Architecture & Memory: August 2014

The original briefing was to visit places that were holding exhibitions about the WWI, as this year is the centenary of its beginning. As it is also the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day, exhibitions about WWII would also interest a visit. The goal is to make a library of memory and study how each place is dealing with the problem of memory and History. First I did some research about the places I could go. I found out that the only countries focused on remembering First World War are the UK, France and Belgium, which made my task a bit hard, and I end up visiting more places related to Second World War. To build the library of memory many pictures were taken. Then, some research about each place and about the issue of memory and History. I visited five museums and four monuments. The museums were: Hollandsche Shouwbourg, Anne Frank House, NS-Doukumentationszentrum, Military History Museum, and Jewish Museum-Palais Eskeles. The monuments were: Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Artillery Memorial, Australian War Memorial, Infantry Memorial. I first talk about the museums and then about monuments, making observations on each of them and commenting how they deal with issues of memory. The reflections are a by-product of my visits to these places and of the reading of a selected bibliography related to matters of memory and History.

All museums I have visited as part of this research share a common topic of exhibition - the World Wars. However, each of them present a different aspect of the topic and with distinct architectural characteristics. The Hollandsche Schowburg, in Amsterdam, focus on Jewish persecution during the World War II and on what has since happened to the building it is located in. Anne Frank Huis – in the same city – present the history of Anne Frank and her family during the time of their hideout. The museum is located in the building that really was the house of the family during the War years. The NS-Dokumentationszentrum from Cologne is located in a building that used to be a Gestapo headquarter and a prison – and that it there conserved and is accessible to the public as part of its exhibition – and presents mostly reports from the Nazi regime. The main exhibition of the Jewish museum in the Palais Eskeles of Vienna is about Viennese Jewish history, but the temporary exhibition I have visited was focused on the participation of these people in the World War I. The Military History Museum, also in Vienna, presents a collection of War objects – from difference times and military conflicts, including the two World Wars.

Each of these museums show different approaches on how to deal with the exhibition. According to the way each of them expose and present their topics – and to the nature of those – I think it is possible to classify the museums I have visited in two groups, that I call here (a) History Museums and (b) Memory museums. Anne Frank Huis, Hollandsche Schouwburg and NS-Dok would be part of the first group, while Palais Eskeles and the Museum of Military History could be understood as History museums.

The memory museums were the ones I felt that were more touching. They make use of testimonials and show personal objects and make use of all kinds of media with the intention of making visitors feel how much people had lived and suffered in reality. The museums I have classified as History museums seems to try to avoid the emotional appeal – focusing on more objectivity and factuality.

No museum I have been to was historically impartial. And they do not try to be like that. There is, however, a huge difference, for example, between the way Palais Eskeles and Hollandsche Schouwburg present the subject of how Jews have been persecuted in the WWII and the way. hile Palais Eskeles has panels explaining the facts, and also some letters and maps, Hollandsche Schouwburg shows you lots of pictures, letters, personal objects and videos with deportation scenes and survivors testimonies.

All museums I have visited as part of this research share a common topic of exhibition - the World Wars. However, each of them present a different aspect of the topic and with distinct architectural characteristics. The Hollandsche Schowburg, in Amsterdam, focus on Jewish persecution during the World War II and on what has since happened to the building it is located in. Anne Frank Huis – in the same city – present the history of Anne Frank and her family during the time of their hideout. The museum is located in the building that really was the house of the family during the War years. The NS-Dokumentationszentrum from Cologne is located in a building that used to be a prison – and that it there conserved and is accessible to the public as part of its exhibition – and presents mostly reports from the Nazi regime. The main exhibition of the Jewish museum in the Palais Eskeles of Vienna is about Viennese Jewish history, but the temporary exhibition I have visited was focused on the participation of these people in the World War I. The Military History Museum, also in Vienna, presents a collection of War objects – from difference times and military conflicts, including the two World Wars.

The memory museums were the ones I felt that were more touching. They present testimonials and show personal objects and make use of all kinds of media with the intention of making visitors feel how people had lived and suffered in reality. The museums I have classified as History museums seems to try to avoid the emotional appeal – focusing more on objectivity and factuality.

No museum I have been to was historically impartial. And they do not try to be like that. There is, however, a huge difference, for example, between the way Palais Eskeles and Hollandsche Schouwburg present the subject of how Jews have been persecuted in the WWII and the way Palais Eskeles shows it. Palais Eskeles has panels explaining the facts, and also some letters and maps, Hollandsche Schouwburg shows you lots of pictures, letters, personal objects and videos with deportation scenes and survivors testimonies.

Anne Frank Huis would be the museum that better fits and showcase what the category of Memory Museum would be about. First of all, it is based on memories, the diary of Anne Frank, so it could not be classified anyway else. The exhibition is all about testimonials and personal objects; none of it is other than memories. On the other hand, the Military History Museum tries not to give way to memory, at least not in a very emotional way. It sticks only to war objects and explanatory panels, mainly focusing on historical facts.

No History museum is free of memories, especially the one that are more focused on modern and contemporary history. There is a great amount material about it and there is no completely objective telling of History. In fact, museums are tools that reproduce, maintain and recreate memory. All studied museums, I could perceive, show a bit of resentment or partiality regarding their reading of the Past, but some were more explicit than others. Some topics or approaches seems to be given more relevance at the expense of others. The subject of the Jews in WWII is, of course, the one that fits this comment better, for the quantity of memory objects and documents that are exposed is huge. It is noticeable, for example, the lack of mentions, in the places I have visited, to other groups that were also persecuted by the Nazis - the mentally or physically disabled people, homosexuals, Romani, and other religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It is also important to point out that the museums I have classified as Memory museums are also the ones located in original places – buildings that were important to some level during the conflicts of World War. All of them were witnesses of Nazi actions. This partially explain why they were turned in museums with focus on memory. From the three memory museums, the NS-Dok is the only one that has an exhibition that is more historical. I have classified it as a Memory Museum because It has a memorial prison, which really explore matters of memory, but it also has an exhibition about the Nazi movement, that tries to be more historical, although not completely free of the memory appeal.

After all, all the museums presented me something new. My knowledge about the World Wars is really basic, but I have come to discover some things that were really revealing to me. For me, the Hollandsche Schouwburg and Palais Eskeles were the more enlightening. The first showed how Netherlands was involved in the Holocaust, and the second, how Austria had always institutionalized segregation against Jews and other groups. All of the museums had something new for me, but I believe this two were the more striking aspects.

When thinking about the monuments my first assumption was that they fail in their task of remembering. Based on my own experience, people tend to ignore statues and monuments across the city in their everyday lives. To exemplify, in 2008 the artist Eduardo Srur put life jackets in monuments and statues of São Paulo, Brazil, to call attention to them, as they were often ignored. After a while, people tend to ignore the world around them, in the case of monuments, tend to ignore their significance and meaning.

After reflecting a little further I have started considering monuments not so unsuccessful. When I visited the monuments, all of them had people around looking at them and seeing what they were about. As the monuments were in public, and a bit busy, spaces they consequently reached more people then many museums. Although they don’t tell much about the conflicts they try to remember, they call attention for the matter.

It is a bit hard to compare the different monuments, as they are really similar, with the exception of the Australian War Monument, which is the only contemporary one. All the others have a neoclassical style. With the exception of the Machine Gun Corps Monument, all of them referred to both First and Second World War, which can demonstrate the vision of the two conflicts being, actually, just one, or being remembered not because of their specificities, but to what they had in common.

When walking around London you see a great range of monuments, and one can identify big differences between the more recent and the older ones. Contemporary monuments are much less figurative. All of them, either old or recent, have many symbolic meanings, with choices that are linked to many matters, from the figures represented to the choice of material. People often need a previous knowledge about mythology, history, or symbolism to fully understand what is being represented. But this does not prevent the monuments from calling attention to certain topics.

Consider this kind of monument effective does not prevent us from thinking about other forms of remembering. Before taking part on this research I had visited some cities in Europe that used other remembering means. Munich and Budapest have many conflicts to remember, but the two cities, in opposition with London, are not full of monuments. Munich has subtle ways to mark the importance of places, two that caught my attention were a plaque, in the façade of a building, explaining, for example, that the place was a Jewish shop before the Nazi regime. There was, also, one alley that had some gold tiles. My researches on it indicated that they were there to mark the way people went to avoid Nazi officers. Budapest has another different way in remembering its past. When walking through the city you can see many buildings that are not in good conditions, but these are actually preserved buildings with the marks of shots and bombs.

As I mentioned before, there is no telling of History that could be completely objective. This become really clear when visiting different museums and memorials. In each one of them it was possible to find the partiality of memory. Remembering is also a political issue. People chose what to remember and what to forget, what suits better each policy has more chances to be remembered. That’s why, in my opinion, memory is much more valued than history in many museums.

Some further questionings.

When receiving the brief my first move was to make a table with some countries I could visit and their museums and memorials about the two World Wars. What first caught my attention was the difference in the number of places about the WWI and of the places about WWII. There is a much greater focus all around Europe in the WWII. I could think of many reasons for that, but what kept me intrigued was that the focus on WWII is so big that WWI is almost forgotten. The majority of places about WWI are military museums and battlefields, these ones normally in places not easy to reach.

Specially after reading some texts about memory, I have questioned myself a lot about the way Europe, in general, deals with these conflicts and their remembering. What first came to my mind was that WWII was, maybe, a lot more shocking and actually involved more countries, which made the focus on it grow. But the fact that WWI, we could say, caused WWII should be enough to bring more attention to it. It is also interesting to notice that only the winners countries are commemorating WWI, it was really hard to find something about WWI in Germany, for example. Also, when talking about WWI the focus is often in the soldiers and the ones who died fighting.

When analysing the expositions about WWII the first thing that came to my mind, after the visits, was the focus on Jew persecution and the lack of information about the other groups who were persecuted. This focus, for me, is not explained only by that fact that majority of persecuted were Jews. Actually, when thinking about it, what comes to my mind is that this is more a political strategy then any other thing. The second point that caught my attention was the focus on associating the Nazi eugenic policy only with Germany. As shown in Hollandsche Schouwburg the Netherlands government was consensual about it. Other countries like France and even Italy are never mentioned. When showing these facts normally these countries appear as “Nazi occupation”, trying to exclude the guilt of other countries, besides Germany, for the Holocaust. A recent article in the newspaper The Guardian showed how, all around Europe, Anti-Semitic actions were taking place due to the Israel attacks in Gaza. The article showed that the actions were not simply protests against Israel’s policy, but actually against Jews. They talked about attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops.

WWII has an enormous amount of memory documents, which makes it really hard to differentiate memory and history. I think this is why WWII is so remembered, there is so many testimonies that people see themselves obliged to remember. But, as Andreas Huyssin points out in his book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory “Memory after all, can be no substitute for justice, and justice itself will inevitably be entangled in the unreliability of memory.” (HUYSSIN, 2003 p.28). In this same book the author also points out that nowadays, with the growth of media, in general, history and memory are merchandise, which causes alienation. The article on The Guardian shows that. Apart from the great amount of information about the WWII, easily found anywhere, history almost repeats itself.

References:

DUINDAM, D., 2011. The Hollandsche Schouwburg as a lieu de mémoire. Ph.D.-project, University of Amsterdam.

HUYSSIN, Andreas. Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

MENESES, Ulpiano T. Bezerra de. A História, Cativa da Memória? Para um mapeamento da memória no campo das Ciências Sociais. Revista do Instituto Brasileiro de Estatística, 34:9,24, 1992