One of the liveliest cultural enterprises that the second half of the twentieth-century and the first decades of the current one have offered in the public sphere is the phenomenon of historical museums. While it is difficult to ascertain whether this new wave has been shaped by the social processes of identity politics and recognition or is simply catering to the tourists’ fascination with the past, it is hard to ignore the race (hopefully not to the bottom) to educate, present, entertain, shape, reshape and encourage empathy towards the past by using historical museums as a leading vehicle. Within this emerging and very vibrant public and academic field, Silke Arnold-de Simine's book is a tour de force that introduces readers to a variety of new museums and heritage sites across Europe (Germany, Britain, Belgium and France) and to a variety of themes with which those museums (and their curators) cope, most of them about and around a difficult past, including emigration, war, slavery and a divided nation, to name but a few.
However, Arnold-de Simine's concern is not only to document the historical museum in Europe; using all the current concepts such as prosthetic memory, post-memory, vicarious trauma and post-nostalgia, she also seeks to ‘identify the aesthetic, ethical and political implications of new practices of historical remembrance for museums and heritage sites’ (p. 1). Her intellectual journey – and it really is a journey – is not just about museum studies, but even more so, about the challenge that museums, and the societies in which they are constructed, currently face. And the challenge is indeed a serious one: since many believe that in order to prevent future atrocities, people need to identify with others’ suffering, museums are expected to assume the ‘role of facilitators in that process by providing experientially oriented encounters with the help of multimedia technologies’ (p. 1) and a variety of other means such as focusing on individual stories, exposing trauma and using authentic locations.
The 200-page book encompasses 20 chapters spanning five sections: the first is an introduction to the field of museum studies and collective memory, the second chapter focuses on issues of trauma, the third examines empathy and its projection, the fourth discusses the paradoxes of nostalgia and the fifth deals with uncanny objects and technologies.
Museums, as Arnold-de Simine reminds us, were born in the Enlightenment. From their very inception they had a social role that was intended to organise knowledge, educate the public, produce a particular type of citizen and maintain the imagined community. Today, in addition to the original mission, new museums are expected to entertain visitors, while at the same time turning them into more generally caring, active and better people. Throughout the pages of the book, we can see substantial examples, such as the First World War museum in Ypres, Belgium (‘In Flanders Fields’), where visitors are asked to wear special interactive bracelets that enable their visit to be personalised, the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr (Bundeswehr Military History Museum) in Dresden, Germany, that invites onlookers to consider how they themselves would have acted in difficult situations (p. 48), the ‘Great Emigration Museum’ in BallinStadt, just outside of Hamburg, Germany, where visitors are ‘encouraged to investigate potential family links with former emigrants and empathize with them’ (p. 50), and the Titanic Belfast Museum in Northern Ireland, in which one can actually take a ride that evokes ‘nostalgia and pride for an age of industry and production’ (p. 65), while enjoying a full five-sensory experience. Thus, if in the past people were taught, because it was believed that knowledge brings responsibility and thus makes people ‘better’ over time, history and knowledge as loci for mankind seem to be losing their power in favour of a new belief: that it is memory (defined more in terms of experiencing the past) that will make people better. Hence the new museums invest in memory (rather than history) and in experience (rather than knowledge). In other words, exhibitions can no longer be ‘boring’ and must display ‘high-end’ technology. No less important, of course, is the fact that contemporary historical museums give what they are expected to give, that is, more room to new voices and new controversies.
Arnold-de Simine's contribution in Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia is at least twofold. The first is a powerful portrayal of the tensions surrounding current historical museums: between knowledge-oriented museums and experience-directed ones, between history perceived as elitist and exclusive, as opposed to memory perceived as democratic and inclusive. Moreover, she discusses trauma and nostalgia as two contrasting approaches to the past, individual memories versus public representation, the popularity of dark tourism and the danger of turning sites of horrific deeds into money-making attractions, authentic sites that require ‘less evidence’ as opposed to out-of-the-way museums that exhibit ‘more’ in order to ensure credence, history as against testimony, fantasy versus reality, narratives and their historical context, memorials (that demand respect) as distinct from museums (that encourage criticism), museums inspired by a community of memory in contrast to those inspired by historians and politicians, museums that are social institutions versus the kind of individual experience that they generate.
The author's second contribution is the salient discussion she raises about and around the ethics of memory. Here, for example, Arnold-de-Simine rightly wonders whether experiencing other people's suffering in the context of a museum (or any context, for that matter) might not actually obscure the boundaries between the experience of real suffering and its representation. In particular, she posits two dangers inherent in such museum exhibitions: blurring the borders between a museum as a site for learning and a memorial as a site for mourning, and secondly – and more importantly – the possible loss of sensitivity towards actual, palpable suffering since ‘I already endured’ the Holocaust/slavery/the GDR at the museum and survived it. The author further offers an excellent discussion of the notion of nostalgia while wondering whether yearning for the past has become an end in itself. Her conceptualisation of the chilling passion for ‘dark nostalgia’ is yet another telling commentary on present-day culture, as is her consideration of the use and abuse of empathy in museums and heritage sites. Thus, at the heart of the book, is the assumption that Arnold-de Simine challenges – or at the very least calls to our attention – that we will be better and more understanding if we immerse ourselves ‘in personal stories and memories of people’ (p. 114) who suffered in different situations, if we develop a sense of empathy with them, which will eventually culminate with people successfully constructing a better world. She worries justifiably that the more we focus on how the past felt, the less we learn about how it happened. One pitfall such primarily felt or emotive evocative museums face is that history and politics (which can actually explain some of the origins of wrong-doing) are set aside and forgotten; and even worse, violence is stylised.
The most moving and powerful chapter in the book concerns ‘Ostalgie’, the wistful nostalgia for the GDR elicited in some of the museums that the author reviews. Here Arnold-de Simine raises yet another interesting challenge. New museums like to think of themselves as democratic institutions, exhibiting ample voices, memories and everyday experiences. A democratic image, however, does not mean that the museums ‘encourage visitors to engage critically with memories’ (p. 171) or that all potential voices find room in the exhibition. This is especially apparent in the GDR museums. Moreover, the very genre of the museum has its limits: at the end of the day ‘the framework of the museum cannot help but invest memories that are part of the exhibition with authority’ (p. 171).
Arnold-de Simine does not lament the old museums but she is concerned about the new ones. She hopes that visitors will come away from the museum experience with greater political activism, but she is not naive, as she gently reproves the faith that museums can actually make a difference, that there is a causal effect between perception, feeling and action. On a more general level, Arnold-de Simine is uneasy about the dangers inherent in this experience-oriented education, and also concerned that this kind of edutainment will encourage people to ‘only recognize what they can grasp on the basis of their own experience’ (p. 123). In many ways, the author calls for rationality and knowledge to be returned to the state, our societies and to our lives (museums included).
When the reader finishes reading this intriguing and moving book, the first thing he or she wants to do is rush out and visit those new museums. Nevertheless, the arguments raised in the book are convincing ones, and we cannot help being worried about the shape of our society and about the chances of doing anything about it. But experiencing concern – like ‘feeling’ the past – is neither a political agenda nor a scientific one. What needs to follow now is a serious research project on historical museums, one that will actually analyse what is happening, what people retain after engaging with (more or less) moving experiences at museums around the world. The setting is clear, the stage has been analysed and criticised; now is the time to see if there is something in the air. Leaving the past (as fascinating as it can get) behind the closed doors of museums is no longer an option for those who care as scholars of museums, memory and cultural studies, or as citizens of this world.