Mediating memory through materiality: trauma iconography of flight and expulsion in the 21st-century museum
Loading...
Date
2018-11-01
Authors
Mikuska-Tinman, Emma
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis examines how German and Polish museums employ the social meanings rooted in flight and expulsion visual trauma iconography in their individual narrative, experiential, and spatial structures through the process of Inszenierung (staging). It does so to better understand the ways in which these museums interact with and intervene in national and transnational memory discourses surrounding flight and expulsion. The Landesmuseen and travelling exhibitions under analysis work towards the construction of an ethno-regional diasporic identity for the expellee community, rooted in nostalgia and collective victimhood. Trauma iconography is used to underscore flight and expulsion as the ultimate historical cataclysm. The national and transnational museums under examination only nominally include flight and expulsion in their overall structures. Despite this, they interrupt or reinterpret the previously culturalized content of these trauma icons in order to create cognitive dissonance between the visitor and more traditional mnemonic patterns of flight and expulsion.
Description
Keywords
Germany, Poland, Flight, Expulsion, Museum, Memory, Cultural Memory, Second World War, 21st-Century, Museum of the Second World Gdansk, German-Russian Musuem Berlin-Karlshorst, Center Against Expulsions, Federation of Expellees
Citation
MLA