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.