Exhibiting the Pain of Others: Museums, Violence and Memory

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor and tutor: Silke Arnold-de Simine
• Assessment: one 5000-word essay (100%)

In the last 20 years the museum as institution has gone through a period of redefining its role and its function in society. One of the results is a new type of history museum which could be more aptly described as a 'memory museum'. Susan Sontag used this as a generic term for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (1993), the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001) and Yad Vashem (revamped in 2005). However, it should be noted that the globalisation of Holocaust memory means that museum practices developed in these museums have been used as templates for a diverse range of museums which engage with modern atrocities on the basis of collective mourning. This ethical dimension of the museum blurs the distinction between the museum and the memorial. The term 'memorial museum' stands for museums commemorating violent histories that led to mass suffering such as war, dictatorship, annihilation and displacement.

Memory museums have proliferated over the last 15 years as a globally successful type of history museum and have diversified into a range of 'sub-genres' which can be seen to address a range of very different historical events and periods. They form part of an international debate about human rights, restitution and justice. That does not mean that they necessarily transcend national perspectives and contribute to transnational understanding. Memory museums claim to democratise the authoritative master narratives and presciptive vantage points of historiography by providing access to a range of diverse memories. However, most of them are still producing master narratives which are an integral part of identity politics. In this module we will attempt to problematise the appropriation of the Holocaust iconography and exhibition practices by looking at examples of 'memory museums' in Germany, Great Britain and France.

Indicative module syllabus

• Commemorative discourses and the 'memorial museum'
• The Holocaust Museum and the birth of the Memory Museum
• Jewish Museum (2001) and Holocaust Memorial with Documentation Centre, Berlin (2005); Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (2005)
• War Museums: German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst (1995) and Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne (1992)
• Contested pasts in the museum
• GDR Museum, Berlin (2006)
• Liverpool International Slavery Museum (2007)
• Migration Museums: German Emigration Centre, Bremerhaven (2005)
• Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris (2007)
• Memory Media and the museum environment