ◽

Concentration Camp ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

Guided Tour ◽

Guided Tours

Guided tours of memorial museums have sought to have an impact on visitors through an affective learning environment and critical reflection leading to ‘action’. However, there is limited work investigating the pedagogical underpinnings of such guided tours in order to understand whether they can facilitate action. This paper presents reflections of 21 students’ experiences of educational visits to the former Nazi extermination and concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland between 2017 and 2018. Students identified the guided tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau as having an affective dimension that enhanced understanding and brought about a perspective transformation but action was ill-defined. In considering ill-defined action, this paper attempts to frame understanding of the guided tour of the memorial museum within the context of Transformative Learning. It concludes that guiding practices should incorporate space for reflection and provide examples of potential ‘action’ so that visitors can mobilise their deeper understanding and experience long-term personal ‘change’.

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Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania

Societies ◽

10.3390/soc11020043 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 43

Author(s):

Duncan Light ◽

Remus Creţan ◽

Andreea-Mihaela Dunca

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Young People ◽

Political Violence ◽

Transitional Justice ◽

Human Rights Abuses ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

Communist Past ◽

The Impact

Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania which interprets the human rights abuses of the communist period (1947–1989). It uses focus groups with 61 young adults and compares the responses of visitors and non-visitors to assess the impact of the museum on views about the communist past, as well as the role of the museum within post-communist transitional justice. The museum had a limited impact on changing overall perceptions of the communist era but visiting did stimulate reflection on the differences between past and present, and the importance of long-term remembrance; however, these young people were largely skeptical about the museum’s role within broader processes of transitional justice. The paper concludes that it is important to recognize the limits of what memorial museums can achieve, since young people form a range of intergenerational memories about the recent past which a museum is not always able to change.

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Slovak and Croatian invocation of Europe: the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum

Nationalities Papers ◽

10.1080/00905992.2013.867935 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 42 (3) ◽

pp. 489-507 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ljiljana Radonic

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Task Force ◽

International Standards ◽

Holocaust Education ◽

Historical Revisionism ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The Individual ◽

Key Aspects

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criterion for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust in the context of “Europeanization of Memory.” Comparative analysis shows that post-Communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform in the context of those informal standards. Both the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia and the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica were founded in the Communist era and played an important role in supporting the founding myths of the two countries. Both were subjected to historical revisionism during the 1990s. In the current exhibitions from 2004/2006, both memorial museums stress being part of Europe and refer, to “international standards” of musealization, while the Jasenovac memorial claims to focus on “the individual victim.” But stressing the European dimension of resistance and the Holocaust obscures such key aspects as the civil war and the responsibility of the respective collaborating regime.

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“People of Freedom and Unlimited Movement”: Representations of Roma in Post-Communist Memorial Museums

Social Inclusion ◽

10.17645/si.v3i5.229 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 (5) ◽

pp. 64-77 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ljiljana Radonic

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

Eu Accession ◽

Memorial Museums ◽

Holocaust Memorial ◽

Memorial Museum ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Communist Countries ◽

First Time

The “universalization of the Holocaust” and the insistence on Roma rights as an EU accession criteria have changed the memory of the Roma genocide in post-communist countries. This article examines how Roma are represented in post-communist memorial museums which wanted to prove that they correspond with “European memory standards”. The three case studies discussed here are the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, the Jasenovac Memorial Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. I argue that today Roma are being represented for the first time, but in a stereotypical way and through less prominent means in exhibitions which lack individualizing elements like testimonies, photographs from their life before the persecution or artifacts. This can only partially be explained by the (relative) unavailability of data that is often deplored by researchers of the Roma genocide.

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