A living place: On the sociology of atmosphere in home museums

Young visitors joke about whether the protagonist of a home museum will return to open the door after hearing the bell ring. Museum guides often start tours by revealing secrets behind turning a private home into a public museum, such as changing worn curtains or using photographs to aid reconstruction work. The changes that the home undergoes connect the protagonists’ habits in the past with the museum’s goals in the present. They may be discovered in what is and what is not exhibited and observed by visitors in the home museums in question. Such seemingly random features, we claim, make up the atmosphere in these museums and are central to understanding the interest and the special experience of visiting home museums.

In this article, we study the ways in which atmosphere is constructed, maintained and shared in home museums. These are spaces that enact the tension between private life and a public site for civic seeing, as Bennett (1988) describes the modern museum. Atmosphere is sought after, and carefully constructed and maintained, in home museums. Otherwise, why bother visiting them when robust, high-tech museums are within easy reach, providing an exciting ‘hands on’ experience of historical events and heroes (Arnold-de Simine, 2013)? Indeed, when one critically observes a domestic realm that has undergone musealisation, one learns both about the memory of the home and its inhabitants and about that of the nation in different times. Lowenthal (1998, p. xv) claims it is likely that ‘most people, most of the time, view the past not as a foreign but a deeply domestic realm’. Home museums have celebrated the connection between personal and national memories since the mid-nineteenth century. The first to open in Germany was Schiller’s house in Weimar, in 1847. As Hodge and Beranek (2011) claim, ‘Houses are among the most accessible heritage sites – everyone has a home and can base an affective engagement with the past (and its present legacies) on their personal experience there’ (p. 99). Within this framework, we suggest that home museums enable us to observe how modes of narrating the past within the domestic realm situate the observer’s memory of historical events, thereby creating a certain atmosphere.

Guided by an interpretative approach to museums and memory studies (Handler & Gable, 1997; Katriel, 1997; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Macdonald, 2011), we claim that atmosphere is created, maintained, and transferred through the condensation of time in specific areas in the home museum. The conditions that enable the condensation of time are, first, the existence of temporal multitude, and second, stories about specific tangible objects that connect different narrative nodes: distinct moments that bring together particular clusters of meaning, here mainly around national memory and private lives. We draw on Harvey’s (1985, p. 33) definition of spatial relations as fundamental material attributes whose forms ‘are not neutral with respect to the possible paths of temporal development’ (cited in Löw, 2008, p. 31). We examine the temporal multitude in home museums as it is spatially determined, materially presented, and experienced. We found that in guided tours and visitors’ responses to them, a performative space opens up that enables what we shall describe at its limit as the uncanny experience. The experience is described as uncanny in the sense of a breakdown of traditional temporality, in which past and present coexist during the visit to a space that was a home and is now a museum. This is somehow also a visit to the home museum as an original place, a place that comes alive to itself and its visitors.

Thus, in this space, national history is mapped into that of the domestic and the home informs the history of the nation in a non-essentialising manner. Following Zelizer (1995), we perceive national memory as neither homogeneous, stable nor unified but rather as an ongoing process involving many memory agents and professionals, institutions, sites, narratives, and their local and historical circumstances (Olick, 2016). The openness of space to the plurality of relations, stories, and structures (Löw, 2008) enables us to observe the malleability of narrative boundaries, of national stories, of war and exile (Eder, 2006). We thus inquire about the modes through which atmosphere is constructed in a certain space, in this case, that of the visit to home museums. We think of atmosphere as a social fact that lies in the realm of experience that is constructed and reconstructed by the museums, and negotiated as well as altered by visitors at the meeting-point of subjects, objects, and places. By analysing the condensation of time and space, we advance the sociological understanding of atmosphere, adding the institutional element in its creation while preserving the malleability in the relations between materials, agents, stories, and times. Our analysis is based on ethnographic research in home museums in Germany and Israel (details below).

Macdonald (2003) and Bennett (1995) argue that the formation and proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century were closely bound to the formation of nation states. Bennett describes museums as instruments of social diversity in the form of civic laboratories that constitute cultural objecthood. According to Bennett (1988), as exhibitionary complexes developed, they made the articulation of knowledge in museums visible, as well as making the public visible to itself. Having a museum, local or national, meant having an identity. Macdonald (2003) claims that museums and exhibitions are material performatives whose ‘very physical presence performed national and civic identity and pride’ (p. 3 fn. 5).

Lowenthal (2011) claims that heritage is essentially parochial and individualised, for one can ‘inherit’ a past, be linked to it personally, and thus the relation between heritage, home, individuals, and groups produces much symbolic memory work. Evidently, this relationship is more pronounced in home museums, where visitors can discover their own and others’ pasts and habits. Bulger (2011) argues, ‘Places and objects become part of the performance of heritage in that they have the potential to elicit shared experience of identification and belonging’ (p. 140).

Nationalism has been cast as an intimate personal pursuit in small-scale ‘Heimat’ museums in Germany (Confino, 1997). These museums are sites where the relationship between the nation as a whole and local parts can be articulated. Gregory and Witcomb (2007) argue that home museums are where ‘the intangible past can be shared’ (p. 265). Moreover, even if today’s audience in home museums does not share the same cultural memories or the values of gentility that most houses represent, they do sense the intangible, the ephemeral, and are able to engage with the place as an imaginary of home while at the same time they situate themselves in it. We thus claim that the home museum, because of its construction of an atmosphere that is made up of personal stories as well as of historical moments, is able to grant visitors a space for the articulation of both similarities with and difference from the past – both in terms of a personal or domesticated story and a collective one.

While home museums are first and foremost committed to the person who has lived in them, they can and often do address wider concerns, just because their inhabitants were key figures in important historical moments. To be sure, if these inhabitants could not be considered ‘worthy of remembrance’, their homes would either be demolished, become other people’s homes, or simply be inherited by their offspring. These home museums are therefore sites in which distinctive elements of heritage are inclusionary, inasmuch as visitors compare them to homes that they know. However, they are also exclusionary, for they are narrated as someone else’s home, where one is by definition not ‘at home’; more importantly, some groups are absent from them, since the homes of politicians stand for larger historical narratives in which certain groups (such as minorities) might not see themselves reflected.

According to Young (2015), home museums of famous authors – and, we would add, of others as well – are sites in which national identity is asserted, and the nation is personified, by making distinctions about belonging. Moreover, in some types of home museums, a version of the pilgrimage takes place. Young states that the reason why these figures are musealised specifically via their dwellings is that home museums are forms of ‘hero’ worship through relics associated with legacy or fame. The logic of relics and the fact that the home contains them makes it into a kind of a shrine. At the same time, since this ‘shrine’ also contains mundane domestic practices, its experience offers a more intimate, humanised perception of the hero. This task of humanising the hero and peering into his or her private world is especially important for relating to the hero, crossing boundaries, and participating in the domains in which the protagonists have operated.

Studies of museums experience observe visitors as consumers of nostalgia (Bagnall, 2003), staged fantasies (Bruner & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1994), cultural performers, inventors and interpreters (Bruner, 1994; Hooper-Greenhill, 2011; Katriel, 1997; Macdonald, 2013), and pilgrims (Booth, 2016; Feldman, 2007). What distinguishes the study of home museums is that visitors can use their knowledge and experience of dwelling to compare and contrast public and private stories, literary texts, political and social transformations (Hodge & Beranek, 2011). The proliferation of museums of everyday life, including folk and pioneer museums (Katriel, 1997), points to the growing interest in various private and public or nationally framed aspects of the past (Hoelscher, 2011). Macdonald (2013) explains how museums have turned to everyday life, finding this process to be ‘at once part of the democratization of the past … but also a reflex of the massive expansion of “things” that industrialization itself produced’ (p. 146). Hoelscher (2011) claims that the scope of what is deemed worth exhibiting has also expanded, preserving a past that is more ‘accessible’. The ineffable aura of things in home museums is inherently related to their material existence at home: first as objects belonging to the protagonists and now displayed and protected as museum objects. This contact between the material that once belonged to the dead, on the one hand, and the visitor, on the other, can be understood through Huyssen’s (1995, p. 15) reading of museums as both burial grounds and sites of possible resurrection. Stocking (1985) adds that objects in museums that once had a spiritual value undergo a process of re-spiritualisation as aesthetic objects on display. The material, aesthetic, symbolic, and market value of these objects are crucial to the explanation of the construction and maintenance of atmosphere in home museums.

Böhme (1995) defines atmosphere as a characteristic manifestation of the co-presence of objects and subjects, things, and persons. By transgressing object and subject boundaries, it also connects people, places, and things. Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen (2015) suggest that atmosphere is an important part of the identity and conceptualisation of landscapes, architecture, and homes. They claim that atmospheres are bound up in temporal dynamics, which again makes them difficult to pin down because they are socially and historically contingent. Löw (2008) stresses that atmosphere is connected with the space’s potentiality, which can influence feelings while observing spatial relations as well as the material element of objects and other forms of non-human influence. Anderson (2009) focuses on the notion of effective atmosphere as he sheds light on how the concept of atmosphere is composed of a series of opposites – presence and absence, materiality and ideality, definite and indefinite, and singularity and generality – which are always in a relation of tension. In analysing domestic atmosphere, Daniels (2015) separates hospitality and status from backstage sleeping, bathing, and eating. While we learn much from the binary aspects of affective, aesthetic, and authentic readings of atmosphere, we nonetheless suggest that we should attend to its socio-political power, beyond object arrangement and aura. Moreover, we aim to understand the phenomenon of recognising oneself in the midst of a scene as always constructed within the interaction of addressor, addressee, the objects in the setting, and the relevant historical context.

In the everyday use of the term, ‘atmosphere’ often serves as a descriptive mediator between a context and a background, as in ‘X grew up in an intellectual atmosphere.’ In sociology, however, little has been written on atmosphere since, as we suggest, it has been taken to be synonymous with context and, no less important for sociology, intangible. The intangible was often understood through Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’ or ‘a property inherent in objects and felt by the viewer, which may have intersubjective qualities’ (Rickly-Boyd, 2012, p. 274). While context is obviously important for understanding social phenomena and their institutional and historical settings, we aim to unpack the relations between background information (selective as it may be), the experience of presence within a material setting, and the enactment of certain practices by multiple agents. Two additional reasons for studying atmosphere are that these sites have to do with the nature both of visiting a home and visiting a museum, namely that visiting is a kinetic form of seeing, both of/at home (Cieraad, 2010) and in the museum (Albano, 2014). Observing atmosphere within home museums helps to collapse the tension between an emotional and an intellectual experience in museums (Gregory & Witcomb, 2007).

Furthermore, studying atmosphere in home museums exemplifies the tension in discussing authenticity between constructivism, on the one hand (Bruner, 1994, 2001) and origins and reproduction, on the other (MacCannell, 1973). Later works on authenticity in tourism (Noy, 2009; Wang, 1999) move away from seeing authenticity in objects. Wang (1999) argues that existential authenticity collapses the tension between the authenticity of knowledge and the authenticity of feeling. Noy (2009) further claims that tourism authenticity is a semiotic resource, which grants both objects and people a symbolic and material ‘worthiness’. What enhances the experience is that home museums can declare that it is ‘here in this place’ where a person lived and certain events took place. This grants them instant credibility and re-membering authenticity (Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2009).

Authenticity itself has authority, Gable and Handler (1996) claim. ‘Heritage museums become publicly recognized repositories of the physical remains and, in some senses, the “auras” of the really “real”. As such, they are arbiters of a marketable authenticity’ (p. 568). Hansen-Glucklich (2014) further articulates, through the case of Holocaust museums, that ‘Artifacts possess an aura of authenticity as traces of a lost time and place. Because they appear to be unmediated remnants […] they possess an almost mystical power to bridge time and space and to act as witnesses’ (p. 81). We now turn to our own terminology, methodology, and research.

The term we use, home museums, differs from the more commonly used ‘historic homes’ or ‘historic house museums’ (cf. Gregory & Witcomb, 2007; Hodge & Beranek, 2011). We chose ‘home museums’ for three reasons. First, these homes have not always been located in houses dedicated solely to them. For instance, Käthe Kollwitz lived in two rooms within a house that is now ‘her’ home museum. With the concept ‘home museum’, we are able to illuminate the capacity to locate the museum in a house that is not populated and can host visitors. This is important for understanding the ways that the domestic realm is transformed into a museum and experienced as a heritage site. Second, we omit ‘historic’ from the term, since we claim that the home and museum as institutions are entangled and, therefore, constitute memory processes in the present. Third, we draw attention to the construction of the meaning of the term ‘home’ versus that of ‘house’: ‘house’ emphasises the structure of living for certain purpose and ‘home’ alludes to dwelling, especially as a family. We thus define a home museum, following the definitions that the museums themselves give, as a heritage site in which a famous person has lived and which is now open to the public as a partial or full reconstruction of a home.

In Germany, we studied Konrad Adenauer’s House in Rhöndorf (Adenauer (1876–1967) was the mayor of Cologne (1917–1933) and the first Chancellor of West Germany (1949–1963)¹); Bertolt Brecht’s and Helene Weigel’s House in Berlin (Brecht (1898–1956) was a poet and playwright, the founder of the Berliner Ensemble Theatre in East Berlin (1949–1956); his wife, Weigel (1900–1971), was an acclaimed actress and director of the Berliner Ensemble²); Goethe’s House in Weimar (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a poet, writer, and statesman; this home is the only one among those we studied which is also a national museum, one that was opened in 1887³); Albert (1879–1955) and Elsa (1876–1936) Einstein’s summer house in Caputh (Einstein was a theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize laureate, and perhaps the most famous scientist to date⁴); the Käthe Kollwitz House in Moritzburg (Kollwitz (1867–1945) was the most acclaimed female artist, painter, and sculptor in pre-War Germany and a hero of the GDR⁵). In Israel, we studied David (1886–1973) and Paula (1892–1968) Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel Aviv, and their desert cabin in Kibbutz Sde Boker⁶ (Ben-Gurion was Israel’s first Prime Minister and is considered its founding father); Chaim (1874–1952) and Vera (1881–1966) Weizmann’s home in Rehoboth⁷ (Weizmann was Israel’s first President (1948–1952), an acclaimed biochemist, and President of the World Zionist Organization (1935–1946)); Shmuel Yosef (1888–1970) and Ester (1889–1973) Agnon’s House in Jerusalem (Agnon was a writer and the first Israeli to receive the Nobel Prize⁸).

The research span, between 2014 and 2016, included in-depth interviews in each museum with curators, directors and guides; semi-structured interviews with visitors; participant observation of 10–30 tours, depending on the different types of tours and the variety of visitors, and in special programmes. Additionally, we analysed object assembly, and performed thematic mappings of the museum spaces. Questionnaires were given to visitors of all ages after visiting. We also sampled entries from the visitors’ books.⁹ One last note must be made about the historical periods of the homes and the biographical memory of the visitors. In all but one of the homes we studied (Goethe’s), there are some visitors who either knew the famous individuals, have family members with first-hand experience of the time and place in which the protagonist lived, or who even visited the home when it was first opened. This biographical fact may affect those visitors’ experiences of familiarity with a person and the era which they project.¹⁰

Based on the practical and intimate knowledge of homes that visitors possess when they come to home museums, we find that these museums free the visitor from the need to perform the conversion of cultural capital that Bourdieu, Darbel, and Schnapper (1991) describe as part of the semiotic struggle that art museum visitors are engaged in. What is required of them is not to decode art (Fyfe, 2004) but rather to experience the home museum as someone’s former home, relate to the authenticity of its parts, even if, as stated earlier, they do not share the values or lifestyle of the person who lived in them. We thus suggest that visitors to home museums are doubly situated: in relation to the home that is exhibited and in relation to their own home. Atmosphere is thus created in the interplay between stories about (the) home, objects at home or in the home, and the situation of visitors in it.

Three types of stories are told to visitors to home museums. The first concerns the efforts made by managements of home museums to meet the requirements of having a space open to the public simultaneously with claiming to remain loyal to the original home. It is worth noting that ‘loyalty to the original home’ implies that the directors take one point in the history of the home as a structure and make an effort to maintain its authenticity. The first story that groups of visitors hear when they enter the home of Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv is the story of opening the house as a museum in 1974 after he died.

Visitors are ready to believe in the authenticity of a home even if the place is reconstructed based on incomplete knowledge of the original state. For instance, in the small dining room in Goethe’s house, the audio guide explains: ‘The room itself doesn’t contain the original furnishings. But most of the objects you see here do come from Goethe’s household or from his art collections.’ By stating that the original furnishing is missing and the artworks are from Goethe’s collection, the museum exposes the act of inventive reconstruction. By including the visitors as capable of understanding experts’ considerations, museums add credibility to the work of curation and provide an authentic ‘insider’ experience of visiting the homes.

The second form of constructing atmosphere through stories is that of telling anecdotes and giving information about the person who lived in the house and his or her work. The work of articulating how the assembly of individual objects and the overall contours of the homes affect the visitor’s experience is directed both by knowledge of an era (or lack thereof), of biographic knowledge and knowledge of oneself, through embodied experience at the home museums. In a guided tour on 6 October 2015 in the Brecht-Weigel home museum, the guide tells the visitors about the large office where Brecht used to work with colleagues: ‘It was never so organised here. Everyone smoked constantly and there were books and papers everywhere. The large bowls on the tables are not for fruit. They are ashtrays.’ Indeed, visiting home museums is often part of a project of Bildung, or the conscious cultivation of the self by visitors, who (in this case) reflect on work ethics and test their knowledge of the person and his time. In this guided tour, the visitors discussed the GDR work ethic that was encapsulated in the description of the chaotic conditions in the office.

The third form of stories that construct home atmosphere concerns those about the home itself. The difference between this form and the first one is that in the former, stories evolve around the preservation of the home and its transformation from the past to the present, while in the latter, the stories are about the way the home used to look and function in the past. For instance, there is an iconic story in Agnon’s house that is often shared when the visitors face the relics of the family’s living room. It symbolises how unapproachable Agnon was. The story is as follows:

The story is emblematic, in that it makes the connection between people, events, and home amenities. It uses the situatedness of visitors and guides in a specific home area. It also mimics the shtetl fable genre that Agnon’s own storytelling often used. Thus, the epistemology of home experience draws on the modes through which Agnon is remembered in his own style of storytelling. By using this genre and situating the story, atmosphere is created for the visitor in the very room and around the reconstructed setting in which it took place.

The sociological and anthropological literature agrees that authenticity is not inherent in objects but is rather a quality that is culturally constructed and that varies according to the context and who is observing the object (Jones, 2010). Experts such as art dealers, museum workers, and tour guides produce, negotiate, and mediate the authenticity of objects in museums (Stocking, 1985). They move objects between rooms, in and out of site and into exhibition space. Indeed, if art and historical museums re-contextualise objects by locating them next to other objects with which they are considered to be related, the home museum does the opposite: it produces scenes that spark curiosity by either preserving a room as it was, or creating a room which alludes to the life which took place there.

While atmosphere can be maintained even without objects that were part of the house or constructed as such, as the case of the Kollwitz House demonstrates, it is easier to maintain an atmosphere and tell stories when surrounded by props. In all but one of the home museums we studied, there are objects that symbolise domestic life, such as a bed, desk, or table. Interestingly, many home museums present objects such as a hat, cane, or suitcase, all marking the boundaries of home. Such ‘boundary objects’ become the centre of curiosity for visitors and tend to anchor museum exhibits.

In this section, we explore the objects’ agency and show how a few objects universally become central to the exhibition of homes. Domestic objects, now on display, tell how selves were cultivated, as Rochberg-Halton (1984) shows in the case of home objects. It is noteworthy that suitcases and glasses – both of which can be found in the homes we studied – are objects that often feature in historical museum exhibitions. They might signify a specific, literal, perspective, as in the case of glasses, or symbolise certain lives and lifestyle. Suitcases are often used as metaphorical vehicles and actual containers for stories of displacement, loss, migration, and travel. In home museums, movement is presented through the absent body that might have worn a hat, or walked with the aid of a cane, for Agnon, Brecht, Weizmann, or their representatives in modern urban centres. The hat, suitcase, and cane signify the movement of an individual (man) in and out of home, and are literal containers of the self, but not of home. In Einstein’s and Kollwitz’ homes, which are virtually empty, such items are absent. Leite (2007) suggests that empty scenery in tourism sites may develop surrogate objects that materialise absence by continuously referring to that which is not there, not replacing it, but rather working on its behalf. In this study, we recognise six types of object positioning in home museums that participate in constituting atmosphere:

• Unmoved and preserved objects – such as dining tables in the Ben-Gurion home, pots and pans in Brecht’s and Weigel’s kitchen, Weizmann’s, Goethe’s, Adenauer’s and Brecht’s study and deathbeds.

• Hidden objects: objects and spaces that are either hidden from the public eye (such as Brecht’s personal clothes and death masks) or have changed their utility altogether (for instance, Ben-Gurion’s bathroom in Tel Aviv has been turned into an office space). They are rarely mentioned and shown only to selected visitors.

• Replaced objects: this type corresponds to objects that were moved from their original location to more visible areas of the home. The suitcase under the desk in Weizmann’s home and the location of canes in different areas of Adenauer’s house, such as his bedroom and his pavilion study, are but a few examples.

• Absent objects: these are usually represented in a void signified by a story or a quotation or a photograph of how things used to look. A large black and white photo of Kollwitz’ room taken around the time of her death hangs in her ‘death room’ and is an example of absent objects that used to be in her room.

• Substitute objects: these are objects deemed essential to the atmosphere of this particular home, but not actually available as historical items. For instance, Einstein’s desk was rebuilt based on photos of the original; worn-out curtains in Weizmann’s house were replaced.

• Added objects: these are either objects that were part of the protagonist’s life outside the house or that are added in order to facilitate visitors’ comfort and expectations. Examples of the first type would be the official gifts given to David Ben-Gurion when he was Prime Minister and placed on exhibition in the home. The second type is exemplified by the addition of the Jewish Mezuza to the entrance of the home. This addition is exemplary of expectations of contemporary Jewish visitors as to what a Jewish home ought to look like and what a public institution in Israel today should do in order to accommodate visitors.

Through these types of dis/placed objects, we show that whether the death-bed is original or imported for the sake of creating and preserving atmosphere, in home museums, visitors do not need what Bruner (1994) terms ‘mimetic credibility’, since they are already in ‘the real place’, where many familiar stories begin, proceed, end, and can be understood. Most importantly, the visitor’s capacity to imagine ‘how things used to be’ crucially depends on his or her situating him/herself in a specific home and atmosphere.

Knell (2007, p. 26) argues that ‘objects […] affect our emotions in ways it is impossible to articulate at the very moment of standing by a centuries old object’. Jones (2010, p. 190) claims that ‘the materiality of objects embodies the past experiences and relationships that they have been part of, and facilitates some kind of ineffable contact with those experiences and relationships’. Following Handler's (1984) concept of the ‘objectification of culture’ in museums, we claim that home museums help visitors both to objectify their own homes and to make an immanent connection between their own experience of home, and that of the national culture on display in the great man’s home. They can then move from the most intimate ‘This is how my grandmother’s kitchen used to be,’ to a famous national meeting, such as the room in which the Declaration of Independence was drafted (in the Ben-Gurion House in Tel Aviv). According to Hoskins (2006), personal biographical objects in the museum arrive at a ‘temporal standstill’. This makes possible both the imagination of time past in which they were useful, together with the people who used them, and the temporal multitude we recognise in home museums and will present shortly.

Once considered dear or necessary, domestic objects are used to connect to other stories of the owner’s time within a certain memory atmosphere. In Ben-Gurion’s house as well as in Adenauer’s, there are telephones located in central intersections and corners to signify just how much responsibility they carried, as well as just how powerful and communicative the two were. The absence of a telephone, on the other hand, is often used to exemplify that Einstein was out of reach, as a metonym to stories told in the home about his theories being inaccessible to most people. In comparison to non-communicative or thrifty intellectuals, the fact that we have a heightened experience of materiality in a home such as Ben-Gurion’s, where many objects are compiled in a way that reminds visitors less of a domestic living place, does not suggest that the atmosphere is more pronounced. On the contrary, it is national. In this light, a central room in the guided tour in Ben-Gurion house is called both the Israeli Defence Forces room and Renana’s room. Indeed, it used to be his daughter’s (Renana’s) room, and when she left the home, it was converted to a room from which Ben-Gurion directed military operations. We know this because the room is not only full of military memorabilia, but because they are placed in a manner that conveys a strongly shared national sentiment of emergency. Moreover, the story told in this room is about a special wall – blocking a window – that was built before the 1956 war so that Ben-Gurion could be protected when he was directing military operations.

Situating visitors within a home area is part of the creation of atmosphere and is performed by guides through telling stories about the organisation and habits of a particular home. The following is taken from a guided tour in Einstein’s house. Guide: ‘I personally feel very much at ease here. I belong to this high-speed society. With my smartphone I am basically constantly available.’ The guide continues, relating that Einstein refused to have a phone installed in Caputh. ‘It was like a refuge here. This is how you should experience it too’ (31 October 2014). The rationale of guided tours is that visiting someone’s home is not only a different kind of experience from other museum visits, it is also one through which individuals can gain a unique knowledge and authentic experience of themselves. In the following example, a guide escorts a group of schoolchildren visiting Ben-Gurion’s desert home (3 February 2014). Before they enter, they are told that the cabin ‘has been kept in its original and authentic shape, as it was in 1973, when Ben-Gurion died.’ ‘So we will see the last year of his life.’ The tour guide asks the young visitors, ‘Why should you bother to visit the cabin? If you wish to learn about Ben-Gurion you can read a history book or surf the Internet.’ The children are not sure where she is heading, but the tour guide continues: ‘Imagine that I visit your home when you are not there. I will be able to tell something about the people who live there. A person’s home testifies to his personality, his worldview.’

At the end of the atmosphere continuum, one can find young visitors who toy with the possibility of actually meeting some of the home’s inhabitants: they ask the director of Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel Aviv whether she is Paula Ben-Gurion. In Adenauer’s house, visitors often ask what will happen if they pick up the Chancellor’s phone and press the red button: would the Chancellor be at the other end of the line today? In these instances, an uncanny feeling is evoked and reflected on, either by visitors or by the guide, often in the interaction between them, which positions the visitors strangely close in time and space to the famous people who occupied the home. In the home museum of Kollwitz, there is a telling difference, as Kollwitz lived there for less than a year and did not work there (since she was very sick); also, she did not choose her furniture. So ‘her spirit’ is not there, the director of the house told in an Interview (31 May 2016). What gives authenticity, indeed legitimacy, to the house is the fact that it is the only surviving house in which Kollwitz lived and is the one in which she died. Indeed, we did not hear visitors imagine her return, but instead, they asked whether the view from the balcony is the one she saw and reported on in her letters. Thus, in Kollwitz’s case, the atmosphere is not built from the material remains of her life in the house but from appropriating her gaze on a view and rendering it peaceful. No less importantly, it seems that visitors seek uncanny experiences like these when visiting home museums.

In locating the hat and cane on the bed, or hanging by a bedroom door, museum workers spur curiosity about the life that was lived in the house; this, together with knowledge of the work of curating, goes to create the unheimlich, or unhomely, uncanny feeling central to its particular experience. We found that specific ‘home fronts’ are more amenable to the construction of uncanny scenery and experience: parts that are intimate or transitory. We thus argue that the revealing and performing of the uncanny are modes through which authentic experience of dwelling as it once was are articulated so that the visiting self, the protagonist being visited and the home are negotiated. Home as a living place, but also as an idea, is where the uncanny originates, as part of the attempt to make the familiar unfamiliar. As Arnold-de Simine (2013) argues in the case of phantasmagoric spectres in museums, ‘The uncanny speaks of a form of alienation that estranges us from our own self, its desires and fears, but also from social life in which family dynamics are constantly reproduced’ (p. 187). The uncanny has been studied in museums (Arnold-de Simine, 2013), mainly in psychoanalytic terms around self, biography, family, and home (Bernstein, 2008; Booth, 2016; Hirsch & Spitzer, 2011).

According to Bernstein (2003), the uncanny has a particular textual structure that is bound up with subjective feelings. She maintains¹¹ that what characterises the uncanny is the impossibility of looking it straight in the eye, so that even if the uncanny is not conceived of as an irreducibly subjective sentiment, it calls not for a definition but rather as a formal textual structure: it ‘demands reading’ (p. 1112). She discusses the ambulatory qualities of the uncanny guest with his uncanny feeling of repetition or return to a known, yet unknown place: ‘the uncanny guest reminds us of the absence he presents’ (p. 1119). We saw this performed in the example in Ben-Gurion’s home. Thus, and this is also true in the curated uncanny in home museums, the walking body partakes in the creation of the uncanny atmosphere. The walking body, however, works differently in the uncanny text than at home, and even more obscurely in a museum. We recognise that the uncanny is constructed as an atmosphere alluding to absence and its tension with present objects, guides, and visitors in a museum. It is not written as a text but corresponds to texts written about a person, by them and about home, which add to the subjective feeling and intersubjective national memory atmosphere as they are mediated and experienced in home museums.

The conditions under which time and space are condensed in the home museum constitute the uncanny, namely the cohabitation of opposites of the real and near and the unknown and far. For instance, as a guide at the Brecht and Weigel house says upon entering Weigel’s bedroom, ‘This is not Helene Weigel’s spirit [Geist, also meaning “ghost” in German] but the squeaking floor.’ The move from text to reality, from one narrative frame to another, brings the uncanny, literally, home. Thus, the uncanny plays with the distinction between diachrony and synchrony, and connects disparate moments. Visitors inquire about the originality of the most miniscule home objects, such as a taped note with a recipe for making Ben-Gurion’s breakfast. The visitor’s expectation that the home has the power to preserve the most transient and mundane things rests on the condensation of time and disrupts the sequence of the story of life and death. The visitor interrupts the ghostly dance and thus tries to restore a homely circle into which they were not historically invited. Nevertheless, museum workers remark in interviews that they worry visitors might feel ‘too much at home’, lie on the beds or sit on chairs, and they have, in some cases, added ropes to protect the home from domestic use. Museum directors, all women at the time of our research in both countries, walk around the home and often ‘straighten up’ furniture, pictures, and carpets. The home museum becomes in many ways ‘theirs’.

Time and space become further condensed through the description of literal dimensions and degrees, such as (1) depth: in Agnon’s house, a guide tells a group that ‘in the depth of these rooms the greatest works of Hebrew literature in the twentieth century were written’. (2) Colour: in Goethe’s house, the audio guide describes ‘The vibrant yellow of the walls, which gave the room its name, was intended – as Goethe wrote in his Theory of Colours of 1810 – to create an atmosphere that was “cheerful, lively and mildly stimulating.”’ (3) Size: small and large rooms convey need, class, and mobility. These are all seemingly spatial, although the time it takes to go through a room or a house is part of its calculated duration of experience. Time and space become condensed in the use of comparisons, specifically resting on the tension between Scarcity and Abundance, as in the following two examples.

A guide told us in Brecht-Weigel’s House, looking at Brecht’s bedroom (25 April 2014): ‘This is the room in which he died. To me it is like a room in a cloister. Like Goethe, he did not need much for himself.’ The same guide tells visitors later on about Brecht’s love for sports cars (standing where his sports car used to be parked). This example helps us to demonstrate that the condensation of time and space is more likely to be performed around dramatic moments and important areas of the home in relation to the protagonist. The empty home enables an examination of the most crucial objects or stories though which one recognizes a home, and we found that there are, in fact, none. In Kollwitz’s house, there is a nightstand on which, during the spring, the museum workers place magnolias, flowers that were documented to have been brought to her grave in April 1945. The crew told in an interview on the 70th anniversary of Kollwitz’s death (23 April 2015): ‘When the magnolias are in bloom, it works.’ In our last example, from Kollwitz’s House, we discuss an effort to revisit national historical narratives of suffering in the Second World War in the service of a serene atmosphere:

One way to understand how Kollwitz’s granddaughter comes to deflect 1995 beauty 50 years back onto 1944 can be found in this condensation of time: the movement between ‘now’ and ‘again’ in relation to home is an idea captured in her testimony. More interesting still, we suggest, is the need to remember her last days, surrounded by a bucolic view, as well as the restoration carried out after Germany’s reunification – one that erases the dichotomies and loss immanent to war. Moreover, the idea of Heimat conveyed in the quotation is stronger than that of destruction in war, stronger even than the need of the family to reverberate what was most precious to Kollwitz, the patriotic pacifist. War and suffering were pronounced in guided tours and in interviews with museum workers, and still, when they reflected on Kollwitz’s end of life, it is the beauty that she allegedly experienced that is most central to them.

This example, we suggest, reveals how national memory atmosphere is constructed: time and space are condensed around narrative elements that are paramount in telling a historical story about Kollwitz, the GDR hero, that resonates with what visitors find most important and around important objects symbolising this continuity. But, more crucial to our study, the story facilitates Kollwitz as a bridge to a world in which not the burning Dresden, but a lake, the geese, and a castle fill the gaze. This is done while looking out the window from her ‘death room’, thus without denying her the role of the artistic woman who drew suffering and injustice in war, particularly as they affected women and children. Rather, in utilising the home where she died, the national memory atmosphere is sustained by facilitating a vision into both the time before the war (the old home and the castle) and afterwards, where they remain standing under azure blue skies.

Both in Germany and in Israel, stories, objects, and situatedness are practices shared by directors, guides, and other memory agents. The same can be said about visitors to the home museums. The structure and component of atmosphere go beyond cultural and national specifics and contingencies. This is no small feat, especially because the famous figures whose homes have become public had an international appeal but at the same time a very significant local presence. They were all national heroes. The only exception to creating intimacy in the present is Goethe’s home museum, where the relevant history and memories are further away in time. Visitors and the audio guides cannot and do not bring either their memories or memories of their family members to assist and reiterate what they experience in this specific home. However, this does not deter visitors from the sense of deep impression and importance ascribed to nineteenth-century Romanticism as a framing atmosphere to what is both noble about German culture and connected to a visit to Goethe’s home; but it also attests to the limits of personal connection to the scene.

The home museum is a unique space that orients our attention to events and memories connected to national events and private lives. The more intimate a room is, the more loaded the tension and ‘bridges’ created to facilitate the coexistence of the two. Classical music records are on a table in Adenauer’s bedroom – those he listened to in his last hours. The Bible is placed by Ben-Gurion’s bed in both his homes. However, the homes do not simply serve as background for the understanding of historical events but rather as sites in which the particular worldview of the person to whose house one comes, is present, and where historical narratives and their systems of justification can be exchanged, tested, and recharged with various meanings.

In the home museum, visitors can oscillate between the various identity positions performed as ‘guests’ of the historic personage memorialised: as family member, citizen, and cultural connoisseur. In the home museum – and this is a difference from art museums – as Gable and Handler (2006) show, such oscillation is legitimate and invited. Visitors can ask themselves what they enter the museum as and this position changes between the rooms (in one as a political observer, in the other as a mother); this bears out the claim by both Kumar and Makarova (2008) and Honig (1994) that the private and public are not separate and autonomous spheres, but rather interact and constitute one another. In studying this at home museums, we show them as institutions where one can illuminate the intricate ways in which these processes are enacted, musealised, and remembered.

This article has offered a sociological consideration of atmosphere construction, maintenance, and experience. This is done in three interrelated practices by guides: (1) telling stories about the home itself, about secrets of the home’s operation, and the people who lived in the home; (2) seeing and talking about objects at home, ranging from items that have been historically preserved to ones that have been added; (3) the situation of visitors within the home at times enables a visceral experience of time and space condensation. We have shown how the experience of the uncanny both contributes to the construction of atmosphere, and serves as its limit case. We hope that our research opens the discussion of atmosphere and the uncanny for future studies in the sociology of museums and sociology in general.

People inhabit a home. At the same time, they are also inhabited by that home as a kind of possession, signified by its capacities and imaginaries. Maintaining atmosphere in home museums directs attention to institutional requirements, cultural predicaments, and market demands. Inquiring about the relations between objects at home, stories about home, and the situatedeness of visitors advances our understanding of authenticity beyond the binary division between constructivism and materialism, and the consideration of the uncanny as a phenomenon of atmosphere, communicable and traceable in museum experience.

Is a home museum a time capsule? It certainly bears its own memories that are not directly related to or affected by major historical events, and which did not ‘take place’ within its confines, besides the work of writing and of hosting. We claim that this type of museum has much to teach us both about atmosphere, and about the potentiality of space which may constitute its ‘feeling’. If visitors are attuned and relate to stories told in those museums, it is because they are situated and are invited to make similar classifications related to home. Home museums thus offer a new way of understanding the sociological meaning of the intangibility of atmosphere. The past is no longer a foreign country. Nor is it perceived as fully mediated. On the contrary, the past is presented as felt, close, familiar, and shared, leaving the ghosts of what is not sharable or known as part of the story of home.

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, and to our research assistants, Lotte Thaa in Germany, Tali (Hamutal) Jaffe-Dax, Tahel Goldsmith, and Noam Keren in Israel, for their help in collecting and coding the data. We are indebted to the museum directors, workers, and guides who offered their experience and thoughts.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.