BUNDESDERDEUSTCHLAND: There are many questions to be asked about Germany--do Germans, in fact, love David Hasselhoff? (Answer--not sure, seemed liked they were much more into Amy Winehouse, especially this one, which I hadn't heard before, and which is six kinds of awesome, though it takes about a minute to get started.) Is currywurst actually any good? (Gray's Papaya is just as good, though has less of a kick.) But what I want to talk about is museum theory. Sure, many of the museums don't require a lot of perspective--a 16th-17th century painting is a painting, and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art/sculpture are pretty easy to talk about. The more difficult thing for Germany is the 20th Century, and Berlin in particular is still grappling with it, as, especially in the East, there's no real desire to remember or exhibit pretty much anything from the rise of Nazism in the 30s to the '89 fall of the wall.
While there's the old Fawlty Towers "don't mention the war" bit, at least post-reunification, there's been movement away from that--there's an impressive section on the rise of Nazism, the Nazi government, and the division of Germany at the German History Museum, an entire privately owned/operated museum devoted to a (surprisingly neutral) assessment of East Germany and its government (Stasi=bad, full employment=good!), and the relatively recent Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish Museum, as well as a small (and sadly, almost all-German) Memorial Museum of Resistance to Nazism. It raises an interesting question--how do you exhibit and discuss a period in history that you played the negative/villain role in? In most circumstances, the German museums do so with admitted frankness, talking about how demagoguery can reach people at their lowest points and (particularly at the Jewish Museum) being frank about the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and how it's been exploited. Talking about how things went wrong and why with honesty seems to me important, and it's impressive to see that the German government, which runs a number of these museums, is willing to do so, and raises challenges for us. (Contrast with, for instance, the Clinton Library in Little Rock, which turns the entirety of Monicagate and various other scandals into nothing more than a single panel of exhibit, and I say that as someone who voted for Clinton in '96, and would have done so in '92 had I been of age to do so.)
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