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Chapter 1: The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum

The core question of this book is how Second World War museums and exhibitions can help prototypical visitors from diverse cultures comprehend or experience the past in the twenty-first century. As the prologue has shown by example of war toys, there are multifaceted ways to involve the visitor in an exhibition, whether it allows for historical understanding or for universal emotional reactions that bring the past closer to the present. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, the museum has become an increasingly significant medium to connect past and present (see e.g. Finney 2017). In other words, it has become a medium of remembrance (see e.g. Makhotina and Schulze-Wessel 2015, 8–9; Thiemeyer 2015). The German philosopher Herrmann Lübbe argues that the increasing musealization of the late twentieth century is a reaction to the acceleration of progress in human society (1982, 2000; see also Koselleck 2004 [1979], 258–263). That is to say, Lübbe argues that the quicker society changes, the more it creates forms and institutions to save artifacts and structures from the otherwise would-be-forgotten past. Consequently, the loss of familiarity with the well-known can be compensated for by musealization. The museum functions as one of the institutions that allow the present to be connected with the past, which for Lübbe enables the process of progress toward the future to actually occur. Even if one objects to the ‘progressive’ nature of this development,1 the trend toward temporalization of the past, present, and future seems to have further intensified in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Jan Assmann’s distinction between communicative (social) and cultural memory (1992, 48–66) helps us to understand the role of the museum when communicative memory becomes increasingly ritualized, materialized, and institutionalized. Astrid Erll points out that memory occurs as both individual and collective processes: “[W]e have to differentiate between two levels on which cul-