Culture Critique
March 2011 v 2 No 1
The German Historical Museum (DHM) as Memorial
Museum: Time, Place, and Space in the Musealization of the
German Past
By Sarah Jaques-Ross
Abstract: In his 2007 book, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate
Atrocities, Paul Williams argues for a specific kind of museum—a memorial museum. The
framework and criteria he presents for the memorial museum provide a useful tool in
evaluating the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin. Building upon his work, I argue
that although the DHM was not originally proposed or built as a traditional memorial, its
function is memorializing: it both presents—through its exhibit—and represents—through its
historical and geographical context—a redemptive, triumphal narrative of German history.
The function of the DHM as a memorial museum becomes apparent through an
examination of the historical moment of its conception, its place, and its arrangement of
space. For example, its conception by the Kohl government during the mid-1980s at the
height of the Historikerstreit alludes to the politicized nature of the museum. Furthermore,
seen in light of some of the earlier proposed locations, the museum’s presence on Unter den
Linden in the Zeughaus may be understood as an attempt to both evade the overpowering
Nazi past and look to the future of a unified, liberal democratic Germany. And finally, the
arrangement of space in the museum’s main exhibit complements the historical and
geographical context of DHM by presenting a chronological, progression of German history.
This chronological presentation is replete with emotive and experiential features, such as
differences in lighting and pathways for the visitor which accentuate the traumas and
triumphs represented by the museum’s displays. Ultimately, the inseparably intertwined
micro-narratives of the DHM’s historical context, place, and space create a triumphal
memorial museum, which seems to simultaneously illustrate, overcome, and, perhaps, evade
Germany’s fraught past.
Sarah Jaques-Ross is a doctoral student in the History Department at Claremont Graduate
University. Her overarching field is the history of modern Europe, but her specific
interests are in German intellectual history and memory studies.
culture critique, the online journal of the cultural studies program at CGU,
situates culture as a terrain of political and economic struggle. The journal
emphasizes the ideological dimension of cultural practices and politics, as
well as their radical potential in subverting the mechanisms of power and
money that colonize the life-world.
http://ccjournal.cgu.edu
© 2011
Culture Critique
March 2011 v 2 No 1
Introduction: My Encounter with a Museum in a City of
Memorials
During a trip to Berlin in 2008, when I was wandering down Unter den Linden
toward the Brandenburg Gate, I came upon a large museum on the west bank of the Spree
River—the German Historical Museum (DHM). Always intrigued by museums and
especially by the physical and symbolic monumentality of this one, I entered the building
and was immediately captivated by this institution that claimed to tell the story of
German history through its collection of objects. The museum so enthralled me that I
ended up staying there for the rest of that day, as well as the majority of the next day.
Immediately after my visit, I was convinced that the DHM was the “best” museum I had
ever experienced. This reaction was in no small part due to my personal fascination with
German history and the materiality of history in general, yet also because of the almost
seamless narrative that the museum seemed to tell. This narrative seemed
comprehensive, incorporating triumphal aspects of German history, such as its victory
over Napoleon, as well as horrific periods, such as the Third Reich and the Holocaust. At
the end of my tour through the “ups and downs” of German history, I had a sense of
satisfaction and closure. This sense of satisfaction and closure was due not only to the
comprehensiveness of the exhibit, but also because the conclusion of the exhibit offered a
kind of “happy ending”—reunification after the Cold War—to the fraught and contested
history of Germany.
This feeling was not to last, however, for upon exiting the museum and walking
around Berlin, I was continually confronted with the burdens of Germany’s past. Some
of Berlin’s main tourist sites, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the
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Topography of Terror, the Stasi Museum, and chunks of the Berlin Wall, portrayed a less
triumphal version of Germany’s past than did the DHM. So the fundamental question
that arose for me, and which this paper seeks to provisionally answer, is how the DHM
fits in with Germany’s historical memory. My contention is that the DHM is a memorial
museum, which commemorates Germany’s “overcoming” of its traumatic past through
reunification.
The Memorial Museum: A Theoretical Framework
In his 2007 book, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate
Atrocities, Paul Williams argues for a distinct category of commemoration—the
memorial museum. This commemorative form, according to Williams, is a blend of the
memorial, which he defined as “anything that serves in remembrance of a person or
event,” and the museum, or “an institution devoted to the acquisition, conservation,
study, exhibition, and educational interpretation of objects with scientific, historical, or
artistic value.” 1 The memorial museum, according to Williams is a “specific kind of
museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind.” 2
The examples of memorial museums which Williams discusses in his book fit these
criteria quite literally, for he includes such commemorative places as the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Museum, the District Six Museum in Cape Town, and the Nanjing
Massacre Memorial Museum. Indeed, all of these museums are dedicated to specific
events or periods in which certain groups suffered. Yet, Williams’s definition of the
1
Paul Harvey Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, English ed.
(Oxford: Berg, 2007), 7-8.
2
Williams, Memorial Museums, 8.
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memorial museum is too narrow and neglects the original, separate definitions that he
offers for the memorial and the museum.
Whereas he at first defines a memorial broadly as “anything that serves in the
remembrance of a person or event,” he narrows the term in his concept of “memorial
museum” to incorporate only events in which mass suffering or trauma occurred.
However, memorials are not necessarily only for commemorating suffering and thus sites
of mourning. Rather, as James Young notes in The Texture of Memory, memorials can
also be triumphal, commemorating victories or the overcoming of obstacles. Similarly, at
first, Williams appears to understand the museum as a kind of dispassionate, objective
institution dedicated to education and conservation. He states that the museum is
“concerned with interpretation, contextualization, and critique,” but this is where his
discussion of the museum ends. 3
However, the functions of interpreting,
contextualizing, and critiquing are all influenced by particular viewpoints. In the case of
museums, the narrative told through its exhibits is dependent upon such factors as
funding sources, the mission statement under which it operates, the particular interests of
the curators, and the intended audience.
Tony Bennett discusses the origins of museums in his 1995 book, The Birth of the
Museum. The museum, in Bennett’s discussion, has various layers and functions. For
instance, in 19th century Britain, one can understand the history museum as intertwined
with the projects of reform and the development of a citizenry. The museum was, in part,
designed as a space in which the working classes could mingle with the middle classes
and learn to emulate their manners and lifestyles. Furthermore, by providing a
3
Williams, Memorial Museums, 8.
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narrative—whether national, evolutionary, or something else—with which the visitor
could identify, the museum functioned as an educative space in the service of specific
state, social, or cultural projects.
Bennett’s analysis of the birth and development of the museum complicates
Williams’s idea of a memorial museum by expanding the functions of the museum.
Rather than thinking about the museum as a kind of neutral institution for education and
conservation—which Williams thinks the concept of a memorial museum has changed—
one must understand the museum as necessarily layered with multiple covert and overt
political, cultural, and social agendas and biases, which contribute to specific narratives
and functions of the institution. Thus, the museum and the narrative(s) it offers through
its objects, place, space, and historical moment is itself a kind of memorial to the social,
political, and cultural forces which gave rise to it and which continue to influence it.
Therefore, memorial museums need not be exclusively dedicated to mass suffering or
trauma as Williams argues. Indeed, if we use aspects of Williams’s evaluative
framework for memorial museums to interrogate other kinds of museums, their
memorializing features become apparent.
In particular, Williams’s framework relies heavily on three ideas. First, he states
that “it is useful to consider all existing memorial museums not as predestined and stable,
but as the result of particular power struggles.” 4 In short, memorial museums are
politicized—they are both products of contention and debate and, in part, instruments of
particular social, cultural, and political interests. Second, the place of a memorial
museum is usually integral to its function and meaning as a memorial. Place in a
4
Williams, Memorial Museums, 107.
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relational sense can add to the grandeur or importance of the memorial museum, and
place can also add a kind of authenticity to the experience. Third, the arrangement of
space within a memorial museum is important for the experience of the visitor. One of
the functions of a memorial museum is to provoke an emotional or visceral response in
the visitor rather than just a cognitive or intellectual response so that the visitor can, in a
sense, experience the trauma which is being memorialized. The arrangement of space in
the museum can promote this kind of experience. An evaluation of the DHM according
to these categories reveals that one may in fact understand it as a memorial museum
dedicated to Germany’s past, with a narrative suggesting that the nation has overcome the
traumas of its history.
The Historical Moment of the DHM: A Contested Past and
National Identity
In Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s 1983 state of the nation address, he outlined plans
for two museums of German history—the Deutsches Historisches Museum (the DHM) in
Berlin and the Haus der Geschichte (House of History) in Bonn. The House of History,
located in the capital, was to focus on the history of the FRG, while the DHM would
exhibit “memorabilia of the German national territories since their origins.” 5 These
museums, according to Kohl, would help Germans “present our history to ourselves, with
its greatness and its calamitousness, nothing removed, nothing added. We must accept
our history, like it was and is: a core of European existence in the middle of the
5
Charles S Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), 121.
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continent.” 6 While Kohl had hoped to open the museum in 1987 during the 750th
anniversary of Berlin, the project became mired in debate and then was further delayed as
a result of German unification in the early 1990s. The permanent collection as it is
currently comprised and arranged did not open until 2006. The DHM main building,
which houses its permanent collection, is located on Unter den Linden (Berlin’s main
thoroughfare) in the former Zeughaus, or arsenal, built during the 18th century. 7
Historians have situated this project for a German Historical Museum within
various political, social, and cultural contexts. Both Geoff Eley and Charles Maier have
understood the museum project and the debate it prompted as a part of the
Historikerstreit, or “Historians’ Debate,” of the 1980s which, as Eley described it in
1988, was “the most recent instalment [sic] in a continuing debate about how the German
past is to be addressed for public pedagogical purposes. But it also reflects a particular
moment in West German intellectual and political life, in which questions of national
identity have returned to the centre of public discussion.” 8 Amidst numerous
international and domestic events such as World War II anniversaries, Germany’s
participation in NATO, and the shift to a more conservative leadership with Helmut Kohl
6
This is my translation. The original German is, “…wir, die Deutschen, müssen uns unserer Geschicht
stellen, mit ihrer Grösse und ihrem Elend, nichts wegnehmen, nichts hinzufügen. Wir müssen unsere
Geschichte nehmen, wie sie war und ist: ein Kernstück europäischer Existenz in der Mitte des Continents.”
“Auszüge aus der Regierungserklärung des Bundeskanzlers Helmut Kohl vor dem Deutschen Bundestag in
Bonn am 4. Mai 1983,” in Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen, Kontroversen, Perspektiven, ed.
Christoph Stölzl, 249 (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1988).
7
The DHM also has a separate building designed by I.M.Pei behind the Zeughaus, which opened in 2003
and houses the museum’s temporary exhibitions. For more information on Pei’s building, see The I. M. Pei
and Deutsches Historisches Museum, I.M. Pei: Der Ausstellungsbau Für Das Deutsche Historische
Museum Berlin = The Exhibitions Building of the German Historical Museum Berlin / Kretzschmar,
Ulrike. (Munich ; New York: Prestel, 2003). For information on the museum’s temporary exhibits see the
DHM website, http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/ausst.html.
8
Geoff Eley, “Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit,
1986-1987,” Past & Present, No. 121 (Nov. 1988), 178. See also, Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past:
History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988);
according to Maier, “Although the lines of division were not identical, the debate over the museums could
be seen as one aspect of the historians’ controversy,” 121-122.
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and the CDU/CSU (the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social
Union of Bavaria), Germany’s national identity and its relationship to the nation’s past
became an important issue both domestically and internationally.
In the Historikerstreit, conservative historians such as Ernst Nolte and Michael
Stürmer (who was also an advisor in the Kohl government) called for a kind of revision
of German history in which the Nazi past was either relativized or ignored in order to
create a “usable” identity for Germany. For instance, in his infamous essay, “The Past
that will Not Pass” published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1986, Nolte
laments the fact that the National Socialist past in current discourse seemed to be
“becoming more vital and more powerful—not as a representative model but as a
bugaboo,” which “diverts attention away from pressing questions of the present—for
example, the question of ‘unborn life’ or the presence of genocide yesterday in Vietnam
and today in Afghanistan.” 9 Furthermore, he suggested that Hitler and the National
Socialists may have committed genocide out of fear that they themselves would become
the victims of Bolshevist murder like those that had occurred during the 1920s and 30s. 10
By suggesting that the National Socialists carried out the Holocaust as a kind of
preemptive strike against Bolshevist aggression, Nolte, according to the philosopher,
Jürgen Habermas, sought to “shake off the mortgages of a past now happily made
morally neutral,” in order to further a German nationalist identity.11
9
Ernst Nolte, “The Past that will Not Pass: A Speech that Could be Written but Not Delivered” in James
Knowlton and Cates, trans., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?: Original Documents of the Historikerstreit,
the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Humanities Press,
1993), 18-19.
10
Nolte, "The Past That Will Not Pass," 22.
11
Nolte, "The Past That Will Not Pass," 42.
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Indeed, in 1986, just three years after Kohl announced plans for the DHM,
Habermas expressed concern that the exhibits in the museum would mirror the kind of
historical revisionism apparent in Nolte’s thinking:
If one has a look at the composition of the commissions that have
designed the plan for the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the
House of History of the Federal Republic in Bonn, one cannot help but get
the impression that the new revisionism is to be realized in these museums
in the form of displays and pedagogically effective exhibits. 12
So the historical moment in which the DHM was proposed and being formulated was
mired in a politically-charged, public debate about Germany’s past and its relationship to
the nation’s identity and its place in the international community. The DHM’s
connection with German politics was also apparent even more recently in 2006, when
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is also associated with the CDU/CSU parties, gave an
address at the museum’s grand opening which praised Chancellor Kohl’s vision in
proposing the museum. 13
The original purpose of the DHM was, at least in part, to create a national identity
for the West Germany nation. Yet, associated with this quest for a national identity were
attempts to relativize or normalize Germany’s National Socialist period such as those
apparent in the Historikerstreit in 1986/87. Thus, the DHM is a product of specific
historical and political circumstances, interests, and power struggles. As such, it is a
memorial to these struggles and the site of new ones.
12
Nolte, "The Past That Will Not Pass," 41.
Angela Merkel, "Rede der Bundeskanzlerin anlaesslich der Eroeffnung der Staendigen Ausstellung zur
deutschen Geschichte im Deutschen Historischen Museum," in Rudolf Bertold Trabold and Deutsches
Historisches Museum (Berlin), Zwanzig Jahre Deutsches Historisches Museum: 1987 - 2007 (Berlin:
Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2007), 67-70.
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The DHM as Place: Geography, Buildings, and Memory
The current and previously proposed locations of the DHM are laden with
historical and symbolic meaning. Its current location is on Berlin’s main thoroughfare,
Unter den Linden. This situates the museum as part of the city’s main tourist attractions;
as politically important; 14 and as historically and culturally important since it is situated
among other memory sites, such as the Neue Wache, the Berliner Dom (which still shows
pock-marks from WWII shrapnel), and the Brandenburg Gate (see Figure 1). The
museum’s location both in Germany’s capital city and on, arguably, Berlin’s most
famous and well-traveled street is a sign of its importance in official, national Germany
memory. This placement, according to Williams’s framework, is integral to the
functioning of the organization as a memorial museum. Given
the site-specific nature of most memorial museums, an appreciation of
their larger geographic location is vital (I consider this another aspect of
my analysis that productively deviates from standard museological
critique). Factors such as the physical size and grandeur of the institution,
the prominence and accessibility of its location, and the proximity of other
city features (either related or dissimilar) determines the ‘geographic
reach’ of the historic event, which in turn influences the degree to which it
infiltrates public consciousness. 15
The geographical, political, and cultural importance of the DHM’s current location thus
situates the institution as central in Germany’s memory landscape. Furthermore, the
contested and circuitous route through which the museum moved before it ended up on
Unter den Linden, reveals the significance of its place. Indeed, the museum’s presence
on Unter den Linden resulted from conscious attempts to geographically and
14
Many foreign embassies are located right on Unter den Linden or just off of it. The Reichstag is also
located just off of this street.
15
Williams, Memorial Museums, 79.
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metaphorically distance the institution from the traumas of the National Socialist period
and from Germany’s division during the Cold War.
From the time in which Kohl announced plans for the DHM until shortly after
unification, the location of the future DHM was a constant source of debate. In 1982 the
expert commission of four historians appointed by Richard von Weizsäcker, the former
mayor of Berlin, proposed three possible locations for the DHM: the Citadelle in
Spandau, the Reichstag, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Kreuzberg. 16 However, all of
these options were eventually rejected. According to the museum committee, the
Citadelle was too small to accommodate the envisioned size of the museum, and the
Reichstag represented a hope for Germany’s future as a unified, liberal, and democratic
nation. The Reichstag, as a symbol for this hope in the future, was contrary to the
purpose and method of a museum about the past. 17
The Martin-Gropius-Bau, originally built as a museum in the latter part of the 19th
century, was the remaining option for the DHM’s location. However, this place was also
highly debated because of its proximity to the former headquarters of the Gestapo and the
fear that this nearby memory site of the National Socialist past would overshadow the
purpose of the museum to present a more balanced and somewhat triumphal narrative of
German history (see Figure 2). 18 Eventually, the debates over the Martin Gropius Bau
16
Christoph Stölzl, Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen, Kontroversen, Perspektiven / Beier-De-Haan,
Rosmarie. (Frankfurt am Main : Ullstein GmbH, 1988), 63.
17
"Darueber hinaus steht seine symbolische Stellung fur ein kuenftiges liberal-demokratisches
Gesamtdeutschland in scharfem Gegensatz zur Idee eines Museums fur deutsche Geschichte. Der
Reichstag is eine offene Frage an die Zukunft, das Museum argumentiert aus der Vergangenheit. Hier
ergeben sich schwere Diskrepanzen," 63. From "Denkschrift von Hartmut Boockmann, Eberhard Jaekkel,
Hagen Schulze und Michael Stuermer fur den Senator fur Wissenschaft und Kulturelle Angelegenheiten
des Landes Berlin vom Januar 1982" in Stölzl, Deutsches Historisches Museum: 61-66.
18
Karen E Till, “Place and the Politics of Memory: A Geo-Ethnography of Museums and Memorials in
Berlin,” Dissertation: Thesis (Ph. D.), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1996, 62-64. Till recounts local
debates about the DHM and the Marin-Gropius-Bau, which, interestingly mirror Sonderweg debates. Some
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location proved too divisive, and in 1987, Kohl launched a competition for the design of
a new museum building, which would be built close to the Reichstag. With reunification
occurring shortly thereafter, however, another building located former East Berlin—the
Zeughaus—became available (see Figure 3). This was not only more cost-effective, and
therefore, desirable for the future of the newly unified country, but also allowed the new
German history museum (originally proposed by the West German government) to
supplant the East German Museum für Deutsche Geschichte (MfDG). So, in both a
physical capacity, as well as in a symbolic capacity, the DHM replaced the MfDG which
had given a Marxist narrative of German history and was a symbol of the country’s
division. 19
Moreover, the Zeughaus, the oldest building on Unter den Linden, harkened back
to a time in Germany prior to the 20th century traumas of the two world wars and the
nation’s division during the Cold War. Indeed, the museum’s current website provides a
history of the Zeughaus, which focuses not on its original purpose—an armory and an
exhibition hall for the spoils of war—but rather on its use as a museum since the 18th
century, portraying the DHM’s location in the building almost as a natural outcome. The
housing of the museum in the Zeughaus is, therefore, important for understanding the
DHM as a memorial museum because the building is a symbolic of a past both
unburdened by National Socialism and dedicated not to militaristic functions, but to
cultural pursuits such as the museum.
thought that the building's proximity to the former Gestapo headquarters would be a more accurate
representation of German history because it would symbolically and spatially integrate the National
Socialist period. However, others thought the site would overshadow the rest of German history.
19
See H. Glenn Penny, III, “The Museum für Deutsche Geschichte and German National Identity,” Central
European History 28, no. 3 (1995): 343-372.
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The location or place of the DHM contributes to the institution as a memorial
museum in three ways. First, its existence in Germany’s capital city on Unter den Linden
clearly situates the museum as important in the nation’s memory landscape. Second,
viewed as an outcome of specific political and cultural contestations, the DHM’s place
was carefully constructed to avoid certain aspects of Germany’s past and to accentuate
others. Third, just as a memorial museum housed in a former prison serves to add to the
authenticity of the narrative it tells, the Zeughaus offers a sense of authenticity for a
German past which existed prior to 20th century traumas and which the museum seems to
exalt through its arrangement of space.
Arrangement of Space in the DHM: Spatial Narratives of Trauma
and Redemption
While existing literature on the DHM provides a historical context for the
museum that focuses on the social, political, and cultural events and debates that
influenced the museum’s development, there is comparatively little critical or evaluative
literature about the permanent collection in the museum as it is currently exhibited. The
English text of the museum’s current mission is “to help the citizens of our country to
gain a clear idea of who they are as Germans and Europeans, as inhabitants of a region
and members of a worldwide civilization.” 20 This, the museum claims to do through its
permanent exhibition:
Spread across two floors…with illustrative multi-media stations and
special pedagogical opportunities, it presents an enthralling and
intellectually enriching tour of the vicissitudes of German history in its
20
Deutsches Historisches Museum. “Concepts Governing the Museum and its Exhibitions,”
http://www.dhm.de/ENGLISH/dhm_konzeption.html (accessed 20 March 2010).
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greater European context from the beginning of our common era into the
present that the visitor can customize according to their personal interest. 21
So the museum ostensibly offers a framework within which the visitor can assemble his
or her own ideas about German history from the artifacts on display. Yet, the very
arrangement of the collection, such as its chronological structure and the placement of
display cases and walkways, subverts this claim of impartiality.
Both Bennett and Williams describe the museum as a performative institution (in
the case of Williams, he seems only to apply this term to the memorial museum).
Bennett understands the museum as a space in which the lower classes experienced and
then emulated the higher classes. Similarly, according to Williams, memorial museums
are powerful not only through the ideas they convey, but also because of the physical or
visceral response that their arrangement of space can evoke. He cites Daniel Libeskind’s
Jewish Museum in Berlin whose “affective power lies not just in ideas, but also in the
experience of its awkward, foreign, claustrophobic spaces.” 22 Instead of visitors gaining
only a cognitive understanding of the museum and the collections it holds, the
performative museum is experiential, so that in addition to grasping the museum’s
narrative through text and objects, the visitor, in some sense, experiences the narrative on
an emotional level. The DHM’s structure and space in the Zeughaus makes it a
performative museum. Just as Libeskind attempted to build the traumas of the Holocaust
into the Jewish Museum’s structure itself with the voids and lack of entrances, the
Zeughaus’s structure elevates Germany’s history prior to World War I over its
subsequent history both physically and metaphorically. Thus, the Zeughaus is not only
21
“Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin,” n.d., http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/staendigeausstellung/english/index.html.
22
Williams, Memorial Museums, 97.
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historically meaningful for the DHM’s narrative, but also spatially expressive of this
narrative about the course of German history prior to WWI.
The DHM conveys a specific, redemptive narrative of German history through its
arrangement of space. The overall structure of the permanent collection is chronological,
spanning from 100 B.C.E. to 1994 C.E., which in itself seems to convey a linear
development or sense of progress. The chronological narrative begins with a
performative aspect—the visitor, having entered at the street level, must ascend a grand
flight of stairs. Thus, the chronological narrative begins in a kind of lofty space, through
which the visitor proceeds without visual or physical impediment. The displays are
arranged around a wide walkway which takes the visitor through the year 1918. Around
this walkway, the display cases are arranged so that one’s vision down the various
corridors is not impeded, which gives a sense of openness (see Figure 4). Furthermore,
this upper level is well-lit and the colors of the walls and floors are light, which again
conveys a sense of optimism and clarity.
This experience changes, however, when the visitor is forced to descend a flight
of stairs and thus exit the exhibit German history prior to 1918. After descending the
stairs, the visitor must locate and choose to enter the room in which the exhibit continues
into 1918 after the end of World War I. Unlike the previous part of the exhibit, the path
to the exhibit starting in 1918 is not clearly marked and the visitor is not plainly guided
by a walkway. Therefore, the stairs and lack of a clear walkway cause a disruption in the
spatial chronological narrative that the museum has thus far conveyed, for not only does
one feel wrenched out of the narrative, but one must descend to the next portion of the
exhibit and choose to continue. This disruption and descent adds to the visitor’s
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experience of one of Germany’s darker periods: its defeat after WWI and the instability
and failure of the Weimar Republic. The lack of a clear pathway for the visitor into this
section also suggests that this period of German history is not continuous with the history
that preceded it. Upon finding and entering the exhibit in the lower level, one
immediately feels confined due to the darker colors, absence of light, and the narrower
walkway (see Figure 5). This spatial narrative of the Weimar Republic, therefore,
conveys a sense of Germany’s rupture with the past and a foreboding, inescapable
pathway toward the Third Reich.
The narrow walkway of the Weimar period gives way to a more open space when
the visitor reaches the Nazi and post-war periods from 1933 to 1949, but this openness is
simultaneously chaotic, for the displays and the walkway are angled so that one’s vision
is obstructed and the direction of the walkway is unclear. The spatial narrative for the
Nazi period thus conveys a sense of confusion, chaos, and obstruction. While this
obstruction and chaos produced by the angled displays continues during the period
between 1949 and 1989, the walkway through the exhibit is much clearer, becoming a
straight path, which evades the angled and obstructed displays of divided Germany. The
end of this straight path is 1989 and Germany’s reunification, which contains no angled
displays and no circuitous or chaotic walkways. Rather, when the visitor reaches this
point, there is almost a sense of relief and comfort because of a lack of unsettling space.
The spatial narrative of the DHM thus seems ultimately to be redemptive as if the visitor
is once again on a correct path after having struggled through the spatial traumas between
1918 and 1989.
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The DHM’s arrangement of space, then, causes the visitor to experience the
disruptions and traumas of German history and, ultimately, to experience a lack of spatial
disruption upon Germany’s reunification. The DHM thus contains a spatial and
performative narrative, which is an essential criterion for a memorial museum. In this
case, the performative narrative conveys a sense of triumph at the end, unlike other
memorial museums that Williams discusses. Yet, if we combine this aspect of the
museum with its historical moment and its place, one sees that the DHM is a memorial
museum in the triumphal sense, commemorating the nation’s overcoming of its traumatic
past.
Conclusion: The Usefulness of “Memorial Museum”
While the DHM does not fit within Williams’s strict definition of a memorial
museum as an institution which offers a site of mourning and edification about a
particular event of mass suffering, it does fit three important criteria which he outlines for
memorial museums. If we consider these criteria as well as a more broad definition of
the memorial, then the DHM is a memorial museum commemorating a triumph over
Germany’s traumatic past. Specifically, the DHM was the result of particular political,
cultural, and social circumstances. The museum and its driving concepts were hotly
contested and dependent upon the historical moment in which it was conceived. This
was also the case with the DHM’s place, for as the debate about the location of the
museum shows, the meanings ascribed to the various places were understood as integral
to the institution’s meaning and function. Fear that the museum’s proximity to other
memory sites, such as the former Gestapo headquarters, would overshadow the
museum’s purpose in creating national identity contributed to its current location and its
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function as a memorial to the nation’s less contested past. The arrangement of space,
perhaps more than any other aspect of the DHM cements its status as a memorial
museum. As Williams argues, the memorial museum is a performative institution which
not only cognitively, but also viscerally, captures the visitor through experience. The
experience of the DHM visitor is one that is not only conveyed explicitly through the
objects and texts in the museum, but through the way in which the museum’s space—the
walkways, lighting, and display cases—implicitly communicate a redemptive narrative of
German history. Thus, the DHM may be considered a memorial museum
commemorating Germany’s overcoming of its traumatic past through reunification.
While theorists such as Tony Bennett have deconstructed the museum and shown
it to be an institution born of, and influenced by, particular political, social, and cultural
prerogatives, the museum is not typically understood as fulfilling memorial-like functions
but rather educative functions. Understanding the museum as primarily an educative
institution mirroring power relations can cause us to overlook the memorializing qualities
inherent in a museum and its narrative(s). These memorializing qualities are important
for several reasons. First, memorials, by their very nature, tend to define victims and, by
default, perpetrators. Furthermore, memorials often act as sites of mourning at which
visitors can, in some sense, “come to terms” with the past. However, because museums
are often only understood as educative, “objective” spaces, their memorial functions such
as defining victims and perpetrators and as sites of mourning are often overlooked or
interpreted as objective fact. Seen as memorials, then, the status of museums as
exhibitors and arbiters of facts becomes questionable.
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Figure 1
Courtesy of Google Maps
Figure 2
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Figure 3
Figure 4
Ottomeyer, Hans, and Hans-Joerg Czech, eds. Deutsche Geschichte in
Bildern und Zeugnissen. Edition Minerva. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2007.
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March 2011 v 2 No 1
Figure 5
Ottomeyer, Hans, and Hans-Joerg Czech, eds. Deutsche Geschichte in
Bildern und Zeugnissen. Edition Minerva. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2007.
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Zeugnissen. Edition Minerva. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2007.
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