A Theatre of History. Twelve Principles

Abstract

Opened in Warsaw in April 2013, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews tells the story of the thousand years of continuous Jewish presence in this part of the world, a history largely overshadowed, understandably, by the Holocaust. While the exhibition avoids a master narrative, it enacts a theatre of history founded on 12 metahistorical principles. This essay sets out the curatorial, pedagogic, and performative storytelling strategies at work in this multimedia narrative exhibition. They include the following. The most important period in the history of Polish Jews is 1,000 years. Jews are integral part of the history of Poland: they are not only in Poland, but also of Poland. This is a story of coexistence and conflict, cooperation and competition, separation and integration. They created a civilization that is “categorically Jewish, distinctly Polish”. Polish Jews became the largest Jewish community in the world and a center of the Jewish world. To tell the story in the very place where it happened is to harness the emotional power of the site. The narrative strategy – driving the story through excerpts from primary sources exclusively from within a given historical period –is intended to pull back from avoid the teleological narrative to the Holocaust as an inevitability.