interpreting the past

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday afternoon. I toughed out the jet lag by visiting the Topography of Terror installation (the Nazi SS headquarters site, now excavated to show the basement remains), with interpretive panels and a new Documentation Center with facsimiles of photographs and other documentation of the SS atrocities.

This is one way to interpret history - present the evidence and hold the interpretation to a minimum. Even so, what's opaque to the viewer is the selection process - which pieces of evidence were selected? Which were passed over? In a museum setting that judgment is not just a matter of historiography but also a question of aesthetics to some degree: what documents will "read" best for the viewer?

Yesterday I visited the DDR Museum, a documentation of a different sort. The approach taken here is to use the actual material culture (of communism) in display cases, but find ways to make it interactive, through the way the displays are framed and through supplemental activities incorporated in that framing. I am not usually a big fan of the multi-sensory "hands on" approach because I think it often results in "hands on" for its own sake - and that is partly the case in this instance. Also, the frame often (and in this case too) visually and experientially overshadows the artifacts. Materials for this kind of frame are usually cheaply constructed because intended not to be permanent. However, I think the interpretive text panels are very well done.

The message I received: communism was a time of scarcity (that theme is very prominent, due probably to the focus on daily life) imposed by possibly well-meaning but certainly incompetent leaders. Actually, now that I think of it, there's little agency in the text pieces: it's "the Party" or "the GDR" or simply the agentless passive voice.

I'm glad I'm writing this - I wouldn't have caught that absence necessarily otherwise. In textual analysis, absence can be hard to see.