Globalized Memorial Museums. Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals

Project Information

GMM

Grant agreement ID: 816784

DOI

10.3030/816784

Project closed

EC signature date 24 January 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 947 513,75

EU contribution

€ 1 947 513,75

Coordinated by

OESTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GMM (Globalized Memorial Museums.Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ has established the Holocaust as a historical reference point legitimizing a global moral imperative to respect human rights. Much has been written about the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’, but there existed no genuinely global comparative study systematically confronting this hypothesis with the actual representations of atrocities. The “Globalized Memorial Museums” (GMM) project broke new ground by examining memorial museums on four continents, arguing that ‘globalization’, in fact, comprises three partially contradictory trends: 1) The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem are role models for a universal moral orientation that focuses on the individual victim and generates aesthetic ‘standards’ for musealization. 2) The German concept of negative memory, self-critically confronting the crimes committed by one’s own population, has inspired museums to tackle the question of one’s own complicity to challenge collective self-victimization and externalization of responsibility. 3) The genocides of the 1990s led to a ‘forensic turn’: the investigation of bones and other material evidence of atrocities has changed the way in situ memorial museums deal with material traces of violence. This shift has also impacted ‘old’ memorial sites like Sobibór, which has become a site of archaeological research after 70 years.
GMM examined 50 memorial museums dealing with
- the WWII period in the US, Israel, Europe, China, and Japan;
- recent genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
GMM’s global typology of memorial museums critically analyzed the concept of ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ and the notion that memorial museums constitute a globalized space of communication and negotiation. We found evidence of references to the Holocaust (museums) in all countries researched – albeit these references have often been appropriated for nationalist purposes and, thus, weaponized in strong contrast to the Holocaust museums they depict as role models. Against the backdrop of the current resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism, the European Union’s identity crisis and the rise of non-democratic powers like Russia and China, GMM served the urgent need to scrutinize the benefits and risks involved in the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We launched the project by organizing two workshops and a public event aimed at reexamining our objectives, with the help of renowned advisory board members, Aleida Assmann (Konstanz University), Omer Bartov (Brown University), Kirk Denton (Ohio State University), Carol Gluck (Columbia University), Rachel Ibreck (University of London) and David Mwambari (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). The interdisciplinary team comprised PhD students from Rwanda and the Czech Republic/China (call for papers), postdocs from Germany/Switzerland/Japan and Poland/Germany/Netherlands, the principal investigator from Croatia/Austria and the project manager from Germany/Austria. We established a shared theoretical and methodological framework to be applied in the analysis of the chosen 50 memorial museums. This included revisiting and reworking existing approaches in memory studies, museum studies, cultural studies, dead body studies, and regional studies applicable to the analysis of globalized memorial museums, and developing our own innovative methodology.
Despite the pandemic, the GMM team visited and documented all 50 museums covered in the project, not only those devoted to the Holocaust, World War II and the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, but also other museums important for the contextualization of the museum landscape: the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia or the former clandestine detention center ESMA in Buenos Aires. For the forensic part of our project, we conducted participatory observation of forensic excavations in Treblinka, Poland, and of the archaeological search for the mass grave of 200 Jews murdered in 1945 in the Austrian town of Rechnitz.
We presented our results in 178 public lectures and published one monograph, two special issues (a third one is in review), an edited volume, 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. One focus of our publications was on theoretical innovations such as the various forms and modalities of displaying violence specific to analyzed each museums and the media through which it is articulated (photographs, historical footage, presence of human remains on display), supplemented by a critical analysis of the violence of display, and of memorial museums as carriers of structural violence. Our articles offer a comparative perspective on the musealization in different countries, for example in Central and South Eastern Europe or in Japan and Germany. Other articles compare museum transformations within the same country over time, as we did for China, Japan, Poland, Bosnia or Croatia.
The head of the project is advising several Austrian ministries in matters of memory politics and musealization and gives lectures in schools. Teaching at universities, videos for social media, TV and radio reports disseminate the project research to a wider audience.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

A key output of the project is the methodological dossier developed by the team, which contains a set of theoretically informed questions for the analysis of each museum. This allowed for a systematic comparison and full consideration of national and regional specificities. The international team contributed to the dossier perspectives that challenge the Western-dominated and Eurocentric memory debates.
The dossier starts with questions regarding the history and role of the museum in the respective society, and its material structure. It also comprises all our innovative methodological knowledge: a novel categorization of museum objects, of photographs on display, and of voids/gaps in museums – informed by extensive readings and analysis of materials collected at the 50 museums. Based on in-depth analysis of human remains on display in museums and material practices around them, the project captures the specificity of things suspended between human remains and material objects, such as prosthesis, framed in the project as ‘atopic objects’. The investigation of museal strategies of exhibiting human remains, itself beyond the state of the art due to its comparative scale and scope, expanded beyond museums traditionally analyzed in this context (for instance, Rwanda) to include museums in China and Japan, where such investigation has not yet been performed. It is a groundbreaking contribution not only to the field of museum studies but also material culture studies and dead body studies.
Another categorization developed in the project pertains to missing, silenced or excluded topics, whose absence needs to be addressed with sensitivity to political, religious, and cultural realities foundational for each museum. We distinguished between politics of marginalization, othering, silencing, taboos, conspiracies of silence/noise, epistemic violence and absenting.
Our comparative results show that most museums today include individual proponents’ private photographs, biographies, biographical objects or testimonies – a trend that can be observed almost everywhere and is “downloaded” and appropriated for the respective national purposes in various ways.

Museum of the Homeland War in Karlovac, Croatia

Participatory observation of forensic excavation of human remains in Treblinka, Poland

Excavated mass burial pit as part of Murambi Genocide Memorial, Rwanda