The memory imperative as a narrative template: difficult heritage at European and North American human rights museums

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the prescriptive expectation placed on governments to confront violent pasts operates as a three-tiered narrative template in exhibitions at state-authorised Euro-American human rights museums. Using Kazerne Dossin, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as case studies, I illustrate that in representing the histories of Nazi collaboration in Belgium, racial segregation in the U.S. and settler colonialism in Canada these museums promote similar master narratives of human rights progress. I thereby build on current museum scholarship which, in describing these institutions as ‘ideas-focused’ and ‘issues-based,’ largely frames them through their focus on tackling present-day human rights abuses by inciting visitor activism and drawing attention to the suffering of the oppressed. I contend that these activist engagements are regulated by an important commemorative function. This function is tied to the imperative to remember dark pasts which produce representations marked by hidden engagements with the ongoing structural inequalities that led to the commission of state-enforced violence in the first place working to the effect of marginalising some voices of suffering. This is evidenced by the narrative template which seals off the past from the present making visitors the most important present-day connection to the difficult past addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights museums
• difficult heritage
• globalised Holocaust memory
• national community building
• museum narratives

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to the two reviewers for their constructive feedback and in particular their useful comments on this paper’s comparative multi-case study approach.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. KD and the CMHR are major national museums that also hold international significance. KD is regularly celebrated by Flemish politicians and is embedded in intergovernmental/supranational networks of European Holocaust commemoration reinforcing its EU-based importance (CLM (Connecting Law and Memory) 2016; IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) 2019). The CMHR is one of nine Canadian national museums and affiliated with transnational human rights museum networks; it continues to win accolades for its exhibitions in Canada and internationally, including in the U.S. (CMHR 2019). This justifies their inclusion in this comparative analysis of overlaps in state-authorised Euro-American commemorative practices. The NCCHR was included because although it is not a national museum of a similar standing like the previous two, so far it is the only American state-authorised human rights museum there is. It was, in part, funded by the city of Atlanta, which managed to involve two of the most renowned American exhibition/architectural design firms in the development of its museum, Ralph Appelbaum Associates and the Freelon Group; both are known for having taken the lead on the permanent exhibition/architectural design at major national institutions like the USHMM (RAA (Ralph Appelbaum Associates) 1993) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC (National Museum of African American History and Culture) 2016).

2. For similar arguments made in relation to other European/Western state-authorised public history projects see e.g. Gooder and Jacobs (2000); Macdonald (2013, 214).

3. I propose that the human rights memorial museum emerged as a new type of memorial museum alongside the recent human rights museum. This new institution diverges from the first generation of memorial museums that emerged after the Second World insofar as it not only sheds light onto the human rights issues it commemorates but does so through adopting an explicit human rights perspective. I acknowledge that due to their shared historical roots, memorial museums and human rights memorial museums share similar human rights-based values. At the same time, however, I argue that they are marked by differences regarding the degree to which the concept of human rights informs their work. For instance, the USHMM’s main mission is to ‘advance and disseminate knowledge’ about the human rights abuses commited during the Holocaust; ‘to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy’ (USHMM 2019). Like the USHMM, one of the three case studies discussed in this paper, KD, also addresses the genocidal event of the Holocaust. It focuses on the human rights violations committed during the Second World War in Belgium, and confronts issues of Belgian complicity in the Holocaust, but does so from a perspective that explicitly ‘combines Holocaust education on the one hand, and human rights education on the other’ (KD 2019). In taking up this approach, which shapes all aspects of its work, ‘it draws on the historical account of the Jewish persecution and the Holocaust from a Belgian perspective to reflect on contemporary phenomena of racism and the exclusion of communities and on discrimination’ while exploring ‘group violence in society as a possible stepping stone to genocides’ (KD 2019).

4. In proposing this narrative structure, I do not claim that each of these three narrative categories are solely employed in the context of Euro-American national human rights museums. For examples of how the second and third categories are used in other human rights museums see Opotow (2015).

5. The research discussed in this article is part of a larger study on museums engaged in the development of human right-based educational programmes and exhibition content. As part of this broader comparative analysis, based on exhibition contents, museum-authored material, government-related documentation, and semi-structured expert interviews with museum professionals, I also engage with the new educational tour at Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial in Austria, for instance. This tour employs principles of human rights education to enhance school-based teachings about active citizenship and participatory democracy (see Graefenstein 2016). I have not included Mauthausen in this paper because it focuses on exhibition contents in Euro-American museums and memorial museums that self-identify with the concept of human rights through their overall mission, title and/or work. Although Mauthausen undoubtedly aims to promote human rights-based values through the new educational tour, its overarching institutional mission is not explicitly linked to the concept of human rights. This finds expression in the fact that it does not engage with the concept in its permanent exhibitions, for example. I did not make reference to this case study in this article given that I specifically focus on human rights museums and human rights memorial museums.

6. While I acknowledge this possibility, I do not wish to imply that visitors necessarily interact with exhibitions in prescribed ways. Given that ‘no one owns the meanings of exhibitions’ (Failler and Simon 2015, 171), visitors may respond to the exhibits in both intended and unintended ways. The key to answering this question, however, lies in visitor studies which is outside the scope of the present study focused on narrative analyses. It is noteworthy that until now, no comprehensive evaluations of visitor responses to the exhibition content presented at the institutions I discuss in this article have been conducted (see Milne 2015 for an analysis of the critical reader comments about the CMHR left in the online forum of a local newspaper, The Winnipeg Sun, 208-112).

7. Although the case studies analysed in this paper tend to refrain from emphasising the legacies of the dark pasts of state-enforced violence they confront, they draw attention to other national/international human rights issues. To nominate a few examples, KD highlights that current human rights policy as it pertains to immigrants and refugees in European countries, including Belgium, continues to produce stories of human rights abuse ‘comparable to those of the 1920s and 1930s’; in its human rights gallery, the NCCHR scrutinises how illegal immigrants working in U.S. sweatshops are deprived of fair wages and access to legal support in cases of workplace abuse; towards the later galleries, the CMHR addresses the international struggle for gender equality emphasising how the suppression of women in Western societies, including in Canada, is partly facilitated by the advertising industry’s objectifying gaze. All these examples are designed to encourage visitors to confront contemporary issues by defending the rights of others (Perla 2015, 205; BCH 2019).

8. To be clear, I do not argue that merely because these European and North American human rights museums submit themselves to the imperative to remember, they represent a rather positive account of the present to the effect of excluding present-day voices of suffering. I acknowledge that the reason for these uplifting museum representations are complex and influenced by a multiplicity of factors. It has been argued that state-funded museums tend to be less critical of contentious issues (see e.g. Sandell and Dodd 2010, 15). Also, Heather Milne claims that the CMHR, for example, counts itself part of the neoliberal entertainment industry and consequently relies on the ‘Disneyfication’ of human rights to attract visitors (CMHR 2015, 121). In arguing that the imperative to remember helps paint a positive image of the human rights-based domestic present through placing visitors into the subject position of the human rights defender and marginalising those who continue to suffer from the negative legacies of violent pasts, I do not wish to discount these explanations. I rather intend to foreground that, in part, the Euro-American national human rights museums discussed in this paper achieve this effect by telling a specific story about the past in the present informed by the memory imperative.

9. For an analysis of how the concept of human rights is used differently to stage difficult pasts and presents in community museums see Kennedy and Graefenstein (2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sulamith Graefenstein

Sulamith Graefenstein (PhD) is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. She has undertaken research in Europe, North America and Asia. Her work in the area of Memory Studies and Museum Studies focuses on developing an understanding of how human rights museums and human rights memorial museums help promote notions of (trans)national justice and solidarity in an era of circulating Holocaust memory and human rights.