The literary exhibition as epistemic method: how the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach reinterprets literary archives

Abstract

The Museum of Modern Literature (LiMo, which is part of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv—DLA) in Marbach am Neckar, Germany, opened a permanent exhibition in 2006 (which was redone in 2015) to stage literary artifacts in ways that defied every convention and expectation. The exhibition’s aesthetic was cool and its contents were abstract. Its aim was to elicit new information from the archives through the way in which they were visually presented by forcing the visitor to perceive the exhibits differently. The process of exhibiting thus became an epistemic method. This article aims to define the approach employed in the LiMo in its 2006 exhibition using a principal object as an example: the manuscript of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (published in 1929). It attempts to reveal the ways in which curatorial practice alters objects and implicitly includes or excludes certain social groups, as well as the ways in which it creates both insights and distinctions. The hypothesis is that the museum stages its literary exhibits as works of art rather than in the usual way as witnesses to cultural history. It replaces hermeneutic interpretation with visual and sensory encounters. This change in the status of the objects raises fundamental questions regarding the connection between materiality and literature. It is also a polarizing move as it is intrinsically exclusive and displays an attitude that presupposes connoisseurship.