Abstract
As a recent publication from Palgrave MacMillan’s Memory Studies Series, Silke Arnold-de Simine’s monograph, Mediating Memory in the Museum, makes a contribution to an emerging area of research that straddles the boundaries between memory studies and museum studies. Taking its cue from a variety of sources, including literary analysis, psychoanalysis, media studies, and visitor studies, Arnold-de Simine’s book splits its emphasis between the spaces and forms through which memory is mediated in museums and the theoretical tools that are subsequently used in academic interrogation of memory museums in twenty-first century societies. Arnold-de Simine premises her study on two important shifts that have happened over the last 30 years: the first shift encompasses a move within museums from history museums to spaces of memory, as seen through the “adoption of new missions and new representational strategies” (p. 8). The author is careful to use the term spaces of memory rather than memorial museums, and includes sites from Germany France, Belgium, and Britain, which range in subject matter from war to slavery to local histories. Arnold-de Simine does not assume a global shift in representational strategy, and as such does not impose Western memory regimes on institutions in disparate locales; this is a marked departure from previous studies (cf. Williams, 2007; Young, 1993) that examine memorial museums and curatorial practices in terms of a specific historical event or a globalized thematic approach. In choosing a range of sites and causes, Arnold-de Simine avoids the politics of comparative suffering or commemorative practices in general, and instead concentrates on the curatorial techniques that signal an increasing importance on memory. These techniques range from an emphasis on individual identification with personal narratives to multimedia and interactive designs that are meant to create an embodied experience for the visitor.
The second shift integral to Arnold-de Simine’s study is the shift from knowledge to memory. She is quick to point out that in recent years, the assumption that knowledge of atrocity will “bring responsibility” (p. 10) has changed to the belief that memory of atrocity will create more ethical engagement. That memory has replaced knowledge in this equation, especially as it regards museums, is due on one hand to curatorial practices that aim to create personal connections with the history on display, and on the other hand with the proliferation of theoretical tools, such as trauma, empathy, and nostalgia, that aim to interrogate points of connection, identification, and subsequent responsibility following a curated experience. This assumption follows on the heels of thinkers such as Huyssen (1995) and Landsberg (2004), who popularized notions of public memory. Through her study, Arnold-de Simine maps responses of museums to the changing landscapes of commemorative culture and technology, and weighs in on the usefulness of mnemonic theories to understand how spaces affect visitors.
These two shifts in mediation—curatorial and theoretical—comprise the bulk of Part 1: Museum, Memory, Medium. After a brief discussion concerning recent developments in museum practice, the author goes on to outline how her chosen conceptual frameworks—trauma, empathy, and nostalgia—have come to dominate the way we think about and value memory museum experiences. Here, Arnold-de Simine outlines debates concerning these theoretical lenses, providing a comprehensive literary review of the major themes and thinkers that straddle the line between memory and museum studies, which gives her readers a solid framework from which to understand her analysis of specific sites.
Parts II, III, and IV each take on one of three conceptual frameworks. While Arnold-de Simine separates trauma, empathy, and nostalgia schematically, each section builds upon the last, especially as it regards trauma and empathy. In Parts II and III, Arnold-de Simine outlines a clear progression of theoretical influence that derives from Holocaust studies, and the memory boom associated with the historical interrogation of its legacy that began to appear in the early 1990s. In Part II, which focuses on sites and icons of trauma specific to war museums—International War Museum (Britain), Militarhistorisches Museum (Germany), In Flanders Fields (Belgium)— Arnold-de Simine sketches how exhibition techniques particular to the Holocaust have come to proliferate in other historical contexts. Taking the example of shoes salvaged from concentration camps after the Holocaust, the author demonstrates how common display tactics provide “a convenient but problematic shortcut when dealing with violent and difficult histories” (p. 82). Here, the convenience comes from quickly identifying objects as part of a memorial culture and eliciting a powerful emotional response, while the danger comes from stripping the objects or sites of their historic specificity and deemphasizing the singularity of each traumatic event. These worries bleed over into Part III—Screen Memories and “Moving Images”—where Arnold-de Simine examines the technological developments that have altered visitor experiences in spaces of memory. In this section, she interrogates the limits of Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory” and openly questions the limits of empathy in the transmission of memory. Prosthetic memory becomes less of an optimistic catch all for the commodification and mediatization of memory when placed in closed proximity to “screen memories,” where one memory comes “to stand in for atrocities and traumas closer to home” (p. 95). While adopting and appropriating mnemonic techniques once used to signal a specific historical event contextualizes and in some cases makes difficult pasts easier to navigate, Arnold-de Simine demonstrates, through her analysis of the International Slavery Museum and the International War Museum that the use of these techniques has the twin possibility of depoliticizing memory, dehistoricizing images, and may act as shortcuts to desired emotional responses.
It is not until Parts IV and V that Arnold-de Simine moves beyond memory tropes that have informed analysis of museums and memorials over the last 30 years, and comes into her own line of analysis, which takes inspiration from psychoanalysis. Part IV—The Paradoxes of Nostalgia in Museums and Heritage Sites—focuses on smaller sites and exhibitions, and offers a strong reading of how curatorial techniques negotiate the realm that exists between memory, spaces, and the various types of people who desire to make meaning from their experiences. The relation between memory and technology is developed using a range of historical contexts that explicitly show how spaces of memory depend on both the technology available to curators today, but also hinge upon the technologies used to store memories/information in the past. The last section, “Phantasmagoria and its Specters in the Museum,” clearly outlines how the development of technologies and their uses in performative spaces were integral to forming a “blueprint for a mode of reception” (p. 191) that makes our current social uses of memory spaces acceptable today. Here, technology comes to mark the shift from knowledge to memory, as it provides “enlightenment through optical illusion” (p. 195). Importantly, the author claims that trauma, memory, nostalgia, and empathy have become master-signifiers as they relate to “modern conditions of alienation, dispossession and homelessness and the efforts to overcome them” (p. 201). With this claim, the weight of Arnold-de Simine’s analysis and focus on spaces of memory becomes much more palpable. If trauma, empathy, and nostalgia have become integral to understanding our places in relation to the world, then spaces of memory become portals through which this understanding is magnified and productively sought after.
Arnold-de Simine provides a very useful starting point for those wading into the research area situated between memory studies and museum studies. In making clear distinctions between authentic objects, representational displays, video testimony, and memory texts within her analysis of the mediated exhibits, she provides a nuanced understanding of the differences between museums, memorials, remembrance, and the spatial reenactment of trauma. Her synthesis of concepts from the various fields associated with the flourishing of “spaces of memory” will prove especially useful for anyone new to this burgeoning field.