Chloe Paver writes:
Another museum with an extraordinary name. What have Germans got against ‘museum’? Museums celebrate precious or fascinating material remnants of the past, whereas most of the history museums in this guide have a rather different mission. Even so, nobody would hold it against Germany for calling this the Museum of East Germany and of German Unification, which is effectively what it is.
Zeitgeschichte or ‘contemporary history’ is a peculiarly German notion, suggesting that, compared with more distant eras, recent history requires its own academic approach. That distinction made sense to historians working at the end of the last century, looking back at a uniquely violent and repressive period of national history. One wonders, however, what will happen when the Third Reich and communist East Germany cease to be ‘contemporary’.
For the time being, Zeitgeschichte suggests a history that the country is still living with, whose legacies have directly shaped today’s state. That is particularly pertinent in Leipzig, where democratic forces are seen to have stood up to dictatorship and defeated it. Still keenly aware of the failure of the Weimar Republic, today’s Germany seeks to nip in the bud any threats to democracy by celebrating democratic traditions and role models.
Accordingly, the second part of the museum’s name alludes to the ‘Neues Forum’, a pro-democracy organisation that challenged the East German ruling party in 1989 and so paved the way for the Peaceful Revolution. Besides, ‘forum’ suggests a place where dictatorship and democracy are not just put behind glass, but where democracy can be acted out through discussion and debate.
The museum’s critics would argue that like all museums run by the House of History in Bonn, this one toes a certain state line and excludes dissenting views. However, the museum would have difficulty staging democracy for the visitor if it allowed only for the existence a single viewpoint. Alternative outlooks are presented in various ways.
Arguably, it is no great concession to minority views to display leaflets and posters made by the groups who were opposed to unification or who opposed the government’s move from Bonn to Berlin, since in both cases those doom-mongers now look rather silly. Germany has been successfully unified for 25 years, few can imagine the government anywhere but Berlin, and Bonn has settled into its revised role as a pleasant if unusually cosmopolitan city on the Rhine.
More boldly, the museum acknowledges the existence of different emotions about the consequences of unification: resentment from Westerners at having to pay for restructuring in the East; resentment from Easterners at the widespread loss of jobs and the loss of familiar structures. These emotions are still live, if fading.
Currently, the museum invites its German visitors to fill out a slip describing their memories of their first encounters with the East or the West, as appropriate. The museum can choose which of the slips that are dropped into the box it wants to display, but those currently displayed include both positive and negative responses. One visitor (who can only have been from the East) lists his or her emotions at the time: ‘Feeling overwhelmed by so many impressions. / Feelings of inferiority. / A feeling of having been cheated’. Another Eastener writes: ‘When my family and I travelled to the West for the first time, in 1990, I couldn’t understand why everyone smiled at us, especially at us children, in such a friendly way. I’d never even met them before. / I was also amazed by the feeling of belonging together (of being a ‘we’) that spread across the country. / Sometimes I look for that precise feeling today but I can’t find it any more’.
The fact that UK visitors would have nothing to write on these slips (which are in any case printed only in German) reminds us that this museum is very much a German-German forum. Nevertheless, UK visitors can enjoy being an onlooker to a form of democratic discussion that has no equivalent in Britain. No national museum is asking us, as far as I know, what the recession of the 1980s felt like. If they asked me, I would say my abiding memory is a linguistic one, of newsreaders saying the words ‘Factory X is to close with the loss of so-and-so-many jobs’, week after week, month after month.
Another thing that has no equivalent in the UK is the sheer wealth of objects that have been collected over 25 years by the House of History and its offshoots. The museum has over 800 000 objects in its collections, of which it shows a tiny fraction at any one time. According to its Collections Strategy, the House of History is continually collecting items related to the big themes of the century such as the banking crisis, but it also uses an approach it calls ‘From the street into the museum’ (‘Von der Straße ins Museum’) which allows it to collect material relating to grassroots or public demonstrations of feeling. The authors give the example of objects relating to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s controversial rally in Cologne in 2014, in which he invoked Turks living in Germany to retain their Turkish identity, integrating without assimilating.
Is any museum in the UK currently collecting an equivalent range of items? Redundancy notices from closed coalmines and steelworks, the hearse from Princess Diana’s funeral, tents from the protest against the Newbury bypass, disinfectant bottles from the mad cow disease outbreak, Mrs Thatcher’s handbags, boxes carried out of the building by Lehman Brothers employees on the day of the firm’s collapse, first editions of Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top, souvenirs from the Hajj, and examples of ‘lads’ mags’? This seems preposterously unlikely. Yet Germany’s history museums collect the equivalents of all these things – as well as large amounts of fine art – as a matter of course.
Germany’s terrible past, for which nothing can ever make amends, seems to have obliged it to develop a form of history museum that the UK is missing out on.
German History Museums 