Memory in the museums ” “

“Reconciliation between friends and enemies, between victors and losers, is necessary to guarantee a future to Europe; but the absence of any distinction between victims and executioners leads to a generalized loss of political responsibility that does not bode well”, says SOPHIE WAHNICH, researcher of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Reviewing the museums of the history of the 20th century in Europe, she emphasizes the different “national” attitudes to their own past and warns of the risks linked to the widespread rejection, “understandable – though unacceptable -, of generating and experiencing feelings of shame” for some aspects of one’s own history. “If we wish to draw a line over a shameful past – explains Sophie Wahnich – we need to recognize it for what it is, and not neutralize it, because the rejection of the emotions linked to it” may lead to “an attitude of indifference and passiveness towards intolerable episodes of history”. A DIFFICULT HISTORY, that of the 20th century. “For over twenty years it has been entrusted to the historical museums in Europe”, points out Wahnich, citing, among others, “two museums in France, the Musée de Péronne dedicated to the Great War and the Memorial of Caen which covers both world wars; the Imperial War Museum in London; and the ‘House of Terrors’ in Budapest”. In Germany “exhibitions on the war of extermination and the crimes of the Wehrmacht, mainly temporary and itinerant, are organized by the Länder with reference to their own history; the site of the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden (Hitler’s holiday bunker) has been transformed into a museum and tourist centre”. CONFLICT BETWEEN VERSIONS OF WHAT IS “INTOLERABLE”. What is the aim of these museums? Wahnich says it is to “transmit in rational language a history charged with emotions, and able to lead visitors to a point beyond where the family memory or the history studied at school have left them. The transmission and elaboration of collective memories are born from the interweaving of individual memory, family memory and public memory”, explains Wahnich. It is, she says, “a moral question that involves the symbolic and political consciousness of Europe”, to which “not all countries respond in the same way”. It is “an emotional relationship” that arouses various reactions: according to Wahnich, “the history of military conflicts in the 20th century is marked by the contrast between two different ways of ‘conceiving the intolerable’. According to the first, “every form of violence committed against man is intolerable. Both war and every other violence practice deserve execration”. According to the second, “the ideologies that deny the values of freedom and equality are intolerable, and what is shameful is to permit their diffusion”. This gives rise to the legitimisation of the war “against such ideologies”. So there is a “conflict between versions of what is intolerable” that becomes in some sense ‘aesthetic’ because “heroism, a category that does not derive from the first definition of what is ‘intolerable’, is absolutely indispensable for the second”. HEROISM “A THING OF THE PAST”. Yet, “while Great Britain honours its own heroes, France has greater difficulties in commemorating them” and expresses towards them “a minimal museum display” in which ample space “is reserved for the civilian victims”. This is tantamount to a rejection of “heroization that seems to be a distinguishing feature of the French memory”, according to which also “being children of the ‘just’, of those, that is, who dedicated themselves to rescuing the Jews from extermination, seems to constitute an existential burden” rather than a source of pride. More generally, “the will to distance oneself from ‘heroic values’ is, in Wahnich’s view, “another way of rejecting a history that interweaves individual and collective destiny”: a perspective in which “heroes are transformed into Don Quixote or into useless martyrs” and according to which “it is more important to “save one’s own skin than sacrifice one’s life to ideals. Heroism is by now considered a thing of the past. Today, people more readily understand an attitude of ‘wait and see’, even when the very foundations of our civil liberties are at risk”. PIETY AND VALUES. “It is not pleasant – notes Sophie Wahnich – to go beyond official memory and family silence and come to terms with the shame of the Nazi ascendancy in Germany or in Hungary, or, more banally, with the history of ‘collaboration’ in France”. In Hungary, confrontation with the country’s 20th century past is stifled, while the “official history paints the picture of a poor country that was never the protagonist of its own destiny and a victim of Hitler”. “The sole emotion not placed in discussion is piety”; nonetheless, concludes Wahnich, “if piety is reconciliatory, it is at the same time relativistic” since “it leads to the de-individualization of events, almost to the point of neutralizing them. It tends to promote a form of humanism divorced from every historical perspective and more sensitive to suffering bodies than to the values that need to be defended”.