Including Exclusion in European Memory? Politics of Remembrance at the House of European History

Abstract

Politicians and scholars agree that a shared historical consciousness could help foster a common European identity, something which is currently lagging behind economic and political integration in the EU. To this end, a flagship of the European remembrance scene is to be opened to the public in Brussels in 2015: the House of European History (HEH). Here, we see that European institutions can play an important role in developing historical narratives that more accurately reflect European political and social reality today than the national paradigms originated from the 19th century. My article investigates the role of ‘marginal voices’ in the HEH's depiction of European history, looking at the issues of colonialism and migration and the manner in which they are dealt with. At the same time, I probe whether the HEH offers counter-narratives to the prevailing picture of European integration as a success story. An examination of the various concepts underlying the museum's approach reveals major difficulties to include exclusion in the official memory. Although a primary aim of the curators is to portray diversity and to offer multiple perspectives, the concept of diversity employed is rather limited, rooted in the structure of the project.

Keywords::

• migration
• exclusion
• history
• collective memory
• museum

Acknowledgements

I thank Kieran Burns of the Academic Project Team in Brussels who provided information about current developments, the editors Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg, plus Julia Mitzenheim and Sheela Braganca for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and Michaela Sehorz who shared her research material with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I observed that temporary exhibitions at the local level have become holding centres for the desire to provide museum representation for migration stories. Major reference projects took place in cities where migration is a constitutive principle of everyday life. Every bigger city in Germany has had at least one temporary migration exhibition within the past 10 years. Just to mention the most well-known ones: Projekt Migration (Köln 2005), http://www.domit.de/de/ausstellung/projekt-migration; Crossing Munich (München 2009), http://www.crossingmunich.org/; Fremde? Bilder von Anderen in Deutschland und Frankreich (Berlin 2009), http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/fremde/; Movements of Migration (Göttingen 2013), http://www.movements-of-migration.org/cms/; Ortsgespräche (Berlin 2014), http://www.fhxb-museum.de/index.php?id = 267; Das neue Deutschland (Dresden 2014), http://dhmd.de/index.php?id = 2292.