New Trends in Museum and Memory Studies: A Way Forward for Central and Eastern Europe?

Abstract

New Trends in Museum and Memory Studies:A Way Forward for Central and Eastern Europe? Tadeusz Wojtych (bio) Smith, Laurajane. Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. Routledge Abingdon and New York, 2021. xiv + 338 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. References. Index. £130.00; £36.99; £27.74 (e-book). Jaeger, Stephan. The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality. Media and Cultural Memory, 26. De Gruyter Berlin and Boston, MA, 2020. viii + 354 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £91.50; £21.00; open access e-book. Maruszewski, Tomasz. Gdzie podziewa się nasza pamięć: Od pamięci autobiograficznej do pamięci zbiorowej. Mistrzowie Psychologii. Smak Słowa, Sopot, 2019. 296 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Zł49.90. Introduction In 2017, the historically-minded public in Poland — and soon elsewhere in Europe and America — was polarised by developments at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. The museum's director Karol Nawrocki, freshly appointed by the ruling populist-conservatives, unveiled a new vision for the permanent exhibition: the existing, more transnational narrative was to be replaced by a tale of Polish heroism and martyrdom.1 [End Page 728] Nawrocki's plans not only caused heated debates in the press and on social media, but also led to the creation of two online counter-museums — one on a website, and the other on Facebook — which remained loyal to the exhibition's original narrative.2 The debates around the Museum of the Second World War, which intensified in 2017 and continue to this day, encapsulate several trends characteristic of the collective memory landscape in Central and Eastern Europe. Since the 1990s, with Communist-era censorship no longer in place, unconstrained discussions about the past have shifted from the private to the public sphere. Just like the controversy around the Museum of the Second World War, other debates about the past and its role in the present have become heated and politicized. As access to the Internet grew, the online sphere became yet another platform for voicing opinions about the past. History-themed social media groups and online museums flourished — yet the debates remained divisive, to the point that Ellen Rutten and Vera Zvereva termed them 'web wars'.3 Researchers discussed to what extent the collective memory landscape of Central and Eastern Europe — shaped by the legacy of Communism, the hardships and opportunities of economic transformation and the rise of digital technologies — was unique on a European and global scale. Three monographs published between 2019 and 2021 form the point of departure for this article. Each of the books proposes or pioneers a new avenue in research on museums and collective memory: large-scale studies of museum visitors that utilize a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods; research of experientiality in museum exhibitions; and a psychological approach to collective memory. These three works rely heavily (though not exclusively) on case studies from the Western world. This article argues, however, that the methodological frameworks proposed by their authors have more universal applications. The second section of the article, therefore, asks how these three approaches may benefit research on Central and Eastern Europe and, conversely, how research on the region [End Page 729] can contribute to — and sometimes challenge — the frameworks used in global museum and memory studies. These questions are discussed with regard to three elements of the research process: subject (i.e. what or who is researched), methods (i.e. how it is researched), and the researcher (i.e. who conducts the study and why). This article does not aspire to be an exhaustive literature review on museum and memory studies in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, it discusses how these recent works by Smith, Jaeger and Maruszewski may create new links between research on Central and Eastern Europe and the Western world. Three new works on museum and memory studies In her 2021 book, Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites, the Australian museologist Laurajane Smith asks how visitors approach heritage sites. To find an answer, Smith interviews 4,502 museum visitors to forty-five museums in three countries: England, the United States and Australia. She then uses...