Museum Media. Группа авторов
are also guided in their evaluation of those events.
Second, because they show individuals who can reflect on the past, video testimonies are used to give moral lessons and to transmit norms and values. In the Haus der Geschichte, again, the German writer Wolfgang Held remembers his visit to Buchenwald concentration camp as a 15-year-old boy. He remembers seeing masses of bodies and fleeing terrified from a barrack where he found people lying on pallets, like corpses, only their eyes revealing that they were alive. When he was standing there, crying, a survivor tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Junge, mit Heulen, das ist zu wenig” (Boy – sniveling is not enough). Everything that he has written since emanates from this sentence, he says. Held’s testimony both instructs (German) visitors that nothing can redeem the major crimes of the past and, at the same time, invites them to become active citizens – like Held himself who today acts not only as a writer but also as a kind of professional witness to history.
In a video testimony on European integration, the curators try to transmit some form of European conscience or European identity to their (German) visitors. Here, Hans-Gert Pöttering, former president of the European Parliament reflects on the opening of borders:
In the past, borders were something that divided and when borders were trespassed it was soldiers who trespassed those borders and the outcome were misery, poverty, death. It was war. And today border controls are abolished. ... It is something wonderful, historically new. And today Czechs and Poles are welcome here and we are welcome in Poland. And this links us Europeans together and this makes us also stronger in a sense. That we are a community of values.
Incidentally, the exhibition does not mention the fact that Germany opted to restrict Polish citizens’ access to the German labor market for the maximum period of seven years after Poland joined the European Union. Dorotee Wilms again observes that some things might not please everyone, but that European integration is a historical stroke of luck for Germany. The former German minister Hans-Jochen Vogel advances the eternally repeated argument that young people, used to a united Europe, might take peace for granted, but that for his generation war was the norm. In this way, not only do the witnesses to history serve as history teachers, but the video testimonies are also used to turn the visitors into active members of civil society – and into good Europeans.
Finally, by relating what it felt like to go through certain experiences, video testimonies are used to educate the visitors emotionally. The extracts selected for the exhibitions are not only the most interesting, but often also the most touching. Thus, Lothar Wesner, the mason who helped to build the Berlin Wall, remembers being disturbed and thinking that he was now contributing to something that would prevent him from seeing his family. When he went home at night he would be so distressed that his mother and his wife said to him, “Junge, wie siehst du den aus?!” (Boy, what a sight you are?!). The former minister Rainer Eppelman talks about “wall sickness,” a psychological condition that seemingly befell people who were living close to the wall. He observes that the idea that “you can’t get out of here” must have been traumatic for many people. Visitors are not only made aware of the psychological consequences of historical events, but also invited to empathize with the witnesses to history. The intention may be to make them evaluate the present positively compared to the past. It may also be to prevent them from doing something similar in the future; this is especially the intention in holocaust museums.
The ultimate goal of most museums of contemporary history today is not only to instruct their visitors on the past, but also to turn them into active citizens. Video testimonies are used as a means toward this goal. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the term “secondary witnessing” has been used to describe the transmission of the testimonies from one generation to another in order to make sure that “we never forget” (Baer 2000). In Holocaust museums which do not function only as historical museums but also as memorials to the victims, survivors make up the largest group of the witnesses to history that are presented. Only occasionally can video testimonies with so-called bystanders be found, while perpetrators never appear. The witnesses to history in Holocaust museums are rarely prominent individuals. They are generally presented as ordinary individuals to whom the average visitor can easily relate. In the Haus der Geschichte, where one of the main goals is to turn visitors into active German citizens, another practice can be observed. The museum presents very few video testimonies with what we would call “ordinary citizens.” Most of the witnesses to history here are prominent actors, writers, journalists, and politicians. Those witnesses to history are, because of their status and their proximity to decision centers, particularly authoritative teachers of history and morals. They also serve as role models for visitors, who are invited to become historically interested and politically active citizens.
Conclusion
Video testimonies have thus become the subject of musealization. While they have been collection items for around 35 years, they have recently also been introduced into museum’s permanent exhibitions. This process of the musealization of video testimonies represents an attempt to turn communicative memory into cultural memory. While, in past times, communicative memory has been in natural decay, we are now trying to preserve it for the future. The availability of technology to store communicative memory is not the only factor here. How we choose to use the technology is also significant. The interest in recording the memories of individuals is, as I have shown, a consequence of a change in the perception of the individual as an authoritative carrier of memory, which first became evident at the Eichmann trial. For the purpose of storage, communicative memory is standardized – it is put into the format of the narrative interview. The narrative interview is supposed to lead to a particularly pure narration of individual memory. The methodology of the narrative interview, combined with aesthetic choices highlighting the extra-verbal expressions of memory, leads to a representation of individual memory as existing outside time and space.
While collected video testimonies become storage memory, video testimonies are turned into functional memory once they are used in museums’ exhibitions. They are exhibited as testimonies to the past and to illustrate and authenticate, or comment on, other museum exhibits. Documents provide information on what happened. Objects and photographs show what it looked like. Video testimonies simultaneously inform visitors what happened, how it was lived through, what it felt like, and how it is remembered. This combination of different potential narratives makes video testimony a particularly potent didactic means. Video testimonies can be used to transmit historical knowledge, to instruct visitors on how to interpret this knowledge, to give them moral lessons, and to affect them. To come back to the painting described in the introduction: video testimonies have now become an additional or alternative means to material remains, documents, and museum text or museum guides of transmitting history. However, as the painting in Figure 4.1 shows, any transmission of history is embedded in a sociocultural context. Cultural memory is always the expression of a particular time and place. In the painting, the history of the Battle of Kursk is related by a Russian colonel to Allied soldiers only. The German Wehrmacht officer is allowed only to overhear this history lesson, not to take active part in it – let alone to have a say. The same is, of course, true of the use of video testimonies in museums. Only a fraction of the potential witnesses to history are interviewed at all, and the testimonies that those witnesses to history give are tainted by their sociocultural context and guided by the questions of the interviewer. Of all of the possible extracts from those video testimonies, only some meticulously selected stories enter a particular museum’s exhibition and are used as functional memory. Which ones are chosen depends on the particular museum and the period in which the exhibition has been designed.
Notes
1 1 Yale University Library, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, at http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/ (accessed August 4, 2014).
2 2 See the Yad Vashem Archive at http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/archive/about_archive_whats_in_archive.asp (accessed July 23, 2014).
3 3