Lest we forget
Sites that help people remember and understand tragic events are complex places that are subject to much debate. Rebecca Atkinson reports
The French call it le devoir de mémoire, the duty to remember. It is an expression often used in connection with 20th-century atrocities such as the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust.
Museums, as repositories of memories, know this duty only too well. “Never again”, another symbolic phrase, is normally the starting point for educating new generations about the horrors of war and our capacity for cruelty.
However, the way we use those memories continues to be subject to debate.
When it comes to dealing with atrocity, what role does memory have in post-conflict healing, longer-term reconciliation and the creation of a future where “never again” might be possible?
At the end of last year, representatives from Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, the Shoah Foundation from California and the UK-based Aegis Trust for genocide prevention and others met in London to discuss the future of the Genocide Archive of Rwanda.
The chief executive of the Aegis Trust, James Smith, says the organisation hopes to announce plans in April to create an archive of international significance and on a scale unparalleled in Africa.
Rwandan genocide: 20 years on
Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the 1994 genocide, in which as many as a million people were killed over approximately 100 days.
The background to the genocide dates to the 1960s when the government instituted anti-Tutsi discriminatory practices. This culminated in 1994 when the Hutu leadership organised members of the Hutu ethnic group to systematically slaughter members of the Tutsi group, politically moderate Hutus and Twa people.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial, built on a site where more than 250,000 people are buried, has housed the Genocide Archive of Rwanda’s collection of documents, photographs and audiovisual recordings from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the genocide since 2010.
One of the challenges is identifying the great range of material in private and public collections across Rwanda and assessing its condition.
The government is a partner on the project, and has asked the archive to collect and digitise the information it holds – from propaganda radio recordings to more than 60 million pages of testimonies from the gacaca community justice courts, which were set up by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s government in order to speed up the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects awaiting trial.
The Kinyarwandan word gacaca means to sit down and discuss an issue. The courts took place in villages across the country between 2002 and 2010, with the aims of achieving truth, justice and reconciliation.
This grassroots approach to justice was controversial, but supporters of gacaca say it gave communities a chance to face the accused, and the suspects to offer truthful accounts of what happened. By airing testimonies and experiences, the healing process began.
Smith says that this approach is central to the memorial and archive too. “The archive is more than a repository – the real intention is to use it to build peace and reconciliation, and to have an impact on policy and help inform education programmes and practice,” he says.
“If we get the model here right and there is an impact on reconciliation, then our hope is it could be a model for elsewhere.”
But as the world’s eyes turn to Rwanda during the 20th anniversary of the genocide, the archive must find a way to ensure that the memories it evokes help to create a more peaceful society as well as telling the truth.
“The context of it can be polarising – how will Hutu children feel? Will it inspire a sense of collective guilt?” Smith says. “Memorials often don’t think about the consequences on people’s identity and how they view themselves and others.”
This issue is at the heart of the mission of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global collective that aims to ensure lessons from the past are not forgotten.
Founded by organisations including the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York in the US and the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, the coalition aims to provide spaces for people to engage with “the need to remember”, in order to connect past and present and help shape a more peaceful future.
Reconciliation
An important part of this process is acknowledging that moving forward can sometimes be used as a reason for forgetting, and that remembering horrific events from the past can divide society just as easily as it can contribute to healing.
The coalition says the effectiveness of memorialisation as a tool for positive change depends on the goals of the memorial and the process through which it is created.
The Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry has made peace and reconciliation a central theme of a permanent gallery, as well as the recent Caught in the Crossfire exhibition.
It has built strong links with Dresden in Germany, which, like Coventry, suffered vast destruction in the second world war. During the Crossfire exhibition, visitors were asked to rebuild Dresden using scaled-down, pre-formed structures, an event that was filmed and displayed in Germany.
Martin Roberts, the senior curator at the Herbert, says it is becoming accepted that museums can contribute to social issues.
“Most are trying to show how they are relevant and how they can make a difference,” Smith says. “The Herbert isn’t just reflecting history and Coventry’s history as a city of peace and reconciliation – we’re playing a part in that story and helping it continue.”
In the US, the 9/11 Memorial Museum is due to open later this year. More than a decade after the event, America is still scarred by the destruction of the Twin Towers so the museum has an important healing role to play.
At the same time, with reports that Islamophobia is on the increase across America, it must ensure that it does not reinforce a fear of Muslims.
The Whole Truth
For museums dealing with genocides that took place longer ago, tackling continuing prejudice and dealing with contemporary issues are ways to ensure the past is not forgotten and the healing process can continue.
The Whole Truth... Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jews, an exhibition in 2013 at the Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany, was inspired by questions written in its visitor comment books such as “What is a Jew?” and “Can’t we just get over the Holocaust?”.
The museum isn’t a Holocaust memorial museum – it tells the story of Jewish history in Germany.
The Holocaust is part of this story, but with fewer survivors around to tell their experiences first hand, the museum continues to look more widely at discrimination and tolerance – it has developed a strong relationship with the Turkish community in Berlin and continues to campaign against antisemitism in schools.
The museum is the result of Germany trying to deal with its history. But Michal Friedlander, the curator for Judaica and applied arts at the Jewish Museum Berlin, says The Whole Truth revealed how much work is still to do.
The most controversial aspect of the exhibition was a glass showcase in which a Jewish person sat, six days a week, to speak to visitors.
Exhibiting a living person in a museum also led to some critics drawing parallels between Germany’s 19th-century Völkerschau (human zoos) and Hitler’s plans for a museum of a “dead race”.
Friedlander says the display became a screen for visitors’ projections. “We were optimistic but we were shocked with what was unleashed,” he says. “The context of the exhibition seemed to give the public a sense of freedom to ask questions they wouldn’t dream of asking in ‘real life’.”
The lessons from the exhibition will help inform new permanent displays at the museum, and have shown staff that it must continue to tackle contemporary issues that persist many years after the Holocaust.
Creating a legacy of understanding
Likewise, the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London holds a large collection relating to the Holocaust and Nazi era, and collects material from contemporary genocides as well as tackling events from recent history, such as the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in India.
“One of the legacies of the Holocaust is that it’s transformed our understanding of genocide and made it a matter of international law,” says Toby Simpson, the learning and engagement manager at the Wiener Library. “Our aim is to contribute towards genocide studies and increase the public and academic understanding of what genocide means.”
Widening its remit beyond the Holocaust can mean taking on controversial subjects, but it also enables the library to promote its collection to new audiences and as a safe forum for discussion and debate.
In 2011 the Rwandan Youth Information Community Organisation donated an archive of audio interviews with survivors of the genocide to the Wiener Library.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the event, samples from the archive will be included as part of a wider exhibition of David Graham’s photographs of Rwandan genocide survivors.
“The images are about contemporary life in Rwanda and don’t relate the genocide, but daily life in Rwanda is profoundly marked by genocide,” Simpson says.
In Rwanda, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, executive secretary of the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, is optimistic that its work expanding the archive will contribute towards a legacy to prevent the denial of genocide and further atrocities being committed.
“I believe that true reconciliation is motivated by the truth, and the truth is contained in these documents,” he says. “This will help young generations who were born after 1994 understand how genocide is planned and executed – and once truth is known, reconciliation can be achieved.”
The government in Norway shortlisted eight proposals from 300 submissions to an international competition to design national public art memorial sites to commemorate the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, which left 77 people dead. The winner was announced on 27 February, after Museums Journal went to press.
The decision to create memorials in the Government Quarter in Oslo and on land facing the island of Utøya was made by a committee created by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture.
The project is being overseen by Koro, a government institution for public art projects, which set up an Art Selection Committee to oversee the plans.
The Utøya memorial and a temporary memorial in Oslo are to be completed by 22 July 2015. The completion of the permanent Oslo memorial will be determined by the redevelopment of the Government Quarter.
The Art Selection Committee has said that the memorials should be for everyone, although it believes that the memorial at Utøya will largely be for those who lost someone in the attack, as well as the emergency service personnel, volunteers and those connected in some way to the victims of the shootings.
The two memorial sites in the Government Quarter is Oslo will address a broader public and it is hoped that they will be visited by a number of different groups.
Because of their urban setting, they will be more accessible and will form part of the public space around the new Government Quarter. This location could make these sites a focus for public remembrances and ceremonies.
Nearly £1m has been earmarked for the permanent memorial site in the Government Quarter, and about £200,000 for the temporary project. There is also about £500,000 for the Utøya memorial site.
Simon Stephens
Museums, as repositories of memories, know this duty only too well. “Never again”, another symbolic phrase, is normally the starting point for educating new generations about the horrors of war and our capacity for cruelty.
However, the way we use those memories continues to be subject to debate.
When it comes to dealing with atrocity, what role does memory have in post-conflict healing, longer-term reconciliation and the creation of a future where “never again” might be possible?
At the end of last year, representatives from Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, the Shoah Foundation from California and the UK-based Aegis Trust for genocide prevention and others met in London to discuss the future of the Genocide Archive of Rwanda.
The chief executive of the Aegis Trust, James Smith, says the organisation hopes to announce plans in April to create an archive of international significance and on a scale unparalleled in Africa.
Rwandan genocide: 20 years on
Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the 1994 genocide, in which as many as a million people were killed over approximately 100 days.
The background to the genocide dates to the 1960s when the government instituted anti-Tutsi discriminatory practices. This culminated in 1994 when the Hutu leadership organised members of the Hutu ethnic group to systematically slaughter members of the Tutsi group, politically moderate Hutus and Twa people.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial, built on a site where more than 250,000 people are buried, has housed the Genocide Archive of Rwanda’s collection of documents, photographs and audiovisual recordings from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the genocide since 2010.
One of the challenges is identifying the great range of material in private and public collections across Rwanda and assessing its condition.
The government is a partner on the project, and has asked the archive to collect and digitise the information it holds – from propaganda radio recordings to more than 60 million pages of testimonies from the gacaca community justice courts, which were set up by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s government in order to speed up the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects awaiting trial.
The Kinyarwandan word gacaca means to sit down and discuss an issue. The courts took place in villages across the country between 2002 and 2010, with the aims of achieving truth, justice and reconciliation.
This grassroots approach to justice was controversial, but supporters of gacaca say it gave communities a chance to face the accused, and the suspects to offer truthful accounts of what happened. By airing testimonies and experiences, the healing process began.
Smith says that this approach is central to the memorial and archive too. “The archive is more than a repository – the real intention is to use it to build peace and reconciliation, and to have an impact on policy and help inform education programmes and practice,” he says.
“If we get the model here right and there is an impact on reconciliation, then our hope is it could be a model for elsewhere.”
But as the world’s eyes turn to Rwanda during the 20th anniversary of the genocide, the archive must find a way to ensure that the memories it evokes help to create a more peaceful society as well as telling the truth.
“The context of it can be polarising – how will Hutu children feel? Will it inspire a sense of collective guilt?” Smith says. “Memorials often don’t think about the consequences on people’s identity and how they view themselves and others.”
This issue is at the heart of the mission of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global collective that aims to ensure lessons from the past are not forgotten.
Founded by organisations including the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York in the US and the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, the coalition aims to provide spaces for people to engage with “the need to remember”, in order to connect past and present and help shape a more peaceful future.
Reconciliation
An important part of this process is acknowledging that moving forward can sometimes be used as a reason for forgetting, and that remembering horrific events from the past can divide society just as easily as it can contribute to healing.
The coalition says the effectiveness of memorialisation as a tool for positive change depends on the goals of the memorial and the process through which it is created.
The Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry has made peace and reconciliation a central theme of a permanent gallery, as well as the recent Caught in the Crossfire exhibition.
It has built strong links with Dresden in Germany, which, like Coventry, suffered vast destruction in the second world war. During the Crossfire exhibition, visitors were asked to rebuild Dresden using scaled-down, pre-formed structures, an event that was filmed and displayed in Germany.
Martin Roberts, the senior curator at the Herbert, says it is becoming accepted that museums can contribute to social issues.
“Most are trying to show how they are relevant and how they can make a difference,” Smith says. “The Herbert isn’t just reflecting history and Coventry’s history as a city of peace and reconciliation – we’re playing a part in that story and helping it continue.”
In the US, the 9/11 Memorial Museum is due to open later this year. More than a decade after the event, America is still scarred by the destruction of the Twin Towers so the museum has an important healing role to play.
At the same time, with reports that Islamophobia is on the increase across America, it must ensure that it does not reinforce a fear of Muslims.
The Whole Truth
For museums dealing with genocides that took place longer ago, tackling continuing prejudice and dealing with contemporary issues are ways to ensure the past is not forgotten and the healing process can continue.
The Whole Truth... Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jews, an exhibition in 2013 at the Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany, was inspired by questions written in its visitor comment books such as “What is a Jew?” and “Can’t we just get over the Holocaust?”.
The museum isn’t a Holocaust memorial museum – it tells the story of Jewish history in Germany.
The Holocaust is part of this story, but with fewer survivors around to tell their experiences first hand, the museum continues to look more widely at discrimination and tolerance – it has developed a strong relationship with the Turkish community in Berlin and continues to campaign against antisemitism in schools.
The museum is the result of Germany trying to deal with its history. But Michal Friedlander, the curator for Judaica and applied arts at the Jewish Museum Berlin, says The Whole Truth revealed how much work is still to do.
The most controversial aspect of the exhibition was a glass showcase in which a Jewish person sat, six days a week, to speak to visitors.
Exhibiting a living person in a museum also led to some critics drawing parallels between Germany’s 19th-century Völkerschau (human zoos) and Hitler’s plans for a museum of a “dead race”.
Friedlander says the display became a screen for visitors’ projections. “We were optimistic but we were shocked with what was unleashed,” he says. “The context of the exhibition seemed to give the public a sense of freedom to ask questions they wouldn’t dream of asking in ‘real life’.”
The lessons from the exhibition will help inform new permanent displays at the museum, and have shown staff that it must continue to tackle contemporary issues that persist many years after the Holocaust.
Creating a legacy of understanding
Likewise, the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London holds a large collection relating to the Holocaust and Nazi era, and collects material from contemporary genocides as well as tackling events from recent history, such as the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in India.
“One of the legacies of the Holocaust is that it’s transformed our understanding of genocide and made it a matter of international law,” says Toby Simpson, the learning and engagement manager at the Wiener Library. “Our aim is to contribute towards genocide studies and increase the public and academic understanding of what genocide means.”
Widening its remit beyond the Holocaust can mean taking on controversial subjects, but it also enables the library to promote its collection to new audiences and as a safe forum for discussion and debate.
In 2011 the Rwandan Youth Information Community Organisation donated an archive of audio interviews with survivors of the genocide to the Wiener Library.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the event, samples from the archive will be included as part of a wider exhibition of David Graham’s photographs of Rwandan genocide survivors.
“The images are about contemporary life in Rwanda and don’t relate the genocide, but daily life in Rwanda is profoundly marked by genocide,” Simpson says.
In Rwanda, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, executive secretary of the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, is optimistic that its work expanding the archive will contribute towards a legacy to prevent the denial of genocide and further atrocities being committed.
“I believe that true reconciliation is motivated by the truth, and the truth is contained in these documents,” he says. “This will help young generations who were born after 1994 understand how genocide is planned and executed – and once truth is known, reconciliation can be achieved.”
After Utøya
The government in Norway shortlisted eight proposals from 300 submissions to an international competition to design national public art memorial sites to commemorate the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, which left 77 people dead. The winner was announced on 27 February, after Museums Journal went to press.
The decision to create memorials in the Government Quarter in Oslo and on land facing the island of Utøya was made by a committee created by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture.
The project is being overseen by Koro, a government institution for public art projects, which set up an Art Selection Committee to oversee the plans.
The Utøya memorial and a temporary memorial in Oslo are to be completed by 22 July 2015. The completion of the permanent Oslo memorial will be determined by the redevelopment of the Government Quarter.
The Art Selection Committee has said that the memorials should be for everyone, although it believes that the memorial at Utøya will largely be for those who lost someone in the attack, as well as the emergency service personnel, volunteers and those connected in some way to the victims of the shootings.
The two memorial sites in the Government Quarter is Oslo will address a broader public and it is hoped that they will be visited by a number of different groups.
Because of their urban setting, they will be more accessible and will form part of the public space around the new Government Quarter. This location could make these sites a focus for public remembrances and ceremonies.
Nearly £1m has been earmarked for the permanent memorial site in the Government Quarter, and about £200,000 for the temporary project. There is also about £500,000 for the Utøya memorial site.
Simon Stephens