Does War Belong In Museums

Presentations of war and violence in museums generally oscillate between the fascination of terror and its instruments and the didactic urge to explain violence and, by analysing it, make it easier to handle and prevent. The museums concerned also have to face up to these basic issues about the social and institutional handling of war and violence. Does war really belong in museums? And if it does, what objectives and means are involved? Can museums avoid trivializing and aestheticising war, transforming violence, injury, death and trauma into tourist sights? What images of shock or identification does one generate - and what images would be desirable?

The First World War’s centenary generated a mass of commemorative activity worldwide. Officially and unofficially; individually, collectively and commercially; locally, nationally and internationally, efforts were made to respond to the legacies of this vast conflict. This book explores some of these responses from areas previously tied to the British Empire, including Australia, Britain, Canada, India and New Zealand. Showcasing insights from historians of commemoration and heritage professionals it provides revealing insider and outsider perspectives of the centenary. How far did commemoration become celebration, and how merited were such responses? To what extent did the centenary serve wider social and political functions? Was it a time for new knowledge and understanding of the events of a century ago, for recovery of lost or marginalised voices, or for confirming existing clichés? And what can be learned from the experience of this centenary that might inform the approach to future commemorative activities? The contributors to this book grapple with these questions, coming to different answers and demonstrating the connections and disconnections between those involved in building public knowledge of the ‘war to end all wars’.

Nominated for the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in non-fiction This volume examines peace museums, a small and important (but often overlooked) series of museums whose numbers have multiplied world-wide in recent decades. They relate stories and display artifacts—banners, diaries, and posters for example about such themes as: art and peace, antiwar histories, protest, peacekeeping and social justice and promote cultures of peace. This book introduces their different approaches from Japan, which has the largest number of sites, to Bradford, UK and Guernica, Spain. Some peace museums and centers emphasize popular peace symbols and figures, others provide alternative narratives about conscientious objection or civil disobedience, and still others are sites of persuasion, challenging the status quo about issues of war, peace, disarmament, and related issues. Introducing Peace Museums distinguishes between different types of museums that are linked to peace in name, theme or purpose and discusses the debates which surround peace museums versus museums for peace. This book is the first of its kind to critically evaluate the exhibits and activities of this group of museums, and to consider the need for a "critical peace museum studies" which analyses their varied emphasis and content. The work of an experienced specialist, this welcome introduction to peace museums considers the challenges and opportunities faced by these institutions now and in the future.

This book explores how recent Colombian historical memories are informed by cultural diversity and how some of the country’s citizens remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the internal war (1980-2016). Its chapters delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and what not to represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth case study, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their way of remembering, which emphasizes peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. By bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, this text contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. By drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, Jimena Perry shows how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. This volume is of great use to students and scholars interested in Latin American and public history.

This book discusses the merits of the theory of agonistic memory in relation to the memory of war. After explaining the theory in detail it provides two case studies, one on war museums in contemporary Europe and one on mass graves exhumations, which both focus on analyzing to what extent these memory sites produce different regimes of memory. Furthermore, the book provides insights into the making of an agonistic exhibition at the Ruhr Museum in Essen, Germany. It also analyses audience reaction to a theatre play scripted and performed by the Spanish theatre company Micomicion that was supposed to put agonism on stage. There is also an analysis of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed and delivered on the theory of agonistic memory and its impact on the memory of war. Finally, the book provides a personal review of the history, problems and accomplishments of the theory of agonistic memory by the two editors of the volume.

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals’ versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it the ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative.

The Second World War is omnipresent in contemporary memory debates. As the war fades from living memory, this study is the first to systematically analyze how Second World War museums allow prototypical visitors to comprehend and experience the past. It analyzes twelve permanent exhibitions in Europe and North America – including the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the House of European History in Brussels, the Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester, and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans – in order to show how museums reflect and shape cultural memory, as well as their cognitive, ethical, emotional, and aesthetic potential and effects. This includes a discussion of representations of events such as the Holocaust and air warfare. In relation to narrative, memory, and experience, the study develops the concept of experientiality (on a sliding scale between mimetic and structural forms), which provides a new textual-spatial method for reading exhibitions and understanding the experiences of historical individuals and collectives. It is supplemented by concepts like transnational memory, empathy, and encouraging critical thinking through difficult knowledge.

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts. Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the military came into existence during this period. Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the State Art Collections Dresden. Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.