Appropriating Memory: Negotiating and Performing Memory in the Museum Landscape

Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques, the modern museum has been radically re-posited in the cultural arena. These changes in museological discourse have resulted in new museums which aim to invite reflection on the representational and mediated quality of histories and geographies, and on memory as a complex aesthetic and rhetorical artifice. By granting a voice to what has been left out of the dominant discourses of history, diversified and sometimes even incompatible narratives have supposedly been granted a place in museums that seems no longer to aspire to any totalizing synthesis.

The new museums thus redefine their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves not just as institutional or disciplinary spaces of academic history or geography, but as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. New museums want to be seen as forums of the communicative memory of the victims and survivors by collecting and displaying donated memorabilia and oral testimonies of witnesses. In these museums individual life-stories are attributed significance beyond the purely private: autobiographical story-telling is part of the museum's newly perceived function of giving voice to the individual fate and transforming bystanders into 'secondary witnesses'. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make these empathise and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their living contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities, as if 'reliving' their experience, in order to thus develop more personal and immediate forms of engagement.

The monograph will not concentrate on single case studies, it aims to provide an overview over the museums responses to major changes in our remembrance cultures, e.g. the prominent role of trauma and empathy in so-called memorial museums, but also on the changing perceptions and discussions concerning nostalgia and the notion of heritage. The monograph attempts to probe the political and aesthetic claims of the shifts in exhibiting practices associated with the transformation of traditional history museums into 'spaces of memory'. The emphasis here is on the role of different media and art forms in the transmission of memory and on questions of their gendering. The monograph will draw together issues which are very much at the forefront of scholarly discussions in Memory and Museum Studies and will benefit both research and teaching.

While working on this project I have organised and participated in research projects, workshops and conferences in which both museum theorists and practitioners came together to develop new impulses for curatorial and outreach practice. In my experience museum theory and curatorial practice are strongly connected - not least through the 'textualisation' of museums themselves. Museum theory and practice share the same desire for self-reflexivity which must be reconciled with traditional notions of the museum as a public educator and as a catalyst of social reform.

My stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at ANU (Canberra, Australia) in 2005 provided me with unique opportunities to meet artists working on commemoration and re-enactment projects. Several of the HRC organised conferences in that year focused on these questions and they fostered my interest in the role of different media and art forms as technologies of memory. Even though it became clear that theorists and artists do not always see eye to eye on how difficult pasts should be commemorated, I think that my monograph will explore some common ground which will enable both sides to profit more from these encounters.

Through my postgraduate and PhD students, who work on related topics, I have established contacts with a range of museum practitioners based in London, but also in other UK and European cities. My aim is to use this monograph to create the foundation for future co-operations between our university based research culture and those museum practitioners.

The AHRC funded networking project 'After the Wall. Representing and Remembering the GDR', for which I was on the steering committee, held two workshops in which museum directors, curators and guides from museums such as the GDR Museum (Berlin), the Documentation Centre of Everyday Culture in the GDR (Eisenhuettenstadt), the Berlin Wall Memorial and Documentation Centre and the Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen Memorial took part. These participants wished to extend our exchanges beyond the limits of the project, and my repeat visits to those museums are an integral part of my workplan for my proposed project. Our discussions with Stefan Wolle, head of research at the GDR Museum, were conducted while the museum was in the process of major refurbishment. Since October 2010 they have not only doubled but also revised their exhibition, not least in response to the scholarly reception and impulses they received in the first few years of their existence. Axel Klausmeier, director of the Bernauer Strasse Wall Memorial in Berlin, which is still in the process of a major redevelopment, has been keen to discuss the problems which arise when a memorial museum has to serve different memory communities.

The monograph will not only be a testimony to the productivity of these encounters, but will furthermore prove to be a valuable source for museum practitioners wishing to engage with questions of how new trends in remembrance culture are reflected in recent museological theories.