Memorial Museum Research Articles

“They didn’t break me either way”. Women, Captivity and Interrogation in World War II: Resurfacing Self-Empowering Narratives

Interrogation and questioning are often remembered as life-changing by those who have been incarcerated in wartime, and they represent a key element of the prisoner of war experience in memories and personal narratives of former captives. However, women’s accounts of interrogation and questioning in World War II are not as easy to find as men’s. Women only rarely fit the definition of POW because even when they were combatants, they hardly were legally so. Perhaps more importantly, female prisoners have not entered the collective memory as strongly as male prisoners, and it is essential to resurface women’s empowering personal accounts and life stories of these experiences in American archives and museums. The in-depth secondary analysis of oral history narratives held at the sound archives of the Veterans History Project within the Library of Congress, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC, provides a series of case-studies to show how narrators were affected by their experiences of incarceration and to what extent their gendered memories fit within the shared memories of captivity in wartime. The article concludes that the way these women came to terms with their violent past challenges ideas about the vulnerability of women in captivity and that their narratives reach surprisingly empowering epilogues.

Tourists’ construction of diverse identities with natural disaster dark heritage sites

Intertwined with death, pain, suffering, and disaster, dark heritage is multi-faceted, controversial and has profound social influence. This paper attempts to uncover the identity-making experiences of natural disaster dark heritage tourists using a classic Chinese dark heritage site—the ‘5.12’ Wenchuan Earthquake Epicentre Memorial Museum. Using content analysis of 3,006 messages left behind in the museum’s visitors’ book from 2012 to 2019, we uncovered four significant themes: place identity, value identity, political identity, and personal contemplation. State-led discourses enhance the political identity of tourists, including patriotism, collective identity, and party identity. Concurrently, tourists’ identity is complicated and dynamic in this study. The natural disaster and the large-scale devastation of death present in the museum has imprinted a profound impression upon the tourists, evoking place identity, value identity and personal contemplation. Natural disaster dark heritage differs from man-made disaster heritage as it provides rich and fertile grounds to sow the seeds for self-contemplation, provoking tourists to reflect on their personal views towards life, inter-personal human relationships and relationships between humans and nature. Our study provides emergent findings of the complicated, multi-faceted and multi-dimensional process of identity construction and has practical implications for the display and interpretation of dark heritage.

Building a Culture of Peace through Non-Formal Education: The Case of Colombia s Memory Museum

Building a Culture of Peace through Non-Formal Education: The Case of Colombia s Memory Museum

Mathematics education and social-environmental crises: an interdisciplinary proposal for didactic innovation with rural communities in Mexico

ABSTRACT We report our progress on the “River Memorial Museum” didactic intervention project developed with schools, in the basin of the Atoyac River in Mexico, that are significantly impacted by the pollution produced through industrialisation. The teachers of the elementary schools in these communities, environmental scientists, educators, and community activists participated jointly in a co-construction process, designing interdisciplinary educational activities to study local environmental issues and recovering the principles of a socio-critical perspective of mathematical modelling. In this paper, we centre on presenting the methodology of the didactic intervention with the teachers of one school of an Atoyac River basin community and the principles for designing educational activities we developed collaboratively with them. We believe this methodology could be helpful to support others in thinking about similar opportunities in their communities.

Review: Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, by Jie Li

Review: <i>Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era</i>, by Jie Li

Review: Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination, by Tim Gruenewald

Review: <i>Curating America’s Painful Past: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination</i>, by Tim Gruenewald

ESMA Museum as a Place of "Hot" Memory

In this article, the object of research is the ESMA memorial Museum, organized in the former underground detention center, one of many belonging to the period of the "last" dictatorship in Argentina (1975-1983). The subject of study, in turn, were the properties of ESMA that evoke a response in the historical consciousness of society. As a theoretical basis, the article uses the concept of "hot" memory, proposed by the German researcher J. Assman. To answer the question of what makes the ESMA museum a place of "hot" memory, the author turns to the context of the transformation of ESMA into a museum space, analyzes its content, as well as the status of the object of memory policy. In addition to studying the basic techniques of working with memory used in ESMA, the author also examines the current assessments given by a number of other authors regarding the official policy of memory reflected in the activities of the museum. The observed tension in the context of the clash of different memory policies and approaches to its preservation allows the author to conclude that the ESMA museum remains a place of "hot" memory. Being a space of "experience" that focuses on evoking an emotional response from visitors, ESMA not only allows Argentines to reflect on their own past, but also reminds new generations of the value of human life and inalienable human rights.

Promoting tolerance through historical memory A discussion with the founders of the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia, Mexico

ABSTRACT Museums are platforms that empower us to bring civilization to a higher level; they exist to expand our understanding of human history and preserve the heritage. At the turn of the century, two young Mexican women, Sharon Zaga and Mily Cohen, had the unbelievable dream of building a museum of memory and tolerance in Mexico City. This discussion paper explores how the exhibitions of human intolerance at Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City can change societal attitudes toward tolerance and historical memory. As a result, this place became not just a museum, but a place going beyond the idea of a museum and art, telling its visitors about the importance of historical memory, showcasing genocides, and ultimately touching on the importance of tolerance.

Perspectives from the Chair of ICMEMO

AbstractThe author offers a personal view on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation, and observations of the self‐evident war crimes taking place, including attacks on memorial sites and the people who work to preserve the memory of past atrocities. In this perspective, Leon argues for conciliation rather than expulsion of the ICOM Russia from the ICOM community, and highlights the important work that memorial museums can do to foster peace, cooperation, and mutual understanding. The author is the chair of the International Committee of Memorial Museums in Remembrance of the Victims of Public Crimes (ICMEMO).

CAPABILITY OF DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL MUSEUMS OF UBEKISTAN.THE DESIRABLE AND THE REACHABLE

This article is about the development and reforms of institutions in transitional periods through the analysis of the history of memorial museums in Tashkent. Apart from other museums, the author took the memorial museum of a great Uzbek actress - Tamara Khanum, as positive experience, which give hope to see development of such institutions

Save the Ukrainian People First: They Carry their Culture in their Hearts

Save the Ukrainian People First: They Carry their Culture in their Hearts

Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance by Jeffrey Demsky

Reviewed by: Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance by Jeffrey Demsky Phyllis Lassner (bio) Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945-2020: Irreverent Remembrance. By Jeffrey Demsky. New York: Palgrave, 2021. xvi + 140 pp. In 2003, toward the end of my course on Holocaust representation, a student eagerly reported that a new film transporting the story of Anne Frank to Spanish Harlem and titled Anne B. Real was a must-see and available on YouTube. I suggested that we all watch it and share our responses in class. Instead of a diary, the Afro-Latinx protagonist expresses her own plight by writing rap poems. My students loved it and would have enjoyed the support of Jeffrey Demsky, who finds that [End Page 207] instead of "supplant[ing] Anne Frank's factuality," the video "modernizes her story," making it relatable to today's students (87). In his critical survey of "tasteless jokes," cartoons, performances, and other irreverent forms of Anglo-American Holocaust discourses, Demsky develops a comprehensive argument that in order to reach today's students and those audiences uninitiated in Holocaust history or misled by social media distortions and denials, "absurdist portrayals can facilitate constructive remembrance" (vii, 129). In this short but rigorously researched, succinct, and illuminating study, Demsky is particularly interested in the way Holocaust memorialization has evolved, from the widely reported confrontation with leading perpetrators at the Nuremberg Trials to its instantiation in the textual and visual turns of American and British popular culture. There is no doubt that Demsky wishes to be provocative. He argues that instead of ignoring problematic kitsch, scholars and teachers should instrumentalize it in the service of showing how Holocaust history and representation have developed in relation to contemporary life and attitudes in the US and Britain. Ideally, the result would be to "rejuvenate this past, helping to ensure that the history is remembered at all" (2). Nazi and Holocaust Representations takes us back to earlier critiques of Holocaust memorialization that many survivors and scholars viewed as diminishing the suffering endured under the Third Reich but that reflect contemporaneous concerns among scholars and teachers. For example, following the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, some cultural critics argued that it expressed American triumphalism rather than the suffering of Nazism's "foreign" victims. For the British, Demsky posits, the Nuremberg Trials translated the embarrassments of prewar appeasement and diminishing global power into recognition of the nation's heroism and cultural diversity. Given the vastness of the Holocaust and the myriad forms of official and popular memorialization, debates persist about the impact of nationalist, ideological, commercial, and popular constructions of Holocaust memory. Once Holocaust representation became a distinct field of study, scholars began to examine various narrative forms that represented survivors' fragmented memories, public memorialization, and fictional reinterpretations. Demsky reviews Philip Roth's imagined Anne Frank in The Ghost Writer as depicting the contradictions and limits of lessons wrought from the Holocaust. With an impact that has never diminished, Art Spiegelman's Maus defied the limits of acceptable narrative conventions by confronting readers with questions about the mediated authenticity and presumed gravity of Holocaust testimony and representation. That these questions continue to be addressed as controversial textual, [End Page 208] graphic, cinematic, and audio depictions proliferate sustains Demsky's study. For example, in rebellion against canonical modes of Holocaust representation, a cartoon image juxtaposing Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler and the lyrics of British rock stars parodies hallmarks of World War II heroism in order to declare "independence from this inherited past." In this vein Demsky invites us to understand the antisemitic lyrics performed by David Johansen and the Oi! rockers in the 1970s as recognition of how "HATEFUL" Nazi rhetoric was (59). Nonetheless, despite illuminating close readings of images and performances, prodigious historical and ideological contexts, and resourceful interpretations, the book strains in its efforts to transform abhorrent representations into pedagogical opportunities. Whether Holocaust mockery and disdain, as in the lyrics "Join the shower queue in your dancing shoes," will inspire learning "factual historical memory" about what Nazism meant for the Jews remains questionable (60). In the case of American sitcoms, Demsky...

Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher

Reviewed by: Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher Paul A. Shapiro Dallas Michelbacher. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 174 pp. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, issued in 2004, made it clear that the Romanian state, recognized as Nazi Germany's most significant military ally on the Eastern Front, was also a major perpetrator of Holocaust-era crimes. The Final Report provided a platform for what since has become a significant outpouring of new scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania, most of which has concentrated on topics that were the focus of the Final Report. These fell into five broad categories: Romanian antisemitism; anti-Jewish legislation and crimes committed by the fascist Iron Guard during the "National-Legionary State" (September 1940–January 1941); the effort of Ion Antonescu's wartime regime to rob and rid the country entirely of its Jewish population; Jewish response; and postwar obfuscation and denial. Barely five pages of the four-hundred-page Final Report were dedicated to forced labor,1 and the topic languished largely unaddressed for years. Dallas Michelbacher provides the first monograph in English on Jewish forced labor in Romania.2 He makes ample use of the major document collection published in Romanian by Bucharest's Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania3 as well as other published documents. To this he adds in-depth research in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives and in major oral history collections. The result is a much more granular study of Romanian forced labor than previously available. The book provides a review of the orders and guidelines issued by the multiple civil and military authorities which administered the forced labor regime. But to this Michelbacher adds a nuanced picture of the corruption that permeated the administration of forced labor, with officials at every level encouraging and accepting payments against labor exemption certificates, preferential retention at one's traditional job, assignment to a particular locality, etc. He describes the varying degrees of risk of verbal [End Page 216] or physical abuse faced by forced laborers according to the personality and motivations of the civilian and military officials overseeing laborers performing tasks that ranged from heavy rail, road, and defense construction work in so-called "external" labor detachments, to humiliating snow shoveling duty assigned to Jews able to remain in their home towns. He captures the antagonistic attitude of local non-Jews toward Jewish laborers and the resentment that the need to keep some 75,000 Jews in technical, managerial, and administrative jobs in order to keep the national economy running created in both official and civil society circles. He provides a glimpse of the impact that removing able-bodied men for labor, under threat of deportation to Transnistria, had on Jewish community organizations and Jewish families left vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail, often lacking in basic necessities, and uncertain as to what would come next. A picture of forced labor at the ground level emerges most vividly in Michelbacher's chapters 4 and 5, which trace developments leading up to Romania's planned mass deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camp at Belzec, and then following Antonescu's decision to abandon the deportation plan. In these chapters the author moves beyond reliance on published sources and draws heavily on previously untapped archival and testimonial source material. He introduces survivor voices, largely absent from earlier studies, and provides graphic detail regarding several well-documented and painfully remembered labor sites—railroad track repair, a canal, defense works, a quarry, etc. Given the power of this new material, it is unfortunate that the book's footnotes provide only partial information, clarifying where a document can be found, but not the precise nature of the cited document. There is an aspect of Michelbacher's approach that leads the author to some problematic conclusions. The difficulty stems from the geographic limitation of the study, for the most part, to forced labor inside the borders of the Old Kingdom (Regat) and Southern Transylvania, isolated from the broader context of what was taking place in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. It...

Reaching Out: How the Pandemic Impacted Knowledge Production and Dissemination in India

The unprecedented spread of the COVID-19 pandemic compelled academic institutions and public repositories worldwide to come up with novel ideas in order to keep themselves functional. Adoption of new technology often constituted the fulcrum of such institutional responses. This article delves into some of the measures adopted by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, one of India's premier research institutes in social sciences. While doing so, it delineates a few anecdotal references from the past as well. The article emphasizes that the technological shifts in the wake of COVID-19 have far-reaching consequences so far as dissemination of knowledge through seminars and access to primary sources are concerned.

Hypological Artifacts of the Copper­Bronze Age in the Archeological Collections of the Museums of Dnipropetrovska and Kharkivska Regions

The actual meaning of this topic is due to the fact that the museum collections of Ukraine contain a lot of material monuments created by the peoples of the Steppe during the Copper-Bronze Age, which were studied only in fragments. The reason for it is that these finds came to museums by accident and as a result were not reflected in reports and publications. Therefore, we do not have a clear information about the situation in the regional and district museums of Ukraine containing the artifacts of the oldest pastoral population in Ukraine. Long ago the need exists to create the qualified catalogs with a description of the monuments of material culture of the early pastoralists, which are stored in the museums of the South and East of Ukraine. Therefore, the purpose of this study is creation of such catalog.&#x0D; The methodological basis of the work is the modern post-neoclassical museological, so-called object methodology, the emphasis of which is focused on the study of material culture and material museums as fundamental elements of cultural and natural heritage.&#x0D; The results. Materials from four museums of the South and the East of Ukraine were involved for processing: D. I. Yavornytsky Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum, Museum of Archeology of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Cultural Institution “I. O. Repin Art Memorial Museum” in Chuguev city of Kharkivska region, Museum of local lore in Zmiiv city Kharkivska region. The territories of Dnipropetrovska and Kharkivska regions were chosen for the study not by accident, because its reflect the gradual change of natural landscapes in the projection on the economy of the population. The study was able to observer the history of the formation of archaeological collections of these museums. A significant achievement for the authors of this article was the creation of a special Catalog of objects in the funds of museums of Dnipropetrovska and Kharkivska regions, which testify to the acquaintance of ancient people with the horse. As a result, it was possible to establish of horse breeding of the local population in the Late Bronze Age.&#x0D; The scientific novelty. A significant amount of unpublished material was introduced into scholar circulation.&#x0D; The practical significance. It gives reason to believe that in the Late Bronze Age only the first stage of domestication of the horse took place in the steppes of Ukraine. But other issues remain unresolved. It is a topic for future researches. The collections of museums in the South and East of Ukraine should play an important role in it.

Reflecting and forging master narratives: A discursive analysis of a Belgian WWII museum's curatorial selection process

AbstractSociolinguistics can help us grasp how collective memory cultures are (in part) shaped by representations of historic events through varied linguistic – and other – sources (e.g. education, news media, conversations and museum displays). In this study, we specifically zoom in on the curatorial selection process of a Belgian Second World War (WWII) memorial museum, whilst simultaneously exploring the reflexive relation between this curatorial process and the wider WWII remembrance context. To this end, we compare exhibited video testimony fragments to the full testimonies available in the museum's research centre, to examine which narratives were selected or silenced. Additionally, we confront fine‐grained analyses of the testimonies with master narratives on WWII remembrance. As our analyses illustrate, the exhibited fragments align with these – typically coherent – master narratives, while the full testimonies are complex. Overall, we show that museums not only reflect master narratives, but are also sites for forging them.

Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories

Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era

Weaving Cloaks and Whakataukī: A Memoir

Beginning with holiday work in the ethnology workroom at Auckland War Memorial Museum, the author, a social anthropologist, traces the development of her lifelong interest and involvement in the Māori art of weaving harakeke ‘Māori flax’ (Phormium tenax). Special attention is given to the weaving of whatu ‘ceremonial cloaks’ and the weaving of words and metaphors in whakataukī ‘proverbs and sayings’, poetry and storytelling. In the process she shares treasured memories of learning, from and with Māori friends and mentors expert in these arts, and emphasises the continual interweaving of contemporary transformations with inherited traditions in response to changing times.

European Mennonites and the Holocaust. Edited by Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2020. xiii + 337 pp. $39.95 paper.

European Mennonites and the Holocaust. Edited by Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2020. xiii + 337 pp. $39.95 paper. - Volume 91 Issue 1