Historians in the Museum

Abstract

In the last two decades Poland has experienced a museum boom. The numbers of new, or significantly remade museums, has grown rapidly, along with the growing numbers of museum visitors. Before the pandemic, Polish museums recorded more than thirty-eight million visits a year, a number equal to the size of Poland’s population. Among the most popular, with more than five-hundred thousand visits annually, were newly opened history museums, offering a new, narrative type of exhibition and museum experience. Museums like Warsaw’s Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk have also attracted international attention of museologists and media, earning enthusiastic reviews and major European museum awards. In recent years, however, they became objects of harsh criticism and pressure by politicians of the ruling Prawo i Sprawiedliwość Party (PiS). In this conversation, four Polish historians with substantial museological experience—three museum directors (present or former) and a museologist—talk about museums as institutions to practice history; they discuss what academic historians can learn working at museums, and they dwell on the challenges resulting from the success of museums as vehicles of public history. Piotr Cywiński is by instruction a medieval historian, who for several years has been the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum. Paweł Machcewicz and Dariusz Stola are historians of the twentieth century, currently professors at the Polish Academy of Sciences: Machcewicz was the founding director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, and Stola was the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Anna Ziębińska-Witek is a historian and museologist, and she has written extensively on Polish and Eastern European museum exhibitions of twentieth-century history. They met online to react to questions posed by Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively on the history of Poland and Eastern Europe; Snyder has also served on the academic council of the Museum of the Second World War. Stola has edited and translated, from Polish to English, the record of their conversation.