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Mediating Memory in the Museum

Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia

verfasst von: Silke Arnold-de Simine

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Buchreihe : Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Mediating Memory in the Museum is a contribution to an emerging field of research that is situated at the interface between memory studies and museum studies. It highlights the role of museums in the proliferation of the so-called memory boom as well as the influence of memory discourses on international trends in museum cultures.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Introduction

Abstract

Mediating Memory in the Museum is a contribution to an emerging field of research which is situated at the interface between memory studies and museum studies. It seeks to gain some perspective on the role of museums in the proliferation of the so-called memory boom as well as on the influence of memory and remembrance discourses on transnational and international trends in museum cultures. By looking at a range of case studies it outlines the paradigm shifts in exhibiting practices associated with the transformation of traditional history museums, exhibitions and heritage sites into ‘spaces of memory’ over the last 30 years. It probes the political and ethical claims of new museums and maps the relevance of key concepts such as ‘vicarious trauma’, ‘secondary witnessing’, ‘empathic unsettlement’ (LaCapra 2001), ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2004), ‘post-nostalgia’ (Jameson 1991) and ‘reflective nostalgia’ (Boym 2001) within academic and museum contexts. Its aim is to identify the aesthetic, ethical and political implications of new practices of historical remembrance for museums and heritage sites.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

Museum — Memory — Medium

Frontmatter

1. A New Type of Museum?

Abstract

The institution of the museum is a product of the Enlightenment and as such it took on an instrumental role in the politics of identity of the modern nation-state: its function was not only to organize knowledge and educate the public in questions of manners and taste, but also to have a civilizing effect and produce self-regulating and proud citizens who would identify with their nation and heritage (Duncan 1995). During the nineteenth century, museums helped to stabilize what Benedict Anderson describes as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006), in which individuals are connected by the knowledge, self-perception, rules and values they hold in common and by the memory of a shared past. It has been argued that the museum in the modern sense, instigated by the opening of the collections of absolutist monarchs and princes to the public, was accompanied by an epistemic shift in the forms of representation and structures of knowing (cf. Pomian 1990; Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Bennett 1995). It established a museum-form that is defined through its role as an apparatus of the modern nation-state. The question raised here is whether the recent memory boom and its major consequences for the institution of the museum have resulted in equally far-reaching changes in museological paradigms.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

2. Memory Boom, Memory Wars and Memory Crises

Abstract

The ‘memory boom’ refers to a development in which, over the last few decades, the prominence and significance of memory has risen within both the academy and society. While western societies seem increasingly obsessed with relating to the past through the framework of memory, there is no shortage of criticism of what is seen by some as an excessive preoccupation. For others the current concern with memory is best understood in relation to its increasing fragility. The ‘memory boom’ has been tied to the idea of a crisis in which the abundance of memory can be attributed to a very real fear of social amnesia or forgetfulness. According to critics such as Pierre Nora, ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’ (Nora 1989: 7). Nora sees the discursive inflation of memory as a reaction to a perceived acceleration of historical change but not as the genuine article, which could only be found in the ‘milieux de mémoire’. Rather, it is some kind of artificial substitute, belonging to what Nora terms ‘lieux de mémoire’; modern society has become cut off from its past, traditions are not ‘organically’ passed on, but have to be ‘artificially’ recreated to be remembered, for example, in museums or memorials. For these critics memory is not only a precious good but has to be distinguished from ‘inauthentic fakes’: false, mistaken or implanted memories, prosthetic, second-hand, mediated or virtual memories, trivial or nostalgic memories, or simply memory scenarios whose veracity or relationship to the real is dubious. The so-called ‘memory wars’ were fought over recovered memories of abuse: indeed, in 1992 a foundation was established to fight an alleged epidemic of ‘false memories’, and the term has since been extended to encompass memories of a variety of events, from alien abduction to identity theft. While there seem to be many forms of pseudo-memories, it is much more difficult to define what makes a memory genuine.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

3. Is There Such a Thing as ‘Collective Memory’?

Abstract

Memory scholars investigate how memories are generated on the level of individuals, groups, societies and nations, how they are constructed, transmitted or transformed by different media and how, within all of these domains, they are reconstructed retrospectively according to present norms, aims and visions. When analysing the social and cultural practices and texts by which a collectively shared sense of the past is generated, negotiated and communicated, the concept of ‘memory’ that we are working with needs to be defined and conceptual tools developed.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

4. Media Frameworks of Remembering

Abstract

Media provide the framework and set the limits in which we experience the world and communicate our memories to others. The media and technologies in which experiences assume expression and are preserved not only provide changing metaphors for memory, but also shape memories in ways that could not be foreseen at the time. While modern media such as Facebook and Twitter increasingly blur the distinctions between public and private memories (Hoskins 2009: 101), memory scholars try to hold on to clear distinctions in their categories or registers of memory (for example, Assmann 2004). Memories of a childhood spent in the 1970s glow with what we now recognize as the typical orange-pink colours of the Agfa colour film stock available at the time. The specific look that these technologies create is an integral part of the emotional associations and the nostalgia this time evokes. Memories take on the qualities of the media in which they are preserved and passed on. These qualities often only become visible in hindsight, when the technology is outdated and has been replaced. In Wolfgang Becker’s movie Good Bye, Lenin! (Germany 2003) the protagonist’s memories of a happy childhood in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are presented in the form of clips of super 8 home movies of typical GDR summer weekends spent in a ‘Datsche’ (summer cabin) and photographs of ‘Neptune parties’ on the beach, manipulated to look as if they were taken and filmed in the 1970s. The emotional investment in these images is certainly activated by what they depict, but it is triggered even more by their media-specific quality which is associated with the 1970s. This goes some way to explain the film’s nostalgic appeal to West German and international cinemagoers who had no personal memories or attachments to life in the GDR. Although the home movie clips are presented as indexical recordings, the fact that these idyllic images double as Alex’s memories suggests that they conceal more than they reveal in this coming-of-age story set around the time of the ‘Wende’ (the fall of the wall between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)). It suggests that what Alex remembers of his childhood and his mother is just as rose-tinted as the amateur films and photographs taken at the time.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

5. Difficult Pasts, Vicarious Trauma: The Concept of ‘Secondary Witnessing’

Abstract

Since the 1980s and 1990s, a remarkable change in the global landscape of remembrance has meant that nations and their citizens are encouraged to remember not only times of glory or martyrdom but also less assimilable pasts of violence and trauma, persecution and guilt. Traditional forms of public commemoration conveniently ignore any collective responsibility for acts of violence while collective victimhood is framed in a narrative of heroic martyrdom, a form of suffering which — not only in a Christian worldview — can also be configured as an empowering nationalistic discourse. While this dynamic of remembering and forgetting was recognized as potentially helping former enemies to overcome their violent conflicts, there is a global trend in which the acknowledgement of suffering is required to allow both sides to ‘move on’. Questions of culpability and victimhood have moved to centre-stage, symbolic apologies, moral and legal accountability and increasingly also material compensation are demanded from those who have been established as perpetrators.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

6. Empathy and Its Limits in the Museum

Abstract

In recent years ‘empathy’ has attracted scholarly attention in various academic areas, from neuroscience, psychology and sociology to memory, literary and film studies. While it is important to acknowledge the breadth of these different approaches, I will focus for the purpose of this analysis on the explorations of empathy that have informed memory studies and museum practices. The concept of empathy has become central to the transdisciplinary field of memory studies, with the rise of interest in witnessing and trauma. More recently, with the growing attention on mediated memory and the way it travels, a focus has emerged on the possibilities for empathy in ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2001), ‘secondary witnessing’ (LaCapra 2001) and ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2004); the understanding is that memories, together with emotions are either transmitted by empathy or, indeed, create empathy. But empathy is often not sufficiently distinguished from other emotional engagements such as identification, concern or solidarity. While empathy as a term is fairly young, the concept as such can be traced back to the eighteenth century ‘when empathy and sympathy [were] regarded as civil society’s primary emotional resources, connecting citizens and fine-tuning their mutual relations’ (Frevert 2001: 12). David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Hamburg Dramaturgy, 1769) may have used a different terminology to describe what is now termed ‘empathy’, but they all argued that moral judgement and moral behaviour ultimately depend on it. Even if they did not all see empathy as an innate human response, they still assumed that empathy, compassion and moral behaviour were intimately connected and would follow from each other automatically. However, they were also concerned with the limits of empathy and conceded that without resemblance between subject and object compassion might fail. The lack of empathy for somebody removed in time, space and kinship was readily acknowledged.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

7. Nostalgia and Post-Nostalgia in Heritage Sites

Abstract

Nostalgia can take many forms in the museum landscape: war museums can deliberately invoke nostalgia for a country’s ‘glorious’ past, its heroic resistance or its stiff upper lip attitude in times of adversity; folk museums evoke a time that allegedly allowed for a simpler yet more fulfilled life, embedded in a community and in touch with nature; industrial heritage sites invite visitors to revel in the ruins of urban modernity that nevertheless speak of the skills of artisans and workers and inspire pride in the engineers and entrepreneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But as well as presenting a past which instils nostalgic longing, museums can become objects of nostalgia in their own right: The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, for example, is perceived by many visitors to be a portal to the past. As a seemingly unchanged Victorian institution, its anthropological exhibition conveys the impression of being stuck in a time warp, a perception that is positively encouraged while nevertheless being deceptive.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

The Deaths of Others: Representing Trauma in War Museums

Frontmatter

8. Sites of Trauma

Abstract

In his essay ‘Excavation and Memory’, Walter Benjamin states that ‘memory is not an instrument for exploring the past’(Benjamin 2005: 576); a sentiment that seems to fly into the face of recent investment in the power of memory to establish a meaningful relationship with the past. Obviously Benjamin does not discount memory as such, but rather he is trying to qualify the way it is perceived. For him, memory is not a tool to access the past but is the earth in which the past lies buried. The metaphor of archaeology, earlier used by Freud, implies that it requires hard work to unearth the past and its secrets. Benjamin insists that they can only be revealed by ‘meticulous investigation’. Taking the metaphor further, he stresses the ‘cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam’; that is, the attempt to look, not for something that one expects to find, but for what is unknown, surprising and even troubling. However, it is not the recovery of data or facts that Benjamin considers to be ‘genuine memory’, but rather images, fragments that, once salvaged from those strata, will be collected in the ‘sober rooms of our later insights’ (Benjamin 2005: 576). By comparing the processes of remembering to the work of the archaeologist, he argues that it is essential not only to care about the things that are found, but to give an account of the resistances and problems experienced on the way to finding them and to consider the person doing the remembering and the circumstances and contexts in which they delivered these memories. For Benjamin, memory as embodied perception and affective engagement does not so much reveal the past as jolt us into a mode of critical inquiry.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

9. Icons of Trauma

Abstract

Even though the MHM displays human remains in parts of its permanent exhibition, it refrains from showing any human remains (such as hair) in the section on the Holocaust. There is a glass case with shoes from Majdanek, however; not in a huge pile like in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, but lined up in (irregular) rows, together with a poem written by a 12-year-old Jewish girl, who was ordered to sort the shoes of the dead and was herself killed in 1944. The poem ‘survived’ because it was memorized by fellow inmates who testified after the war. It counterbalances the mute material witnesses whose careful arrangement reminds visitors of their mediated presentation which takes great care not to mimic the way the shoes were collected and stacked in the camps. Their re-collection in the museum re-individualizes the shoes, even if they stay nameless. Shoes are the closest one can get to bodily remains: the leather of the shoes behaves like a second skin and through constant wear moulds to fit its owner’s feet. This has become proverbial in expressions such as ‘to put oneself into someone’s shoes’ or ‘to step into someone’s shoes’ that is, to feel what someone else is feeling and even to take on their identity.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

Screen Memories and the ‘Moving’ Image: Empathy and Projection in ISM, Liverpool and IWM North, Manchester

Frontmatter

10. The Politics of Empathy

Abstract

Media coverage of the 60th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy (2004) took a lot of interest in the fact that state representatives of Germany and Russia — Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Premier Vladimir Putin — had for the first time been invited to take part in the official remembrance celebrations. Far less controversial was the fact that Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg sat among the heads of state and veterans as official guests. Not only have the battle scenes in their collaborative Hollywood projects such as Saving Private Ryan (US 1998, dir. Steven Spielberg) and Band of Brothers (US 2001, dir. Tom Hanks et al., prod. Steven Spielberg) been praised by veterans as ‘authentic’ (Walker 2004: 123), but this seal of approval also means that they are perceived to have successfully transferred the memories of veterans to the screen for audiences around the world to witness and to experience. Their presence at the commemoration ceremony was a clear signal that the veterans and the organizers of the event had endorsed the film Saving Private Ryan as a vindication of ‘their’ war, as a life-like record of the soldiers’ experience and as an authentic representation of their memories. The film not only emulates the real-time reporting of war photography and footage (Walker 2004: 124) — key episodes were shot in the grainy style of the 16mm colour film used in the 1940s (Westwell 2006: 76/92) — but in parts aims to induce in viewers a visceral sense of disorientation and concussion as experienced by soldiers in combat. Some of the non-realistic effects, such as slow motion, are supposed to convey inner experientiality and make viewers feel immersed in the horrors of D-Day. In Hirsch’s words, ‘cinema constitutes a kind of witnessing to both the outer, physical reality of historical events and the inner, psychological reality of the effects of those events on people’ (Hirsch 2004: 6). Viewers are not only given the impression that they are part of the action, they are also equipped with ready-made memories of the events.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

11. Testimonial Video Installation

Abstract

The video installation placed in the ‘Enslavement and the Middle Passage’ gallery features a very different form of video testimony: actors narrate and act out scenes of everyday life on the plantations in the Americas. The testimonials were filmed with costumed actors on location on the island of St Kitts and are inspired by and based on original sources but scripted by curators simulating the first-hand voices. They can at best be described as a simulacrum of an eyewitness account and might therefore better be called ‘testimonial videos’.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

12. Middle Passage Installation

Abstract

The Middle Passage, the infamous transatlantic voyage transporting enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the coast of North America, has come to epitomize the horrors of transatlantic and plantation slavery and therefore usually forms the centrepiece of any slavery exhibition. When designing this centrepiece curators could hardly ignore the long European tradition of iconic visualizations of the Middle Passage that focus around the image of the ship (cf. Wood 2000: 14). Various exhibitions have faced the challenge of finding an adequate way to represent the Middle Passage by opting for walk-through reconstructions of the hold of a slave ship. The Transatlantic Slavery Gallery (TSG) in Liverpool (1994) had originally also decided on such a recreation, dominated by a soundtrack of atmospheric noises (for example, waves against the ship’s hull) and the alternating readings from the log entries of captain John Newton on voyages made between 1752 and 1754, and the memoirs of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), who endured the Middle Passage as a child. Anthony Tibbles, one of the curators of the exhibition, detailed the debates and considerations that went into this design, freely admitting that they were not satisfied by the compromise which was eventually reached:

Some wanted us to construct an emotive but authentic hold to walk through with manacled bodies covered in excrement, groans, smells — the full works. […], but we did not want something that frightened people (particularly children) and we did not want to sensationalise. […] We wanted visitors to use their imaginations and hoped to provide them with enough information and experience to do so. […] Some people do find it a moving and emotional experience; for others the bareness of the interpretation leaves them unmoved. I suspect that visitors’ responses depend on what they bring with them.(Tibbles 1996)

Silke Arnold-de Simine

13. The Big Picture in IWM (North)

Abstract

The IWM (North), which opened in 2002, aims to enrich its visitors’ ‘understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war and conflict […] by creating vivid personal stories and powerful experiences’ (Manchester 2013e). Here, as in the ISM, the idea is that visitors can gain this understanding by immersing themselves in personal stories and memories of people who ‘fought in wars, tried to escape them, or had to live and work through them’. An audio announcement at the beginning of each Big Picture Show states: ‘Every image, every document, every voice is part of someone’s story.’ Although this is phrased in very general terms, the focus is clearly on the British perspective. Here, even more than in the ISM, film is the preferred medium to present these stories: large audio-visual projections do not so much provide details about the causes as focus on the consequences of war, or, to be more precise, the impact of various twentieth-century conflicts on (mainly British) people’s lives. There is no central projection space, but once every hour alternating image and sound shows are screened on the walls of the main exhibition space. After the opening of the museum, historian Matthew Hughes criticized the IWM North, arguing that ‘without the Big Picture, the IWM-N is just a box with a restaurant and a viewing platform’ (Hughes 2002).

Silke Arnold-de Simine

14. Guilt, Grief and Empathy

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the traditional educational role of museums has been renegotiated and modified. In the nineteenth century monuments and museums were seen as instruments for defining national identity by interpreting the past in martyr-like or heroic narratives which encouraged pride or at least unequivocal identification with the nation. Jay Winter argues that the First World War marked a shift in commemoration paradigms as monuments became the centre of ritualistic public mourning, a place for the bereaved to grieve for individual soldiers whose deaths were nevertheless redeemed within a narrative of communal sacrifice for a greater good (Winter 1995: 80). In contrast, contemporary museums are assigned the social responsibility of providing a controlled and safe environment in which all members of society can potentially expose themselves to past events that are difficult to remember because they are painful and/or controversial and inspire guilt rather than pride. Memorial museums have been assigned the role of society’s conscience. But maybe this is not such a major break with the museum’s traditional educational role after all, because according to Cameron, the task

to improve the human condition, to act as sites for the formation of values and incubators of change, appears reminiscent of the older and now unacceptable moralising and reforming treatise. […] Are the contemporary discourses of social responsibility simply a revisionist version of the older ideal? (Cameron 2007: 330)

Silke Arnold-de Simine

The Paradoxes of Nostalgia in Museums and Heritage Sites

Frontmatter

15. (Post-)Nostalgia for the Museum? The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Abstract

Nostalgia, in one of its most recent and still dominant incarnations, is seen not only to debilitate critical awareness of and engagement with the present, but also speaks of the loss of a sense of historicity. Jameson’s famous neo-marxist critique of the 1980s and 1990s branded nostalgia a conservative, self-deceptive, disingenuous and sentimental idealization and misappropriation of the past, a way of avoiding the harsh truths of history in favour of familiar myths of cultural memory. In Jameson’s and other cultural critics’ view, nostalgia is a way of relating to the past that edits out any uncomfortable issues and is exploited for manipulative and commercial purposes. But, as Linda Hutcheon has remarked, Jameson’s own rhetoric sounds at times distinctly nostalgic: he repeatedly yearns for what he calls ‘genuine historicity’ (Jameson 1991: 19; cf. Hutcheon 2000: 203) and even for ‘passionate expressions of that older longing once called nostalgia’ (Jameson 1991: xvii) in the face of a postmodernism which, in his words, is ‘an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’ (1991: 19). Jameson would certainly be the first to concede that what we describe as nostalgia is historically and culturally specific and that the cultural practices clustered around the notion of nostalgia change over time. Therefore, the ‘post’ in his ‘post-nostalgia’ (Jameson 1991: 19–21) must indicate that something significant and decisive has happened with what Raymond Williams calls the ‘structure of feelings’. Nostalgia is definitely not what it used to be.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

16. The Ghosts of Spitalfields: 18 Folgate Street and 19 Princelet Street

Abstract

Another example of a ‘post-nostalgic’ museum is 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields, London. Dennis Severs created it over the course of 20 years: in 1979, two years after the ‘Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust’ was formed, he bought an almost derelict Georgian terraced house, originally occupied by Huguenot silk weavers, and reinvented it as a ‘living demonstration of eighteenth and nineteenth century life’. He inhabited his creation without modern amenities such as central heating and for some time even without electricity, until his death in 1999. Although Severs derived income from showing visitors around, he refused to call his house a ‘museum’; in his view it was not a simulation of past life, it was a way of immersing himself and to some extent his visitors in a ‘collection of atmospheres’ of the past.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

17. Intangible Heritage, Place and Community: Écomusée d’Alsace

Abstract

At first glance there seem to be more differences than similarities between the Écomusée d’Alsace and 19 Princelet Street: one is all about rural community, agriculture and a style of life that is rooted in the landscape, the other is about migrants taking their chances in initially strange and unfamiliar urban environments; one focuses on how different people shape a place, the other on how people are shaped by a place, its landscape, its geological and geopolitical features. The Écomusée is the largest open-air museum in France and a major tourist attraction;¹ 19 Princelet Street is confined to one house, fights for funding and is not permanently open to the public. What connects the museum at 19 Princelet Street to the concept of the ecomuseum, which appeared on the French museological scene in the 1970s, is their approach: they both aim to relate the connections between tangible (objects, architecture) and intangible heritage (customs, beliefs, skills) in order to ‘preserve and deepen a sense of place’ (Davis 2004: 368) and a collective identity that is based on a people’s relationship to a place. Both projects deal with difficult histories but also evoke nostalgia for these times of struggle. They are keenly aware of questions of ownership of heritage and are based on the idea of public participation and the involvement of the local community in the project.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

18. Ostalgie — Nostalgia for GDR Everyday Culture? The GDR in the Museum

Abstract

The question of whose memories can make themselves heard is very much at the centre of the controversies around GDR remembrance culture. Different memory discourses, memory communities and museological paradigms vie for public funding, political endorsement and visitor attention. Museums, memorials and heritage sites referring to the GDR are divided into two kinds: they are either ‘trauma’ sites concerning the Wall and the Stasi, or they are considered to be part of the wave of nostalgia for the former everyday culture of the GDR termed ‘Ostalgie’ — a pun formed out of ‘Nostalgie’ (nostalgia) and ‘Ost’ (east).

Silke Arnold-de Simine

Uncanny Objects, Uncanny Technologies

Frontmatter

19. Phantasmagoria and Its Spectres in the Museum

Abstract

In the internalization of what before had been pictured as external forces, psychoanalysis shaped twentieth-century western views of how the dynamics between self and other, past and present could be envisaged and negotiated. Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis itself is intrinsically uncanny because of its capacity to lay bare forces in the individual that are the product of the bourgeois family and society, thereby rendering the familiar frighteningly unfamiliar and revealing the unfamiliar to be familiar. The uncanny speaks of a form of alienation that estranges us from our own self, its desires and fears, but also from social life in which family dynamics are constantly reproduced. It characterizes modern society in which agency and invested participation is continuously undermined while responsibility increasingly rests with the individual. At the same time the uncanny, which results from individuation and isolation, is an experience shared with others. It is for this reason that Royle interprets Freud’s uncanny as ‘perhaps the most and least subjective experience, the most and least autobiographical “event”’ (Royle 2003: 16).

Silke Arnold-de Simine

Conclusion

Abstract

According to Huyssen, trauma, the uncanny and the abject are ‘master-signifiers’ of the late twentieth and — I would add — early twenty-first century, ‘all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a present repetitively haunted by the past’ (2003: 8). I would argue that memory, nostalgia and, more recently, empathy, also belong to this group of ‘master-signifiers’ which cluster around the modern conditions of alienation, dispossession and homelessness and the efforts to overcome them. What trauma and nostalgia have in common is that they are both reactions to spatio-temporal displacements and the recognition of loss. They speak of the desire or compulsion to return to the familiar which has become alienated. They converge in the conflicting desires for familiarity and individuation, in the urge to know and uncover, but equally to forget and repress, a conflict which Freud has identified as the uncanny. They are characterized by a compulsive spilling of the past into the present and therefore refute the concept of linear time in which past and present are contained and neatly separated.

Silke Arnold-de Simine

Backmatter

Titel: Mediating Memory in the Museum
verfasst von: Silke Arnold-de Simine
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-35264-4
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35011-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352644