The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums 9781782382188

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The Enemy on Display

Museums and Collections Editors

Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra Editorial Advisory Board Chris Gosden, University of Oxford Corinne Kratz, Emory University, Atlanta Susan Legêne, VU University Amsterdam Sharon Macdonald, The University of Manchester Anthony Shelton, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Paul Tapsell, University of Otago, Dunedin As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public. Volume 1.  The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific. Edited by Nick Stanley Volume 2.  The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation. Edited by Paul Turnbull and Michael Pickering Volume 3.  The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display. Louise Tythacott Volume 4.  Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Claire Wintle Volume 5.  Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site. Mads Daugbjerg Volume 6.  Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives, and Representations. Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen, and Kerstin Poehls Volume 7.  The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums. Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer, and Maria Senina

The Enemy on Display The Second World War in Eastern European Museums

Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015, 2018 Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina First paperback edition published in 2018 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. This publication does not represent an expression of opinion by the Foundation EVZ. The authors bear responsibility for its content.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-217-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-760-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78238-218-8 (ebook)

Contents List of Figures

vi

Preface: Project’s History Zuzanna Bogumił

ix

Acknowledgementsxi Zuzanna Bogumił Introduction: The Enemy on Display

1

Chapter 1.  Temple of Heroic Community: Soviet People, Leningraders and German Fascists in the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg

27

Chapter 2.  Temple of Romantic Martyrdom: Poles, Germans and Jews in the Historical Museum of Warsaw

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Chapter 3.  Forum Revising National Myths: Second World War in the Dresden City Museum

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Conclusions133 Appendix.  Museum Descriptions: The Second World War and City History

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References157 Notes on Contributors

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Index171

Figures 1.1. The first room of the exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1944’. The room is named ‘Attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union’. The photograph presents on the left-hand side the ‘Soviet corner’, and on the right-hand side the ‘German corner’. Photo by Christian Ganzer. 41 1.2. Room: ‘Attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union’. The photographs present the hierarchical world of the Germans. Below the pictures stands a showcase (Figure 1.3) with a German sub-machine gun and items used to torture prisoners. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

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1.3. Room: ‘Attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union’. The showcase with a German sub-machine gun and items used to torture prisoners located just below the pictures presenting the hierarchical world of the Germans (Figure 1.2). Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

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1.4. The last room: ‘Victory’. The Soviet anti-tank gun stands on a showcase containing German helmets, road signs and flags. On the right-hand side there is a white flag of surrender, and a ­picture of General Rauser signing the act of capitulation of the Army Group Courland. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

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1.5. View of the room ‘Food Supply. Everyday Life during the Siege. Children of Leningrad’, mostly dedicated to the winter of 1941. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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1.6. Room: ‘Science and Culture during the Great Patriotic War’. The puppets and cartoons representing Germans were used by the Front Circus Theatre. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

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Figuresvii

1.7. Painting of the breakthrough to Leningrad in the room ‘Operation Spark’ (painters: V.A. Serov, A.G. Kazantsev and I.A. Serebryanyy). Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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2.1. A map and a list of the places of executions in Warsaw 1939–1944, indicating the estimated numbers of victims. This ­picture was taken from the old exhibition. According to the plans, this display board will be placed at the end of the terror room in the new exhibition. Photo by Christian Ganzer. 82 2.2. View of the resistance room. On the display boards, with the emblem Polska Walcząca (Fighting Poland), are various clandestine groups’ members’ photographs, biographical entries and descriptions of their resistance actions. In the  showcases are their belongings and/or objects related to the actions. Photo by Christian Ganzer. 83 2.3. One of the walls in the ‘everyday life’ section imitates the  ­sabotage of Nazi propaganda on the city’s walls. On the right in small print, the inscription: ‘Tylko świnie siedzą w kinie’ (Only swine go to the cinema). Photo by Christian Ganzer.  87 2.4. The view of the right-hand side of the total annihilation room. Photo by Christian Ganzer. 

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2.5. View of one side of the Warsaw Ghetto section. In the centre the narrow window: the only way for a visitor to look inside the ghetto. On the left, a Nazi order signed by Jürgen Stroop with the heading ‘Stop! Forbidden Zone’ warning of the death ­penalty for those entering the Jewish district ­without ­permission. On the right, the maps of the ghetto and some ­information about living conditions in the ghetto, Janusz Korczak’s orphanage, the Final Solution plan, and the ­ghetto’s destruction. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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3.1. Overview of the exhibition of the first half of the twentieth ­century. On the right, the outer wall of the central installation with a terminal that gives information on the election results for Dresden in 1932. In the centre, exhibits on ­technological and cultural p ­ rogress in the Weimar Republic. On the left, aspects of ­architecture. Photo by Christian Ganzer. 112

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Figures

3.2. View into what we called the ‘destruction and memory room’. In the background, an aerial photograph of the destruction in Rotterdam. Photo by Christian Ganzer. 113 3.3. Christmas tree baubles. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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3.4. Kurt Krause’s album presented in the corner of the room ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił. 119 3.5. Chronology of anti-Semitic measures taken by the Nazis. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

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3.6. Bronze eagle hidden in the wall, which presents the ­chronology of anti-Semitic measures taken by the Nazis. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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Preface: Project’s History This book has grown out of the fascination that my c­ ollaborator, Joanna Wawrzyniak, and I have with museums, which, a decade ago, led us to our first critical analysis of historical exhibitions. I met Joanna Wawrzyniak in 2005. At the time we were both engaged in developing the Museum of Communism’s ‘SocLand’ project, which was planned for the basement of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. We soon discovered, however, that we were more interested in analysing museum exhibits than in their creation. It is difficult to say now if we were discouraged by the failure of this project or we simply did not share the optimism of those scholars who believe in the power of museums as real instruments for social transformation (Weil 1990: 236), but we resigned from our posts with the Museum of Communism and embarked on our first research on the image of the Germans that was being portrayed in those Warsaw museums displaying the history of the Second World War (Bogumił and Wawrzyniak 2009: 189–204). The project met with interest, which encouraged us to continue our research. Hence we decided to look at the image of the ‘war enemy’ in museums from a broader perspective of Central and Eastern Europe, and made comparative studies in Poland, Germany and Russia. We were convinced that such research should be carried out by an international team, so we invited our German and Russian colleagues – Christian Ganzer, Tim Buchen, Anna Lubivaya and Maria Senina – to participate in the project. In 2007 we obtained financial support from the Foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (EVZ) [Remembrance, Responsibility and Future] and the Robert Bosch Foundation for our new project, entitled ‘Representations of the Second World War in Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg’. As I became its coordinator, the project was institutionally affiliated to the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science where I was writing my Ph.D. thesis at that time. The University of Hamburg, where Christian Ganzer was academically affiliated, was the project’s official partner. In summer 2007 we undertook our field research

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in Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg, and later held three workshop seminars in Warsaw. By the middle of 2008 the project and the report of the field research had been completed. We received positive feedback from the Foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, as well from Berghahn Books and scholars who read the report, which strengthened our belief that we should continue, and make our results accessible to a wider public. We again started to work collectively, this time in a smaller group, and this book is the final result of our efforts. Zuzanna Bogumił

Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the work, help and ­personal engagement of many people. I begin by acknowledging our great debt to Leonore Martin, from the Foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, for her support and patience during the realisation of our research, report writing and book preparation. I am also grateful to ­professors Andrzej Rychard and Henryk Domański from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences for their confidence and encouragement. They not only welcomed the project and partly sponsored its realisation, but were also always ready to respond to our requests and solve the problems we encountered. I am also indebted to Professor Elżbieta Tarkowska, Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education, where I currently work, for her encouragement and support, and to the authorities of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the University of Warsaw, Joanna Wawrzyniak’s work place, who agreed to host and co-finance the final preparation of the book. I also wish to ­acknowledge members of the Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education who co-financed some editorial work on the final manuscript, as well as our ­colleagues from the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, for their organisational support and the thought-provoking discussions we have had during our seminars. At each museum visited we received the helpful support of management and staff. I owe tremendous thanks especially to the people working in the city museums of Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg for their permissions to carry out the research and for all the help they provided during the data collection. My special thanks go to Roland Schwarz, the chief curator of the exhibition at the Dresden Museum; Joanna Maldis (curator) and Maciej and Marek Mikulski (designers) of the new Warsaw exhibition; and Tatiana Mikhaylovna Shmakova, manager of the branch of the City Museum on Naberezhnaya in St Petersburg. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Tobias Krohn, who showed us interesting films of

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celebrations of the commemoration of the bombardments and of a neoNazi demonstration in Dresden. Furthermore, I am grateful to Dr Dariusz Gawin from Stefan Starzyński Institute in Warsaw, who presented to us the idea and goals of the Warsaw Rising Museum, and to Hanna NowakRadziejowska, who introduced us to the museum’s cultural activities. I also express my appreciation to Tatiana Voronina from the European University in St Petersburg, who presented the project ‘Pamyat’ blokady’ carried out by the European University in St Petersburg, and to the Memorial Society in St Petersburg, who kindly hosted our two-day workshop summing up field research in their office. All the above generously shared with us their knowledge of memory of the events, and gave helpful critical comments on our approach to the project and report writing. We are also indebted to Professor Anna Wieczorkiewicz from the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, for reading the manuscript of the report and giving useful advice on book preparation. Some parts were also considered by Ines Keske from the University of Leipzig; Dr Arnold Bartetzky from Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas (GWZO) in Leipzig; Tatiana Voronina from the European University in St Petersburg; Andrea ZemskovZüge from Berghof Foundation in Berlin; and Markku Kangaspuro from the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki. Monika Heinemann from Collegium Carolinum in Munich helped us to find German literature on museums. I am also grateful to Professor Stefan Troebst from GWZO in Leipzig and Professor Markku Kiven from the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki for offering me Fellowships in their institutions, during which I could work on the book’s development. We also appreciate all comments and feedback we have received during the presentation of our project at various ­conferences and seminars. Considerable aid in the realisation of the project has been given by John Fells and Diana Roberts, who generously assisted with English editing of the book. Clara Mansfeld, from the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, helped us with editorial work on the final manuscript. I am also very grateful to the management and staff of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science – Grażyna Drążyk, Urszula Stasiak, Maria Kozak, Halina Klusek, Bożena Łysiak, Janina Paszkiewicz, Iwona Trochimczyk-Sawczuk and Katarzyna Krosnowska – whose work was invaluable in planning and carrying out the field research and organisation of three workshops. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to all participants in the project, and to the co-authors of the book – Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer, Maria Senina and Joanna Wawrzyniak – for their engagement in

Acknowledgementsxiii

the ­project, ongoing support, many good conversations, challenging ideas, and willingness to share their knowledge. Zuzanna Bogumił

Introduction

The Enemy on Display We are all held together in a fabric of stories; we are enriched by the possibilities of interpretation; and we are made strong by acts of helping each other to listen. —David Carr, A Place Not A Place

It is an exciting time to research historical museums in Central and Eastern Europe. In the changing political and social order over the last twenty-five years, many new exhibitions have opened and most of the museum projects have been accompanied by heated public debates on the meanings of history and the transformations of cultural identity. This book originated from this fascination. Our main aim was to compare the ways in which the history of the Second World War was being narrated in the historical museums of three cities: Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg. While analysing the exhibitions we focused on the form and content that was being used to present the ‘war enemy’, and we tried to interpret the role that this plays in museum stories. Although there were different common themes that we could treat as a basis for such a comparative analysis – such as death, resistance, ordinary life experience – from the beginning we wanted the project to play a reflexive role in contemporary European intercultural communication, so we decided to pay special attention to the stereotypical images of ‘enemy’ from the past, which may still influence the present. Our approach locates this project within so-called ‘memory studies’, and concerns the way in which communities remember and reinterpret their past (Urry 1996: 45–68). We assume that history is socially constructed and that its transmission can take various memory forms, one of which is the public historical narrative represented in a museum. While focusing on this theme, we deliberately chose museums in those European cities which represent national symbols of suffering experienced under the cruelties of the Second World War. The Siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg) that took place between 1941 and 1944 was unique in the Soviet Union in terms of the length of the

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blockade and the number of civilian victims, as well as what the fate of the city came to mean after the war was over. While Stalingrad was the setting for an enormous battle between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, and is remembered as a place of military glory, Leningrad is perceived as the scene of heroic defence by city dwellers against the cruel belligerence of Nazis who were prepared to conquer and annihilate the city by any means, including mass starvation and bombardment. In contemporary Russia, this Soviet myth of heroic defence is at the same time strengthened and revisited. Warsaw’s history too is without any doubt a significant story of the Second World War. The Polish capital was not only conquered by Nazi Germany, but also experienced two uprisings and the destruction which followed them. Its people suffered deprivation and death, and the city lost most of its historic architecture. Nevertheless, in Poland the city is not only remembered as a place of suffering, but also as space of unusual heroism. At the time of the People’s Republic of Poland there was conflict between government representatives, who contested this heroic narrative, and opposition groups who struggled to have the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 made a national symbol of the Polish will to maintain national independence. At the same time, in the sphere of international historical representations, this event competed with the memory of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto (Young 1993: 155–84). Finally, Dresden, with its often overestimated death toll and the loss of Baroque architecture in the ‘Anglo-American firestorm’, has long been remembered as an ‘innocent’ city, as a city of art and culture; not as a wartime military industrial complex, but as a place symbolic of the destructive forces of modern warfare, and a target for the furious revenge of the Allies for what Germany had brought to Europe. Thus, Dresden has often been perceived as a representation of a kind of better, older, pre-Nazi Germany, a ‘land of poets and thinkers’, which was unjustly brought to ruin by the Second World War. Therefore, although the three cities suffered differently – the experiences of bombardment, hunger and cold or two tragic uprisings – the history of the commemoration of these events has some important common elements. Firstly, the war became a key determinant of the identity of local residents; they often organised themselves in groups of memory in order to publicly commemorate their version of past events. Secondly, almost immediately after the war, the city catastrophes were subject to competing discourses of memory and historical policy. The narratives of the cities’ catastrophes used to serve as a tool of communist propaganda, but since the Iron Curtain came down they have become subjects of new interpretations.

Introduction: The Enemy on Display3

This is why we decided to look at exhibitions of the Second World War history in St Petersburg, Warsaw and Dresden, taking into account the differing cultural patterns of memory and the differing debates on war history in Russia, Poland and Germany. It should be noted, however, that we did not intend to fully reconstruct the dynamics of the process of remembrance. We treated it rather as the context that allowed us to better understand the war stories in the museums we visited. From the existing literature, we distinguished those elements of memory discourses which  – in our opinion – had had the greatest impact on the shape of the exhibitions. Our main focus was the changes that have taken place in these exhibitions since the fall of communism. We noted, however, that they have not been altered by a replacement of the communist stories with new the ones, invented in the political and social contexts of transformation to free market and democracy. On the contrary, we point out that the narratives we have analysed are the effects of overlapping components of different discourses, and one can still find that they possess many elements of interpretations before 1989–1991. Thus, in accordance with some memory studies, we show that representations of the past do not only relate to the actual events and to the contemporary situation, but they are also path dependent – their final shape resonates with earlier ways of commemoration (Olick 1999: 381).

The City Museum Tells a Story In our analysis, we treat exhibitions as narratives told in particular historical time and space. Along the lines of the new museology studies (Vergo 1989), we understand them as the result of academic knowledge and popular interpretations, and we recognise the museum as a medium in which the society expresses itself (Macdonald 1998: 7–8). The museum is the place where social memory often wins against history as an academic discipline. By collecting the objects, the museum stores memories which are ‘the basis of cultural or national identity, of scientific knowledge and aesthetic value’ (Crane 2000: 4). Like other cultural artefacts, such as literature, art or monuments, museum exhibitions help to construct and maintain ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). This role of the museum in shaping the national identity and promoting national agendas is complex and multilayered. As Tony Bennett (2011: 263) claims: ‘From the early modern period, museums have been places in which citizens – however they might have been defined – have met, conversed, been  instructed, or otherwise engaged in rituals through which their

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rights and duties as citizens have been enacted’. History museums are particularly engaged in this process of ‘meaning making’, of transforming the history into identity (Knell 2007: 3), or as Didier Maleuvre (1999: 10) says, into a ‘myth: that is, an image that gathers people and summons an identity’. The power of museums, and historical museums in particular, lies not only in that they maintain collective memory (Swank 1990: 85), but because they ‘constitute part of the morally and emotionally shaped social and ideological landscape’ (Edwards 2010: 28). In the museum ‘everything belongs to some matrix of memory, even if it is a matrix which is remote from human concerns and interests’ (Casey 2000: 311). While all history museums are vulnerable to ideological manipulation and conflicts, the historical exhibitions about the Second World War are particularly good examples of this.1 This war is still the subject of vivid discussions and silences, dilemmas and oversimplifications, understatements and exaggerations. It is still a living history, made out of ‘dreams and wrestling with recollections both cherished and painful’ (Yeingst and Bunch 1997: 152). The fact that we have concentrated on city museums is not accidental. As Max Hebditch (1998: 108) claims, these kinds of museums quite often connect their narrative with national history. This is the case not only in old states such as France and Great Britain but also, as David Fleming (1999: 132–33) has already pointed out, in the former Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where political change has led to a renewed scrutiny of city histories. The current third wave of Europeanisation also brings new challenges and opportunities in this respect. All over Europe we observe the growing process of nationalisation of history (Karlsson 2010: 39), and ‘museums, as repositories of a nation’s history, cannot shirk their responsibility for national identity’ (McLean 1998: 245). However, at the same time, in Eastern Europe, we observe some attempts to change old canons of public history in order to acknowledge the diversity of ethnic, regional, gender and individual experiences of war, regardless of national divisions. Moreover, contemporary Europe must deal with a reversed intensity of the memory of the Holocaust and the Gulag, in the West and the East (Maier 2002), and, therefore, look for new paradigms of commemoration in the public realm (e.g. Assmann 2009; Leggewie and Lang 2011). Some observers in the case of Polish historical museums argue that nowadays they stand at the crossroads of romanticising and revising of national history (Szczepański 2012, cf. Kaluza 2011). This dynamic situation brings consequences for museums as places which ‘have potency to change what people think and to influence attitudes and values’ (Cameron 2005: 229; cf. Weil 1990).

Introduction: The Enemy on Display5

This potency was used by some Western ­museums which, by giving a voice to previously marginalised voices, supported processes of democratisation (Kaplan 1994). A question arises whether the East European city museums have become spaces of social transformation, and what kind of the transformation they favour. In addition to these changes in the perception of the past, there are outcomes from speeding globalisation and technological progress which challenge many old functions of the museum and dissolve the borders between museums and other institutions. All this makes the examination of Central and East European exhibitions a fascinating endeavour. In our analysis we wanted to pay close attention to three exhibitions by trying to establish what the story is that the city museums of Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg display. Given that they can present both the history of the city and national history, we compared how much of each appears in the analysed exhibitions. We also asked whether or not the way the history was presented changed after the collapse of communism. And finally, we posed the most important question: what is the role of the figure of the enemy in the whole museum narrative? In analysing the exhibitions, we referred to the categories introduced by Duncan Cameron (1971) of the ‘temple’ and the ‘forum’ museum.2 For Cameron, temples are the museums which support the construction of respective nation states by presenting one interpretation of history, which is treated as objective truth. Intensive development of ‘temples’ took place in the nineteenth century, when museums played a legitimising role for the existing social and political order. As Wolfgang Ernst (2000: 20) put it, museums became a kind of ‘patriotic Valhalla’, places where national h ­ istory was constructed. From that moment on, museums became responsible for promoting the public definition of truth and value. Maleuvre (1999: 10) claims that they were a ‘countenance of fate’ built on the assumption that ‘all stages of the past belong to a necessary pattern of reason, triumph, and order; that all is as it should be on the stage of world history’. The ‘forum’ museums, on the contrary, are open to diverse interpretations. Cameron (1971) maintains that instead of singular truth claims, there is a plurality of possible and equivalent approaches. For instance, in the case of historical museums the forum will include the story of marginalised groups, or permit them to present their history in the exhibition. Moreover, the forum is open to diverse accounts of the same historical event. In particular, one-sided interpretations, which were so crucial for the temple narratives, become problematised and discussed in the forums, where frames of remembrance are challenged, fragmented and made transparent. This kind of ‘post-museum’ belongs to ‘reflexive societies’ which

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recognise the right to be different, and which appreciate debates and productive confrontations if they contribute to cooperation among diverse actors (cf. Marstine 2006: 19–21). The ‘temple’ and ‘forum’ are most of all metaphors. Nevertheless, for several years they have also been in use in actual museum work. For instance, the contemporary handbooks on management in museums will stress that good exhibitions should support social interactions by being engaging and participative, include multiple points of view, welcome difference and dialogue, and encourage discovery, empathy and reflection (Black 2005: 269). However, the very latest literature questions not only the idea and practice of the old type of museums, but also draws attention to some difficulties behind the forum type of museum. For instance, Carine A. Durand (2010: 151–52), in her book on ethnographic museums, underlines that it is necessary to further examine whether museums really address the controversial issues or whether their interest is only in showing the successes of indigenous peoples’ reinventions of tradition. Fiona Cameron (2003: 39) pointed out that, even if many museums are deeply interested in presenting difficult topics and diverse opinions, they ‘act as brokers of perspectives rather than [being] sites for serious dialogue and meaningful engagement with their constituents around contentious topics’. Thus it was also one of the goals of our project to critically examine the very ideas of ‘temple’ and ‘forum’ in relation to historical museums. Both the temples and the forums are embedded in the cultural patterns of the societies in which they exist. Thus, the way of representation and creation of history in the exhibition is not accidental but reflects a certain order and hierarchy. Whether it is temple or forum, it is ‘the act of selection’ which turns the item into the museum exhibit and which gives it a sense (Pearce 2012: 24). Documents are beyond ‘historical notice’ until ‘historians find something to do with them … Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove’ (Carson, quoted in Knell 2007: 8). Even if museums take items and documents from their original context, and this displacement causes certain objects’ features to be forgotten (Radley 1990: 53), museums need them because they ‘constitute material “facts” and evidence for stories to be told’ (Dudley 2012: XXVII). However, the object’s success depends on how the museum fulfils this remnant of the past with meaning (Knell  2007: 26) and, as we will show, temple and forum do it in different ways. The way the story itself is told is rooted in the current ‘episteme’, to use Michel Foucault’s term from Plato: it reflects the array of rules and

Introduction: The Enemy on Display7

thoughts that permit the society to describe and function in the given cultural moment (Foucault 1970).3 This array, which later Foucault named as discourse, is unconscious but uncovers the foundation of significances and meanings shared by the society. For Foucault the elements which seem to us incomprehensible and aberrant are carriers of the heart of matter; they are a kind of relic of past thinking, which helps us to understand that the sense is not a simple truth, but a result of a former way of thinking. In fact all, even the most obvious, beliefs about the surrounding reality or the meanings of things have their origins in the past, and can be explained if we take an ‘archaeological step back’. If we look at the museums’ exhibitions from this perspective we can see that they are not stores of objects or values, but are the result of the way we think, interpret, and make sense of the world. To put it most simply, they are places of human ideas (Boyd 1999). In the case of the historical exhibition, this array of thoughts is immense and concerns the way we describe and understand culture, society and politics. However, in the case of the exhibitions analysed by us, the most ­crucial factor influencing the construction of displays seemed to be political memory and existing memory discourses of the event. Following Foucault, we understand the discourse as the array of beliefs about the event existing in the society, which can construct a certain coherent interpretation of the past. There can be a dominant discourse, which is often the official − state − interpretation, but there can also be some minor discourses ­constructed by particular groups. All these discourses are built of certain elements (beliefs), which are sometimes common for different discourses, but ­sometimes belong to only one of them. Depending on their configuration and inner relationships, these elements establish different interpretations. Some elements which try to explain the sense of an event are so strongly rooted in the tradition that they acquire a ‘mythic power’. In nation states, ancient myths concerning the gods and heroes are often replaced by stories about national ancestors and their heroic deeds. As Gananath Obeyesekere claims, myth-making is prolific in European thought. Myth models, which ‘refer to an underlying set of ideas (a myth structure or cluster of mythemes)’ are employed in a variety of narrative forms. These myths are not sacred stories but have the same power to influence. They are not only rooted in the array of beliefs but, what is most important, they appear ‘as surface structure’ to ‘embody a narrative theme and determine the way that the content is constructed’ (Obeyesekere 1992: 10). The myth-making process seems to be especially valid in the case of the interpretation of traumatic events which, by virtue of the fact that they concern

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borderline experiences, are often perceived as the beginning of a new era. The understanding of these events is not only formed out of historical knowledge, individual experience and personal imagination, but also out of the use of clusters of mythemes, and other stories/legends about ancestors, which have a similar isomorphic form and which, therefore, help to give a sense to the event. However, it is important to stress that we have not analysed the discourses or myths, but only treated them as the context for the better understanding of the image of the enemy in the exhibition. Thus, on the basis of a literature review, we have distinguished and named the most important elements of these discourses, which can be decoded in the exhibitions, or which had an influence on the construction/reconstruction of displays. Later, while analysing an exhibition, we tried to show which elements came from which discourse, and thus how origin determines interpretation. Knowledge about discourses, as well as being aware that each historical exhibition is rooted in them, helped us to understand that if a museum’s exhibition does not manage to show a certain problem, or if it presents it in an aberrant way, it is not only proof that the problem was not ‘worked through’, but is also a crucial element of the message of the narrative. It is this incomprehensible element which, as Foucault would say, can bring us to the heart of the matter – to the real reason and significance of the museum’s interpretation. That is why, while analysing the image of the enemy, we also looked at the general narrative of the exhibition and at how certain historical facts were being presented, or even concealed. This was important for us as the background and ­reference point for the analysis. Focusing on the image of ‘the enemy’ and the presentation of his role in the general narrative meant that the main character/hero of the story also became a very important part of our analysis. We had two more reasons for deciding to concentrate on the story’s main character. The first is linked with the nature of historical exhibitions which form a kind of consensus between the past and the present. We believe that the attributes possessed by the main character are still valid for the social groups involved in producing the exhibition. The second reason is related to the fact that the exhibition tells a story about the deeds of ancestors, so the construction of the character can include some of the features which create a mythical hero. Thus, in each exhibition we tried to decode and name the main character as well as show what kind of relationship there was between the main character and the enemy. We suspected that both of them could be strongly contrasted and dichotomic, so that the way the enemy is presented would depend on the presentation of the main character.

Introduction: The Enemy on Display9

‘The Enemy’ For the purposes of our analysis, we defined ‘the enemy’ as the agent who threatens both the identity and the very existence of the main character of an exhibition’s story. The exhibitions that we analysed tell the story of European cities between 1939 and 1945, when the continent – as a result of German aggression – was embroiled in the Second World War, with states either fighting to try to impose their supremacy and ideology upon the others, or trying to resist this threat. Both sides made use of an ‘image of the enemy’. In contemporary Europe the concept of diversified unity seems more important than the concept of separate nation states. However, as Ulrich Beck (1997: 68) claims, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989 meant that both the East and West lost the enemy, the image of which was so fundamental to their postwar identities. Thus, a search for new ‘enemies’, or new indicators of identity, started. This inclination is particularly visible in Europe which, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain in general, has been forced to find a new way of stabilising and legitimising its existence. In Central and Eastern Europe one observes a tendency best characterised as ‘national awakening’, triggering the search for new national identities. The search for new enemies is not only connected with the new political situation since 1989, but also with the cultural changes that have been provoked by globalisation, which is often said to have caused a loss of ‘clarity’ of the individual’s identity (Fiebig-von Hase 1997: 33). In the search for identity, other cultures serve as a convenient enemy. Even if the concept of ‘otherness as such under all circumstances’ is widespread, as Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase notes, the tendency to stereotype relationships in order to make the world less complicated is also noticeable. The existence of these tendencies to search for new cultural enemies, and the creation of new enemies in the framework of a reborn nationalism, makes it necessary to gain a better understanding of how the image of the enemy is constructed by currently powerful institutions which influence society’s imagination. Museums are among such institutions. Their influence on people’s imaginations seems even greater because they make use of a very important component of the community’s identity, its history (Anderson 1991; Knell 2011), and do so by applying ‘moralising and reforming ­discourses’ (Cameron 2007: 330). The fact that the image of the enemy has been historically utilised and instrumentalised in order to call for war and conflicts has been widely analysed and seems quite obvious.4 However, even if the image of the enemy is important for individuals and groups, its genesis, changing patterns and

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The Enemy on Display

functional uses are complex and imprecise. The definition of the enemy depends itself on an academic approach and an applied ­methodology of research. Looking at the problem from the psychological point of view, one can say that hostility is an immanent feature of the human psyche, characterised by Sigmund Freud as Thanatos, the drive to self-destruction. Fiebig-von Hase (1997: 6) developed this idea, and claims that enemy images can be perceived as the self-destructive energies of the drive to death directed against others. In this situation the enemy appears as the convenient other, legitimising aggressive behaviour. Anthropological and sociological approaches stress the importance of the ‘we–other’ division as an element of the process of structuring and giving sense to the world. People organise their knowledge and they construct value and belief systems for their orientation. ‘Others’ are classified as ‘enemies’ if their appearance is perceived as a threat (Finlay, Holsti and Fagen 1967: 1–3). Any kind of difference – racial, ethnic, religious, ideological or cultural – might give rise to this. The intensity of such antagonism and the form of enemy images depend on ‘the composition of a society, its cultural identity and its political structure’ (Fiebig-von Hase 1997: 26–27). This political construction and function of enemy images is related to other images that political actors use to structure the social world, such as barbarian, imperial, rogue, degenerate, ally (Cottam et al. 2004: 52). In its most extreme form ‘the diabolical enemy’ is seen as ‘irrevocably aggressive in motivation, monolithic in decisional structure, and highly rational in decision making’ (ibid.: 52–53). Strong and extreme emotions are associated with the enemy, which can either be a real danger or only imagined, individually or collectively. The group starts blaming the enemy for all its misfortunes and failures, and often when the enemy is not a real aggressor but only a product of the imagination, the mechanism of the scapegoat starts to work. A victim is found and becomes the object of aggression. Scapegoating returns lost balance to the group (Girard 1986). The enemy helps to tighten community relationships. The enemy’s world is perceived as the reverse of the community’s own culture, and its attributes are contrasted with the community’s own features. The stronger the image of the enemy and the more intense the emotion it provokes, the better is group consolidation and self-definition. The feeling of real ‘community’ helps to overcome periods of crisis and insecurity. The existence of the opposed systems of values (the enemy’s values versus our own) enforces internal consensus and discipline upon a society, which can then be used by the government for its own aims. Political agents seek enemies according to their ideological self-definition, although the argument of moral superiority over the evil ideology of the foe is commonly used. All

Introduction: The Enemy on Display11

the purest moral values are embodied in the image of the hero, who is also a powerful figure offering a foundation for government rule, legitimisation and preservation of the status quo which assures the state’s monopoly of power. Given all of the above, we wanted to deal with the concept of the enemy which, by dividing a society into ‘us’ and ‘them’, stands in the way of building a diversified world which is not hostile. Even if a lot of work has already been done in order to build common ways of describing and representing European history,5 many popular representations still support the old stereotypes and national myths. That is why in our analysis we wanted to see whether the exhibitions which deal with traumatic episodes of European history denationalised the enemy or clung to the old ideas. It seemed important to us because, as Andrea Witcomb (2010: 40) claims, museums ‘are spaces in which transformative experiences are possible because of the ability of objects to reach out and literally touch someone’, and because the exhibition as a ‘world of imagination’ has a power to evoke such a level of empathy in viewers that they may become ‘other, if only momentarily’. However, in the case of the enemy, such an image which ‘touches someone’ may maintain the vision of a hierarchically arranged social world, and treat the process as equalising the relationships between different cultures (cf. Bennett 2011). Understanding that the image of the enemy is crucial for the construction of identity, we decided to distinguish and analyse particular features of this image. When analysing historical exhibitions one needs to bear in mind that the image itself is not merely the representation of the enemy as current during that particular period, but is distorted with time, and subjected to a curator’s interpretation. Obviously the photographs, posters, advertisements, exhibits and other artefacts of the past are a direct reflection of the enemy of the time, and they set the framework of the visual form presented at the exhibition. By showing the way in which the enemy was described and interpreted then, they reveal a historical aspect of the enemy image. However, the image itself has two other significant features which play an equally important role in the development of a museum’s interpretation. Apart from historical features, the enemy’s image also bears some characteristics of the political discourse of the period when the exhibition was prepared. We will show that in the case of the exhibition in St Petersburg it is the Soviet discourse of the 1960s, while in the case of Dresden and Warsaw some elements of current discourses are present. If we agree with Sharon Macdonald (1996) that the exhibition says more about current times than about the past, we must conclude that the enemy’s image,

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The Enemy on Display

despite the fact that it draws on historical sources and iconography, is constructed in such a way that it reflects ‘current’ social notions – meaning those from the period when the exhibition was being prepared. Another factor which can have a strong impact on the enemy’s image as presented at an exhibition involves the deeply rooted and culturally shaped notions of individual ethnic groups and their mutual relations, which are rooted in the culture of the exhibition’s authors. The latter can make the enemy’s image not only reflect what happened and how it is currently talked about, but they can also impart certain features, that could be called ‘archetypal’, resulting from the thought structures deeply rooted in a given culture. What seems even more important than stereotypes is the very archetypal thought pattern existing in a given culture concerning ‘we–other’ relations and the role that this pattern plays. Stereotypical conceptions can be found in historical presentations, such as the aforementioned posters, prints or propaganda texts. During the war they had been used to create a negative image of the enemy, and therefore their presence in the museum seems obvious. On the other hand, the archetypal thought pattern about the we–other relation constitutes a much deeper cultural dependency, which not only concerns the presentation of the enemy, but also has an impact on the creation of the tale’s hero–enemy relation, and on the whole shape of narrative. It is therefore worthwhile thinking about the role of the ‘we–other’ dichotomy in Russian, Polish and German culture. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (2000) maintains that the we–other juxtaposition is a constituent element of Russian culture and identity. The we– other division existed in traditional Russian culture in many social strata, not only in the ethnic dimension but also reflected in folklore, language and habits.6 The bonds of community were particularly strong in the face of a threat or of war.7 Community then became a dominant value, appreciated more than the value of the life of the individual (Rancour-Laferriere 2000: 113–14). At the same time the notion of what Russianness is not forms an integral part of the Russian identity. From this perspective the Russian seal which represents Saint George sitting astride a horse and battling a dragon might be interpreted as proof that Russia cannot live without an enemy persecutor (ibid.: 177). On the other hand, Elene Hellberg-Hirn (1998: 17) maintains that the dragon represents the dehumanised image of Russia’s enemies, which in turn is juxtaposed with the image of the perfect Russian who is a sort of ‘universal human’, with the messianic mission of assimilating other nations.8 James Wertsch (2002) shows that the enemy, and more precisely, the way the Russian talks about the triumph over him, is a part of Russian ‘textual heritage’ and forms ‘unique national ways of explication’.

Introduction: The Enemy on Display13

The we–other juxtaposition also forms an important element of Polish folk culture. According to Benedyktowicz (2000: 10), ‘it results from the bridge-like nature of the Polish folk culture that has been developing between the East and the West of Europe, as well as historical determinants and a frequent need to protect one’s own identity’. There are many stereotypes functioning in Polish culture concerning various ethnic groups. Important are images of Jews and Russians, sometimes conflated in the political stereotype of Judeo-Communists (cf. Michlic 2006) with its roots in the interwar period. However according to the Polish sociologist and ethnographer, Jan Stanisław Bystroń ([1935] 1995: 167), one of the best-rooted notions of an ‘alien’ is the image of a German: ‘Germans have always been considered alien in Poland, to such an extent that the term German was used to refer to aliens in general, in particular those stemming from North-Western Europe; in this sense a Dutchman, Swede or Dane, and sometimes even an Englishman or Frenchman, was referred to as German’. One may therefore say that in the popular sense the word ‘German’ became a synonym for any foreignness. This notion is reflected in a still-popular Polish proverb: ‘As long as the ways of the world persist, Poles and Germans will not coexist’ (Bystroń 1995: 181–82). This combination of two concepts has resulted in the image of a German being well recognised in Polish culture, and it will not be tamed as long as its meaning is not separated from the concept of an ‘alien’. German notions concerning the we–other relation, as in the case of Russia, were strongly influenced by the Napoleonic Wars. According to David Jacobson (1997), the French army was perceived as a ‘real enemy’ that posed a threat to people’s existence. The sense of real threat influenced the idea of an organic nation, a Volk, ‘a nation in search of a state and, more than that, a protest against the nationalist and cosmopolitan beliefs of the French Revolution’ (ibid.: 23–24). The Romanticism and the Prussian reforms had a decisive influence on the shape of the German notion of a community as an organic cultural and racial entity marked by a common language. According to Bystroń (1995: 25), the racial superiority of the Germans and their special role in the development of European civilisation and culture was supported by Germanic myths and a belief in the German genealogy of Christ, which nationalised God and thus deified the nation. In this sense, the Germans believed they were the embodiment of the greatest values, and they perceived evil as something external that threatened their very existence. Hence, as a threat to their existence, the enemy could not be assimilated. He had to be destroyed. This notion of the we–other division functioned until 1945. German postwar education efforts focused strongly on the deconstruction of this

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The Enemy on Display

way of thinking, but its popularity shows that this dichotomous thinking is still present. Such a brief presentation of the culturally and historically shaped patterns of the we–other relation in Russian, Polish and German culture does not exhaust the topic. It merely accentuates the most characteristic features which seem to influence the picture and function of the enemy’s image in the analysed exhibitions. They unveil a deeper level of the we–other relations, and can enrich the historical analysis related to the Second World War by conveying a deeper sense of the cultural background. When analysing the image of the enemy we decided to consider all the three possible sources of the notion – namely, historical, cultural and political. We were aware that all these factors combine and merge in the museum image of the enemy, and so we were not trying to analyse them separately. But by being mindful of their existence, whenever the analysis required this, we tried to say how they influenced the presentations.

Our Approach When we started our project in 2007, the literature on historical museums in Eastern Europe specifically, and on the methodology of how to study the cultural aspects of historical museums in general, was limited. Only recently has that situation changed (e.g. Ganzer 2005; Knigge and Mählert 2005; Apor and Sarkisova 2008; Łuczewski and Wiedmann 2011; Troebst and Wolf 2011; Ziębińska-Witek 2011; Szczepański 2012). Hence – ironically as East Europeans – in designing our approach we were largely informed by West European literature and the new museology studies which started with the aforementioned anthology by Peter Vergo (1989). One should note that the new museology primarily included authors with previous academic training in art history and ethnography, which of course influenced the type of museums studied (most of the analyses concerned either art or ethnographic museums). The leading publications were written or edited by authors such as Mary Bouquet, Sandra Dudley, Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Ivan Karp, Simon Knell, Sharon Macdonald, Suzanne MacLeod, Janet Marstine, Susan Pearce and Donald Preziosi. The key issues raised by those authors about exhibitions concerned the politics and poetics of display, power relations, aesthetics, and the construction of knowledge. The actual subjects of analysis included the investigation of narratives and representations, the studies of agency of various museum makers, museum dilemmas and contradictions, ­meaning

Introduction: The Enemy on Display15

and status of museum materials such as objects and photos, and the examination of visitors and reception. Most interesting were the holistic approaches, examining the interrelationships between production, content and consumption of exhibitions (Macdonald 1998; Bogumił 2011b). The critical approach of the new museology did not usually stop at the stage of description and explanation through the deconstruction of underlying assumptions of a given exhibition, but was normally involved in giving some prescriptions as to how a good exhibition should look. As Marstine (2006: 5) argued, ‘museums are a “social technology”, an “invention” that packages culture; it’s our job to deconstruct this packaging so that we can become critical consumers and lobby for change’. In this context, strong influences in the new museology were the already described metaphors of a museum as a temple or as a forum. The new museology stood, obviously, on the side of the forum, and believed that museums were able to support social transformations, and to even have therapeutic or ‘healing’ potential (Silverman 2002; Janes 2009; Macdonald 2009). Eilean HooperGreenhill (2000: 152–53) described the forum as a ‘post-museum’, and that ‘rather than upholding the values of objectivity, rationality, order and distance, the post-museum will negotiate responsiveness, encourage ­mutually nurturing partnerships, and celebrate diversity’. The new museology was influenced by the post-structural theories and narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, by post-colonial discourse and problems of multicultural societies, as well as by changes in museums themselves brought on by both technological changes and the demands of the consumer society, which prefers being entertained to being enlightened; it also prefers experience to contemplation (Starn 2005; Marstine 2006; Ziębińska-Witek 2011). Even though it was disputable whether this approach was fully suitable for studying museums in different cultural contexts, it was the only perspective we had at our disposal when we started our research. Nevertheless while pursuing our interpretations we became aware of some limitations in applying theories which had been born in a specific West European cultural context to studying museums in an East European one. While we were agreed on the general approach from the very beginning of our project, an intense discussion began before we started our field research about the actual methodology that we should apply. The longer we discussed this problem the more we understood that it would be impossible to strictly follow only one methodology. First of all, the analysed material was too complex, and secondly, our academic backgrounds, and the methodologies used in them, differed so much from each other that it would have been unworkable to follow just one method from one

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The Enemy on Display

field. Thus, we decided that we would use those elements of which ever method which would help us the most to better understand the collected material. The principle was to understand the exhibition, and to try to establish a common interpretation, rather than to follow one methodology in a dogmatic way. As a consequence our perspective is a mix of different methods from different disciplines (history, sociology and anthropology), which were applied in the individual analyses, and enriched and improved by long discussions during which the final interpretation was constructed. The central question of our research concerned the role of the image of the enemy in the historical exhibitions presenting the traumatic events of the Second World War. However, in order to get a better understanding of the image of the enemy it was necessary to obtain knowledge about the relevant political and cultural discourses, and to understand what role the image of the enemy plays within these discourses, and how the discourses influence the image presented in the respective historical exhibition. We have not analysed the discourses themselves, but have just treated them as a context for reaching a better understanding of the image of the enemy in the exhibitions. Our awareness of museums as institutions that derive from academic and popular knowledge in order to construct their own interpretation, inclined us to pay special attention to cultural determinants of the enemy’s image. The image of the enemy is a significant figure well rooted in our cultures, so we presumed that cultural features would be an important element of the construction of the image of the enemy in the exhibitions. From the very beginning of the research we had to deal with the problem of the impossibility of maintaining fully objective attitudes to the analysed material. One cannot forget that in our research we did not deal with the image of the enemy in general, but with a very particular image which represents traumatic historical events. In the cases of four of us, these events greatly affected the histories of our own families. It was therefore difficult for some of us to distance ourselves from the exhibitions, especially when confronted with critical arguments from colleagues from less-affected countries. In order to solve the problems described above, we decided that the main element of our methodology would be a ‘conversation’, through which we would come to an agreed sense. ‘Conversation’ is understood, after the Polish cultural anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (1995), as openness towards the other and permitting the other to express what he or she wants to tell. She argues: ‘Who listens will be open towards claims of truth, claims that can be advanced through otherness. Then, it can happen (but not necessarily!), that the other is right and we are tongue-tied’ (ibid.:

Introduction: The Enemy on Display17

14). Sometimes during the research we had the feeling of ‘being tonguetied’, especially when we were talking about some elements of national discourses which were obvious for us yet seemed incomprehensible and problematic for the rest of the group, or when we were caught thinking in stereotypical ways by our colleagues. We dealt with these problems ­practically throughout our common work. As a first step of our actual research the national subgroups composed short lists of museums worth visiting in each of the three cities. The selection was not accidental. We chose museums on the basis that after visiting them we believed we would have a basic knowledge about the museum’s commemoration of the respective event in a particular city. The members of the group selecting the museums were familiar with the national discourses of their country, so, in fact, we approved a selection of institutions, which, in our opinion, show important elements of the dominant discourse. The fact that we live in discourses and that they dominate our understanding of things was also visible in the subsequent steps of the research. In July 2007 we spent one week in each city. We started with a quite complex but rapid visit to the different museums,9 and after this brief reconnaissance we decided which museum in each city would be the subject of deeper analysis. At the beginning it was not obvious that we would analyse the city museums, but there was an idea to choose museums of the respective events (bombardment, uprising and blockade). However, in Dresden there is no museum of the bombardment, so the city museum was the only option. In Warsaw, we initially planned to analyse the Warsaw Rising Museum, but understood that to ensure comparability of the analysis it is important to select similar types of museum. The city museum looked appealing, especially given that the exhibition in the Warsaw Historical Museum was being modernised at the time. When we arrived in St Petersburg there was no doubt about which museum we would analyse – the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg, which is equivalent to the city museums in Dresden and Warsaw. In the museums, during our detailed exhibition mapping, we used a kind of ‘museal game’ – to use a term introduced by Polish anthropologist Anna Wieczorkiewicz (2000: 18–20) – which enabled each of us to visit the exhibition separately and establish the first pre-interpretation. Wieczorkiewicz developed the idea of the museal game on the basis of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ([1975] 2006) concept of the game as the way a work of art comes into existence. Gadamer claimed that a work of art does not result from an artist’s will, but through the process of the game, which has its rules, in which the artist and the piece have to play. Wieczorkiewicz

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The Enemy on Display

used this concept to explain the contact between the visitor and the exhibition. In our case it could be understood even more literally as a way of behaviour − a way of collecting material on the exhibition − used by each of us. It really looked like a kind of game. Some people sat down and drew maps of each room, while others wandered around like sleepwalkers breathing in the atmosphere in order to record information in their notebooks a minute later. Some spent a lot of time standing in one spot and staring at one object while others passed it by. Nearly everybody made some drawings or took photographs or videos. Thanks to the different approaches we mapped the exhibitions in detail, and later during the ­conversations there was no problem with reconstructing the exhibition. However, there was a problematic element of the game. Some of us did not have sufficient knowledge about the historical facts and so tried to learn them from the exhibition. This is quite risky because the selected presentation of the historical events is also a part of the construction of the exhibition, so the interpretation should not only contain information about the presented facts, but also about those not presented. To avoid misunderstanding, we started the ‘conversation’ not only with the exhibition, through the game, but also with each other, through dialogue. Team members with better historical knowledge helped those who had some problems, while those who were better in cultural explanations helped to decode the relationships between elements. Sometimes there were vivid discussions about the exhibition: the first interpretative thought exchanges. We also had to solve another problem. When the group started analysing the exhibitions, each of us had some prejudice and expected to find certain elements of certain discourses in the exhibitions. The ‘museal game’ approach and thought exchange with other participants of the project helped us to realise our own limitations and prejudices, and to establish a kind of distance from ourselves and from the exhibition, which in ­consequence permitted a real contact with the exhibition narrative. Furthermore, in order to get a better understanding of the exhibitions, we met with museum staff to obtain more precise information on the given exhibition. We also talked to the curators of the exhibition or people responsible for the exhibition’s development.10 Moreover, in each city we had some meetings with people other than museum staff – people who located the museums in the existing local context of Dresden, Warsaw or St Petersburg.11 Subsequently we have also collected published sources on the museums. In such a way we could pay attention to the wider context and the history of each exhibition, because we did not want to assume that museums are straightforward reflections of political and

Introduction: The Enemy on Display19

ideological ­interests; this has been a fair point of criticism of some of the museum studies (Macdonald 1996: 4–5). Thus, we tried to reconstruct the dynamics and contexts that formed the exhibitions by looking into various published sources, and collecting information on the changes in the exhibitions since their establishment. Nevertheless, the present shape of the exhibitions and our readings of them are the main focus of our study. Each evening after visiting the museums, we brainstormed and noted some interpretative triggers for further development. The meetings were recorded and the recordings distributed amongst participants. At the end of the field research in each city we spent an evening summarising the interpretative clues from the selected exhibition. The whole field research ended with an evening workshop at the Memorial Society in St Petersburg, during which we tried to establish the outline of the report and noted down the most important elements of the case studies. We also divided ourselves into three subgroups (pairs), which were required to write the case studies. We decided that in each subgroup there would be one national of that country and one foreigner. Such a division of labour was intended to help us avoid stereotypical ways of thinking and to compensate for gaps in historical knowledge, enabling us to deal with discourse and in consequence guarantee the possibility of a common interpretation rather than a one-sided approach. At the same time, we agreed that the work of the subgroups would be consulted and supervised by all participants during the workshops held in Warsaw, as well as via emails. We started avidly reading the literature on the subject and created a basic, common bibliography of the publications which could be reference points for our analysis. Our aim was not to undertake deep research into the historiography of the destruction of each of the cities, but to establish which events the historians investigating the Bombing of Dresden, the Warsaw Uprising and the Leningrad Blockade considered significant for understanding each catastrophe. We recognised that without such a list it would be difficult to constructively discuss which information the ­exhibitions omit and to which they pay maybe too much attention. ‘Museum meanings are dependent on personal and community memory and imagination, and often involve emotions and sensory experiences’, as Sheila Watson (2010: 205) summarises the vast research on the role of subjectivity in the perception of exhibitions. Already during the field research and later during our meetings in Warsaw we realised how differently each of us were looking at the exhibitions analysed, and that this dissimilarity was not simply a result of our national origins. Thus, the national groups sometimes tried to cover over some problematic elements of their national

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The Enemy on Display

exhibitions, for instance by adding information which was not presented in the display but which was, in their opinion, important for better understanding the story. Nevertheless, discussions with colleagues led to greater awareness and permitted further development of the interpretation. In consequence, dealing with the different national perceptions of the exhibition seemed less difficult than the problems arising from the different academic backgrounds of the participants. Coming with backgrounds in sociology, history and anthropology, we used diverse methods and tended to pay more attention to those elements important within our own respective fields. Moreover, even people coming from the same academic field (e.g. history) had different approaches, which depended on the specifics of local (German, Polish, Russian) historiography. In these cases the national confrontations were much more intense than in cases of simple ­interpretation of the exhibition elements. Once the frameworks of our common interpretative language had been determined and we began to speak more or less the same language, the interpretation of the ‘poetics’ of the exhibitions could commence. It was a ‘semiotic analysis of the diversity of ways in which exhibitions create representations of cultures’ (McLean 1998: 247). We were interested in the multilevel dependences present in the exhibitions. We tried to understand the structure and meanings of the whole narrative which we treated as a complex text. We wanted to understand its inner construction and dependences, to name and characterise particular elements, and to establish the relationships between them. The ‘synthetic’ construction of the exhibition was very important: the way objects were presented and the relations between different exhibits, as well as the artefacts and texts or pictures themselves. However, in order to understand the relationships between particular elements of an exhibition, it is necessary to look at each element separately (Edwards 2001). Thus, we wanted to establish to what extent displayed objects propose a ‘complex, problematized, and nuanced view of the past’ (Lubar 1997: 16). We were interested whether they were displayed in a wider historical and cultural context (Knell 2007) or whether only the basic information about the item could be elicited. It seemed to us very important, because as many researches claim ‘objects are dumb’ (cf. Crew and Sims 1991: 159; Kavanagh 2004). It means that when we think that they communicate something to us, in fact we talk to them and ‘infuse them with our thoughts and desires’ (Knell 2012: 324). Therefore, we also looked on ‘the codes of presentation through which meaning is created’ (Pearce 1992: 196) and on labels, because the way the objects are described determines how they are perceived and understood (Knell 2007).

Introduction: The Enemy on Display21

We paid special attention to photographs, which are tools of ‘economy of truth’ par excellence (Edwards 2010: 27, after Porter). As Elisabeth Edwards (2001: 186) claims, in museums ‘photographs are used in a didactic way, to show how this or that “works”, “is used”, “made”; they are seen as providing context, they explain, authenticate and, on occasion, substitute for a real object’. Photographs are quite often stripped of their hermeneutic potential (Edwards 2010: 27) in the museum, and are used only as ‘functional realist images as a “window on the world”’ (Edwards 2001: 184). Summing up, in our analysis of the poetics of exhibitions we tried to understand the significance of each element of the exhibition and then translate its historical and cultural meaning for the narrative in order finally to understand the complex message. However, the narrative of the story is also constructed through the development of the space of the exhibition. The way in which spaces are arranged and the objects displayed has an influence on the viewer’s perception of the exhibition. We applied several methods as drawing plans of the exhibitions to bear in mind ‘how culture manifests itself in the layout of space by forming a spatial pattern in which activities are integrated and segregated to different degrees’ (Hillier and Tzortzi 2011: 285). These plans were also important for us, because there is a significant difference between an exhibition which forces the visitor to follow the curator’s narrative by creating a kind of one-way circulation, and an exhibition which permits the visitors to choose their own way through the exhibition. The first one may be called after Christopher Marshall (2005) as ‘projective space’, which tries to convey certain massages, the second as ‘reflective space’, which permits individual contemplation. These space analyses were very important for our case studies, because the museums that we analysed belonged to both ‘temple’ and ‘forum’ space constructions. Our methodology was a multilayer dialogue concentrated on understanding the exhibition. First of all, each of us adopted an informal, even playful, approach to each exhibition during the process of our ‘museal game’; then there was a deep ‘conversation’ between the partners from each subgroup, during which the two individual’s different approaches towards the exhibition could be identified; and finally there were meetings of the whole group, where all approaches and interpretational proposals were acknowledged. When the highest conversational level was achieved, we once more made our way down the levels in order to check the veracity of the agreed statements. However, the hierarchical construction of the dialogue is only apparent. Very often during our meetings we discussed the exhibition itself, not only our interpretations. By showing pictures we tried collectively to re-enter the ‘museal game’ in order to liberate ourselves

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from interpretative limitations and to try to establish the factual meaning of a particular element of the exhibition. Our aim was not limited to understanding the claims of the other participants of the project. Through conversations in which different perspectives clashed, we wanted to come to the cultural meaning of the exhibition. Thus, the conversation, even if treated very subjectively, was a means through which the ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973: 3–32) of the exhibition was produced. The ‘thick description’ should be understood as the contextualised and problematised (concentration on the image of enemy) explanation of the exhibition, enriched by the interpretation of a broader context.

The Book’s Structure To make the interpretation comprehensible, we have divided each case study into several parts. For each, we begin with a short introduction, followed by information on the development of the discourse of the event, a brief account of the history of the museum, a short description of the narrative, and finally our interpretation. The structures of the interpretative parts are different, because the exhibitions themselves were diverse and our texts were written by different people. However, the assumptions underlying the interpretation are the same. We interrogated each exhibition about ‘the enemy’, the main character, and their common relationships as well as the general structure of the story. We also questioned what the meanings and values attached to the city were before and after the enemy’s appearance. These are the frames of the case studies, which only define the general outline, but do not determine the content which is the ‘thick description’. The main core of the book comprises three in-depth qualitative case studies devoted to the images of ‘the enemy’ in three museums located in three European cities, which tell how these cities coped with the effects of the Second World War. Chapter 1 interprets the exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’ at the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg. It shows how the exhibition, first created in the 1960s, converges two discourses: the Soviet state discourse of the heroic behaviour of Leningraders as one of many heroic wartime acts, and the local discourse which highlighted the exceptional experience of the city. As a result of this double influence, the image of the enemy takes two different forms: the military enemy related to the conception of morally dehumanised German soldiers (state discourse); and the image of the people’s enemy (local discourse), which takes the form

Introduction: The Enemy on Display23

of food and water shortages, lack of heat and other scarcities in everyday life resulting from the Germans’ actions during the Leningrad Blockade. Moreover, the image manifests itself in the way the Leningraders thought of the enemy who never entered the city, but who posed a constant threat by their presence and actions. These complexities do not adversely affect either of the discourses. In the conclusions, we refer to Yuriy Lotman’s (1990) idea on the perception of the city as an antithesis to the surrounding world understood as nature. The imagery of the city as a symbol of the victory of culture over nature reinforces the museum’s tale about the division of the world into good and evil, where the good is associated with the inhabitants of the city, while evil is an inhuman, animal-like enemy. This view on the siege of Leningrad is common to both discourses. Chapter 2 is on the exhibition about the German occupation of Warsaw (1939–1945), including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) and the Warsaw Uprising (1944), in the Historical Museum of Warsaw. We interpret the image of the enemy by referring to the pattern inherent in the Polish culture of martyrdom, particularly its two main narrative threads: struggle and suffering, deeply embedded in Catholic symbolism, and nineteenth-century romantic thought. This pattern explains the idealised qualities of both the main character of the exhibition’s narrative, the Polish nation, and the invader, the Nazi. Their features are, above all, presented by various contrasts frequently used by the exhibition’s creators, such as attacker–defender, perpetrator–victim, anonymous–distinctive, immoral– moral, guilty–innocent, dishonourable–honourable and evil–good. The cultural pattern for romantic martyrdom also helps us to understand why Warsaw Jews, who constituted one-third of the pre-war population of the city, have been marginalised in the exhibition. Chapter 3 shows how the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’ in the Dresden City Museum tries to deconstruct some of the myths concerning the Bombing of Dresden (the most important being the myth of the ‘innocent city’) and proposes a thought-provoking approach to the German past and memory. The exhibition develops an element of the German discourse on common guilt, and shows that the majority of city dwellers were responsible for the city’s destruction because they voted for National Socialism in the democratic elections in 1932. The enemy in this exhibition is, therefore, neither external and dehumanised, nor particularised in the Nazi leaders, but comprises a psychological dimension. It is a hostile part of the human personality. While the beauty and prosperity of the ‘Florence on the Elbe’ in the nineteenth century was a result of cooperation among citizens, the city’s destruction in the twentieth century is presented as a consequence of the destruction of the united community.

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This mutual relationship between the condition of the community and the beauty of the city, which determines the shape of the museum narrative, is called the ‘Dorian Gray effect’. We show that this reference to the beauty of the architecture is problematic because it permits the exhibition to taboo some important dilemmas of collective memory. In the final chapter we draw general conclusions from these three case studies. We identify the regularities found in constructing images of the enemy in each exhibition, and point out some of the risks involved in musealising12 (i.e. keeping alive) the historical ‘other’. Then, we discuss the potentials and dangers of the ‘temple’ and the ‘forum’ metaphors with regard to the research of historical exhibitions. In such a way we recognise that interpreting a museum exhibition is an ongoing, never-ending process. Nonetheless, the very process of seeking to interpret and explain the role of the contemporary historical museum is absolutely essential for intercultural communication in the future. We hope this part will be of special interest to museum curators.

Notes   1. On exhibiting war in museums, see for example Zolberg 1996; Hinz 1997; Gieryn 1998; Thomas 2000; Boursier 2005; Bogumił and Wawrzyniak 2010; Thiemeyer 2010.   2. Duncan Cameron used these terms to analyse art museums. However, both terms were later used by other researchers to analyse ethnographic museums (Ames 1992: 15–24) and historical museums (Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci 2008: 275–305).   3. Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge was applied by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1992) to analyse the history of the museums.   4. Compare the examples that Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase (1997: 9) recalls in footnote 18. See also, Senyavskaya 2006; and Jarecka 2008.   5. Good examples of attempts to write a common past are the French–German history textbook History: Europe and the World After 1945, and the Polish– German textbook Understanding History – Shaping the Future: The Polish– German Relationship 1933–1949.  6. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (2000: 129–31) shows examples of how this dichotomy functions in language and communication. He also recalls the example of the traditional Russian peasant bridal laments to show how this dichotomy was transferred into everyday life.   7. While describing the history of Russian culture in his book Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes (2002) shows how Napoleon’s Invasion in 1812 influenced a total shift in the mentality of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia from the Western model of life to concentration on their own, inner-­Russian

Introduction: The Enemy on Display25

values, which began to be the most important elements of the Russian identity.  8. According to Rancour-Laferriere (2000: 153), the image of the universal human was first propounded by Dostoyevskiy in his speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.   9. See the appendix for the list of all the museums visited, together with a short description of each. 10. In Dresden we talked to Roland Schwarz, the chief curator of the exhibition; in Warsaw we met Joanna Maldis (curator) and Maciej and Marek Mikulski (designers) of a new exhibition. In St Petersburg we talked to the guide who showed us the exhibition, and to Tatiana Mikhaylovna Shmakova, the manager of the branch of the city museum on Naberezhnaya. 11. In Dresden we met Tobias Krohn who showed us interesting movies about celebrations of the Bombing of Dresden and a Nazi demonstration in Dresden. In Warsaw, Dr Dariusz Gawin explained to us the core idea of the Warsaw Rising Museum, and Hanna Nowak-Radziejowska introduced us to the museum’s cultural activities. In St Petersburg we talked to Tatiana Voronina, who described to us the project ‘Pamyat’ blokady’ carried out by the European University in St Petersburg. 12. We refer here to the Hermann Lübbe’s (1991) concept of ‘musealisation’, which means that the archival thinking is no longer confined within the museum, but concerns every zone of culture. This growing importance of historicism in contemporary culture has a great impact on sensibility of our times, and perception of time and space changes.

Chapter 1

Temple of Heroic Community Soviet People, Leningraders and German Fascists in the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg Walking along Nevskiy Prospekt, the main street of St Petersburg, on 8 September at about 11.35 a.m., one may hear from loudspeakers in the street the sound of warning sirens, and then the regular clicking of a metronome. If anybody is listening to the local radio or watching a local television channel at that moment, they will also be informed that on this day in 1941 an 872-day siege of the city by the German army started. In 2009, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, these signals were broadcast to remember the defenders, citizens and victims of the Leningrad Blockade (also known as the Siege of Leningrad). Since that moment, local memory of the blockade has acquired its new ‘sound’ dimension (Voronina and Utekhin 2010: 63). As Tatiana Voronina and Ilya Utekhin (ibid.) point out, the role of acoustic signals is to inform people about events that are ‘the most important to them in a given moment’. These sounds played this role both during the war as well as today. In besieged Leningrad, the sound of sirens warned people of approaching air raids; and the metronome, played over the radio when no other information was broadcast, informed people that the city was still alive. Today, on 8 September every year, the sounds are played to remind residents about the fate of their city during the war. Thus, the sound of a metronome is one of those symbols which the French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur (2003), would describe as ‘giving rise to thought’. However, it is not the only meaningful symbol of the blockade. Another symbol is a 125-gram piece of bread. When, on 8 September 1941, the encirclement of Leningrad was completed, the city was cut off from the rest of the country. As the city was not well prepared for a siege, and food reserves could suffice for only one month, the city dwellers were

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to experience nearly 900 days of a ‘frozen hell of starvation and disease’ (Glantz 2002: 132). The most severe time began in November 1941 when the daily bread ration was reduced to 125 grams for dependents, such as children, pensioners and adults relying on aid, as well as those working in offices (but not in factories). Scientists in the besieged city developed a formula for an artificial bread, which had 179 calories only and was composed of 20–25 per cent of cellulose mass and 40–50 per cent of various additives such as bran, oilcake and chips. This bread was to form the basic diet for the majority of Leningrad’s inhabitants during the winter of 1941/42. This 125-grams ration has become well recognised today, not only in St Petersburg, but throughout the country. This bread is both symbolic of a heroic deed – it presages the final lifting of the blockade – and of the suffering of ordinary people during the war. As with the metronome, it is a very important memory and symbol of the war experience. They are both icons, and their power lies in the fact that they not only give rise to thought, but force one to reflect upon the past. This is why they are always present in survivor’s memories, visible and audible in the city landscape, and this is why they feature so strongly in museum exhibitions. Indeed, one may find a replica piece of Leningrad bread not only in the Blockade Museum in St Petersburg, but within local museum exhibitions throughout the country, such as displays in the Komi Republic1 telling the story of the Great Patriotic War.2 These items – the metronome and piece of bread, as well as others, such as a child’s sledge used as a means of transportation when the public transport system was out of action, and a tiny stove (burzhuyka) used to heat houses when the central heating was cut off – are all symbolic of the fight with the enemy. They also suggest that the image of the enemy was not uniform during the war, but was a dual image; it was perceived as both the German soldiers, who besieged the city, as well as the hunger and cold, which daily threatened people’s lives. These symbols, however, also infer that the memory of the war is much more complex than it would appear at first glance. The State Museum of the History of St Petersburg, while telling the story of the blockade must deal with this complexity, and therefore presents the enemy in these two fundamentally different forms. It is the museum’s aim to show the history of the blockade, however in doing so it does not escape from the influence of memory. Thus, as we will show in this chapter, when the museum story concentrates on warfare, a military enemy is apparent, yet when the focus is on the city’s history, the image of the enemy becomes hunger, cold or a bomb. Despite the fact that both images complement one another, they have their own development dynamics in the museum

Temple of Heroic Community: St Petersburg29

narrative and are strongly contrasted with the main characters of the story, namely the citizens of Leningrad on the one hand and Soviet heroes on the other. In this case study we concentrate our analysis on this complex relationship between enemy images and their relations to the main character/s of the story. We also pay special attention to the role of the symbols of the blockade in the narrative. To ensure our argument is clearly understood, we begin this chapter with a short description of the development of the memory of the Blockade of Leningrad after the war.

The Blockade of Leningrad in Official and Local Memory The German attack against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 started a new chapter in the history of the Second World War called, in Russian historiography, the Great Patriotic War. The capture and, if necessary, destruction of Leningrad, which had been the cultural capital of Russia and symbol of Bolshevik Revolution, was one of the Hitler’s priority wartime objectives (Glantz 2002: 9); equally, the city’s resistance was one of the Stalin’s strategic defence goals. The ultimate number of casualties from the Blockade of Leningrad as a result of both the siege and the ensuing battle, will probably never be known, but historians estimate that 1.6 to 2 million Soviet civilians and soldiers perished during the 872-day blockade between 8 September 1941 and 27 January 1944 (Glantz 2002: 327–67).3 As David Glantz (2002: 148) claims, ‘regardless [of ] the actual death toll, these figures accord the Battle for Leningrad and its associated winter blockade the dubious distinction of being the most terrible and costly siege in recorded history’. It should, therefore, not be surprising that memory of the blockade has evolved with the great social and political changes since the war. These changes have resulted to a large extent from the official historical policy in force at a given point in time. The Soviet authorities that wielded power over all media were able to shape official memory, making it correspond to their current political needs and blocking any alternative interpretations. It was this very force that made the Soviet authorities prevent and forbid the development of independent memory about the blockade, and, by including it in the discourse on the victory in the German–Soviet war, the Soviet authorities used it as an element of their own propaganda. This is not to say that other interpretations, divergent from the ones proposed by the dominant discourse, were non-existent. As a most critical event in the life of many of Leningrad’s citizens, the blockade had a strong influence on

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their society (Kirschenbaum 2006: 77). Nevertheless, the personal recollections were individual in their nature. Whenever they became a collective phenomenon – for instance, Leningraders’ memory of the joint experience of the war – they were subdued and destroyed by the authorities, starting from immediately after the war. The first ‘memory projects’ to commemorate and secure the memory of the blockade began as early as 1941 (Konradova and Ryleva 2005: 245; Shishkin and Dobrotvorskiy 2007: 3). The city authorities had issued an order to collect weapons and military equipment that constituted proof of a heroic fight by the defenders of the city. The collected items formed part of an exhibition opened in 1941 on ‘The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Nation against the German Fascism’.4 These items were then combined in 1943 into a new exhibition on ‘The Heroic Defence of the City of Leningrad’, following Operation Spark in January 1943 which had broken the blockade. Individual rooms of the exhibition displayed information about consecutive episodes, which together relayed the ‘true story’ of what had happened during the blockade (Shishkin and Dobrotvorskiy 2007: 3). Local history and tales about the blockade were intertwined with national history that talked about the German–Soviet war. Just after the war, in 1945, the exhibition was extended again with new rooms and materials. Later on it was transformed into the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad.5 Both the exhibition and the museum were of great interest to the citizens (Salisbury 2003: 571–72). In January 1945, Leningrad received the Order of Lenin, the highest decoration of the Soviet Union, for its heroic fight during the war and defence of the nation. The Order confirmed the significance of the blockade in the narrative at state level. International significance came soon after when the Nuremberg Trials started at the end of 1945. The Blockade of Leningrad was proof of Nazi crimes committed against civilians. For the first time Leningraders, the Soviet people generally, and indeed the whole world, learnt of the number of people who had died of starvation in the besieged city (Gorshenin 1954). The figure of 641,803 people who perished during the blockade became symbolic. Even if later research showed that the number of casualties was larger, the number agreed at the Nuremberg Trials was widely used by state propaganda as a number of international significance (Voronina 2011). In that period much was written in the local press about the blockade, creating a picture of ‘Leningrad war fame’ (Kalendarova 2006: 277). Stories about the heroic deeds of Leningraders were used to mobilise people to rebuild the city and give them moral courage in the face of very difficult postwar living conditions. At the same time the articles

Temple of Heroic Community: St Petersburg31

­ ighlighted the exceptional attitude of the city, which had not only driven h the enemy back, but also freed itself from the siege without any external support. Aleksey Kuznetsov best expressed this thought in his speech in 1946 when he was appointed Secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad. He made it clear that the city was one of Hitler’s strategic targets and, thanks to its heroic attitude, was not only the first one to face the enemy, but also contributed to the defence of the motherland. Kuznetsov emphasised the role and significance of the city by claiming that Leningrad was ‘the city that overshadowed the fame of Troy’ (Kalendarova 2006: 277–84). Glorifying the city and emphasising the exceptionality of its fate, Kuznetsov belittled Stalin’s role, whether deliberately or not. The words of the First Secretary were captured by the Leningrad press, which frequently quoted his statements. The judgements and assessments of the blockade expressed in that period by the commanders-in-chief in the Soviet Union highlighted other aspects of the Siege of Leningrad. First of all, they pointed out the key role of Stalin in breaking the blockade. Secondly, they focused on the military achievements. The citizens were only mentioned in order to point out that their attitude and dedication should serve as an example in postwar times too. What is interesting is that neither Kuznetsov’s statements nor the statements of high-ranking state officials mention the number of casualties or the conditions of life experienced in the city. Even if they presented different approaches, in fact they concentrated only on the positive aspects of the blockade. The end of the 1940s was marked by growing conflict between the memory of the exceptional fate of Leningrad, as created by the city authorities, and the state interpretation of events, which focused strongly on Stalin’s role. It was also asserted increasingly frequently that the victory of Leningrad was not an achievement of its citizens alone, but an outcome of aid rendered by other regions of the country, and of the mobilisation of all citizens of the Soviet Union.6 This conflict of memory became one of the elements of the complex mechanism of the so-called Leningradskoye delo (The Leningrad Affair),7 an action against the Leningrad party organisation commanded by Andrey Zhdanov and prepared on Stalin’s order. It resulted in repression of the city’s high-ranking party officials, members of the Soviet mass organisations and of many Leningrad communists (Salisbury 2003: 571–83).8 Memory about the blockade was also subjected to repression. In 1949 the Museum of the Leningrad Blockade was shut down,9 and its staff were accused of creating an anti-party attitude that allegedly diminished Stalin’s standing. They were also accused of preparing an attack against Soviet power. Shishkin and Dobrotvorskiy (2007:

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26) write that the evidence for this was the weapon and military exhibits in the museum. The management, including the director, were sent to prison camps; other people were released but subsequently could not find new jobs (Salisbury 2003: 579–83; Shishkin and Dobrotvorskiy 2007: 25–31). The press printed fewer and fewer articles on the siege, and those that were published praised Stalin’s achievements and highlighted the importance of aid rendered by other cities and fronts that contributed to the Leningrad victory (Kalendarova 2006: 285). Memory about the blockade was rekindled in the official discourse at the end of 1950s. The image of the blockade and methods of its interpretation shaped in that period have endured until today, with some minor changes and adjustments. During this period the first memory projects were also established, which set the framework of the language used to commemorate the blockade. The beginning of the 1960s marked the development of officially remembering the German–Soviet war as a national victory. In Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, the victory of the nation over fascism was mentioned for the first time, and the significance of Stalin and the wartime commanders diminished (Hösler 2005: 157). It was also asserted more and more frequently that it was necessary to preserve the memory of the wartime events for future generations. The emphasis on the ‘link between generations’ played an important political function. It showed that all generations jointly built the Soviet future. In June 1965 Leningrad was awarded the Gold Star decoration10 for its extraordinary achievements, setting an example for future generations. According to Glantz (2002: 470), in this context, the history of the blockade was important in so far as ‘the course and outcome of the Battle for Leningrad represented the entire Great Patriotic War in microcosm’. Due to the authentic involvement and struggle of not only soldiers but also civilians, the blockade became a symbol embodying all the highest values of Soviet society. As the newspapers wrote at the time, the blockade ought to be ‘known in order to appreciate and love our Soviet Motherland even more’ (Kalendarova 2006: 287). The references to the history of the blockade had another propaganda goal too. In the face of the Cold War, the fear of repetition of the blockade served as an element to legitimise power. Moreover, memory of the blockade served to build a discourse on ‘the Soviet fight for the peace’ (Voronina 2007). Reference to the heroic ‘authentic’ defence which brought about victory over fascism supported their conviction about the moral superiority of the Soviet Union over the West. In that period, the press published increasing numbers of articles that not only described the heroic approach of the blockade, but also

Temple of Heroic Community: St Petersburg33

­ ighlighted the issues of hunger, cold, death and suffering in everyday h life. The first publications of memories also started to appear, and for the first time, official discourse mentioned the issue of casualties among the citizens.11 The developing memory of the tragedy completed the heroic one, thus creating the image of the city as both hero and victim. However, taboo subjects still existed. The process of commemorating the blockade in art and architecture also began in the 1960s, following the erection in 1957 on Nevskiy Prospekt of a replica of ‘the white and blue signs’ which had warned Leningraders during the war about the danger of air raids (Kirschenbaum 2006: 88). The first memorial complex, the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, which was officially established as the memorial site of the blockade on 9 May 1960, had very important national meaning (Kalinin and Yurevich 1979). Its central element is formed by a sculpture of the Monument Rodina-Mat’ (Mother Motherland), which symbolises national unity, and the epitaphs on the stone plaques are reminiscent of the texts from the memorial on the Field of Mars, where the participants of the February Revolution were buried in 1917. Thus, according to Rusinova (2006: 338–39), ‘the civic outburst at the time of the blockade equals the one during the Revolution. Each of them presents in a very similar way a voluntary sacrifice in the fight for socialism’. This is how the motive of the ‘link between g­ enerations’ and the common Soviet victory receive a visual form. The language of ‘lyric statehood’ generated in that period, strongly drawing on individual memories, became a permanent element shaping the identity of postwar Soviet society (Gudkov 2005: 92). In the 1960s and 1970s more than sixty monuments were erected around the city making a kind of ‘one-to-one scale model of the blockade’ called the Green Circle of Glory (Kirschenbaum 2006: 189). However, the most significant memorial, which united local history with the state myth of victory, is the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, which was erected in 1975 and inaugurated on Victory Day. According to Olga Rusinova (2006: 348–55), this monument, in contrast to the monument of mourning erected on the Piskaryovskoe Memorial Cemetery, shows the blockade as a triumph. It was erected to build a blockade myth about the historical victory which took place, but it also concerned the contemporary Soviet reality of the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s a ‘crisis of interpretation’ of the blockade ensued and no new monuments were erected (Rusinova 2006: 357). Nevertheless, during this period a new discourse about the blockade began. In 1979 the Book of the Blockade, written by Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin, was published in which, for the first time, the dark sides of

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the blockade were spoken of publicly (Kirschenbaum 2006: 231). When Perestroyka arose in the late 1980s there were more articles in newspapers and journals showing the blockade as a humanitarian catastrophe, during which acts of cannibalism, pillage and robbery had taken place. However, as Lisa Kirschenbaum (ibid.: 235) writes, ‘inclusion of previously taboo details did not necessarily imply a rejection of the Leningrad epic’ of heroism. The heroic feature was still present and strengthened by the Blokadniki (survivor of the Blockade) societies which, in the face of the social and economic difficulties of the 1990s, fostered ‘their wartime heroism’ in order to gain respect and social welfare, and retain continuity of identity (Kirschenbaum 2006: 259; Voronina 2007). From the mid-1990s the Blokadniki societies had increasing influence on the shaping of official memory; in consequence the memory of the blockade remained, and is still perceived, as heroic. Despite overcoming the taboo issues, many historical facts were still not mentioned in public debates. So far, victory in the war had been considered by the majority of Russians as the only positive moment in the history of the Soviet nation, and the most crucial element in its formation. As in the 1960s, the image of a heroic and tragic fight was used by the contemporary authorities to consolidate its image (Konradova and Ryleva 2005: 245). The image of the past created in this way enables the reasons behind the war, with all their ambiguities, to be passed over in silence (Gudkov 2005: 94).

History of the Exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’ As already mentioned, at the beginning of the 1960s, during the wave of patriotism which resulted in the creation of monumental statues and museums devoted to the Great Patriotic War, it was also possible to build memorials commemorating the Leningrad Blockade. At that time, the reopening of the exhibition on the history of the blockade to describe the fate of the besieged city was discussed more and more often. Although, from the moment the Museum of the Blockade was closed in 1949, the authorities had tried to make sure that no project commemorating the blockade appeared in the public space of the city. As Kirschenbaum (2006: 147) writes, ‘at homes, the Leningraders preserved domestic siege museums’. The change of memory policy that occurred at the end of the 1950s opened the way for transforming the domestic museums into public ones that reviewed the fate of the whole community.

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An exhibition presenting the history of the Siege of Leningrad was opened only in 1964 to mark the anniversary of the lifting of the blockade. The exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’ was prepared by the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg (Pavelkina 1997).12 It was opened in the branch of the museum located in the Rumyantsev Palace.13 The exhibition was only possible because it was situated within the City Museum. A museum solely devoted to the Siege of Leningrad, and presenting the exceptionality of the city’s history, would still not have been possible then (Kalendarova 2006: 284–93).14 The exhibition was also possible because in 1964 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted a policy ‘increasing the role of museums in the communist education of the workers’ (Shulepova 2005: 180), thus a role of the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg was to become a temple of education for the Soviet people. According to information we received from museum staff, there are no archive materials documenting the process of the creation of the exhibition. It was a time of strong communist propaganda so we can only guess at the pressure under which the then curators worked. None of these people still work at the museum, and the current staff never knew them. Today there is a new generation, who began working at the museum after the political changes – in the 1990s or even 2000s. Thus, we were only able to learn how the exhibition looked at the beginning from one elderly woman who had worked all her life in the museum as a guard of the exhibition. She said that in the 1960s, when the exhibition was opened, the visitor to the museum started on the third floor, where one could see exhibits relating to the Revolution of 1917, the civil war and the first Five-Year Plan. Going down to the second floor, in the first room the visitor learnt about the annexation of Baltic countries by the Soviet Union in 1939, and saw large pictures of smiling people demonstrating their happiness at the incorporation. The following room showed the history of Mussolini and Hitler coming to power, by presenting pictures of their public speeches and displaying the social support for their regimes. Only from this room did the visitor enter the first room telling the story of the German–Soviet war. It was a symbolic room with only a few artefacts and omnipresent gloom. There were clouds on the ceiling and it was possible to hear the melody of the song Svyashchennaya Voyna (Holy War). Just in front of the entrance was a large picture of a village burnt by the Germans. To the left was another large picture, of soldiers going to war. To the right was a poster, ‘The Motherland is calling’; a showcase with uniforms; and a table which was used during the war to enlist soldiers going to the front. Here the story of the city’s wartime history started, and was presented in

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the next twelve rooms. The museum’s exhibition ended with the history of the revival of the Soviet Union after the war, with the development of industry, cultural life and prosperity. We learned from the guide that during the 1990s, though she did not work in the museum then, that the exhibition was partly changed. The section on the Revolution was replaced by an exposition about the Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika (New Economy Policy). The rooms about the annexation of the Baltic countries were closed, as was the exhibition on Hitler and Mussolini coming to power. At present, the history of the Rumyantsev Palace and its owners is presented in these rooms. The symbolic room with clouds on the ceiling was also replaced by a reconstruction of the nineteen-century palace interior. Some elements from that room were moved to the second room of the German–Soviet war, which, at present, is the first room of the exhibition showing the Siege of Leningrad. However, as the guide stressed, the story presented in the twelve main rooms has changed only a little. Some items have been replaced by others and a few elements added. There is no postwar history of Leningrad in the museum, either. The story about the war ends with victory in 1945. At the end of the room there is a large picture of the Orthodox Church, Pokrova Bogoroditsy (Memorial of the War and the Siege). The Orthodox Church is a typical means of commemoration of the dead in the Russian tradition. Pokrova Bogoroditsy is a symbol of commemoration of the victims of the Siege of Leningrad, but also of all the victims of the German–Soviet war. The main structure of the story presented in the twelve rooms has not changed. As a museum leaflet explains, the way the story is presented is still relevant and the exhibition itself is ‘the most complete and comprehensive among all the others of its kind’.15 This was the same explanation we got from the museum manager, when we talked to her during our meeting. However, as Julian Spalding (2002: 13) claims: ‘It is tempting to think that museums do not change because their collections stay the same. In fact, they are changing invisibly all the time because, though specimens might be pinned down, our thoughts about them cannot be’. Even if the exhibition has changed only a little, the political transformations of the 1990s have prompted a different approach to the past in Russia. Thus, as we will show, the overall message of the exhibition has also changed. The political changes in the 1960s made it possible to relay the history of the Leningrad Blockade in a museum space. The exceptional fate of the city and its inhabitants was presented in the context of the German–Soviet war. The time and location of the exhibition have a meaningful impact on how the museum story is told. It is, therefore, worth considering the features of

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this story. First of all, the museum narrative treats the city’s wartime history as an event that constitutes a part of the wartime history of the whole country. This means that the exhibition shows certain wartime experiences from the perspective of the Soviet Union. At the same time, as a city museum, it tries to convey the exceptionality of the wartime experience of Leningrad’s inhabitants. Finally, as the exhibition was created at a particular historical moment, it bears certain elements of the policy then prevailing. Analysing the exhibition, therefore, it is necessary to separate and name the different narrative elements, as well as attempt to answer the question of why the design and new themes were not added until after 1991. It also seems important to stress that the changes made during the 1990s in the arrangement of rooms has broken down the single narrative of the twentieth-century history of Leningrad into a whole range of smaller stories presented on different floors of the museum. In fragmenting the narrative and removing the imposed direction of movement on visitors between rooms, the history of Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s and of the blockade in the 1940s now appear more like exhibitions of separate times rather than one coherent story. This is especially so because they are located on different floors; thus a visitor going to the exhibition of the Second World War does not have to enter the exhibition of the prewar period. Moreover, the interpretation is complicated by the fact that the exhibitions were created at different times and executed by different curators. Apart from chronology it is therefore difficult to distinguish any other common features of the exhibitions. Indeed all the exhibitions reveal distinct aspects of the city’s life, but they lay out their focus differently and as a consequence they do not constitute a common story. In the curatorial text placed at the beginning of the exhibition, the basic objective of the story about the New Economic Policy was ‘to show interpersonal relations and the moral situation of the society’. The same objective was set for the exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’. Therefore, the connection between these two exhibitions does not occur at the narrative level, but at the level of meta-assumption made by the curator who decided that the moral situation of the society would be a base for telling both stories. Thus, we concentrate only on the war story in this case study.

The Great Patriotic War on Display The exhibition about ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’ is a typical thematically chronological exhibition, which tells the story of the most important military events of 1941–1945, and of the life of ordinary

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people during the Siege of Leningrad. In showcases and on the walls, nearly two thousand pieces of carefully selected authentic items, documents and photographs are shown. To better present the history, various posters, flags, uniforms, paintings, maps and diagrams are used. To make the exhibition’s message more comprehensible, visual techniques using appropriate lighting, colour and technological aids are employed. They aid the viewer’s perception of the message, as well as build the atmosphere of the display. There is also a reconstruction of a ‘bomb shelter’ and a typical ‘blockade apartment’, where sounds of air raid sirens and a metronome beat are heard. Both rooms are intended to activate the ‘sensory experiences’ of visitors and permit them to ‘be transported from the present to an earlier time’ (Sepulveda dos Santos, in Edwards 2010: 27). As Edwards writes: ‘the more senses are engaged the more effective a piece of historical engagement is deemed to be’, thus the museum has applied a great diversity of techniques to be sure that special feelings will be stimulated and that, through them, the curators maximise what visitors experience. The entrance to each room of the exhibition has an introductory text in Russian and English, but thereafter all texts and descriptions are only in Russian. Although the exhibition is rich in means of expression, and combines them to improve its meaning, they all derive from the 1960s when the exhibition was created. Only in the last room is a contemporary television set added – however, this does not present any documentary material in a film loop, for instance, but is used only during educational lessons. On entering the first room, visitors are instantly submerged in historical events. After the changes made in the 1990s, the topics relating to the beginning of the German–Soviet war and the start of the blockade were combined and presented jointly. As a consequence, the beginning of both the war and the blockade overlap. While the first part of the room talks about the commencement of the war, the second part presents Leningrad’s preparations for repulsing the German army as it closed in. It is difficult to identify the borderline between the beginning of the German–Soviet war and the local history of the city. Simultaneous presentation of both national and local history also applied in other rooms. In the next rooms, the story of the siege is told chronologically and step by step: the closing of the ring, the bombardments, the cold and hunger of winter 1941, ‘The Road of Life’, the normalisation of life in 1942, the scientific and cultural life of the city and its industrial production, the breaking of the encirclement after Operation Spark, and ultimately, the lifting of the siege in 1944 and final victory in the German–Soviet war. In each case the main accent is put on the description of life, struggle

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and heroism. In almost every room there are photographs and information about people who became heroes because of their participation in this particular historical event. The military aspects are only a background to the story, and are quite often presented in the form of numbers, maps or models. However, as Andrea Witcomb (2010: 39) writes, such presentation explains ‘the process and its impact in terms of numbers killed’ but is not able to explain ‘the meaning of what happened’ because it does not help the visitor to personalise what happened. Thus, warfare is presented only in the two first and two last rooms. The central part of the exhibition is filled with pictures, testimonies and symbolic artefacts of the blockade, which have the ability to create ‘affect’. It is important to stress, that whenever the history of the blockade is accompanied by information on the military achievements of the Soviet Union, the two narratives are not separated, but complement and permeate each other. This is the case in the first room, covering the beginning of the war and the blockade. The same happens in the room related to the ‘closing of the blockade’, which presents the Battle for Leningrad. Next, the strategic meaning of the Battle for Moscow is described in the room devoted to ‘The Road of Life’. The final rooms of the exhibition, which talk about breaking and lifting the blockade, also simultaneously quote the most significant military achievements of the Red Army on other fronts. The coverage of Operation Spark gives the opportunity to mention all the strategic achievements of 1943: the Battle for Kursk, the liberation of leftbank Ukraine and the Battle for Stalingrad. The last room, in which the lifting of the blockade is presented, at the same time presents the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism and reviews the liberation of the Central and East European countries by the Red Army. In this room the events related to the decisive offensive which ended the siege, the so-called Neva-2 Operation, are presented on the left wall and culminate with a low relief depicting the lighthouse and the Military and Navy Museum on Vasil’yevskiy Island in St Petersburg. In turn, the history of the victory over fascism is presented on the right-hand side of the room and ends with a parade of the army in Moscow’s Red Square and a low relief of the tower of the Kremlin. Both low reliefs are located centrally on the wall in front of the entrance. In the space between them are photographs of the 1945 victory parade in Moscow. As the low reliefs are architectonic symbols of the Moscow and St Petersburg victories, they strengthen the account that emerges from photographs, exhibits and texts. In this way the last room, being the end of the narrative, at the same time underlines its sense – the victory. It is both the victory of the Leningraders over a 900-day blockade, as well as the victory of the whole Soviet Union

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over fascism in the German–Soviet war. This double narrative has an impact on the construction of the image of the enemy, as well as on the hero of the story. The image of the enemy presented in the exhibition is not uniform. It is presented in two fundamentally different forms. On one hand, a military enemy is represented – the German soldiers and generals who attacked the Soviet Union. On the other hand the enemy of the people is introduced, taking two forms: an enemy that is a real threat to the lives of citizens (cold, starvation, threat), and an enemy who is imagined by the citizens (German soldiers never entered the city so the invaders had to be imagined). Despite the fact that both images complement one another, they each have their own development dynamics, and so it is worth taking a closer look at them individually. At the same time the image of the enemy is strongly contrasted with the main characters of the story, namely the citizens of Leningrad and Soviet heroes. Since the military conflict forms the core of narrative, it has an impact on the image of the enemy and the main character of the tale, located on the opposing sides of the clash. This sharp juxtaposition of Germans and Soviets is visible from the very beginning of the exhibition and thus helps to determine the image of the enemy. The enemy does not form any separate entity, but is always presented in relation with the main character of the story.

The Military Enemy Just beyond the entrance to the first room, on opposite sides of the door, there are Soviet and German corners (Figure 1.1). Presentation of the Germans on one side and the Soviets on the other side of the room symbolically stresses the division of the world which had occurred with the beginning of the war. A very important element of this part of the exhibition is that both groups of actors are presented in the same way. There are pictures of the leaders of both states, Hitler and Stalin, some fragments of documents which illustrate their decisions, and military equipment like uniforms and guns. The images of Germans and Soviets are simplified down to their militaristic features only, strengthening the military causes of the story told in the exhibition. Such an arrangement at the beginning of the exhibition perfectly reflects the way the world is perceived during a real military conflict. As a Polish researcher of war propaganda, Urszula Jarecka (2008: 199), explains, ‘those who are guilty and those who are innocent must be geographically located and clearly separated from each other’.

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Figure 1.1. The first room of the exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1944’. The room is named ‘Attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet  Union’. The photograph presents on the left-hand side the ‘Soviet corner’, and on the right-hand side the ‘German corner’. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

The German corner is very important for the whole story, not only because it displays some features of the enemy’s world, but also because it is the only concrete and complex, even if very limited and symbolic, representation of the enemy’s world. It is presented through a vertical construction composed of a sequence of photographs and items (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). This resembles a pyramid. At the top there is a picture of Hitler with Nazi generals preparing the attack on the Soviet Union. Lower down hang photographs which show German soldiers destroying the ‘Soviet world’ and committing crimes against the Soviet people. Below is a fragment of the text of the Barbarossa Plan translated into Russian, which is evidence of the attack, and a verbal summing up of the cruelty presented in the photographs above. On the floor stands a showcase with items confirming the Germans’ presence on the territory of the Soviet Union. These include a net of human hair from Auschwitz, tools of interrogation, prisoners’ concentration camp badges, a Wehrmacht soldier’s shoes and a German gun. There is also a photograph of very young German soldiers, some still look like children, who are posing for the photographer with knives between

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Figure 1.2. Room: ‘Attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union’. The photographs present the hierarchical world of the Germans. Below the pictures stands a showcase (Figure 1.3) with a German sub-machine gun and items used to torture prisoners. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

their teeth, trying to look frightening. The description comments on the masquerade: ‘They wanted to conquer the world’. The items displayed in the glass box came from different semantic fields. The badges of the Auschwitz camp prisoners, especially, are not directly connected with the German–Soviet war, but together they reflect in a symbolic way the meaning and structure of the enemy’s world. The objects are treated here as an ‘information package’ which represents the meaning imposed by disciplinary curatorial strategy (Dudley 2010: 6). The information given on the labels is very limited, because museums, and especially temple museums, ‘are often hesitant to reveal all they know about their collections, especially if this undermines the status of an exhibit’ (Spalding 2002: 25). The status of analysed exhibits was to authenticate the curatorial ideas around which meaning is organised. The hierarchical and vertical construction reflects the totalitarian and militaristic structure of the enemy’s world, with Hitler and his generals as the decision makers at the top, and German soldiers as the executors of orders below. Items presented in the showcase show the enemy’s way of

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Figure 1.3. Room: ‘Attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union’. The showcase with a German sub-machine gun and items used to torture prisoners located just below the pictures presenting the hierarchical world of the Germans (Figure 1.2). Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

acting, as well as displaying the results of the enemy’s activity. The German corner more or less presents types of cruelty (physical cruelty, psychological tortures, desecration of corpses, and barbarism to culture), which Jarecka (2008: 213) distinguishes as the most willingly visualised by war propaganda specialists during a real conflict. Thus, the image of the enemy presented in this part of the exhibition is based on the way the image of the enemy was constructed during the war, and is therefore very much militaristic and dehumanised. The Germans are presented as destructive war machines, which do not possess any human feelings or values. The torture tools and photographs of the young German soldiers with knives between their teeth depict the ferocious nature of the Germans, and assert that the enemy is a quasi-human creature, coming from a primitive society. The Germans are presented as a separate genus of mankind, or as monsters for whom the category of Homo sapiens is not appropriate, but rather the ‘cybernetic Homo ferus’ (Douthwaite 1997: 176–202) – cybernetic, because at the beginning of the exhibition only the wildness of the enemy’s morality and behaviour are presented, and the

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physical features recall the militaristic aspects of a war machine rather than the characteristics of a wild animal.16 The accent placed on moral features reinforces the sense of the world divided into ‘good Soviets’ and ‘bad Germans’. The image of the German machine contrasts with the image of the pure, natural Soviet who fights almost barehanded. The inhuman image of the enemy reinforces the pure image of Soviets who protect their Motherland and fight for moral values. Later on in the exhibition, both images evolve, but even at the end of the exhibition, where the victory of the Soviet Union over fascist ideology is presented, the Soviets and the Germans belong to two different worlds: the world of the victor and the world of the defeated. In the inner rooms of the exhibition, there are no militaristic images of the enemy. Such images appear once more in the last room entitled ‘Victory’, yet with many more human features than at the beginning of the exhibition. The vertical way of presenting the German world, which was implemented at the beginning of the exhibition, is also repeated here. There are two photographs, one showing General Rauser, and the second some other generals of the German army signing the act of capitulation. Analogous with the first room, below the pictures there is a glass display case showing a gun, helmets, Nazi flags and German road signs, which together symbolise the enemy’s military power. Even if there are many more German military items in comparison to the beginning of the exhibition, they are no longer threatening because they are symbolically defeated by the Soviet anti-tank gun which has been placed above them (Figure 1.4). Moreover, the composition does not reflect a hierarchical and coherent world. Pictures and items, even if located more or less in the same space, do not reflect a united whole. It is dispersed and surrounded by pictures and medals of Soviets, which stress the breakdown of the enemy’s world. The defeated enemy is a cornerstone here, but is not at the heart of the matter. The essence of the last room is the victory itself. The military image presented in the exhibition does not adequately reflect the way the Germans were perceived during the war, but responds to the curator’s needs. As Senyavskaya (2006) describes, at the beginning of the German–Soviet war, the image of the Germans was quite positive – a result of very strong propaganda after the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in 1939, which worked on creating a positive image of the Germans. However, within a few months of Germany invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 the image of the Germans changed into that of an aggressive wild enemy, although the beginning of the exhibition does not correspond with these historical representations. There is not the positive image of the enemy that Senyavskaya described but instead, from the beginning, the narrative

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Figure 1.4. The last room: ‘Victory’. The Soviet anti-tank gun stands on a showcase containing German helmets, road signs and flags. On the right-hand side there is a white flag of surrender, and a picture of General Rauser signing the act of capitulation of the Army Group Courland. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

stresses the inhuman features of the German invaders. Interestingly, as the narrative moves to the end of the war, the exhibition does not have a problem with presenting the enemy’s image in a more humanised way. Historically this may be explained because, firstly, the enemy was no longer an invader of ‘our’ territory, and had been defeated on its own soil, and secondly, according to Senyavskaya, Soviet soldiers could see that ordinary Germans had also suffered during the war, which influenced the more empathetic approach. Therefore, such a representation is applied at the end of the exhibition, because here it does not threaten the overall message of the story, whereas presenting a positive image of the Germans at the beginning of the exhibition could weaken its message. Summing up, the militaristic image of the enemy image is deeply rooted in the way the Germans were represented during the war. However, only those features are taken which suit the image of an inhuman and cruel enemy. Even if in the last room the enemy is no longer a cruel invader, but a defeated soldier, there is no information about any acts of revenge made by the Soviets on the Germans. The enemy’s world c­ ollapsed, but the Soviet world stayed

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pure and untouched by human ­vengeance. As Jarecka (2008: 207) writes: ‘“we” cannot turn out so despicable, ­inhuman and cruel as “they” are’.

The People’s Enemy The second image is one of an enemy who poses a real, direct threat to the lives of the besieged Leningraders. It is described in the part of the exhibition which directly recollects the life and struggle of the city in the years 1941–1944 during the Blockade of Leningrad.17 The Germans never entered Leningrad, but by blockading the city, organising systematic bombing raids and obstructing aid to the city, they were the source of a continuous, external threat which greatly influenced the lives of the people living there. Indeed, the lack of a physical presence of the enemy led that enemy to seize a greater hold in the citizens’ imaginations. Therefore, during the war the image of the people’s enemy represented their social notions and worst fears about the enemy much more than was the case with the military enemy. Hence, as the Leningraders’ enemy was invisible, yet permanently threatened the city, its image took the form of destructive power. The exhibition draws from the historical imagination and presents the people’s enemy as hostile forces. One of the most frequent forms taken by the enemy is a ‘bomb’. In the room entitled ‘Closing the Ring’, the enemy materialises in the form of German bombs, presented in display cabinets and freely located across the room, which damaged the city and set it on fire. The sheer design of the room, with a piece of a destroyed wall, refers to the scenery of bombarded Leningrad. Since the city here becomes the main character of the tale, the image of the enemy has the same semantic feature and becomes a bomb which destroys the city. However, the citizen’s enemy is presented in the most exhaustive way in the room devoted to the tragic winter of 1941. The shape of the room, visual techniques, the white and blue colours of the walls and the play of lights create an atmosphere of a besieged town (Figure 1.5). At the entrance to the room, on the left-hand side, there is a wooden board with posters and leaflets from the war period. The form of the board itself refers visually to those used during the siege, which imparts a sense of authenticity to the study of the posters. The image of an enemy-invader, presented in the posters selected by the curators and displayed on the wooden board, is strongly emotional and explicitly negative. One may find here such expressions as: ‘fascist bandits’, ‘animalised fascist hordes’, ‘Hitlerian scoundrels’, ‘fascist robbers’, ‘Hitlerian bandits’,

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Figure 1.5. View of the room ‘Food Supply. Everyday Life during the Siege. Children of Leningrad’, mostly dedicated to the winter of 1941. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

‘German murderers’, and ‘foul scum’. According to Jan Stanisław Bystroń ([1935] 1995:  63) such descriptions for enemies are developed on the basis of features considered to characterise them in the most appropriate manner. In each of the quoted expressions, the nouns used to describe the enemy – bandit, scoundrel, robber – define its criminal and murderous character in the social dimension and not the military dimension. On the other hand, the expression ‘animalised hordes’ refers unequivocally to the Tatar Hordes, which regularly harassed Russian soil from the thirteenth century, thus lending the enemy’s image the historic dimension of an eternal, external invader and a threat to the country. The words ‘Hitlerite’, ‘German’ and ‘fascist’ unequivocally indicate the enemy’s provenance. According to Konstantin Simonov (Senyavskaya 2006: 82), during the German–Soviet war the enemy was most frequently referred to as ‘German’ or with a pronoun ‘he’. The word ‘Hitlerite’ was mainly used in official notifications and communications. The word ‘fascist’ was used as frequently as ‘German’, although it appeared most often in the context of aviation – ‘fascist aviation’. However, the ethnic term – ‘German’ – was used by people the most frequently to refer to the enemy. Thus, the posters presented in the exhibition form a real mixture of the images of

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‘the enemy’ inherent in Russian culture, and used by Soviet propaganda in the besieged city. Thus, on the one hand the posters depict the real conditions of the war, while on the other, by using various notions and semantic connotations, they perfectly reflect the way Leningraders perceived their war situation. They also form very clear massages for contemporary Russian visitors to the exhibition. A centrally located poster – ‘The enemy is at the gates of Leningrad, do not spare your strength and lives; let’s protect our own city from the damned Hitlerian robbers’ – unequivocally asserts that the action Leningraders took in that historical situation, namely the defence of the city at any price, was the only solution. Such a conviction has a great impact on the perception of the further story about living conditions in the city during the winter of 1941. The exhibition repeats the Soviet propaganda argument that the suffering and death of the people in Leningrad was a heroic deed (Zemskov-Züge 2011), and leaves no doubt in the minds of visitors to the exhibition that the people besieged in the city were real heroes of struggle. The Germans, however, never entered the city; thus the real battle Leningraders fought was not with ‘the damned Hitlerian robbers’, but with hostile forces which took the form of bread rationing, interrupted power, lack of water and heating supplies, and a damaged sewage system. The atmosphere of the room, the light, and the colour of the walls enhance the sense of coldness and hunger that form a sensory image of the enemy. Such a depiction shows the omnipresence of the enemy – the force besieging all spheres of life and activity of Leningraders. The exhibition tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of the besieged city. Faced with the threat that surrounds them, the citizens form a community of struggle and mutual aid. Such representation is also historically rooted, but this time in the memory of the city dwellers. In the testimonies of survivors, there very often appears information that there was a real community amongst Leningraders during the blockade. As James Clapperton (2007: 53) stresses, ‘despite the considerable suffering they (Blokadniki) endured during the siege, survivors often express feelings of nostalgia for that sense of closeness arising from co-suffering’. Harrison Salisbury (2003: 557) adds that ‘[d]uring the worst days … Leningrad had become one family’. The exhibition tries to reconstruct this atmosphere. In a very symbolic way the exhibition presents the methods used to fight the enemy, both at an individual as well as collective level. It does it by presenting the objects symbolic of the blockade. However, these objects constitute only ‘a set of materials which resonate with a group of people who have a shared experience’ (Knell 2004: 20), the residents of St Petersburg whose

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testimonies are presented in this room. The real subject of this part of the exhibition is the people, and the objects themselves are only secondary. The exhibition here is about remembering and belonging; it comes from people and, therefore, has the potential of the forum museum. At an individual level, various leather goods are used as food and serve the purpose of fighting against hunger; a tiny stove (burzhuyka) used to heat houses helps to fight the cold; hand-made lamps are used to fend off darkness; while a child’s sledge is a solution to the lack of transport. On the collective level, the exhibition presents aid to and care for children and, what seems the most important, a receipt for baking an artificial bread substitute devised by the scientists of the besieged city. A 125-gram piece of bread placed in the display cabinet with highlighted proportions and names of ingredients bears an important symbolic meaning as it foretells the final victory over the enemy. Bread is commonly perceived as a symbol of abundance, welfare and harmony. Lethal actions by the enemy damaged the pre-war order and Leningraders’ way of life, and imposed a permanent mourning for the dead. When describing the meaning of bread in mourning behaviour, Alfonso M. di Nola (1995: 220) writes that common activities, such as preparing leaven, fermentation, baking and sharing bread acquire a symbolic dimension, as sacral acts that rebuild the order shaken by death, and that prepare people to get out of the drama of mourning and come back to ‘life and reality’. Thus, a 125-gram piece of Leningrad bread, even if it could not ensure the survival of the person eating it, was perceived as a community remedy which brought back the lost harmony of life. Thus, this object is ‘a part of the word of human values, a part which, evidently, every visitor wants to bring within his own personal value system’ (Pearce 2012: 24). However, the way this piece of bread, the main symbol of suffering, is presented in a specially lighted showcase, only strengthens its heroic meaning. As Gaynor Kavanagh (2004: 159) says, people do the talking for things, and ‘by the same token, people also do the forgetting for them’. In this case the tragic dimension of the symbol is diminished. This attempt to narrow the meaning of the multidimensional symbol is a typical procedure used by a temple museum to validate its interpretation. The fight against the enemy taken up by the Leningraders, the beginnings of which are visible in the room ‘The Winter of 1941’, is later developed in the room ‘The Year of 1942’, which presents actions taken in spring that year by the citizens, aimed at the final defeat of the enemy. Similarly, as in the case of the room ‘The Winter of 1941’, where sequences of pictures present consecutive stages of the city’s ‘death’, this room depicts scenes of a slow rebirth: cleaning the town, restarting public transport, and growing

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Figure 1.6. Room: ‘Science and Culture during the Great Patriotic War’. The puppets and cartoons representing Germans were used by the Front Circus Theatre. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

v­ egetables in public parks. All this is dominated by a photograph of the St Isaac Cathedral, in front of which people cultivate a cabbage field. The cathedral is a promise of a final military defeat of the enemy, as presented in the last room of the museum’s story. A characteristic feature of the rooms which represent what happened inside the encircled city is that they practically lack any images of Germans – the invaders. It is particularly noticeable since at the beginning and at the end of the exhibition there are some military images of the enemy, as mentioned before. The only representations of the enemy that can be found include four caricatures and three hand puppets in the room ‘Science and Culture during the Great Patriotic War’ (Figure 1.6). The puppets represent Hitler, ‘a fascist general’ and a ‘fascist soldier’. The body and hands of Hitler’s puppet are of unnatural size and deformed. On the other hand, the red nose and cheeks, and big, bare teeth of the ‘fascist soldier’ are more reminiscent of a predator’s muzzle than a human face. The hand puppets are a caricature conception of Germans. By enlarging and deforming certain parts of the body they reveal a moral defect of the object which seems to be the goal of the ridicule (Eco 2011: 152). In contrast, the caricatures of Göring, Himmler, Goebbels and Hitler18 do not have any

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Figure 1.7. Painting of the breakthrough to Leningrad in the room ‘Operation Spark’ (painters: V.A. Serov, A.G. Kazantsev and I.A. Serebryanyy). Photo by Christian Ganzer.

human features. They are beasts that embody the devil (ibid.: 185–201). Equipped merely with some scarce, mainly military accessories stigmatised with a swastika, they highlight the wild, ferocious and primal nature of the enemy. Their physiognomy, nakedness and hair resemble Homo ferus corporally (Douthwaite 1997), while at the same time they draw on archetypical images of the enemy (Benedyktowicz 2000: 124–28). The moral Homo ferus, personified in the image of the military enemy, and the physical Homo ferus, being the effect of the collective imagination of the Leningraders, meet in the realistic painting that presents the break of the blockade in the room ‘Operation Spark’ (Figure 1.7). The hierarchical, primitive, wild and ferocious world of the enemy is defeated here, and the dead bodies of German soldiers are the evidence of it. The fact that the enemy does not pose a threat any more enables the museum to apply a different narrative in the last room (which has already been mentioned when describing the image of a military enemy). The story presented here does not focus so much on the absolute capitulation of the enemy, but mostly on the moral victory of the Soviets. It also sets the framework of the world after the final defeat of ‘evil’.

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Leningraders versus Soviet People As mentioned before, the main character of the tale takes two fundamental forms which reveal its various features. Whenever military actions are accentuated in the story, the Soviet people are the heroes. On the other hand, when the history of the blockade is discussed, the story focuses on presenting the behaviour and lives of the Leningraders imprisoned in the city. This division overlaps in a way with the images of the military enemy and the enemy of people. Contrary to the fragmentary image of the Soviet people who appear in different rooms and are presented as a collection of Soviet heroes and exemplified with a group of partisans, the image of Leningraders is much more coherent. From the very beginning the exhibition presents citizens’ actions aimed at defending the city, stopping the enemy invasion and engaging jointly in a fight in the name of survival and final victory over the enemy. The image of Leningraders was presented in the most comprehensive way in the rooms ‘The Winter of 1941’ and ‘Science and Culture during the Great Patriotic War’, which present the steadfast resolve of the Leningraders to fight, as well as their spiritual and cultural power. All the elements in the room ‘The Winter of 1941’, including the way the room is arranged, are based on the memory of the blockade. The represented memories of witnesses, the relic objects belonging to Blokadniki, and symbols such as sanechki (child’s sledge), bread, and burzhuyka (a tiny stove), all refer to an authentic history. The voice of the narrator plays a background role. At the same time, the wartime fate of Leningrad’s inhabitants, both tragic as well as heroic, is exemplified with real stories about people, now symbols of the blockade. Leningraders are personalised by Tanya Savicheva,19 symbol of the victims of starvation; by a picture of S. Petrova,20 symbol of survival; Dmitriy Shostakovich,21 symbol of struggle; Ol’ga Berggol’ts,22 symbol of moral fight; and Katya Markova and Irina Bogdanova,23 symbols of mutual help and community. All the symbols and effects of the exhibition which take advantage of the sensory imagination reveal not only the tragedy of the citizens’ fate and show various dimensions of everyday life, but also reveal the process of a tightening sense of community between the citizens. Their common fate was additionally highlighted at the exhibition by combining the war history of the city and its inhabitants into one tale. This is shown very well by the large picture on a wall in the room ‘The Winter of 1941’ of a table with food rations placed on the picture of public transport at a standstill because of lack of fuel. The city and its people experience the same fate.

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Archival pictures of Leningrad used in the exhibition and the reconstructions of parts of the town not only show the common fate of the city and its inhabitants, but also show that city architecture is a kind of ­extension of the social life of its citizens (Mazzoleni 1993: 289). The exhibition also uses the symbolic meaning of some historical buildings, in order to integrate them with the exhibition’s narrative. This function is played, among others, by the above-mentioned picture of the St Isaac Cathedral, as well as by cut-outs from sheet copper located in the last room, ‘Victory’, representing the Strelka and the Stock Exchange Building on Vasil’yevskiy Island.24 The location of the architectonic symbol of the St Petersburg’s military power next to both the tower of the Moscow Kremlin25 and the copper cut-outs, emphasise the contribution of the city and its inhabitants to the final victory over the enemy. Soviet people defined as ‘not-Leningraders’ are presented in the exhibition either as ‘heroes of labour’ or ‘heroes of struggle’, and exemplified by a group of partisans well defined in the exhibition narrative. Partisans are presented in the first and last rooms. The beginning of the exhibition stresses their role in the homefront formation and guerrilla fight against German troops at the beginning of the war. The last room explains the partisans’ input into the final victory. However, their role is not limited only to the detailed presentation of the historical facts. Partisans as historical actors seem even less important than partisans as ‘time mediators’ – a kind of linkage between the history told in the exhibition, earlier Russian history, and the political discourse of the 1960s. The image of partisans who were fighting in the Leningrad district is very stereotypical. They are presented in coats and with long beards, so that they reflect the nineteenth-century image of a partisan.26 Such representation seems not to be accidental. The image of the partisan plays an important role in Russian-Soviet historiography and has become a symbol of the fight for freedom by ordinary people. That is why partisans are used in the exhibition as time mediators. The image of partisans refers to the past, thus including it in the narrative gives it a deeper historical context than that limited to the Second World War. The German–Soviet war becomes another clash in which Russian-Soviet people ‘fought’ for the freedom of their Motherland. In such a way the exhibition repeats specific Russian historical narratives, which James Wertsch (2002: 93) calls a ‘triumph over alien (hostile) forces’. This historical context gives hope that such an attitude will also manifest itself in the future, which is why the partisans’ image plays an important educational function arising from the needs of 1960s discourse. Partisans represented ‘moral and responsible citizens’ (Cameron 2007: 337), whose postures should be emulated by visitors.

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Representation of the Soviet heroes reveals a strong discourse of the 1960s and includes a social and educative project which was then associated with the figure of a hero. Heroes are mainly presented in the rooms with war events and successes. They are all depicted in a similar way: at the top there is always a portrait with a name and surname, while at the bottom there is a brief note about their wartime achievements for which they were awarded the title of ‘hero’. Despite the fact that the services of each hero are clearly emphasised, they are never isolated, but appear in the presence of other heroes who participated in the same wartime event or received the same medal for their virtues. A hero has, therefore, some very individual features, but he is never a lonely hero, but a member of a community of heroes. Such a representation is strongly related to the way in which individuals and the community were perceived in the 1960s in the Soviet Union. As Oleg Kharkhordin (1999: 199) writes, Russian individualism is strongly connected with the collective. The collective is the basic and the most important unit of Soviet society, and even if individualisation only started to develop during the Soviet period, self-formation was only possible within collective frameworks. ‘A person is an integration of socially relevant features, representing the essence of the given society in the individual; an individually unrepeatable and potentially infinite combination of active capacities of man’. The figure of the hero is the best example of the individual, and was mostly used by Soviet education in the formation of self-development. In the individualisation and hero-making processes, the German–Soviet war, when many heroic deeds took place, played a crucial role. The heroes became ‘the secular equivalent of Christian imitatio Dei’ who should be imitated by the Soviet people in everyday life (Kharkhordin 1999: 357). The way heroes are presented at the exhibition differs from the way people as symbols of the blockade are presented. The basis of both representations is formed by the same individualisation processes, but the way people-symbols of the blockade are presented seems to be less embedded in the propaganda discourse of the 1960s, while the images of heroes resemble such secular imitatio Dei of that period. People-symbols are mainly presented via personal objects and letters which belonged to them during the war, while heroes are presented by the narrator of the story. Any objects related with heroes are of a military nature such as weapons, or medals awarded following the war. The second fundamental difference in the presentation of the two images is that Blokadniki are presented as individuals, whereas heroes form a group. However, both representations bear some common features. They epitomise a heroic deed achieved by a

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given person. Various actions of people reveal different levels of heroism, thus uncovering varying faces of the main character of the story. Actions by the main character led to the creation of a new dimension in Soviet existence, which was presented most extensively in the last room of the exhibition depicting the triumphant community, whose strong internal bonds and pure values enabled it to conquer the enemy and liberate other European nations. In such a way, the last room shows not only a rebirth of the community but also stresses its messianic role, which formed an important element of the Cold War discourse on the ‘Soviet struggle for the world’ (Kalendarova 2006: 288). The recently added picture of the Orthodox church-memorial of the Leningrad victims now also lends the victory a religious dimension and embeds it in the Russian myth of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’. As Vladimir Toporov (Toporow 2000: 63), Russian semiologist claimed, St Petersburg and Moscow are usually contradictory in Russian culture; however there are situations when their meanings are fulfilled. When Peter the Great made a decision about city construction, he wanted St Petersburg’s topography to resemble the urban space of Rome, so the localisation and character of some temples in both cities are similar. In such a way, St Petersburg could participate in a mythological time and gain meaning from the Eternal City (Żyłko 2000: 11). This symbolic cultural meaning of St Petersburg was used during the war to encourage people to defend the city, and is nowadays used by the curators to give deeper meaning to the exhibition narrative.

Conclusions The enemy from the museum story has two fundamental forms, that of a military enemy and that of the people’s enemy. The difference in presentation results from the way the exhibition has been constructed, simultaneously representing both the Leningrad Blockade and the events of the German–Soviet war in general. The image presented of the military enemy is related to the prevailing conception of German soldiers – it is militaristic and morally dehumanised. It also gives insight into the construction of the enemy’s world, which is inhuman and based on hierarchical principles. On the other hand the image presented of the people’s enemy has two forms. The first one is a ‘real enemy’: hunger, lack of water, cold, and scarcities in all the means for everyday life resulting from the enemy’s actions during the blockade. The second arises from the way the Leningraders imagined the enemy, who never entered the city but nevertheless posed a constant threat by their presence and actions. These imaginings are conveyed in

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the expressions used to refer to the enemy on the one hand, and in the ­representations of the enemy’s body on the other. When put together, the two images of the military enemy and people’s enemy articulate a portrayal of the enemy as wild and animal-like, shorn of any human feelings – a ferocious Homo ferus who in fact personifies the devil. In the exhibition the enemy’s image is sharply contrasted with the image of the main character(s) of the story, namely the Leningraders and the Soviet people: Soviet heroes and partisans. There is a very strong correlation between them, both at the level of their personality traits as well as in terms of their appearance. The images constitute their mutual antinomy. A noble, virtuous, honourable, righteous character of the story who believes in pure moral values is juxtaposed with a mean, wild, predatory enemy who follows base animal instincts. This contrast is also reflected in the visual presentation of the enemy’s body. While heroes always have a face which is a visual synonym of humanity and thus reflects the hero’s moral purity, the enemy is usually presented as a deformed, animalised body. Its face is more reminiscent of a muzzle and strongly reflects its inhuman character. Thus, while the enemy resembles a devil, a Soviet is presented as an ideal man or woman who fulfils the messianic mission to help other nations (Bogumił 2011a: 91). It seems important to stress that the way the German enemy is presented in the exhibition ‘Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’ is typical of the way Germans are generally represented in Soviet exhibitions devoted to the German–Soviet war in other museums. The enemy mainly appears at the beginning and at the end of the exhibition and is manifested by only a few representations. His image is visually limited and not much is said about it. However, those representations which do occur create a dehumanised and militaristic image of the enemy. Of course there are some differences in portrayal, however they mainly result from a different situation of historic events rather than from the way the image is constructed. The exhibition was established in the 1960s, a period of strong cultural and political legitimisation of the meaning of the Great Patriotic War, and a time of ambitious communist educational projects. One of them was this temple museum. Its role was to show the history of Leningrad as a wartime event experienced in microcosm by all Soviet citizens. Thus the exhibition reflects the state political discourse which treated the heroism of the Leningraders as one of the heroic wartime acts. However, this is not to say that it does not reflect a discourse about the exceptional fate of Leningrad itself. The room ‘The Winter of 1941’, containing blockade memories and mementoes, is a kind of essence of the blockade, showing the exceptional character of the city’s experience. Thanks to the power of

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symbols of blockade, which are ambiguous and therefore provide the possibility for different interpretations, the exhibition is able to present the uniqueness of the city’s fate. The 125 grams of bread, which we analysed in this chapter, proves that the exhibition is rooted in the discourse of the uniqueness of Leningrad’s fate. However, as already said, the way the bread is displayed in a lighted showcase, strengthens its heroic significance and thus supports the communist educational project and state discourse on the blockade. As Simon Knell (2004: 20) claims, the same object may be ‘for one a remembrance of home and for the other symbolic of colonisation’. In addition, the way the bread is presented in ‘The Winter of 1941’ room is reminiscent of the exhibition at the Museum of Defence of Leningrad in 1946. As Salisbury (2002: 572) writes, there was a model of a Leningrad bread shop: ‘The window was covered with a frosting of ice so thick you could only see through a narrow opening in its center. Within there stood scales, on one side four small weights, on the other 125 grams of bread. Above the scales was listed the composition of the “bread”’. The exhibition in the State Historical Museum presents a ration of bread in the same way. In consequence visitors who do not know the history of the blockade may not notice it, and treat the presentation as a glorification of Leningraders, but the city residents who survived the blockade and who cultivated the blockade memory in their homes may perceive in the layout of this exhibition a similarity to the design of the exhibition in 1946. The layout of the exhibition is, therefore, path dependent; its shape is the result of an earlier way of commemoration (Olick 1999: 381), and in such a way it is a carrier of the local memory of the event. The exhibition is therefore a kind of consensus between two discourses: state discourse, which treated the heroic behaviour of Leningraders as one of many heroic wartime acts, and local discourse, which highlighted the exceptional experience of the city. The consensus was possible thanks to the emphasis that was put on the common elements in both discourses. The first element definitely includes a symbolic meaning of the city and its history both to the citizens – as it is their local history – as well as to Soviet/ Russian nationals generally. St Petersburg is both a symbol of the country’s naval power, as well as its cultural life, which is why it is an important element of the identity of all inhabitants of the country. Another meaning of the city seems important in the wartime narrative conveyed in the exhibition in question. Yuriy Lotman (1990: 191–202) claims that a city is perceived as an antithesis to the surrounding world understood as nature. This means that the creation of a city is a supernatural act, and from that moment it has to struggle against any kind of attempts to annihilate it. The

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meaning of the city as a symbol of the victory of culture over nature is one of the elements that reinforce the museum’s tale about the division of the world into good and evil, where good and all higher values are linked with the inhabitants of the city, while evil is an inhuman, animal-like enemy outside the city. This perception of the history of the blockade seems common to both political discourses (Bogumił and Wawrzyniak 2010: 5–9). The second element that combines the two discourses is the focus on the representation of a community of struggle and aid. In the case of Leningrad ‘the myth of the united wartime community was regarded as a fundamental motivating factor in the quest for survival’ (Clapperton 2007: 6). It was and still is very present and vivid in survivors’ testimonies. On the other hand the same union of the community is stressed in the perception of the whole war period in contemporary Russia. As Joachim Hösler (2005: 161) claims, people describe the wartime years, when there was a total community, as the best period of their lives. The community, its inner relationship, common fight and victory, which made heroes of the community, is the main story of the exhibition. The image of the enemy is important for the process of community formation, because it is a frightening power, which forces people to unify. Focusing on the community-like character of victory is an answer to the question of why the exhibition is still current and why presently there are no plans to change it. As Lev Gudkov (2005: 98) has written, the memory of the war has not undergone any significant changes since the 1960s when its main features were coined. So far the Great Patriotic War has been associated with victory more than with remembering the dead, and although this aspect is present, it is not dominant. Therefore an exhibition narrative talking about victory of cultural heroes over the animalised enemy is still valid. We could paraphrase the words of Sheila Watson (2010: 216) who concludes her analysis of the meaning of the Winston Churchill Museum in London: ‘visitors to the museum are encouraged to accept that this is the sort of people they were or the British were, and by implication still are’, and say that similarly St Petersburg residents are encouraged by this Temple of Heroic Community to perceive themselves as potential national heroes.

Notes   1. The Komi Republic is located in the European part of the Russian Federation, and its capital is Syktyvkar. This region developed intensively during the war, when coal excavated in the mines of Vorkuta and Inta was transported to the besieged Leningrad.

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 2. The term ‘Great Patriotic War’ is used in Russia and some former Soviet ­republics for the German–Soviet war from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945.  3. During the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, the Leningrad City Commission to Investigate Nazi Atrocities presented 671,635 as the number of people killed during the war in Leningrad and its surroundings. This figure included 641,803 who perished due to starvation. For almost the whole Soviet period this number was taken for granted. However, there has subsequently been much discussion about the final death toll (Salisbury 2003: 514–17; Ignat’yev 2005; Voronina 2011).   4. The exhibition was first opened in 1941, on the 47th day of the German– Soviet war. The first room of the exhibition told the story of the ‘defeat of Fascism’s ancestors’ – the knights of the Teutonic Order. Only in the next room was the German assault on the Soviet Union in 1941 exhibited. German tanks, planes and trucks were presented as war trophies (Shishkin and Dobrotvorskiy 2007: 3).   5. For more information about the construction of the exhibition, see Shishkin and Dobrotvorskiy 2007.  6. As Kalendarova writes, the main aspects of this new interpretation were established in an article by Leonid Govorov, Marshall of the Soviet Union (Kalendarova 2006: 284–85).   7. The conflict between memory discourses disclosed the essence of the dispute but it was not the direct reason for the purge of the city notables. The Leningradskoye delo had a political character. According to Stalin, the city authorities were too popular among the inhabitants and therefore had become dangerous potential rivals (Demidov and Kutuzov 1990).   8. In 1954, after Stalin’s death, the process of rehabilitation of the accused and sentenced people started (Ignat’yev 2005).   9. The museum was reopened in 1989 as the ‘State Memorial Museum of the Defence and Siege of Leningrad’. 10. The Gold Star Order was established in 1939 and awarded to people who received the title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ for special acts of bravery: protecting the Motherland, helping others, promoting peace. 11. David M. Glantz gives the number who died during the blockade as 642,000,  the number who died during evacuation as 400,000, and the number of soldiers killed as 1,017,881 (Glantz 2002: 469; Salisbury 2003: 514–17). 12. See the museum’s website: http://www.spbmuseum.ru 13. For the Rumyantsev Palace, see the website: http://www.spbmuseum.ru/ rumyantsev or the catalogue ‘The Rumyantsev Mansion and Its Owners’, St Petersburg, 2005. 14. The State Memorial Museum of Leningrad Defence and Siege, which had been opened in 1944 but was closed in 1949 during so-called Leningradskoye delo, was reopened only during Perestroyka (Brammerloh 2011). 15. From the leaflet ‘1941–1945: Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War’.

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16. The presentation of the Germans as machines reflects the way in which the Soviet people imagined the Germans at the beginning of the war. As Russian researcher, Senyavskaya (2006) writes, the German army outnumbered the Soviet army a few times over in terms of equipment, and this fact influenced the perception of the Germans as machines. 17. The detailed story of the life of Leningraders stops in 1943. The last chapter of the war is presented as the story about the whole country; the fate of Leningrad is only a backdrop to this story. 18. The caricatures present characters which were used by the Leningrad frontcircus in the spectacle called ‘Fascist Zoological Park’. 19. Tanya Savicheva was eleven years old when the war started. During the blockade she kept a diary, in which she wrote the dates and hours of death of her family and relatives. On the last page there is a symbolic statement – ‘All died. Only Tanya has stayed’. Even though she was evacuated from Leningrad in 1942, she died of dysentery. Tanya Savicheva, as a symbol of children’s wartime suffering, is often compared with Anne Frank or Sadako Sasaki, the young Japanese victim of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. 20. We do not know very much about Petrova. In the exhibition, one can see her passport pictures taken before, during and after the war, which show how her face changed during the blockade. 21. Dmitriy Shostakovich finished his famous 7th Symphony during the blockade. It was performed for the first time on 9 August 1942 in Leningrad’s concert hall, and quickly became a symbol of the struggle against the Germans (Redepenning 2011). 22. Ol’ga Berggol’ts (poet) worked during the blockade at Leningrad Radio and each day read some poems, or gave speeches to Leningraders and soldiers in order to spur them on in the fight and to raise people’s morale. Marchasev (2011) has written about the role of radio during the blockade. 23. The history of Katya Markova and Irina Borisevich is presented in the ‘children’s corner’ in ‘The Winter of 1941’ room. Irina was a child during the war. Her father was killed during the Great Terror, and she lived with her mother and grandmother. They both died during the blockade and, for a few days, Irina lived alone at home with the two dead bodies of her relatives. She was found by sixteen-year-old Katya Markova who worked in a ‘self-defence unit’. Irina was evacuated and placed in a kindergarten. She survived and found relatives, with whom she lived after the war. In 1985 both women met, and Irina could thank Katya for saving her life. 24. Vasil’yevskiy Island, and particularly the Strelka and its Stock Exchange building, which at the moment is the Central Navy Museum, is one of the symbols of St Petersburg. It was the place where Peter the Great ordered the first harbour to be built, and became symbolic of Russian naval victories. 25. It is the highest tower of the Kremlin, symbolic of Russian/Soviet power and government.

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26. Natal’ya Konradova and Anna Ryleva (2005: 247) claim that the image of ‘the partisan’ was shaped during the Napoleonic War in 1812 and has not evolved much since that time. As Konradova and Ryleva stress, it is the image developed in the nineteen century of the peasant who is fighting for the Motherland.

Chapter 2

Temple of Romantic Martyrdom Poles, Germans and Jews in the Historical Museum of Warsaw Warsaw has not yet become a hot spot for global tourism – unlike Budapest, Prague, and even Krakow and Dresden. Warsaw does not share the story, as these other cities do, about a ‘return’ to the European family after being cut off behind the Iron Curtain for half a century. Those cities have won the admiration of the international travel community that enjoys the myth of common European medieval or fin de siècle pasts. Warsaw has simply not become an integral part of the story that inspires travellers from all over the world. Warsaw tells a different story; its image is not built on the return to Europe after imprisonment in the communist bloc, but is about the miracle of the return to life itself. Warsaw’s myth is the legend of violent foreign occupation, resistance, and total destruction during the Second World War. It symbolises the survival of the idea of Poland as a nation and as a state, and is the embodiment of Poland’s will to live, which made it possible to build a new capital out of the rubble of the old one. The main narrative of the capital of Poland and the most important founding myth does not lie in the glory of distant pasts, but in the Second World War – and in triumph over destruction. The Historical Museum of Warsaw, which tells the story of the city from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, is housed in several reconstructed houses at the Old Town market. The market itself, apparently untouched by the upheavals of the twentieth century, represents the myth of overcoming total annihilation – at least to people who know the history of the city or who have seen the exhibition. The museum, which hosts the exhibition, can be read as both a traditional museum and a memorial site, or even as a trauma site which exists as a factual testimony to the violence that took place in the past (Violi 2012: 37). The next pages

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are our subjective guide through those parts of the exhibition that present the Second World War; a guide enriched by historical information and the reconstruction of memory discourses that, in our opinion, fuel the story presented by the museum. In such a context we try to interpret the image of the enemy. In our interpretation, the city is above all a scene of national history and the citizens are primarily the actors of a patriotic drama. They are Varsovians, but they suffer as Poles and they fight for values, such as state independence and national freedom. The story’s heroic character becomes especially peculiar with regard to how the history of the Warsaw Jews is displayed. We will identify the paradox inherent in that display: the Warsaw Jews are both part of the main plot and excluded from it. With this approach to Jewish history, the exhibition highlights the second important quality of the hero: Catholic faith. While the hero of this story is the Polish nation, the German occupants are its enemy: they not only endanger the city and its inhabitants but at the same time imperil the very life of the nation and its state. German–Polish relations constitute the exhibition’s main narrative and take two main forms: the Poles’ struggle, including armed resistance, sabotage and civil disobedience, and their suffering at the hands of the Germans. The themes of the struggle and the suffering find their climax in the display of the Warsaw Uprising and its aftermath. Our main claim is that this narrative follows the pattern of Polish national romantic discourse. We will support this thesis by pointing out the important and persistent romantic symbols presented in the exhibition.

Public Memory of City Destruction There are many important events of Warsaw’s wartime history which for years have been commemorated in Poland. Among them are the city’s defence and capitulation in September 1939, various resistance acts against the Nazi terror, tortures by the Gestapo in Pawiak prison and in the place of detention in Aleja Szucha, and the killings in Palmiry village. However, in this overview we decided to concentrate on the Polish public memory of two important moments which mark the physical destruction of the city by the Nazis: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) and the Warsaw Uprising (1944). As we show later, some well-known accounts of these events influence the story told by the analysed exhibition. We start with the accounts and symbols of the Warsaw Uprising, because the legend of this historical event is much more visible and pertinent in

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Poland and, in certain ways, impacts depictions of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Stories of the Warsaw Uprising 1944 Let us firstly introduce some basic facts from the historical narrative of the Warsaw Uprising which scholars generally agree upon. In 1944 the Red Army entered Polish territory, pursuing the Germans towards Warsaw. Fearing Stalin’s hostility to the idea of an independent Poland, the Polish government in exile gave orders to the underground Home Army to commence Operation Tempest, whose main task was to initiate national insurrection and seize control of strategic territories – including Warsaw  – before the Red Army’s arrival. At the time, Nazi defence plans required Warsaw to be held at all costs. The Home Army command ordered full mobilisation of underground forces in the Warsaw area on 1 August 1944. The armed struggle, planned to last forty-eight hours, went on for sixty-­three days. Most of the insurgents were young men and women from Warsaw who, despite some military training, lacked experience and equipment. In early August, after some initial insurgent success, SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was appointed commander of all the forces employed against the uprising, and began to counterattack. He ordered the crushing by all means of the city’s will to fight: behind the lines, special SS, police and Wehrmacht groups were murdering civilians. By 8 August, some 40,000 people had been killed in the Wola district of Warsaw alone. According to different estimates of the Uprising’s total human costs, between 120,000 and 200,000 Warsaw civilians were murdered and over 10,000 Home Army soldiers killed. German casualties totalled over 17,000 soldiers. (Among the most extensive popular historical accounts, see Borodziej 2001; Davies 2004; and Komorowski 2004.) The insurgents finally surrendered on 2 October 1944. Soldiers of the Home Army were transported to prisoner-of-war camps in the Reich, while Warsaw’s entire city population was expelled. Hitler, ignoring the terms of capitulation, ordered the German troops to burn Warsaw. Together with earlier damage suffered in 1939 and during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), most of the city’s architecture and infrastructure on the western side of Vistula was destroyed. On 17 January 1945 the Red Army finally entered the city, but it was one which had been almost totally devastated. To paraphrase James Young (1993: 119), the killing stopped, the sites remained and the floor was opened for the deliberative acts of memory.

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Although the new political situation framed an important context for the commemorative activities, the patterns of public memory were dynamic and did not just follow the ideology of the ruling communist party. There is extensive scholarship on the national legitimisation of communism in Poland (cf. Zaremba 2001). Many authors stress that the dominant cultural discourse on the Warsaw Uprising had its roots in the nineteenth century when Polish romanticism offered justification for insurrections against the partitioning powers. In the Romantic-Catholic interpretation of history, Poland – which lost its independence and saw its territories divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria – became the ‘Christ of Nations’: the struggle for national sovereignty was connected to the welfare of humanity (Porter 2000: 17–29). Polish philosophers, poets, writers and artists cultivated a mystical doctrine of Polish sacrifice and messianism. The figures of national enemies were important in this tradition, because they inspired the image of a victimised nation, which sacrificed its life in mortal combat with its political foes. The so-called romantic martyrdom was an overwhelming national style – as well as cultural concept and cultural practice – which persisted into the twentieth century. Several generations were socialised to the central values of the culture of national heroism and forfeit, such as motherland, independence, honour, and self-sacrifice for the group (cf. Janion 2000; Huener 2003: 47–58, 108–43, 185–225; Olschowsky 2003: 317–27; Dabrowski 2004; Gawin 2004: 19–25). In the course of the debates on the Warsaw Uprising, it has been stressed that the romantic tradition was actually an inspirational myth of the very event. Already in 1945 the émigré writer, Stefania Zahorska, pointed out that there would not have been a Warsaw Uprising if there had been no romantic and insurrectionist poetry and literature in the first place: ‘The vision of heroism realised in the Warsaw Uprising and in the war in general was born a hundred years earlier and has been nurtured by poets and writers until it has now become flesh and blood’ (Gawin 2004: 20). Hence, it was predominantly romantic martyrdom that enabled meaning to be found in the historical drama of the uprising, and which was interpreted as a necessary and unavoidable struggle for freedom, sovereignty and honour, and above all for giving testimony to these values. One non-romantic cultural interpretation of the necessity to fight was given by Maria Dąbrowska, a famous writer and dedicated reader of Joseph Conrad. In the late 1940s, in her widely known debate with (at the time) communist literary critic Jan Kott, she referred to Conrad’s ethics of staying faithful to one’s values despite blind and merciless fate, as implied in the Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim (Dąbrowska 1946). A similar ­interpretation

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appears in the first film ever made on the Warsaw Uprising, Andrzej Wajda’s Kanał (1957).1 The film tells a story of a worn-out company of the Home Army resistance fighters escaping the Nazi onslaught through the city’s sewers in September 1944, the last days of the uprising. Reluctant to admit defeat, the men and women of the platoon press on through the underground labyrinth, only to become separated and finally die. This symbolic style of telling the uprising’s story was powerful, but nevertheless contested. One dominant issue was always discussed: the very sense of the struggle. The power of emotions was confronted with the need for political reason and calculation in the face of the enemy. Critics of the uprising came from various political camps. Immediately after the war was over, one could find them among the ruling communist elite who were interested in overthrowing the legend of the Home Army (as well as that of the Polish Underground State and the Polish government in exile in London), seeing it as the main political and symbolic obstacle to the legitimacy of their authority. Until the mid-1950s, the Home Army’s high-ranking officers were treated as quasi-fascists, accused of collaboration with the Nazis and of the deliberate destruction of the city’s life. Many insurgents were persecuted and sentenced at the time. A certain reconciliation of the Home Army’s myth was possible in the warmth of the Polish thaw of 1956 (Sawicki 2005; Wawrzyniak 2009). From that moment onwards the official stance of the Polish United Workers’ Party was that, although the uprising’s tragedy had been caused by the politically irresponsible and ideologically immature elite of interwar Poland, one could not deny the heroism of the masses, including that of the Home Army’s soldiers and its officers. Indeed some of the insurgents were even honoured, decorated for their war effort and admitted to the official veterans’ organisation, The Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację). In such a way the authorities recognised the insurgents’ combat with Poland’s (and the Soviet Union’s) wartime enemy: Germany. Nevertheless, in the official anniversaries of the event, the role of the Home Army was usually ­diminished, and the uprising was interpreted as one among many military feats undertaken by Poles on the road to their national and – at the same time – class freedom. A specific post-1956 cultural discourse on the uprising was symbolised by the term ‘A generation of Columbuses’ (pokolenie Kolumbów), which denoted the age-cohort born soon after Poland regained her independence in 1918, and whose adolescence had been marked by the times of the Second World War and the experience of the uprising. The term also meant a lost generation, in a double sense: not only was the fighting lost

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and most of the generation’s representatives dead, but their political ideals were misplaced too. In his famous novel, Kolumbowie. Rocznik 20 (1957), the author of the term, Roman Bratny, presents the insurgents as honourable but tragic men and women; in political terms right was on the side of communists who decided to ally with the Soviet Union and who did not obey the Polish Underground State. There are different explanations of the metaphorical association with Christopher Columbus; for instance, that the young men and women left the world they knew, discovered a new one (of war, killing and death), but never reached their chosen destination; or that they were not rewarded – but punished – for their committed service to the country. Bratny’s novel was the first book after the Polish thaw which gave a more sympathetic portrayal of the insurgents, although it was critical of the uprising’s commanders. There was a certain compromise in it: the novel was widely read in Poland because it referred to the uprising, but at the same time it was well received by the ruling elite because it was critical of the event (Wnuk 2003: 777–806). There were, however, also critics of the uprising whom one would hardly associate with the ruling elite. Some of them lived in exile in London, while some of them stayed in Poland (Gawin 2004: 27). They mocked the pomposity and lofty tones of the romantic tradition. They saw the cult of heroism as both literarily pretentious and politically criminal. In such an interpretation, the biggest crime of the Home Army’s commanders was their unrealistic stance. At a moment when the strategic goal of Polish society was its very survival, they ordered a battle which could only be lost. The uprising, which was supposed to defend the nation against Stalin, had actually made it defenceless. The critics also pointed out that, while most of the civilians did not want this fight, they suffered the most as a result of it. The political and cultural elite of various camps – despite the level of sympathy or criticism towards the uprising – generally tended to present the event as a national episode. One of the most powerful literary accounts, and among the few to distance themselves from the grand narratives, was A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising by Miron Białoszewski (1977), published in Poland in 1970. Białoszewski detached himself from the cultural rhetoric and political debates, and gave a mundane account of his wartime experience using colloquial language. In his autobiographical story of an ‘ordinary’ city dweller, there is no place for pathos or martyrdom or politics. Instead there is the sense of an overwhelming fear of death and a sheer biological instinct to survive. Apart from the political and cultural realm, the commemoration of the uprising has also played an important role in the city’s public space.

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Immediately after the war, the places of death were marked by crosses, candles and flowers. Hence in the late 1940s the scope and means of commemorating the armed struggle had become a source of conflict between various memory groups and the state authorities. Generally speaking, the authorities have allowed a variety of forms of commemoration in churches and cemeteries (Tyszka 1990; Markiewicz 2003). Two sites have a particularly important symbolic dimension and have become places of mass gatherings for insurgents and younger generations: the military section of Powązki Cemetery with a monument Gloria Victis, and the Cemetery of Warsaw Insurgents in Wola district of Warsaw where SS units murdered thousands of civilians in August 1944. In the 1970s a gigantic monument  – bearing the telling title ‘The Fallen-Undefeated’ – was erected there. The memory of the uprising is also visible in various plaques on the city’s walls, although the terminology used in the inscriptions often conceals the political identity of the commemorated. This is also the case with a limited number of monuments which the authorities agreed to erect in Warsaw, such as the Monument of the Little Insurgent (1983) and the Warsaw Nike – The Monument of Heroes of Warsaw: 1939–1945 (1964). Despite many grass-root efforts, the authorities have never allowed a monument which would simultaneously stress the national dimension of the uprising and commemorate the Home Army. The idea of building a museum of the uprising also fell victim to similar ambiguity. At the time of the Solidarity Movement (1980–81), a social committee for building the museum organised a public collection of exhibits. After Martial Law was introduced (December 1981), the committee dissolved itself and handed the collection over to the Historical Museum of Warsaw. Even though in 1983 the city’s representatives agreed to build the Warsaw Uprising museum as a branch of the Historical Museum of Warsaw, the project failed. Nevertheless, the staff of the museum continued to collect exhibits and worked on plans for the exhibition. One of the very first signs that the debates and myths of the uprising had not vanished together with the communist dictatorship in 1989, was the atmosphere of political and aesthetic disagreement surrounding the erection of a gigantic monument to the uprising in the historical part of Warsaw. From that moment on, the Home Army became a central category of both popular and political commemoration of the uprising. Today, it is commemorated in street names, on wall plaques, and in a wide range of anniversaries, publications and events. Attempts to build a museum of the uprising continued and were finally successful in 2004, on the sixtieth anniversary of the event. The Warsaw Rising Museum is at the moment the most modern Polish exhibition in terms of visual display

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and techniques. Despite severe criticism, including the one-sidedness of the narrative, the aesthetisation of death, and insufficient references to the Holocaust, it is widely visited and treated as a reference point for several newly built historical museums in Poland (cf. Kurz 2007; Żychlińska 2009; Bogumił 2011b). Again, however, the political context is important if we are to understand the content of the exhibition. The idea of the museum was particularly supported by politicians from the right of the Polish political scene, significantly by the brothers Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński. Jarosław Kaczyński was Poland’s prime minister between 2006 and 2007, and Lech Kaczyński was the mayor of Warsaw between 2002 and 2005 (at the time of the museum’s establishment), and president of Poland from 2005 until his death in the air crash in Smolensk in April 2010. Today the museum is considered – both by its supporters and its critics – to be a model example of history policy and patriotic education. The exhibition shows the uprising as a kind of foundational myth of independent Poland. In this idealistic vision one learns about the heroism of young Poles but gains poor factual knowledge about the fate of the civilians. The place is at the same time both a museum and a memorial (with a memorial wall and a chapel). Moreover, the museum not only tells the story of the uprising, but also tries to settle a score with the communist past. What seems to be most significant is that the museum finally presents the uprising as a national event of the highest importance. At the same time, in contemporary Poland, various counter-memory discourses have developed in reaction to the grandiosity of both the museum display and its nationalistic discourse (Crowley 2011). A very recent example of this is the book Festung Warschau by Elżbieta Janicka (2011). The author examines numerous monuments and memorial plaques located in the area of the former ghetto in Warsaw. She points out that often they do not commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943, but the Warsaw Uprising 1944. In this sense, the national-Catholic discourse overshadows Jewish life and death in Warsaw.

Stories of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943 In 1940 the Polish Jews of Warsaw – between 30 and 40 per cent of the city’s population – were herded into one designated zone, ‘the Warsaw Ghetto’ – an area only about 4 to 5 per cent of the size of the city. The brick wall built at the decree of the Nazis later became the symbol of the isolation of the ghetto from the outside world. Between 1941 and 1943,

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starvation, disease, random killings and, at the end, massive deportations to death camps nearly annihilated the community. Over a quarter of a million people were ultimately gassed in Treblinka. (For information on the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto, see Gutman 1982, 1994; Mazor 1993; and Engelking-Boni and Leociak 2009.) The occupiers’ racist policy also considerably worsened Polish–Jewish relations which, even before the Second World War, were far from ideal. Polish–Jewish relations are complex, going back centuries.2 After the foundation of the Polish Republic in 1918 – especially within the context of growing radicalisation of political thought after the Great Depression and the rise of the fascist movements in Europe – anti-Semitism had become a part of official policies (for instance, a numerus clausus, a racial quota, was enforced in universities). The clergy and radical youth organisations, in particular, developed anti-Semitism into a cultural code, and demanded further discriminations against Jews, as well as other national minorities. On the other hand, the 1920s and 1930s was a time of rich Jewish cultural and religious life in the Polish Republic. Polish–Jewish interactions existed at various levels, including marriages and the assimilation of Jews into Polish society. In occupied Warsaw, the Nazi authorities announced the death penalty for Poles hiding Jews, and exacerbated the ethnic division between Poles and Jews, using local society to exterminate Jews by rewarding denunciations (Paulsson 2002: 138–61). The Nazi tactic of dehumanising the Jews, together with collective acts of mockery on the streets, not only prompted ‘ordinary German people to kill’ Jews, but also led Poles to beat up and rob their Jewish compatriots. The pogroms around Easter 1940 were so brutal that the purely cynical statement of the German authorities that the Warsaw Ghetto should protect the Jews from Polish excesses contains a bitter grain of truth (Szarota 2000: 25–82; Sauerland 2003: 103). Even though some non-Jewish Varsovians established effective networks to help the Jews by hiding them or supplying food, money or medicine (Paulsson 2002: 26–137), the majority stayed indifferent during their annihilation. In January 1943 the ghetto became the scene of the first urban uprising during the Nazi occupation in Europe. In reaction to the deportations, several Jewish underground organisations established armed self-defence units. On 18 January, a group of fighters secretly slipped into a column of people who were being taken to the transfer point at Umschlagplatz, then broke ranks and fought the German guards. Due to the revolt, the Germans suspended further transports. After the apparent success, insurgents began to construct bunkers and shelters in

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preparation for a defence should the Germans resume the deportation. The uneven battle started on 19 April, when numerous Nazi troops entered the ghetto. Under the command of Jürgen Stroop they systematically burned and blew up this part of the city, building by building. Significant resistance ended on 23 April, and the German operation was officially completed a month later. Like Elżbieta Janicka (2011 – see above), many scholars of the memory of the Holocaust in Poland have argued that Poles, in both official and widely spread cultural interpretations of the Second World War, disregarded the fate of Polish Jews due to various psychological, cultural and political reasons (cf. Steinlauf 1997; Huener 2003). While, in general, the statement about ‘forgetting’ the Holocaust is true, it becomes complicated in the case of commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the Polish People’s Republic, the story of the uprising was appropriated to serve the ruling elite’s interpretation of the war, and it was the best (and perhaps only) ‘Jewish’ story known to the larger public. The heroism of some ghetto fighters and of communist aid to the insurgents was underlined. In Warsaw’s landscape, the heroic narrative was marked above all by the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, designed by Nathan Rapaport and unveiled in April 1948 (Traba 2003: 184–85). Every year state and communist party officials celebrated the anniversaries of the uprising in front of the monument. To the larger Polish public the (ab)use of the ghetto fighters’ history by the elite was probably unintelligible, for while commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was visible, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising was not. As James Young (1993: 176) observed, in the minds of many of the survivors of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Ghetto Monument principally served as a reminder of the absence of a memorial to their own uprising rather than recalling the Jewish rebellion in the ghetto. However, two patterns of public memory seem to be more important and vivid here. The first in a way explains why – from many possible stories of the fate of Polish Jews during the Second World War – the Ghetto Uprising was to be remembered. The answer again lies in the culture of Polish romanticism and perhaps also more generally in the heroic patterns of European commemoration (Segev 1993; Lagrou 2000: 21–37). This culture has long preferred to remember heroes/­martyrs (dying always for the good cause) rather than ‘passive’ victims. Maria Janion (2008), the literary critic, stresses that Polish commemorative culture – entrapped in the nineteenth-century schemes, stereotypes and dichotomies of heroic and un-heroic, aesthetic and un-aesthetic, worthy and unworthy death – could not bear the memory of the Holocaust. In many accounts (diaries, novels,

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poems and academic writing) of the Ghetto Uprising she finds the same motive: the juxtaposition of the passiveness of most of the exterminated Jews (symbolised in a well-known cliché, brutal to the contemporary ear: ‘like lambs to the slaughter’) and the active resistance of a few fighting insurgents, who were struggling – as it was stressed – in defence of the honour of a massacred nation. The praise for those rising up in arms was juxtaposed by almost contempt for the defenceless, dying people. In some written sources of the war period one can also find an opposition between the alleged psychological traits of Polish and Jewish societies as such. The Poles were characterised by the cult of struggle and honour, while the Jews were characterised by pettiness and cowardice, leading to degradation. Nonetheless the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – as active, military resistance – could be assimilated into the Polish insurrectionary traditions. The Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa, is famous for his words in 1988, during the forty-fifth anniversary of the uprising: ‘we commemorate this struggle today in a special way, because in this land, the land of so many uprisings, the uprising of the Jewish fighters was perhaps the most Polish of all ­uprisings’ (Young 1993: 177). The second pattern is on problematic attitudes of Poles towards Jews imprisoned in the ghetto. Although Polish help to the insurgents is often stressed, the scope of that help is questionable. The cultural landmarks which express Polish ambiguity are the famous poems of Czesław Miłosz, A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto and Campo de’ Fiori (translated in Polonsky 1990: 49–51). Miłosz wrote these poems in 1943 as he watched the ghetto burn from the other side of the wall, but they only became widely read and discussed in Poland in the 1980s, when the, then émigré, poet won the Nobel Prize, and his writings were finally allowed to be published in his home country. He speaks about the desolation of the fighting ghetto. He contrasts a merry-go-round and laughing Polish couples near the ghetto wall with the struggle inside the Jewish part of the city. One could also read in the poems a questioning of whether the Christian Poles really had no opportunity to influence the cruel world inside the wall. In an interpretation of this poem, a journal article entitled ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, by literary critic Jan Błoński (1987), stirred up Polish public opinion in the late 1980s, and claimed that Poles bear a heritage of overwhelming guilt from passively witnessing the annihilation of the Jews. Poles refused to remember that they were indifferent towards the Jews, because they ‘want to derive moral advantages’ from the past. They want to be ‘completely clean’, and ‘want to be also – and only – victims’ (translated in Polonsky 1990: 34–48; cf. Steinlauf 1997: 116).

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However, what Błoński pointed to was the guilt of indifference in the face of the mass crime but not the guilt of participation in the genocide. Only after 1989 was the consciousness of Poles confronted with this more serious charge. One of the first who publicly recalled the darker side of history was Michał Cichy (1994), a journalist from the largest Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. His article, referring to the Warsaw Uprising, mentioned that the fighters freed hundreds of Jews from a concentration camp in Gęsiówka, but also cited evidence that twenty to thirty Jews were murdered by soldiers of the Home Army in the ruins of the ghetto. The heated debate about the article lasted for several months and, as Michael Steinlauf (1997: 135) points out, the main arguments against Cichy’s evidence were psychological. Popular convictions ranged from the assertion that non-Jewish Poles helped Jews as much as they could, recalling that Poles were also victims of the war, to the denunciation of an alleged Jewish conspiracy, always targeted against Poles. The same argument is usually put forward when other Polish misdeeds towards the Jewish population are evoked. Nationally significant are the numerous public debates on Jan T. Gross’s books (2001, 2006, 2012) on the participation of the Poles in the Holocaust (cf. Forecki 2010; Sułek 2011a, 2011b). It seems that in Polish discourse the Warsaw Ghetto is above all an important symbol of the difficulties in assimilating the history of the Polish Jews into Polish history. The very distinction between Poles and Jews not only serves as a descriptive category; often Polish citizens of Jewish origin are not presented as the main character in war stories (of equal importance to Poles and members of the same nation), but rather as ‘others’ to whom Poles could be compared; or they are depicted in stories – which refer only to their fate – and do not show the complexity of Polish–Jewish relations. However, nowadays this discourse is being increasingly challenged, especially by some historiography, the activities of various NGOs, and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews which opened in 2013 during the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The museum aspires, ‘by recalling the memory of a thousand years of Polish Jewish history’, to play a role in ‘the formation of modern individual and collective identities amongst Poles and Jews, [in] Europe and the world’ (Museum website 2013). All these sources attempt to present Jewish history as a part of Polish history, and not only as a lieu de mémoire with its distinctive features. Moreover, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a subject of international commemorative activities. The image of Willy Brandt kneeling at the Ghetto Monument in 1970 became a world-renowned symbol. The anniversaries of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are celebrated together with the highest

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representatives of the Israeli state and other governments. The monument is also visited by school trips from Israel, Germany and other countries. And a ‘global’ tourist who plans to visit the Polish capital probably knows more about the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than about the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

The National Drama on the Stage of the City Museum The Historical Museum of Warsaw was created in 1936 as a branch of the National Museum, but nearly all of its pre-war collection perished during the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, the museum became a municipal institution of culture; its staff initially supplied the new collection with finds from the ruins and from families’ donations. In 1955 the exhibition presenting the city’s history was opened to the public; ten years later it was renovated and reopened under the new title, ‘The Seven Centuries of Warsaw’ (Durko 1975; Meller 1995: 22–27). In subsequent decades some of its elements were modernised, but the modernisation did not affect the exhibition’s chronological structure until the time of our research in 2007. The visitor must have seen (or at least walked through) all the main galleries, presenting the history of Warsaw from the earliest times. The exhibition on the third floor – the larger part of which was the actual object of our analysis – shows Warsaw after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and the postwar rebuilding effort up to the swearing into office of President Lech Wałęsa in 1990. As far as the display techniques are concerned, one must take into account the building itself: the permanent exhibition rooms occupy the ground floor and three storeys of eleven rebuilt Renaissance houses of the Old Town Square. Hence, we moved as if through a labyrinth of staircases and narrow rooms. The display up to the section on the Second World War was traditional: the exhibition clearly concentrated on displaying objects; it did not try to be interactive, neither did it use any high-tech media. There were showcases presenting items of everyday, cultural, social, economic and political life, such as paintings, city plans, diagrams, photographs, press releases and archive documents, plus reconstructed rooms with furniture. We sensed there the hand of a historian or a traditional art custodian more than a contemporary museum curator. In terms of critical museology, the exhibition presented objects as ‘relics of the past’ associated with historical events and characters; such a display differed from ‘art and treasure’, ‘illustrated historical narrative’ and ‘the resurrection of the body’ ways of exhibiting (Pearce 1992; Moore 2000: 44).

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However, the Second World War part of the exhibition we analysed had been reorganised, with an attempt to change both the traditional display and the narrative – therefore we decided to study it separately, without invoking the context of the whole exhibition. This section, showing war, was actually rearranged during our research period and its reconstruction was not completed until the end of our project. We have also subsequently learned that the whole museum will not reopen until 2017, once revival of its pre-Second World War section is complete, and will only host temporary exhibitions in the intervening period. Therefore, in our analysis we have relied on the curatorial conception, the designers’ plans, and the exhibition’s display. We have focused particularly on the sections which were complete during our visit, keeping the unfinished exhibits in the background. Although, this situation contrasted with the cases of Dresden and St Petersburg, we felt we had been given a wonderful opportunity to grasp the very moment of the exhibition’s transformation, alongside a showcase example of alterations in Polish public memory in the first decade of the twenty-first century. We spent relatively more time in conversation with its creators in order to understand the planned changes. It is important to stress that the new exhibition was originally conceived by Joanna Maldis, the curator, working with two designers, Maciej and Marek Mikulski. Only the room dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising was organised by one historian who for years had been dealing with the theme of the uprising in the museum. In a conversation with us the curator stressed that as she had already planned many exhibitions she was being given ‘a free hand’ by the museum director to develop this one. There were no inspections from the city council, nor any other outside pressure on how to develop the exhibition. Although some ideas were discussed at the meetings of the whole museum team, all final decisions were taken by the curator and the designers. We learned that for the new version of the exhibition, one of the goals of the curator and the designers was to clear the content of the ‘old’ communist rhetoric and vocabulary. As the curator stressed in conversation with us, she assumed that everybody knew what the Second World War was, and how it looked in Poland. Thus, she decided not to make any radical changes in the old exhibition but only to adjust the meaning and design of each particular room, more or less retaining the same division of themes. She stressed several times that it was the meaning that was being changed. Hence, despite the fact that texts of the exhibition had already been changed after 1989, the exhibition makers could still sense the (unwelcome) presence of the Polish People’s Republic’s interpretation of history. Equally important, however, was their attempt to modernise the

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way in which history was visually presented. After visiting other Warsaw museums and after several conversations with museum employees, we had the impression that the important context for this exhibition was being set by the recently inaugurated Museum of the Warsaw Rising. As already mentioned, in contemporary Poland this museum established new standards of how to create a historical exhibition; its makers were influenced by study tours to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the Terror House in Budapest, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. They put great stress not only on the role of a museum as a community building (including patriotic education of the younger generations), but also on the fact that such an institution has to compete with modern attractions for the attention of school pupils and tourists. As a result, this was the first Polish historical museum which recognised the role of effects and sensory experiences in the engagement of visitors: personal narratives, multimedia, sound and artefacts have been explicitly more welcome than historical items by the architect of the exhibition, Nizio Design International, a studio which specialises in designing museum compounds and thematic exhibitions in Poland. However, the creators of the exhibition in the Historical Museum of Warsaw were severely restricted by their small budget. In conversation with us they also stressed that they were limited by the space they have available, as the historic interior of a Renaissance building cannot be changed. Therefore, they wished to engage and educate visitors through emotions invoked by using photographs, music and the presentation of biographical materials of people who lived and acted in the historical times. The old showcases, pictures and display boards have been replaced with new ones, now reinforced by music and sounds of war. In such a way, to put it in theoretical categories, the curators were aiming to induce a ‘sense post-memory’, as we have called it in reference to Jill Bennett and Marianne Hirsch’s terms. While Bennett (2003: 29) explains that sense memory forms a ‘seeing’ rather than ‘thinking’ truth, Hirsch’s (2001: 9) category of post-memory denotes ‘a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation’. The sensory form of knowledge (ability to recognise sounds and images) differs from the cognitive methods of understanding, and is at the same time supportive of historical imagination and conducive to national mythology (Watson 2010: 204–23). Surprisingly, however, in the Warsaw museum, despite the curators’ convictions that, together with special lighting and sound, the personalisation of history is key to attracting the contemporary visitor, there

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have not been any attempts to use oral history or recordings of the human voice from the past. Instead, the text about people is supposed to play this role. Some parts of the display are actually overwhelmed with biographical entries, giving a textbook-like impression, and therefore do not have the same force of impact that an oral history would. As we show later, it has mainly been the selection of objects and digitalised photographs which has shaped the moral and emotional landscape of this exhibition and which, at the same time, is responsible for giving the impression of h ­ istorical reality (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 103–23; Edwards 2010: 27–30). In addition, it may be striking for someone who has visited both the old and the new version of the exhibition that the curators have not changed much of its chronological or thematic structure. Apart from financial and architectural restrictions, a hidden dimension behind the absence of substantial changes in the order of the exhibition may also be that certain elements of the historical discourse on the Second World War endure, despite recent changes in the political, cultural and technological contexts. To put it another way, much of the work of this museum in the past (within the broader framework the public memory of the communist period) established a canon, difficult to alter in its several tacit but powerful discursive strategies, despite the political change and a willingness ‘to get rid of the old’. The sections devoted to themes such as terror, resistance, daily life, and the Warsaw Uprising remain the same, although change is visible in the techniques of display and narrative. A detailed summary of the old narrative would be difficult because important parts of the texts, and some objects, were already changed after 1989. Nevertheless, certain features of the old narrative can be highlighted on the basis of a museum brochure from the 1980s which describes the content of the exhibition at that time (Durko 1986). In this publication, the story presented in the section on the Second World War combines the elements of national and class interpretations of Polish history. The booklet stresses the role of Warsaw workers in the defence of the city, as well as the bravery of large and anonymous masses in later events, including the Warsaw Uprising. The class narrative is supported by the emphasis put on the active resistance of the Polish communists and on the role of the Red Army in liberating the city in January 1945. The Home Army is barely mentioned, and the Polish Underground State not at all. At the same time, the brochure underlines the unique features and central importance of Warsaw in national history. The capital was supposed to hold ‘spiritual pre-eminence’ over the rest of the country. The arguments supporting this were the number of headquarters of

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underground organisations in the city, the highest number of clandestine publications and the disobedience to Nazi orders displayed by the Warsaw population in general. The anti-heroes are anonymous ‘Hitlerites’ (hitlerowcy) – the Polish People’s Republic equivalent of the word Nazi. It was introduced in the 1950s – after the creation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – and replaced the term ‘Germans’ as previously used, because Polish communists did not want to blame GDR citizens for war crimes. In the Polish People’s Republic the word Hitlerites was often used interchangeably with the Soviet term ‘fascists’. This, especially in the early 1950s, was the function of class narrative: fascists were not only the national enemy, but above all the class enemy, as fascism allegedly was the ultimate and most cruel form of capitalist exploitation. Hitlerites were guilty of mass terror, executions, round-ups and forced labour transports to concentration camps and the Reich (Durko 1986: 19, 20). As far as we were able to establish, the major post-1989 changes in the narrative – prior to the current reconstruction – concentrated on altering the texts of the exhibition in such a way that the new versions diminished the role of communist resistance in favour of the Polish Underground State and Home Army. The word ‘Hitlerites’ reverted back to ‘Germans’, thus giving a national face to the enemy (Bogumił and Wawrzyniak 2009).

The Plot on the Display: Martyrdom and Dematerialised Enemy The exhibition imposes a single way of viewing it, and therefore presents the story in a way typical for the ‘temple’ museum. Visitors are channelled through the rooms arranged according to the chronology and themes of wartime history. The first room invokes the images of the pre-war city; the second presents the defence of Warsaw in September 1939 and the beginnings of Nazi rule in the city. The latter theme is continued in the third room, entitled ‘Occupation Terror’. However, visitors see only one part of it, before entering the fourth room, devoted to the anti-Nazi resistance and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Leaving the resistance space, visitors again enter the terror room, from where they move to the fifth room devoted to the city’s everyday life, education and culture. From here they descend a staircase to the sixth room about the Warsaw Uprising, and finally to the seventh and eighth rooms which present the scale of destruction in 1944 and the postwar reconstruction respectively. At the time of our research, new displays had been completed in rooms four to seven. For the rest we relied on information and plans which the designers had generously

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s­ upplied to us, except for the eighth and final room on postwar reconstruction for which we were unable to obtain even the plans for the new displays. According to the designers’ plans, upon entering the exhibition visitors will be confronted with a collage of postcards sold in Warsaw in summer 1939, before the outbreak of the war. These souvenir images, photographs of beautiful architecture, as displayed on the plans, all show an urban paradise. They give visual pleasure and an opportunity for longing and dreaming; they are the representations of a distant place – symbolic messages from the already non-existent world. This idyllic and sentimental vision is only an ephemeral reminiscence of a paradise lost, because on their right-hand side visitors will see reprints of mobilisation orders. In such a manner they are acquainted with the scene of the drama which will soon take place, and they learn of the city’s will to defend itself. The themes of struggle and suffering are already introduced in the second room. From the captions, one learns that Warsaw’s mobilisation against the enemy started with the invasion of Polish territory by the German Wehrmacht in September 1939. The renovated section of the exhibition was not yet displayed; however, according to the plans it corresponds well with the existing one in its narrative form and structure, the changes mainly concerning the means of visual display. It shows the defence of the city against the predominant power in the general context of the outbreak of war, which in the Polish discourse exists as ‘September 1939’, and invokes such associations as dedicated fighting by Polish soldiers, as well as the chaos of war, including columns of refugees heading east. Therefore, texts and photographs give the visitor a sense of the broad national dimensions of the first month of war. The national political context is particularly visible in the reference to the Red Army’s unexpected movement into the eastern territories of the Republic of Poland on 17 September 1939. It is worth remembering that in the official discourse of the Polish People’s Republic, this action was not remembered as aggression against the Polish state; it used to be either omitted or presented as the Red Army’s aid to the population in face of the fascist invasion. After the democratic change in 1989, interpretations altered and in general public discourse as well as in historiography, the double nature of the invasions began to be stressed. Thus, a map – showing the attack on Poland from the west and the east – was added to the old exhibition and will still be retained in the new one, situated in a central position on one wall of the room with a slightly different display. The map portrays a country which had fallen victim to assault from the west and the east, by the Wehrmacht and by the Red Army, by the swastika and by the hammer and sickle. It is important to stress that, for Polish visitors, such a presentation evokes historical ­associations with

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the eighteenth-century partitions, which erased the Polish state from the map of Europe. Furthermore, it is directly embedded in Poland’s nineteenth-century romantic discourse of crucifixion by foreign powers, in which Poland was not only the victim but the innocent victim of the treacherous violation of diplomatic treaties. The symbols of the two oppressive totalitarian powers visible on the map – used frequently in Poland, by the way – do not change, but rather strengthen this impression. This victimisation is not the end, though. The story is about the victim who desperately and daringly fought in his own defence. Apart from the descriptions, photographs and artefacts from the actual military struggle, on the back wall (displayed in a digital collage) is another important reference to Polish national romantic discourse: Polish cavalry in a rural landscape. Although the cavalry did not play any significant military role (and, above all, did not fight in the city), the symbol of a man on a horse fighting a German tank is persistent in Polish culture (a famous example is Lotna, a movie by Andrzej Wajda from 1959).3 It also evokes – for a Polish visitor – associations with popular stories of cavalrymen of honour who did not surrender after the Polish Army General Headquarters had signed the act of capitulation. Again, on this theme there were novels and movies, such as those by Melchior Wańkowicz (1959) and Bohdan Poręba (1973).4 Most importantly, all of these associations link the museum narrative with the legendary image of Polish Uhlans, who bravely fought for the country’s independence in the nineteenth century, as well as for the freedom, equality and brotherhood of other nations.5 Only against this backdrop do we see the face of the city’s mayor, Stefan Starzyński, well known for his courageous stance during the defence in 1939 and for his passionate speeches in which he tried to encourage the Varsovians to fight. All this does not leave any doubts that the hero of this plot is not only the  city as such, but the larger national subject, endowed with spiritual qualities. Stefan Starzyński acts not only as a defender of the city, but of higher values as well, including the honour of a nation which does not surrender easily. Nevertheless, the room confronts the heroic defence with the story of the conquered city. The image of the victimised nation is transmitted here to the urban level. Consecutive photographs show defenceless Polish soldiers who, standing on the city streets, give up their weapons and raise their hands in the desperate act of surrender. Some of them are being crowded into transport cars and driven to an unknown destination. The citizens are left to the occupiers’ mercy. Finally, we meet the conquerors, too. Photographs show German soldiers and high-ranking officers who contrast greatly with the miserable Poles. They are not only fully uni-

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formed and equipped with weapons, but also self-confident and proud. Most significantly, we see Adolf Hitler who had arrived to celebrate the victory parade. He raises his hand in the Deutscher Gruß gesture and acknowledges military formations marching past him. Standing on the reviewing stand, he seems higher than the city and his own soldiers; he dominates the scene. In such a military presentation of the disciplined and subordinated bodies, we see the Ordnung (order) and hierarchy of the enemy’s world, the persistent images of the Germans in Poland. These pictures probably once also fulfilled an important propaganda function for the occupiers themselves. The room tells us even more about the image of the enemy, although in a less concrete way. We get certain messages from the contrasts implied in the overall presentation. The Polish soldiers were the defenders, while the Germans were the invaders. In this sense, the Poles were innocent, while the Germans were guilty. Whereas the Polish soldiers fought an unequal but honourable battle, the reason for the German victory was their technical superiority, well illustrated by a large picture of air raids. This kind of advantage is a sign of depravity and immorality, not only in the sense of breaking political treaties, but also of the military code. We see no connections with les chevaliers de l’air, because men of honour would never duel with an unequal rival: they would not bombard and set fire to cities; they would not shoot defenceless civilians. Altogether, the Germans’ supremacy in the battle reveals their moral inferiority, and such a didactic message leaves visitors without any option than to identify with the victim of an immoral assault. Moreover, they will soon learn that although conquered, the victim remained undefeated. When the military defenders were gone, the civilians found the strength to continue the fight. However, before learning the story of the Polish resistance under the conditions of occupation, visitors must walk along a narrow corridor lined on both sides with replicas of SS helmets and black uniforms, under a huge red flag with a swastika. This section (unfinished at the time of our research) is intended to present artefacts from the German world, and therefore one could expect that it will tell the story of ‘Germans in Warsaw – but this is not the case. On the contrary, in this ‘terror corridor’ one is confronted emotionally with the atmosphere of occupied Warsaw, with the experience of the proximity of the enemy and with the fear experienced by the Poles. At the end of the corridor is a list of the places where the invaders executed Varsovians during the occupation (Figure 2.1). The list gives only the estimated numbers of victims killed in a particular place: sometimes a dozen or so, sometimes several thousand. In such a way we learn about the magnitude of the crime and harsh rule of the conqueror.

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Figure 2.1. A map and a list of the places of executions in Warsaw 1939–1944, indicating the estimated numbers of victims. This picture was taken from the old exhibition. According to the plans, this display board will be placed at the end of the terror room in the new exhibition. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

One learns that Ordnung and hierarchy imply the efficient machinery of killing, requiring discipline and obedience, and leading to mass murder. In another part of this ‘terror room’ visitors are acquainted with an aspect of the enemy, represented in the figure of a German policeman. The figure is labelled with a quotation from the Nazi Governor-General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank: ‘a German policeman has the right to shoot anyone whom he meets on the street and considers suspect’. Still visitors do not gain knowledge of anything personal or specific about the enemy, who remains an anonymous and frightening military force with the power of life and death. There are no testimonies from an occupier, and so visitors do not learn about any emotions the Germans may have felt or how they imagined the fate of the subordinated society. In the terror section, visitors are forced to feel only the overwhelming power of the enemy, a sense exacerbated by the single direction of circulation: straight into the resistance room, which shows that struggle with this devastating force is the only alternative.

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The ‘room of resistance’ is a very Polish room in a double sense. Firstly, the Germans are largely absent from the representations of the fight against them; and secondly, it is the space of the Polish Underground State (Polskie Państwo Podziemne), which was a national phenomenon. In this way, Warsaw becomes the underground capital and the heart of Poland. The room is overloaded with biographical entries and photographs, following the approach to learning history by getting to know the people. It is also arranged with the intention of inducing reverence towards the mass of Polish citizens who took part in the struggle against the enemy. But at the same time, it is supported by columns which remind us of the alleged pillar of the secret state: the youth. The showcases in the columns exhibit relics of the young heroes of the Polish Underground State, including letters, documents, someone’s simple shirt and other belongings (Figure 2.2). All these objects of former everyday life have become symbols of cultural memory imbued with national meaning; at the same time they have a certain aura of mystery (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 108–11; Sepulveda dos Santos 2003:

Figure 2.2. View of the resistance room. On the display boards, with the emblem Polska Walcząca (Fighting Poland), are various clandestine groups’ members’ photographs, biographical entries and descriptions of their resistance actions. In the showcases are their belongings and/or objects related to the actions. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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40). The legend of young, courageous Polish people has many variations, including the Columbus generation already described. Yet here, in this room, visitors are being assured that the young men’s fight was not only charged with a sense of honour, but also that it was not mistaken. In order to unveil another, but still close pattern of cultural memory, one may recall the poetry of the ancient poet Tyrtaeus, which was very much present in Polish literature of both the nineteenth century and the interwar period. The Greek bard was admired for inspiring the youth of Sparta with a patriotic love for their motherland and for praising bravery in defence of civic virtues. These merits have been recreated here in the frames of the story of the Polish Underground State. One also finds a strong contrast between the enemy corridor and this room. In the latter, we see pictures of various heroic fighters; we read their names and learn about their fate. In the former there are only anonymous, uniformed, dark forces, not even bearing faces: a blank page to project fear and evil. While at the end of the ‘terror corridor’ there is a list of SS victims, in the ‘resistance room’ one is confronted by a map of Warsaw showing all the acts of resistance committed against the oppressors during the Second World War. Even the optical structure of the design highlights the contrast between the German and the Polish rooms. While the German rule resides on columns of SS helmets, the Polish state is supported by the pillars dedicated to the heroes of resistance, subdivided into different underground groups, including Gray Ranks (Szare Szeregi), the Storm Groups (Grupy Szturmowe), the Combat Schools (Bojowe Szkoły), People’s Guard (Gwardia Ludowa), and various military and sabotage actions.6 The difference is reinforced by the sound in this room, which tells much about the imagination of the self and the other: the music of Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849), the Polish-French romantic composer and pianist, is interrupted by German martial music. While Warsaw, as such, is represented by high culture, the Nazis are identified with the Prussian tradition of military marches. That Chopin, in particular, was chosen – instead of typical Warsaw street music, popular during the 1940s – also tells a great deal about representation of Warsaw as a highly cultured, melancholic but explicitly Polish city, disturbed by the rough sounds of enemy marches. However, the longer a visitor stays in this room, walking between the columns, reading the biographical entries, looking at photographs and personal belongings, the more one gains the impression that the room’s meaning is the restoration of hope and dignity of the victims of the occupation, by stressing the high moral values of the defenders and the significance of the particular Polish underground actions. We called it ‘the Robin Hood effect’, in which the role of personal features, such as intelligence

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and cunning in fighting against a stronger enemy, were emphasised. Such representation also seems to encourage visitors to identify with a Varsovian of the time. First of all it is a fight, which in the room overall takes the form of the actions of the defenders of the Warsaw population (the members of the Polish Underground State) against well organised and heavily armed groups of occupants. However, the struggle does not always take a physical form: symbolic battles with words and slogans were important too. One learns that sabotage of German propaganda was the power of the weak. Moreover, the mechanisms of radicalisation and intensification of terror that the occupier applied in answer to the defenders’ actions are not presented as raising ethical dilemmas to the defenders. There are no questions as to whether the actors had any doubts or fears. Their struggle, including executions of collaborators ordered by the underground state, was always interpreted as an act of heroic virtue. Therefore, in the way the narrative is constructed, the emphasis is put on what is perceived as the ideal fight for good without deeper reflection on all the consequences of the defenders’ actions; it turns the narrative into a fairy tale. Within such a narrative one also finds specific urban legends. The iconography on some of the columns, such as pictures of the resistance’s members participating in a given action, and some exhibits, especially a schematic map of the terrain where brave actions took place (as if this were the original plan, signed in backyard cellars by relentless defenders of the town), all bear the charm of black and white gangster films.7 When cunning divisions of the Home Army rob a bank or sabotage the German war effort, they seem like friendly urban gangsters who embarrass the stupid uniformed authorities who do not know the terrain and cannot hope for the support of the local population. In this closer view the enemy seems a bit stupid and clumsy. To stress his awkwardness and ridiculousness he is presented as a monkey in one of the caricatures. At the same time the caricatured enemy is a remedy for fear and anxiety. His animal nature makes him pitiful, and this helps the visitor to believe that the enemy is not so difficult to beat. This stereotype of Germans as animals recreates a common anti-Nazi picture from wartime (Szarota 1996: 154, 155). One of the room’s sections is particularly intriguing, though. Beneath the description of the subversive operation codenamed ‘N’ (‘N’ stood for the Polish word Niemcy, ‘Germans’, and the operation was a psychological-warfare campaign that produced German-language newspapers and leaflets), there are reprints of original documents, some of which are now nearly unreadable. These documents offer a fascinating insight into the different tactics used in the vast field of sabotage. The diversionary leaflets, newspapers and letters were printed by the Polish underground and aimed

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at the German police and armed forces in Warsaw. Using them as a basis, it is possible to analyse what, in the minds of Poles, would undermine the German troops’ morale or even motivate them to desert. The printed sources are of a great variety: from the texts, which show a good knowledge of German conservative thinking, to testimonies of hopeless attempts to convince German soldiers to surrender, written in faulty German. One can also imply that, since the Poles tried to convince the Germans to retreat, they in a way considered them more human and approachable than other parts of the exhibition suggest. However, these documents are presented without captions and without translation into Polish or English. Hence, this great resource for studying the image of the enemy, created by Polish forces through the years of occupation, is only accessible to the well-informed, German-speaking expert. Without any explanation or comments, the average visitor might well regard these reprints only as illustrations which create a historical atmosphere. As an example, one text, which mentions Winston Churchill as the main enemy, could hardly be identified as an act of diversion; it is more likely that it was an original German propaganda text that must have mistakenly been put in this section by the curators. This section shows well – to quote an American historian, who once dismissed the material culture of museums as a source of ideas for historians – that ‘it is not that these documents are beneath historical notice; but until historians find something to do with them, they languish in a mass of unenfranchised facts. Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks for them to prove and disprove’ (Carson 1978: 44; Knell 2004: 8). In this section, visitors are, therefore, only left with impressions of the Poles’ engagement in the underground; and such documents only play the role of wallpaper, testifying to this idea without an invitation for a closer look. Also, the exhibition does not pay much attention to the city’s actual everyday life under German occupation. The hierarchy of themes is evident in the specified route of the visit. Visitors must first experience the terror of the enemy and resistance against the terror; only later may they feel compassion for the suffering in people’s everyday lives. Similarly, the newly renovated section on everyday life concentrates more on civil disobedience than on the actual tactics of survival employed by ordinary people. It presents descriptions of secret schooling and the clandestine press, as well as the pictures of people who were engaged in organising these illegal activities. The room is dominated by graffiti on one wall which imitates the street sabotage of German orders (Figure 2.3). Within this heroic context, the existing descriptions of activities, such as illegal trading, may also be interpreted as another means of resistance against the Germans rather than an

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Figure 2.3. One of the walls in the ‘everyday life’ section imitates the sabotage of Nazi propaganda on the city’s walls. On the right in small print, the inscription: ‘Tylko świnie siedzą w kinie’ (Only swine go to the cinema). Photo by Christian Ganzer.

account of ordinary existence. Among the exceptions are several personal belongings showing daily hardships, such as handmade bags produced by a young girl to earn her living; and a copy of a booklet with the modest household expenses of an accountant, which one can page through – the only interactive element within the exhibition. Yet, all these items are both marginal and supportive of the predominantly heroic narrative line. In the ‘everyday life’ section, the themes omitted are important, especially collaboration with the Germans and the Germans’ everyday life. The former is mentioned only in the context of sabotage. One can read an inscription on the wall, ‘Tylko świnie siedzą w kinie’ (Only swine go to the cinema), which recreates the way in which the Polish resistance tried to discourage the population from watching Nazi propaganda movies. In this way the exhibition directly transfers the desires of the organisers of the resistance into the present: it portrays collaboration as a marginal phenomenon. This room exemplifies well the curatorial truth that ‘the crucial idea is that of selection’ (Pearce 2012: 24). One cannot resist the feeling that if the curators had decided to present the collaborative dimension of Polish–German

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relations, they would have destroyed the narrative of the exhibition. Not only would they have needed to present the non-heroic features of the story’s main characters, but they would also have needed to portray the enemy differently: as someone who is in some way approachable, therefore human. This also might be a reason behind the general absence of German everyday life in Warsaw; we see neither life in the German district nor German women and children. The enemy remains inaccessible, otherworldly and dehumanised. The story’s hero meets him only in the final – life and death – situations, and even then the enemy is distant. This is the case of the Warsaw Uprising room, where the exhibition’s themes of resistance and suffering find their climax, and the presentation finally reveals the martyrdom within the narrative. Who, after all, are the martyrs? In the original sense of early Christianity, as the Belgian historian, Pieter Lagrou (2000: 211) points out, the martyrs are not ordinary and arbitrary victims, but they suffer or die for their faith, which is both the cause and effect of their suffering. Martyrs are targeted as victims of persecution because of their witnessing to their faith. In the more secular and contemporary meaning of the term, the martyrs are those who suffer and die in the name of a good cause; their martyrdom is a matter of their choice. This is the meaning we find in the Warsaw Uprising story presented in this exhibition: the story of a struggle for the nation’s freedom which was chosen as a duty by young men and women who had to pay with their lives for their deeds.8 The Warsaw Uprising is represented under two slogans: joy and despair. These themes are illustrated by two digital presentations made out of photographic materials displayed on opposite walls. The presentations are intermingled with each other when the visitor stands in the middle of the room. ‘Joy’ shows the Home Army fighters, while ‘despair’ portrays the damage suffered by people and caused to architecture in the uprising. The sounds in the room are the same for both shows: the sounds of shooting, burning, and an air-raid siren. The display operates with strong contrasts and direct oppositions. Against the background of the dark colour of the room, the white and red colours of the Polish flag shine even brighter. There is a very strong and deep symbolisation of the Home Army as the last and only hope for Poland. The red is not only the most recognisable colour, but also the one associated with many meanings from love to rage; it is the visualisation of blood and of the heart too, which will beat on until independence, which is at the heart of the struggle. It is the sign of a return to a world which was lost at the moment when the Second World War broke out. The use of photographs in the representation of ‘joy’ is peculiar. They do not present the enemy, only the insurgents. This presentation resembles

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a family album in which visitors ‘get to know’ how their ancestors – who did not survive the battle – looked; as it portrays their everyday life, it has the power of reality. The emotional influence of such photographs is strengthened and amplified by the digital form of the display. In such a way it is impossible to escape the images: one sees young men and women who found themselves in the role of soldiers, usually with a smile on their faces. The photographs demonstrate their enthusiasm; they show them during swearing-in ceremonies, preparing cartridges and guns, reading newspapers, lighting cigarettes, embracing each other fondly, and getting married. The pictures show the sunshine in August and the hope before and during the first days of the battle. Nevertheless, the sentimental presentation is interrupted by the sound of gunfire, which announces the forthcoming catastrophe and reminds visitors that the story will not end happily. Among the photographs, the only emergent sign of the enemy is an aircraft flying over Warsaw, signifying the impending destruction of the city. The unfriendly aircraft also shows the superiority of the German war machine against the heroic but simply equipped Varsovians. The sound and the aircraft’s appearance are a link with the second theme – ‘despair’. In one of the last photographs a group of barricade fighters look up at the sky as if they recognise the messenger there. One of them is smiling into the camera lens, raising his arm in a greeting gesture; the visitor knows that this is a goodbye wave. While the display of photographs under the slogan of ‘joy’ represents the idea of struggle for freedom and independence, the presentation on ‘despair’ brings the signs of death. Consecutive pictures show that it is unavoidable; but again, the visitor does not see any direct representation of the enemy, only the signs of his ubiquitous existence. We see that the city is being destroyed from the air and set on fire. The most important signs of death, though, are the Catholic religious symbols apparent in the photographs. There are the communities of people praying, there are crosses, and there are the figures of the Virgin Mary and the crucified Christ. While the Virgin Mary gives consolation in the time of despair, Christ means torment and sacrifice in the good cause. However, he also signifies that the suffering was not senseless, but meaningful. In addition, visitors see dozens of young faces looking straight at them from the photographs: it seems as if they are asking to be remembered. In this way, visitors learn that they too ought to become members of this community of sacrifice. In such a presentation we find perhaps the most important pattern of the Polish culture of martyrdom: the spiritual communion between the living and the dead. Romanticism found sense in death, because it was believed that the next generation would not forget the generation of martyrs (Janion 2000:

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22–25); that the old and new cohorts would be united by the intent that was the reason for the sacrifice. Although the images induce different emotions now from those evoked at the time, they act as a medium through which the past can appeal to the viewer in the present (Watson 2010: 217). The approach to understanding history by forcing empathy with the insurgents on the viewer has gone far here. The room reduces the Warsaw Uprising to two feelings or moods, and does not specify the various attitudes of the city inhabitants to this campaign. The technique of showing as many photographs of young participants as possible, to remind us of their loss and their heroism, makes this room resemble a memorial. The enemy is a target for grenades and rifle salvoes, but visually he is absent, apart from the aircraft in both slide shows. We do not even see the enemy as a perpetrator of war crimes. The martyred stance and dematerialisation of the enemy becomes even clearer in the final chapter of this narrative: the ‘total annihilation’ room. One gets an impression that only the eternal fight between good and evil was left. The centre of the floor resembles a cemetery with electric lights imitating the candles which Poles traditionally put on their loved ones’ graves on All Souls Day (Figure 2.4). The numbers on the floor draw

Figure 2.4. The view of the right-hand side of the total annihilation room. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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the visitor’s attention to the magnitude of the death toll. However, the Christian symbolism in this room again reminds us that this sacrifice was not senseless. The room is dark with changing illumination and shadows, which might be interpreted both as signs of the fleeting nature of life and as signs of hope. The fire, which is still present in the photographs displayed on the wall, may serve as a sign of death, but also of purification and immortality. The most powerful symbol is again the cross: a sign of innocence, duty, torment, sacrifice, redemption and victory. When the room periodically becomes dark, three pictures of human faces are highlighted. In the middle, we see a young man with closed eyes and a hung head. On either side of him are two uplifted profiles of women. Even though these pictures were taken from original documents from a transit camp for Warsaw civilian expellees, their arrangement reminds the visitor with a Catholic background of Jesus on the cross, mourned by the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. It also reminds one of the nineteenth-century romantic vision of Poland as ‘the Christ of Nations’. Even the music played in the room, Krzysztof Penderecki’s (b. 1933) Polish Requiem, represents Christian mourning. In this way religious metaphors, iconography and high culture become intertwined with national narrative. The Warsaw Uprising becomes a sacrifice to free Poland. Its defeat is at the same time its spiritual victory.

In the Background: The Warsaw Ghetto In our analysis we pointed to the bipolarity of the enemy and the hero as a major mechanism for constructing the exhibition’s story. However, even during our first visit to the museum and in our initial discussions, there was one element which we found peculiar. This was the way the history of the Warsaw Jews was presented. Above all we were astonished by two aspects of this display: that so marginal a space was devoted to the fate of the Jews, and that it was displayed in the section on the resistance. The Jewish history is presented in a large box, imitating the Warsaw Ghetto, at one side of the resistance room. The outside walls of the box bear information about the erection and annihilation of the ghetto, the living conditions there, Jewish resistance groups and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and also about the Polish Council to Aid Jews, Żegota. Inside the ‘ghetto-box’ we find pictures of miserable living conditions and exhibits from the destroyed ghetto. However, visitors are only able to look at them through very narrow, window-like breaches in the wall (Figure 2.5). This is the single means to get an idea of life in the ghetto, which differed

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Figure 2.5. View of one side of the Warsaw Ghetto section. In the centre the narrow window: the only way for a visitor to look inside the ghetto. On the left, a Nazi order signed by Jürgen Stroop with the heading ‘Stop! Forbidden Zone’ warning of the death penalty for those entering the Jewish district without permission. On the right, the maps of the ghetto and some information about living conditions in the ghetto, Janusz Korczak’s orphanage, the Final Solution plan, and the ghetto’s destruction. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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greatly from conditions in the rest of Warsaw. This is a particularly striking presentation when we remember that the exhibition’s creators put so much stress on appealing to visitor’s emotions and empathy with regard to the narrative’s hero and, in fact, on identifying with it. Yet, within the conception of the emotional approach to the hero, the way the history of the Warsaw Jews is presented means that visitors only see the history and tragedy of the ghetto from the perspective of a non-Jewish Varsovian, and they are not able to change perspective and go inside the ghetto. Therefore, ironically – to paraphrase Czesław Miłosz’s poem – one may say that the exhibition invites ‘a poor visitor’ to look at the ghetto. The display expresses only the experience of non-Jews, and tells the story of the Holocaust from the perspective of Christian Poles. This conception, far from being unique in Polish culture, continues the nineteenth century’s thesis of Polak–katolik (one must be a Catholic to be accepted as a Pole). One could also claim, however, that it refers to contemporary times, when hardly any Jews live in Warsaw and only the non-Jewish Poles can tell the Jewish story. Nevertheless, this display is troubling, if we take into account the contexts of the inscriptions in the room, and of the exhibition’s overall narrative. The Polish descriptions on the ghetto walls astonish the foreign visitor, because the texts reflect a dichotomy between the ‘Jewish’ and ‘Aryan’ sides without quotation marks, and without any explanation about the historical usage of these terms during the occupation. The presentation is, in our opinion, far reaching (although most probably unconscious) in its juxtaposition of the fate of non-Jewish Poles and Jewish Poles. The suffering of the Jewish population is shown by ill and poorly dressed people screaming, thus evoking compassion rather than respect, while the non-Jewish Poles in this room are always full of dignity. The Jews are portrayed as wretched and anonymous, whereas the room is full of pictures and biographical entries of the Polish resistance actors (nearly eighty people outside of the ghetto-box are presented with names, nicknames and photographs; most of them with biographical entries). The Poles are characterised by the cult of struggle and honour, and the Jews by their misery; the Poles die heroically fighting for an idea, the Jews die unimpressively in terror and darkness. Therefore, the display of the room brings to mind the already mentioned concept of the more valuable and more aesthetic worthy death, contrasted with the unworthy death. It also shows, better than any other section of the exhibition, that the narrative cannot escape the conventional, national image of the war as a story of bitter glory, and thus cannot present it as a human tragedy. However, some Jewish fighters are portrayed in this room. Moreover, they seem to be quite important for the exhibition’s structure, because

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they justify the display of the Holocaust in the resistance section. Their biographical entries hang on the outside walls of the ghetto-box and they are similar to the entries of the non-Jewish Poles. This is symptomatic of the trend for assimilating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Polish insurrectionary traditions, and is possible, because there exists a common denominator: the struggle. Jewish fighters form a kind of protective presence for the anonymous masses suffering within the ghetto. Still, there is a large disparity between the presentation of Jewish and non-Jewish anti-German resistance. The gap lies not only in the number of entries in this room, but also in the very fact that the Warsaw Uprising has its own room, while the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is squeezed into the presentation of a larger theme. The Jewish struggle is presented as an act of desperation, which stands in harsh contrast with the glorious fight of the Polish Underground State’s heroes. The pictures of the Ghetto Uprising show its failure, while this facet is missing in the presentation of the Warsaw Uprising. Moreover, while Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews, is presented using pictures and descriptions of its participants, the text on the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, the Jewish Fighting Organization, is only illustrated with pictures of two nameless women and anonymous men with guns. The understatements are important too. The exhibition omits any reference to the issue of relations between Poles and Jews in occupied Warsaw. We only learn that, although there was the ghetto, some contact with the outside world existed and it was, to a limited degree, possible to flee from there. While the actions of rescuing Jews are mentioned, there is hardly a reference to the phenomenon of szmalcownictwo, the blackmailing of Jews in hiding, or of non-Jewish Poles denouncing Jews to the Nazis for financial reward. Meanwhile, robbery and pogroms do not figure at all. All this strengthens the impression that the exhibition tells the story of the non-Jewish Varsovians for non-Jewish visitors. Despite being a traditional way of presenting Polish history, it is a problematic approach for a city museum today, especially in such an important city – Warsaw being both the national capital and a former centre of Jewish life in the region. Fundamentally, however, such questions about the multiple dimensions of history are barely compatible with the narrative line of the exhibition, especially if they belong to the already mentioned collaboration theme. Therefore, within the memory of heroism, the Jewish story cannot be fully presented here, because it would destroy the positive and constitutive features of the narrative’s hero. At the same time, by showing certain connections between Poles and Germans, it would have undermined the bipolar construction of the exhibition between the hero and the enemy.

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Conclusions In our case study we argue that the exhibition about Warsaw’s wartime experience is narrated along the lines of Polish romantic discourse and is full of its (frequently Christian) symbolism. The main character in the exhibition’s narrative is the nation state which lost its independence. Its representatives are very often young, non-Jewish Poles who struggled and suffered for the sake of regaining national freedom. The exhibition is not a place where visitors are able to interpret the history for themselves, nor are they given the choice of selecting an interpretation from a set of possible alternatives. Instead, it tells them a one-dimensional story of the struggle, suffering and heroism of the Polish nation, using the example of Warsaw in the Second World War. Therefore, referring to Cameron’s (1971) ­categories, we decided to name it ‘the temple of romantic martyrdom’. We argue that the relation between the nation and its enemy is constitutive for the overall narrative. Following the definition of the enemy agreed for all three case studies at the beginning of this research, ‘the enemy as the agent which endangers the very existence of the hero’, in this exhibition the hero of the story fully reveals its qualities in the mortal struggle with the enemy. Thus, the enemy simultaneously threatens and constitutes the identity of the main positive character. The features of both the hero and the enemy are, above all, presented by various contrasts frequently used by the exhibition’s creators, such as attacker–defender, perpetrator–victim, anonymous–distinctive, immoral–moral, guilty–innocent, ­dishonourable–honourable, and evil–good. Therefore, our answer to the main question underlying this book is that the enemy is above all an idea. We do not learn anything specific about the goals and strategies of the invaders or about their feelings and convictions. We do not learn about any doubts the soldiers might have had while they brought suffering and cruelty to the city. The Germans appear as a black wall with swastikas; as the very embodiment of evil. As such they build a background against which the tradition of a Polish nation state is shown; the tradition which was even stronger than terror, which united the society with collective values such as bravery, creativeness, fearlessness and persistence. In confrontation with a militarily superior enemy, the citizens of Warsaw, presented as a collective of young Poles, forced themselves to hope in a hopeless situation, and fought a desperate fight. The question whether during the long occupation period there might have been a variety of attitudes within the Polish society, but also within German army, police and civilian population, is not a part of this story. The strong romantic myth of fighting and uprising, which is once more repeated in the exhibition,

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projects a figure of the enemy which must stay one-dimensional. Yet, the hero stays equally dehumanised and one-dimensional, even if presented positively and in more detail, for these are details of an ideal community, which do not embrace the actual historical complexity. Finally, we point out that there was a crucial element which was buried by this story of heroism and innocence, an element which could ruin the overall construction if it was shown. The identity of a just and honourable national collective could be endangered if the variety of attitudes towards the other, Jewish, non-Christian one-third of the population of pre-war Warsaw was revealed. The bipolar juxtaposition of the enemy and the hero would suffer, and the Holocaust story would also show that there were other values to protect apart from national freedom: sheer life, for instance. The romantic myth embedded in the exhibition’s story blurs the historical circumstances. Czesław Miłosz’s fears from the above cited poem (Polonsky 1990) about poor Christian Poles being counted ‘among the helpers of death’ were not taken into consideration by this story, which is still told from outside of the ghetto wall. We are aware that we have just proposed one among many possible readings of this exhibition. Others might have a different reaction to the display, depending on their historical knowledge, cultural background and emotional sensitivity. This interpretation was the result of our generational and academic identities, the very close and deconstructive reading of the narrative, and the confrontation of the poetics of display with our politics of seeing. Others will probably observe more selectively without time for close analysis, concentrating only on some items and contextualising them within their own world views, different from ours. In this regard, one could paraphrase Simon Knell (2004: 20) who wrote ‘curators may imagine that the closely argued historical narrative on the gallery walls gives this sense of place and contributes to building identity but most visitors will not read it’, by also emphasising that critics of museal discourse are in danger of making too many assumptions concerning the meaning and impact of an exhibition. Yet, we strongly believe that curators’ attempts to make a (coherent) story by use of various means do deserve attention and careful reading – if not by everyone, then by those who feel engaged and affected by the story, even if critically. This is especially the case of a ‘temple’ museum as the one discussed above, which treats displayed objects and photographs as evidence of a one-dimensional narrative. After all, most of the museums sponsored by public funds will adhere to some moral mission and higher values (Cameron 2007). The critical museum literature convinces that they ought to be responsible for producing an ‘open and tolerant society’; however, the narratives of many historical

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museums in Eastern Europe (and beyond) show that they are still much more affiliated with ‘modern’ understanding of morality, which imposes single-sided national truths (McLean 1998). The involvement of visitors and researches in re-plotting the cultural map of those truths (HooperGreenhill 2000: 140) is a way of understanding phenomena of national identities in ­democratic societies and a globalising world.

Notes  1. Kanał, movie directed by A. Wajda, screenplay by J.S. Stawiński.   2. Since the Middle Ages, kings and the nobility had needed the trading skills and help of the Jews in colonising the country. Despite the fact that Jews had, in general, different legal and social statuses, there existed various contacts between them and Christians. The deepest changes that worsened their relations occurred in the nineteenth century, at the time of Poland’s partitions, modern nation-building and industrialisation. The emancipation of Jews and peasants brought new constellations and competitions in trade and handicraft. Modern anti-Semitism developed the idea of the Polish nation as an ‘organic body’, whose health was threatened by intruding elements. Less modernist circles blamed Jews for everything that was regarded as new and harmful: the sciences, liberalism, free economy, internationalism, mass media and socialism. The large influence of struggling Catholicism often sharpened conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. Especially during and after the Soviet– Polish War (1919–1921) many Poles identified Jews with the Bolshevik threat, blaming them for a communist conspiracy using the ­notorious term ‘żydokomuna’.  3. Lotna, movie directed by A. Wajda, screenplay by A. Wajda, W. Żukrowski.  4. Hubal, movie directed by B. Poręba, screenplay by J.J. Szczepański.   5. Even the exhibition’s designer in conversation with us referred to the image of men on horses as the image of Uhlans. Uhlans (in Polish: ułan) were originally Polish light cavalry soldiers armed with lances, sabres and pistols. After the start of the Napoleonic Wars, Uhlan formations were raised by the Duchy of Warsaw. Polish lancers serving with the French Army expeditionary corps in Spain and Germany included the Vistula Legion and the Chevaux-légers de la Garde Impériale. The traditions of the Polish Uhlans were preserved during the Kingdom of Poland. They fought against Russia, both in the November Uprising of 1830 and in the January Uprising of 1863. In the period between the world wars, the Polish cavalry was reformed, with some units retaining their Uhlan traditions.   6. Such as the assassination of SS General Franz Kutschera in 1944; operation M – underground scouts’ propaganda among Polish youth; operation Pod Arsenałem – releasing prisoners from Gestapo detention in March 1943;

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operation Góral – hijacking a bank truck with money in 1943; and o­ perations Café Club and Mitropa – armed reprisals in cafes intended only for Germans.   7. After a discussion, we decided to include reference in the chapter to Tim Buchen’s associations of the Home Army’s fighters with ‘good gangsters’, although with the comment that Joanna Wawrzyniak distances herself from it. For a Polish visitor, these urban legends bear associations with the clever Varsovians from workers’ districts (smart Gavroches, one could say), as depicted in the prose and songs of Stanisław Grzesiuk, famous, for instance, for the slogan ‘No one is more cunning than a Varsovian’ (Nie masz cwaniaka nad Warszawiaka). Our discussion confirms general points on the polysemic capacities of objects (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 111).   8. In their outline of the exhibition, the curators explicitly say that the main principle of this section is to simultaneously demonstrate the uprising as full of optimism, undertaken by free people in defence of their own dignity and freedom, and as the price they had to pay for their heroic deed: ‘W założeniu jest pokazanie Powstania Warszawskiego jako pełnego optymizmu zrywu wolnych ludzi w obronie własnej godności i wolności oraz ceny jaką przyszło Im za to zapłacić’. Powstanie Warszawskie. Muzeum Historyczne miasta stołecznego Warszawy (unpublished manuscript, 2006: 2).

Chapter 3

Forum Revising National Myths Second World War in the Dresden City Museum ‘I recommend it (this movie) to my beloved Valentine Kamila at Saint Valentine’s Day and the anniversary of the famous air raid’,1 wrote an internet surfer on a Polish online movie forum.2 He had in mind the German television drama, Dresden, directed by Roland Suso Richter, which  presents a romance between Anna Mauth, a beautiful young German nurse, and Robert Newman, a British bomber pilot, whose plane had been shot down in a raid on Magdeburg a few days before the ‘Bombing of Dresden’ by Allied bombers. Injured during parachuting, Robert looks for help in a hospital where Anna works. She finds him hiding in a cellar and a Hollywood-like love story starts (Cooke 2008), full of dramatic twists, threats and tension, with the Bombing of Dresden in the background. While the Polish internet surfer was touched by this tragic, romantic plot (Anna and Robert could not be together, he died in a plane crash after the war), in March 2006 over twelve million German viewers watched this two-part television melodrama because the love story was located in Dresden during the Allied air raids of February 1945 (Vess-Gulani 2011: 85). A few days after the movie was transmitted, Joachim Käppner wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that ‘a few years ago such a film project was still unthinkable’ (Crew 2007: 117), and Evelyn Finger claimed in Die Zeit that the film ‘contained historical misrepresentations designed to balance German guilt with German suffering’ (Vees-Gulani 2011: 89). As a counterargument to the accusation that the movie may relativise history, and prevent Germans from seeing themselves as perpetrators, it was shown that even if the melodrama concentrates on the Dresden bombardment, it makes some references to the Holocaust. A subplot with the story of Simon Goldberg and his non-Jewish wife, as well as some pictures

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of Nazi behaviour towards Jews before the destruction, or a symbolic scene in which concentration camp inmates collect corpses, were interpreted as evidence of German guilt. Crew (2007: 124–25) pointed out that the movie does not show the fate of the Jews that were killed before winter 1944/45. As a consequence, the viewer only learns about those who survived the Holocaust up to the events covered in the film. The discussions around the movie mostly focused on the place of German guilt and German suffering within contemporary German identity. Susanne Vees-Gulani (2011: 85) even claimed that the mini-series, Dresden, itself provided an outlet for the public discussions of German wartime suffering that had been taking place in Germany over the previous two decades. Even if this opinion seems exaggerated, one must agree with David Crew (2007: 129), who stated that ‘whatever we may think about the quality of this particular film, these are the pictures now in the minds of millions of Germans with which they will try to imagine the bombing of Dresden’. The melodrama, Dresden, was one of the representations of the city’s history that arose in the aftermath of the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing. All the events which took place at that time, as well as the reopening of Frauenkirche (Our Lady’s Church) which had been destroyed during the air raids in 1945, put the city of Dresden in the centre of public discussions in 2005. The historical exhibition in the Dresden City Museum (Stadtmuseum Dresden) was opened in the same year that the movie was broadcast. The way the museum displays the city’s war history resembles in some respects the way the movie presents the bombing; thus, in this introduction, we will refer to the drama in order to make our further analysis of the museum narrative more comprehensive. Of course, we agree with Wulf Kansteiner (2006: 21) that each medium is determined by different prerogatives, thus each presents memory in a different way, and we are aware that ‘docudramas’ have a very special place in German memory culture. This is because, since the 1980s, television has played a particularly important role in the process of the transformation of German memory (Huyssen 2008: 136). However, we claim that as a consequence of the growing popularity of historical exhibitions in Germany (Zacharias 1990: 120), museums are now having a similar impact on people’s social understanding of the past as movie productions have. Moreover, as Stephan Jaeger (2009: 407) pointed out, ‘any representation of the bombing of Dresden on 13 and 14 February 1945 must reflect upon questions of guilt and punishment and right and wrong’. Thus, its analysis should touch such ethical questions as: Was the bombardment of Dresden militarily justified? Can the Germans be portrayed as victims; and if yes, who was the enemy? Is there a way to create a representation of the experience of the

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air raids, which is not unsatisfying reconciliation? (ibid.). In our analysis of the exhibition in the Dresden City Museum we ask very similar questions. As Tami Davis Biddle (2008: 413), an American historian of air warfare, claims, the Bombing of Dresden ‘like many other high-profile historical events, … is encrusted with myth and misunderstanding’. Thus, we start our analysis of the exhibition in the Dresden City Museum with a short overview of political discourses on the destruction of the city. Our main aim is to examine the persistence of the myths surrounding the Bombing of Dresden, and try to establish the place this event has within German discourses of the past. We do not give a complex picture of the ‘divided memory’ (Herf 1997), and only mention some events that took place in East and West Germany after the war to show how the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past was conducted in both countries. Our main focus is on the discursive situation after German reunification. We refer to the literature on German memory discourses, which shows that German victimisation discourse has gradually developed since the war, and that after German reunification a visible shift in German memorial culture – from exposing German crimes to discussing German suffering during and after the war – may be observed (Jaeger 2009: 409). We try to establish how much this discursive context influenced the museum narrative. In the analysis of the exhibition we pay a lot of attention to the role of the city’s architecture. The significance of visual archives of Dresden is frequently stressed by the researchers of historical representations of Dresden. Susanne Vees-Gulani (2011: 87), in her analysis of the melodrama Dresden, claims, for instance, that the movie uses the pictorial history of Dresden and that, by juxtaposing pictures of the city’s architecture before and after the Bombing, ‘tells a story of mourning and loss by presenting the city first as an architectural treasure and then as a city in ruins’. The use of views of Dresden, both before and after the bombing, has the effect of decontextualising these images from the historical context in which they were taken. Tobias Ebbrecht (2007: 229), in his analysis of the melodrama Dresden, explains that ‘these emblematic images lose their ambiguous status, become icons of a new historical narrative and evoke an emotional response for the audience. The audience identifies with Germans as victims and no longer as perpetrators’. Moreover, the strategy to include archival footages of the war within a new film also has a significant influence on how the past is understood. David Crew (2007: 131) showed that the closing scene of the melodrama, in which the viewer sees a crowd of people attending the reopening of the restored Frauenkirche in Dresden in 2005, leaves no doubts that Dresden is a symbol of international reconciliation. The fact that the last picture in the exhibition refers

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to the contemporary history of Frauenkirche, presenting the retrieval of the cross which had previously decorated the cupola of the church, shows that all these architecture-related matters are also very important for an understanding of the rhetoric of the museum narrative. There are also some other similarities in the presentation of architecture in the movie and the exhibition. As in the movie, paintings, drawings and photographs of the city before and after destruction are omnipresent in the room relating twentieth-century history. As we show in this case study, they are not simply decoration but are a key to understanding the structure and role of the image of the enemy. The exhibition, too, ends with pictures of the restored Dresden Frauenkirche, and evokes the sense that a historical loss can be undone (James 2006: 248). Similarities are also visible in the way the movie and the exhibition describe ‘things Jewish’ (Zipes 1994). They both, for instance, use Victor Klemperer’s diary as a source. Indeed, the character of Simon Goldberg in the movie is modelled on the life of Klemperer (Widera 2005: 131). However, unlike the movie, the museum narrative puts the Holocaust in the centre of its story and describes city life in the 1930s and 1940s by mostly referring to the ­feelings of Jews ­experiencing social exclusion. The museum narrative shows that the intellectual and cultural development of Dresden was a result of symbiosis between the different elements of Dresden’s community, which moulded the periods at the turn of the century and the Weimar Republic, and was destroyed by Hitler’s rise to power. The Jews are presented as an integral part of Dresden’s community, which was not split along racist lines before the Nazi era. According to the exhibition, as we show, Jews were a part of the ‘We’. The separation of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans only starts with Hitler being elected. However, the main character of the narrative remains the same: it is still the collective of the city dwellers, even if divided into Jews, Nazi supporters and opponents. In contrast to the exhibitions in St Petersburg and Warsaw, in this narrative the enemy does not have a physical nature but rather a psychological one. It is presented as a hostile part of the ‘I’ of the main character. We show how such rhetorical constructions enable the Dresden exhibition to confront some stereotypes and myths concerning the bombing. Nevertheless, problems do remain, as the destruction of some myths promotes the reproduction of others. This dilemma will be analysed together with the last section of the war story, which is dedicated to the bombing itself. To clarify this problem a little, we refer once more to the melodrama, Dresden. In one of the scenes showing the city after the bombing, the viewer sees Alexander, Anna’s fiancé, who at the beginning of the movie was

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presented as an opportunist and who ‘had worked so hard to save the lives of Hitler’s soldiers’ (Crew 2007: 131), but who, after the inferno, helps a child that has been injured during the raids. David Crew asks: ‘[S]hould this scene be read simply as a sign that the bombing has transformed the Nazi-era racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) into a “community of fate” and suffering to which all Germans now belong?’ In this case study we claim that the way the exhibition in the Dresden City Museum presents the aftermath of the bombing renews the importance of this question.

Bombing of Dresden and Political Memory As Tami Davis Biddle (2008: 447) writes, ‘History and memory of the Dresden raid have been complicated by national and personal agendas, the Cold War, international politics, and popular culture’. The fact that Dresden won a particular place in the history of the Second World War means the literature on this event is very rich and diverse, both in Germany and abroad. Thus, in this overview of political memory, we concentrate only on some aspects of Dresden memory. Our main goal is to establish the link between memory of the city’s destruction with two main German discourses on German guilt and German suffering. From the end of the 1960s, debates about coming to terms with the past became a central element of German public life. Initially in West Germany, and after reunification in 1990, discussions were carried out throughout the whole country in the press, and on radio and television. Intellectuals, historians and publicists participated in them, as well as witnesses to the events and ordinary citizens who were interested in the history of their country. One of the results of these debates is that German discourses on the Second World War have become multifaceted, with numerous different fields. We will present only those aspects which seem to be the most important for understanding the analysed exhibition and which concern the Bombing of Dresden directly. We also make some minor references to local commemoration practices and discussions. This is because, as we will show later on in this analysis, the museum narrative is mostly fed by these two main, national discourses, even if it tells only the local story. To start with it is worth having a look at the way in which the bombing was mythologised and why the event gained such symbolic power. This question seems quite important, because during the Second World War many German cities were hit by Allied bombs. Although the attack on Dresden was one of the heaviest since the destruction of Hamburg in July 1943, the absolute extent of the destruction and number of casualties did

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not differ much from that in other German cities. However, it is Dresden which became a symbol of the horror of air raids and German suffering, recognised not only in Germany but often mentioned in other countries together with Auschwitz and Hiroshima (Reifenrath 1995). Thus, it seems important to look at the roots of the myths connected with the Bombing of Dresden. One of the main sources for many elements of the myths vivid to this day was the publication of an article in Goebbels’s weekly, Das Reich, on 4 March 1945, under the title ‘The Death of Dresden: A Shining Light of Resistance’.3 While stressing the destruction of cultural heritage and architecture, the author, Rudolf Sparing, kept quiet about military industries, slave labourers, barracks, and the whole terror machine (Taylor 2004: 407). Sparing used the key words that later became strongly connected with the narrative on Dresden: ‘Dresden catastrophe’, ‘mass murder’, ‘most radical annihilation’, ‘senseless destruction’, and ‘calculated plan of murder and extermination’ (Widera 2005: 116). This article and other German propaganda measures show that in the very first days after the bombing the German propaganda machine started to use Dresden as a strategic element of its rhetoric. The German historian, Thomas Widera (ibid.: 115), described these efforts in the following way: ‘Regardless of the local armaments industry, German propaganda characterized [Dresden] as a peaceful city of arts and culture of worldwide recognition, without any meaning for war production. It aimed to deny any military sense of the bombing at all’. Focusing on the destruction of cultural heritage, the assumption of the innocence of the city – and later of its dwellers – was a logical consequence. Thus, the questions of whether the attack was unprovoked, and whether Dresden became an innocent victim of acts of war, was later repeatedly discussed. Taking into account Dresden’s military industry, the large number of slave labourers in the city, its significance as a strategic crossroads, and the Dresdeners’ mass support for Hitler, his politics and his war, the city’s ‘innocence’ seems more problematic and controversial. Widera (2004: 40) even points out that from a military point of view Dresden was a legitimate target. However, the myth about the senseless attack on a cultural centre and civilians has remained one of the strongest until now. Another question was connected with the total number of dead. Goebbels claimed about quarter of a million casualties as the result of an unprovoked and unprecedented act of terror against the civilian population (Taylor 2004: 403). This propaganda was so powerful that foreign newspapers in the first weeks after the bombing also started to repeat the information of the German Propagandaministerium.

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In addition, eye witnesses participated in the process of legend making. They told of attacks by low-flying fighter planes on civilians who gathered in parks or tried to leave the city by the main roads. These stories were later picked up by German propaganda to present the Allied pilots as cold-blooded murderers of children and women (Taylor 2004: 403). It seems important to stress that when historical researches showed that these claims were untrue (Schnatz 2000; Bergander 2005: 22), many Dresdeners protested, claiming that they had themselves witnessed those attacks. Such research made them feel as if someone was trying to steal their memory (Bergander 2005: 22). The same concerned the alleged use of liquid phosphor or napalm-like chemicals in the bombing, which had never happened, but was ‘witnessed’ by many Dresdeners (ibid.). A number of factors meant that Dresden became a highly significant lieu de mémoire in Germany: the social appeal of Nazi propaganda; the engagement of eye witnesses; the fact that the decision itself to bomb Dresden was considered controversial from the very beginning (Ten Dyke 2001: 82); and that the historical city centre, considered to be a masterpiece of European Baroque architecture, was damaged. In consequence, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) also found in the ruins of Dresden important elements of a foundation myth. Even if the war damage in other German cities was also willingly used as examples of ‘the work of the capitalist West’ (Jackman 2004: 345) against good Germans, the Bombing of Dresden played a particular role in this myth-making process. As Thomas Widera writes: ‘in the totality of the destruction lay the singular chance to present the utopia of the new time in contrast to a past that had been completely wiped out and to define in their entirety the memory structures [of this event]’ (Widera, quoted in Vees-Gulani 2008: 30). GDR propaganda, therefore, portrayed the Bombing of Dresden as a senseless ‘terror attack’ by the Western Allies (Vees-Gulani 2005). Even more vicious, because as the GDR propaganda claimed, the city was only destroyed because the Western Allies knew it would become a part of East Germany (Fox 2006a) and they wanted to stop the advance of the Red Army. This particular interest of the GDR in the Dresden bombing is especially visible in the commemorative practices of the event. While the celebration of the first anniversary of the bombing in 1946 had no national resonance, the speeches of party activists simply ignored the British and American identity of the bombers and highlighted the responsibility of the Nazi regime for the destruction of the city (Margalit 2007: 126). Subsequently, together with Sovietisation, the tone of official statements changed significantly. The official celebration in 1955 was particularly important for shaping tropes – the official way of speaking about Dresden (Fox 2006a).

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In 1965, Walter Weidauer published a book titled Inferno Dresden, which began to serve as ‘a standard reference point for the East German formulaic language on the bombings’ (Fox 2006a: 139). Weidauer’s thesis that Dresden’s fate was comparable with that of Hiroshima was later willingly used by the GDR propaganda machine (Reifenrath 1995). This comparison of Dresden with Hiroshima also rooted its material representation in the memorial erected in 1964 at the Heidefriedhof Cemetery, where most of those who died during the bombing were buried. The monument was erected between the burial places of anti-fascists and of those who died during the bombing. Thus a moral equation of both groups’ destiny was suggested (Margalit 2007: 131). The memorial consists of a circle of stones bearing the names of cities destroyed by the Germans during the war, of villages burned down by the Germans and of several concentration and death camps. Yet, beside names like Rotterdam, Leningrad and Auschwitz, Dresden’s name also appears on one of the stones. Such comparisons meant that Dresden started to function in the social imagination as a specific type of ahistorical event. If it is related to history, then it is not as an element of the city’s history, but as an example of a critical experience, comparable to Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Leningrad. The Dresden bombardment possesses a deeper human significance and because of that, it is willingly used by different political groups. Not only the bombing itself but also the ruins of the damaged city gained a powerful significance. Immediately after the war, the city authorities planned to rebuild the historic city centre of Dresden, arguing that modern architecture is the ‘first step of American Colonization’ (VeesGulani 2005: 149). It was claimed that the re-creation of the original historical structure of the past would permit Germans to re-establish themselves without risking criticism from other nations (ibid.). Thus, a collection of funds for the reconstruction of important buildings of the city, and above all of the Frauenkirche, started. However, the Sovietisation of the country in the 1950s and insufficient collection of funds for the project inhibited the reconstruction of the church. Moreover, the GDR authorities made political use of the Frauenkirche ruins by giving them the status of a ‘bombing memorial’ dedicated ‘to the tens of thousands of dead, and an inspiration to the living in their struggle against imperialist barbarism and for the peace and happiness of man’ (Vees-Gulani 2005: 150). Over the years the church ruins gained a different symbolic meaning. In 1982, Dresden inhabitants lit candles on the ruins, which was a sign both of commemoration and of the wish for an alternative social organisation to the state. It was an early but very significant step towards the formation

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of the civil movement in the GDR. From that moment, the church ruins gained a double status. They were a symbol of suffering during the Second World War as well as a sign of opposition to the communist regime. After German reunification, this symbolic power of the Dresden ruins did not fade away, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who wanted to rebuild German identity based on positive moments in history, willingly referred to the ‘myth of the old Dresden’ and promoted the idea of city reconstruction. He thus tried to show that the new German nation was one ‘that had successfully overcome its past’ (Vees-Gulani 2005: 150). The reconstructed Dresden was to become material proof to that effect. People started once more to donate funds for the restoration of the church and thus finally, in 2005, the Frauenkirche was reopened. However, the political situation after reunification meant that the memory of Dresden’s destruction had to face some new discursive circumstances. Until that moment the collective identity of the GDR was based on the idea that East German society was composed of the victims of the Nazi regime and resistance fighters, while old Nazis and militarists lived mainly in West Germany. When the GDR joined West Germany and GDR citizens became citizens of the new ‘Berlin Republic’, they were confronted with interpretations of the past that were characteristic of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). West German discourses from the end of the war until the 1970s were dominated by covering up Nazi crimes and by self-victimisation. However, in the context of the 1968 student revolts, things began to change in the West, and in the late 1980s and the 1990s debates about German war crimes became mainstream. German ‘victimhood’ discourse was overshadowed by German responsibility for war, crimes and genocide. Nevertheless, in the 1990s other voices began to be heard, which stressed fear about a German future and diagnosed an approaching ‘cultural crisis’, which was perceived as a consequence of a lack of a strong collective identity (Geyer 2001: 364). There was social expectation for a return to the process of national identity construction, and to a return to the glorious past of German history before the Nazi era (Jabłkowska and Żyliński 2008: 33). This need was expressed in 1999 by Michael Naumann, the first Federal Minister for Media and Cultural Affairs, claiming that ‘West and East Germans will become aware of what it means to be German in Europe first and foremost through culture and history. We need this sort of “unifying tie” even more than others in the wake of the disastrous past’ (James 2006: 251). In his decision to support a social initiative by Dresden’s residents to rebuild the Frauenkirche, Helmut Kohl referred to these social expectations. This politicisation of

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the reconstruction of the church was not without influence on the perception of the bombing held by the inhabitants of Saxony’s capital, but also by many other Germans. To make the picture of the memory of the Bombing of Dresden in unified Germany even more complex, it is important to refer to German victimhood discourse. As Robert Moeller (2006: 27–28) claims, from the end of the war both East and West Germany ‘devoted considerable energy to … incorporating victim status into public memory’. In consequence, the problem of German wartime suffering has been present in Germany all the time. However, according to Thomas Fox (2006b: 1), since 1989 one may observe with increasing frequency the presentation of Germans as victims of the Second World War – at the hands of the Soviets, Poles and Allied air raids. Fox stresses that whenever these problems are discussed, they are presented as ‘taboo-breaking’ themes, so it seems as if talking about them before was impossible. The social power of German victim discourse was especially visible in 2004 when, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Germany, the popular German tabloid newspaper, Bild, demanded an apology for the Bombing of Dresden in February 1945. This demand provoked indignation in some circles, but it also showed how deeply this discourse is embedded in German society. Moreover, after the publication of Günter Grass’s novella Im Krebsgang in 2002, and Jörg Friedrich’s book Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, one observes the appearance of a new language within German victim discourse. This discourse is also supported by neo-Nazis, who frequently use the symbolic power of the Bombing of Dresden. In 2005, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied air raids, five thousand neo-Nazis from all over Germany marched through Dresden in the country’s largest right-wing-extremist demonstration since the end of the war. This was just another act of appropriating the commemoration of Dresden’s destruction for a political agenda. It is important to stress that members of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) often use the Bombing of Dresden in their political struggles, and as Thomas Fox (Fox 2006a) claims, their rhetoric ‘resemble(s) in some respects the discourse of the East German ruling party, the SED, which for forty years viewed Dresden as the German Hiroshima’. However, the city’s inhabitants themselves do not perceive Dresden as a neo-Nazi nest; for them it is a cultural site possessing world-class status. As Vees-Gulani (2008: 36) writes: ‘Through the re-creation of such key buildings as the Frauenkirche, which is portrayed as an international cultural icon’, Dresden emphasises its importance as a European heritage

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site. Cultural heritage is here ‘“lauded as the legacy of all mankind”, which ultimately raises Dresden above national boundaries’ (ibid.). At the end of this summary of the memory of Dresden in contemporary Germany, it is important to stress that the whole discursive situation that appeared in the country in the late 1990s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century had an influence on the exhibition we analysed. As we are going to show, the exhibition not only reflects on existing discourses, but also contests some earlier interpretations of the events, which were generated by the propaganda of the Third Reich, the GDR and the FRG.4 However, by deconstructing the assumptions of some discourses, the museum supports the key elements of another one, which is equally problematic and controversial.

Dresden City Museum Tells its Story On 30 November 2006 the permanent exhibition, which displays the history of the city, was opened to the public in the Dresden City Museum, situated right in the centre of the city in the historical Landhaus, the meeting place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Landstände (Estates) and the Landtag (Parliament). The exhibition halls presenting the history of Dresden are located over three floors according to historical period. Therefore, the visitor does not have to go through the whole museum, but is free to choose their preferred period. The part of the exhibition under our consideration, entitled ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’, is located on the third floor opposite the exhibition on the nineteenth century. The chief curator of the museum, Roland Schwarz, was unable to tell us how the exhibition had changed since the 1960s when the building was rebuilt and dedicated as a museum. He had moved to Dresden from West Germany in 1997 but only entered the museum a few times before it was closed for renovation. In spring 2004, when Schwarz joined the museum to lead on creating the permanent exhibition, there was already a team working on a new concept for the museum narrative. A team of six historians, one cartographer, designers and an architect together developed the new narrative. They worked alongside at least one curator for each exhibition room, although the room dedicated to the twentieth-century history of Dresden was exceptional with three curators: one for the First World War and Weimar Republic, the second for the Nazi period, and the third for the postwar period and the GDR. In each case the curators were supported by the chief curator, and the team had absolute freedom

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in planning the new exposition, only making two presentations to the city council to obtain funding for the project. As with the book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914– 1991 by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1996), the Dresden City Museum begins the story of the twentieth century with some information on the First World War and ends with German reunification in 1990. However, while in Hobsbawm’s conception the twentieth century is divided into three significant stages, with the first ‘The Age of Catastrophe’ covering events between 1914 and 1947, the exhibition offers a different periodisation. Here the ‘catastrophe’ starts in 1933 when Hitler came to power and ends just after February 1945 when Dresden’s Baroque city centre had been turned into ruins. It was very important for the curators to divide the rooms chronologically, so that the passages between particular periods of twentieth-century history were clearly marked. However, for many visitors, as Schwarz has claimed, these divisions are not obvious enough. For instance, the Nazi period is shown in the same room as the GDR, consequently conflating these two periods. Although the end of the war marks the beginning of the so-called ‘second dictatorship’ – the GDR – this tyranny is not presented as powerfully as the Nazi one. Furthermore, the displays relating the story of the second dictatorship are constructed with the use of different narrative rules compared to those retelling the history of the first dictatorship. The most important change is the way the image of the enemy is constructed. The story of the second dictatorship has its own, new image of the enemy, which seems to have little in common with the conception of the enemy presented in the first part of exhibition dedicated to the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. For a better understanding of the message of the exhibition it is important to look at the way it is constructed. As Suzanne MacLeod (2005: 3) writes, spatial and design features ‘create possibilities for interaction and experience’. Visitors leave the room through the same door as they enter. Consequently, after reading and experiencing the city’s twentieth-century history, the visitor returns to the same place from where the journey began, and learns that ‘the GDR joined the FRG, the old states were restored, and Dresden was once again the capital of Saxony’5 and a ‘cosmopolitan European cultural centre’.6 This feeling that the reunification of Germany enabled Dresden to regain its former status is reinforced by the fact that, when leaving this room, the visitor is once more faced with the exhibition dedicated to the nineteenth century, in which Dresden is presented as the capital of Saxony and a place of unique European significance. The spatial organisation of the exhibition, therefore, strengthens the message of the

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uniqueness of Dresden and the sense that the process of working through the past may finish positively, and that Dresden is a great example of this. The architectural dimension of the exhibition is also significant. The room of about 300 square metres is divided into two by a large central installation containing both a small cinema hall and a corridor-like exhibition space focusing on the Bombing of Dresden in February 1945, and remembrance of the event. We will call this room the ‘destruction and memory room’. This means of spatial presentation lends the bombing an exceptional status and underlines that it is the pivotal moment in the history of the city. By locating and presenting the bombing in a separate, specially arranged room, located in the middle of the exhibition, between the sections devoted to the Nazi and GDR periods, the bombing became a kind of liminal stage, to use Arnold van Gennep’s (2004) term – time between and beyond two ‘dictatorships’. The two parts of the exhibition dedicated to the Nazi and GDR periods are constructed in very similar ways. At the beginning and the end of each of these narratives there are collages of photographs on the walls, ‘little narratives’, which ‘are constituted by and are constitutive of the “grand”, or at least “larger”, narratives’ (Edwards 2001: 3). Moreover, for both parts of the exhibition only a general chronology is given by the division of the room and the passage near the ‘destruction and memory room’, thus one can move around according to the chronological construction of the exhibition into the depth of the space, or change direction and visit different levels of the narrative. The exhibition is, therefore, an example of ‘reflective space’, which as Christopher Marshall (2005) claims, does not impose the meaning but opens the visitor up to the communication and ­contemplation of the museum narrative. In the section on the Nazi dictatorship, the left-hand wall contains materials and documents with details of the city’s history, with the emphasis on economics and architecture. The right-hand wall is dedicated to political history, mostly to the history of anti-Jewish measures. On tables in the middle, the curators have positioned glass cases that contain objects belonging to the sphere of everyday life, military production and political repressions. However, this is only the general construction of the exhibition, so in fact visitors can move and interpret the story in their own manner (Figure 3.1). Original exhibits are very important elements in the construction of the narrative and are carefully selected and displayed. However, they are not treated as a ‘tool of memory and history’, which sell a ‘fixed truth that cannot be changed but can only be repeated’ (Lord 2007: 358). The way the objects are displayed suggests that they ‘make history’ (Moore 2000:

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Figure 3.1. Overview of the exhibition of the first half of the twentieth century. On the right, the outer wall of the central installation with a terminal that gives information on the election results for Dresden in 1932. In the centre, exhibits on technological and cultural progress in the Weimar Republic. On the left, aspects of architecture. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

142); they are the ‘starting points for developing microhistories’ (Lord 2007: 261). Every object supports and illustrates a complex of ideas. They are divided into documents, photographs, personal belongings and artefacts. They possess special descriptions, which present the object’s history so that they are not only illustrative of the narrative but sometimes tell a part of their history through the description. Thus, the exhibition treats objects as an ‘integral part of what we are’. They are grouped in sequences to stimulate reflection on ‘the condition of possibility of past circumstances’ (Lord 2007: 365). A different means of presentation has been applied in the central ‘destruction and memory room’. It is constructed as a narrow corridor that leads to an end wall, used as a screen against which photographs of ruins of different cities destroyed during the war are projected (Figure 3.2). The usual glass cases displaying objects are recessed into the side walls here. In this part of the exhibition, photographs of the destroyed city, things that were found in the ruins, fragments of letters and diaries written by

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Figure 3.2. View into what we called the ‘destruction and memory room’. In the background, an aerial photograph of the destruction in Rotterdam. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

eyewitnesses tell about the outcomes of the air raids in February 1945. Here we find the only hands-on items in the exhibition: more than twenty books stand on a reading table, so if visitors are interested in gaining more information about the event, they can sit down and read. It is important to point out that they offer different ways of interpreting this event. Such spatial and content organisation of the exhibition supports the perception of it as a ‘reflective’ and discursive one. The narrative should be viewed as seeking ‘truth on a journey it shares with visitors’ (Spalding 2002: 25). It means that the exhibition poses many questions and does not present one exclusive point of view, but offers many ways of decoding the historical events concerned. One may even see it as a clear illustration of the strong tendency in modern German historiography, characterised as a multipoint approach to the interpretation of historical events. This tendency is typical for German memory of the Second World War, which is shaped by different commemorative and discursive cultures. As we are going to show, not only is the exhibition rooted in these discourses but the image of the enemy it constructs also derives from them. In consequence, the exhibition does not present the enemy as inhuman Allied

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Forces, as one could expect, but offers a rather reflective approach to the problem. The image of the enemy here is closely connected with the way Germans nowadays officially perceive their role in the history of the Second World War.

Beautiful ‘Florence on the Elbe’ The image of the enemy is closely connected with the social belief that Dresden was a ‘Florence on the Elbe’. Key components of this myth are displayed in the exhibition entitled ‘The Bourgeois City – The long Nineteen Century’, that is located on the same floor as the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’. As Bill Hillier and Kali Tzortzi (2011) claim, one of the elements which impacts the shaping of the experience of a museum visit is the ‘configurational relationship’ between museum spaces. The two exhibitions are located opposite each other, and hence a review of the nineteenth-century gallery will help us to define the key elements of the image of Dresden as the capital of culture. The nineteenth-century gallery presents Dresden as the centre of the Kingdom of Saxony. Pictures, objects and texts displayed in this room form a narrative on a time of achievements in all spheres of life. Dresden’s beauty is presented here as a result of common effort by all her city dwellers. The exhibition informs of extensive transport structures that changed the appearance of the city: additional bridges over the Elbe, new railway lines and stations and an Elbe port, a new city hall, an opera house, and numerous other public buildings that were built. Visitors also learn that at the end of the nineteenth century Dresden was the fourth largest city of the German Empire with a population of more than half a million. This image of Dresden as a ‘beautiful Baroque city – birthplace of ­democratic-liberal ideas, the epitome of the beautiful city and largely successful case of the transition to modernity’7 is an important reference point for the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’. The main message of the nineteenth-century exhibition is that the city became a cultural centre of European importance thanks to the cooperation of all social and ethnic groups living in Dresden. While describing the religious rights given to both Christians and Jews at that time and the actions taken to improve the situation of workers, the curators show the values inherent in democracy, liberalism and the free market. This peaceful and happy coexistence of all social and religious groups is so important to the overall narrative that even when the exhibition provides information about the economic crises, tensions and social conflicts that emerged in the

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city in the nineteenth-century, it is counteracted by short curatorial notices explaining that ‘In “Red Saxony”, the capital, too, was a centre of social democracy’. What seems even more important is that ‘the high culture of museums, theatres and concerts houses formed the core of a new Dresden identity that bound together all classes and groups’, and ‘circles of romantic artists, writers and scholars formed the seed of a modern bourgeois culture’. The consequence of such an uncritical embedment in the myth of ‘Florence on the Elbe’ is that visitors leaving this exhibition have no doubts that values such as democracy, liberalism and the free market are crucial for the wealthy development and happiness of society. The introductory text to the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’, which presents the historical situation of Dresden at the beginning of the twentieth century, shows that all these values were still valid in Dresden after the First World War: ‘During the Weimar Republic, Dresden developed to become a city of reforms, with large-scale exhibitions on social policy, modern apartment complexes, a highly technological industrial sector and an innovative cultural life. For a long time Dresden remained a hotbed of social democracy. The liberal bourgeoisie shaped politics in the city’.8 Thus, the period after the First World War and the revolution of 1918 are presented as a time of ‘recovery’. Saxony became a Freistaat (Free State), the monarchy was abolished and free elections were introduced for all strata of society. In its cultural life, Dresden became a centre of modernist art. Moreover, as with the nineteenth-century room, the beginning of this exhibition starts with a presentation of modern technological progress showing cameras, machines, the textile industry, and scenes from the business side of city life. In the exhibition we see a poster illustrating the opening of the ‘Annual German Work Exhibition’ (Jahresschauen Deutscher Arbeit) that ‘presented the latest technological achievements’. It was the time of the extensive spread of mass culture through radio and cinema. The products of Dresden’s industrial enterprise became standard features of modern life. Moreover, the exhibition shows distinct forms of social-cultural life, from dance to the workers movement, highlighting the coexistence still present in society, even if some tensions provoked by the war are mentioned. All these achievements came under threat when the Nazis came to power in the city after the 1933 elections. The fact that Dresdeners freely voted the Nazis into power also became a turning point in the narrative and determines the ongoing plot. The narrative is now constructed to show that the bombing of the urban landscape in 1945 was only the last stage of destruction, understood as a slow parting of Dresdeners from the values that had guided them during the previous century. Just as the beauty of

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Baroque Dresden was presented as a result of the compatible coexistence of the inhabitants of the city, pictures of the ruins of Dresden symbolise the strength of their moral downfall. This mutual relationship determines the shape of the museum narrative we call the ‘Dorian Gray effect’: the Nazis’ rise to power gave birth to an enemy that had been unknown when people lived in peaceful coexistence. As a result of the division of society, the city became increasingly ugly and eventually died during the Allied bombing in February 1945. This construction of the narrative, however, raises some problems with determining the boundary between the main subject and the enemy. As we show, however, these are not firm categories, and the main character and the enemy are transformed during the course of the story.

Hero versus Enemy – The Problem of Identity The exhibition does not depict Dresdeners as a homogenous subject. Even if the curators present the beginning of the twentieth century as a time of progress, they also stress the other side of the coin: social inequalities and tensions between social groups. A display showing a dining room from a wealthy household on one side and photographs of working-class women on the other clearly indicate that these contradictions are much more serious than presented in the nineteenth-century exhibition. Postulating the idea of Dresden as a ‘democratic, progressive city’, the curators also present it as many-faceted: the lifestyles of the bourgeoisie and the working class diverged. People’s private lives and leisure activities, which remained emblems of class experience, were played out in forums that new technologies and productive capacities had created, such as the cinema and department store. The dynamics of the German economy provided increasing opportunities for women outside the home. However, the exhibition shows the differences between the experiences of working-class women and bourgeois women. Leaflets from several parties and election campaigns between 1921 and 1932 displayed in the exhibition put some light on the political diversity of the Weimar Republic, but they do not present the full political context of that time. In accordance with the dominant German discursive lines concerning the end of the Weimar Republic, the photographs from a rally with Adolf Hitler in Dresden in 1932 are annotated with the comment that the ‘enemies of democracy gained support. The NSDAP9 and KPD10 agitated the masses threatened by social descent’. This information clearly defines the enemy as a force which opposes democracy. This was vividly

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expressed via an interactive screen where visitors can find information on the election results, even at the level of individual constituencies. Here one can see in each part of the city how many Dresdeners voted for the parties of the extreme right – or opposed them. One of the core elements of democracy – free elections − helped the anti-democratic regime to come to power. The popular support of the Nazis is mentioned in the main text for this part of the exhibition, together with information which seems to be an explanation for the voters choice, stating that the ‘majority profited from the economic recovery, driven in part by war preparations, and accepted the rule of terror’.11 The Nazi regime, therefore, is seen not as an idea imposed by the state but rather as a popular and widely accepted idea among the citizens. The people had several alternatives, but the majority chose this option. A very significant symbolic confirmation of this support for Nazism by Dresdeners, and for the spreading ‘banality of evil’, is the Christmas tree decorations with a swastika and the inscription Heil Hitler on them, exhibited in one of the display cases (Figure 3.3). In addition, the children’s game ‘Bombs on England’ indicates to what extent National Socialist culture and propaganda became part of the Germans’ everyday lives. Other ordinary items displayed in the glass cases in this part of exhibition, as well

Figure 3.3. Christmas tree baubles. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

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as the photo-collage on the wall, illustrate citizens’ different involvements with Nazi activities. The exhibition, therefore, presents a variety of ordinary objects which have propaganda meaning, but does not display many pieces of typical National Socialist propaganda. In consequence, the exhibition room is not dominated by Nazi symbols, as is often found in historical ­museums. Too often curators use these materials merely as illustration, without u ­ nderstanding the influence this highly professional propaganda can still bear (cf. the Warsaw case). However, when there is so little such m ­ aterial, as in the  Dresden exhibition, visitors do not gain a c­ omprehensive insight into the rhetoric of the language of the Nazis. The presented ­materials are ­insufficient to uncover how they tried to mould the world and which m ­ echanisms were used to manipulate society. In consequence, the r­esponsibility of the ordinary inhabitants of Dresden is even more ­palpable; yet at the same time this responsibility is anonymous. Even when pictures of Dresdeners involved in a new ideology are shown, they appear without names. The exhibition shows the inhabitants as guilty of voting in favour of the Nazis, persecuting Jews, attempting to destroy Baroque Dresden by  constructing new Nazi buildings in the city, ­organising labour camps, and imprisoning communists and other opponents – but it does not accuse any particular person. This concerns not only the ‘ordinary person’, but the ‘bigwigs’ of Nazi society are also absent from the exhibition. The only one of them mentioned is the mayor, Ernst Zörner, who appears three times in minor texts. In the annotations of the local Nazi newspaper exhibited, Der Freiheitskampf, we read that on ‘the first of August 1933 the member of the NSDAP Ernst Zörner was appointed mayor’. In the chronology on anti-Jewish measures it is noted that in June 1938 he ‘terminates the contracts with all Jewish tenants of communal living and business accommodation’; and finally, the annotation on ‘degenerate art’ mentions that Zörner initiated the ‘cleansing’ of art collections. The visitor learns nothing about his biography, or about his two Nazi successors, or other Nazi Dresdeners. The fact that the exhibition presents the Dresdener as responsible, but does not accuse any particular person, may be understood if we refer to the existence of asymmetry between local and state memory in Germany (Saryusz-Wolska 2009: 9). That the exhibition does not accuse any particular person can thus be interpreted as a desire to avoid the stigma of ancestors among current city residents, who are the main audience for the museum story. According to Helmut Schmitz (2007: 4), ‘while public memory is dominated by images of Nazi crimes, private and family memory predominantly communicate experiences of suffering hardship and heroism’ (cf. Jabłkowska and Żyliński 2008: 39).

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Figure 3.4. Kurt Krause’s album presented in the corner of the room ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

The only item that gives us some insight into the wartime reality for Dresdeners, who witnessed the violence against another country’s population, is a photograph album belonging to the Wehrmacht Unteroffizier, Kurt Krause (Figure 3.4). Such albums were very popular amongst German soldiers, who took cameras with them into war and documented what they saw. Out of 273 photographs from Kurt Krause’s album, the curators have chosen 21 to illustrate a Dresdener’s experience of the war. The way the album is presented is somewhat problematic for it is initially suggested that the exhibit is Krause’s own album (‘Kriegsalbum des Unteroffiziers Kurt Krause’), while it is actually only an extract, possibly chosen after consultation with his relatives. Half of the photographs show German soldiers in different countries and situations (standing to attention, waiting for food, marching, with military cars, graves of Wehrmacht soldiers). Four of them depict material destruction, two show corpses (the first, two Polish civilians, one of them described by Krause as ‘a gunman’; the second, fallen Soviet soldiers in front of the German lines), and another photograph is of ‘arrested Poles and Jews’. Looking at the smiling faces of the German soldiers one could gain the impression that, for Krause, the war was an exciting adventure that he mostly enjoyed. The enemy does not warrant

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much attention, but his own comrades are a good subject for a picture. Krause’s personal destiny can be seen as symbolic. He took part in the war from the very beginning (the first photograph is dated 23 March 1939 in Czechoslovakia), fought on different fronts, and finally died aged 28 in September 1942, somewhere between Kharkov and Stalingrad. Krause’s album was not put in the exhibition accidentally. Usually German Heimat and city museums show exclusively what happened in the respective town, but not what men from that town did in foreign countries – especially if their deeds are nothing to be proud of. By presenting Krause’s album, the curators decided to take another path. The story that the twenty-one photographs tell us is about part of the life of a typical young Dresdener, his way to and through the war that for him ended earlier than for most of his fellow countrymen. They take us step by step along his route to destruction and death in the name of the ideology – for Führer und Vaterland. However, while the selected pictures show Krause’s slow destruction, they seem to be somewhat toned down because these images emanate hardly any cruelty. Still, without the predominance of horrific pictures of cruelly murdered men, women and children, or hanged and tortured corpses, they refer to the well-known pictures predominant in exhibitions during the 1990s devoted to the crimes of the Wehrmacht (Heer 2004; Korzeniewski 2007). As Susan Crane (2011: 106) claimed, such pictures provided ample evidence of atrocity and barbarity, and forced viewers to ‘reconsider their own relatives’ potential involvement in genocide’. Some of those images were used so frequently that they became iconic emblems of German crimes, as Susan Sontag (2003: 119) has said, ‘objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality’, which appear before the eyes of the viewer whenever the problem of the Wehrmacht’s crimes is discussed. Thus, even if the Dresden exhibition presents much genre photography, the affective impact of these pictures is not reduced. Such a toned down presentation, though, does not leave any doubts about the active involvement of Dresdeners in the war, with all its facets. It should, however, be noted that the story of Kurt Krause is a separate one. Krause grew up in Dresden, he joined the army there, but on leaving the city, his fate became unrelated to Dresden’s history. There is no information about the Krause family’s involvement in the war, or about their reaction to their son’s death. Hence, it is a story about a Dresdener, outside the city, in the war. In addition, the location of the story, presented in a corner of the room, further strengthens the perception of it as a separate entity. The album is, therefore, evidence of the participation of Dresdeners in the war, but it creates a certain distance. It is not a war ‘made by us at our home’, but somewhere at the front. In some way it moderates the

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image of the enemy. The visitor does not feel a strong bond with the victims presented in the pictures, and one gains no insight into their feelings, which has the effect of somehow tempering the image of the crime itself. Using the language of Roland Barthes (1981), these photographs are a kind of studium. They are pure historical pictures, which provide information about what happened, and not punctum which strikes and touches the viewer, which catches his eye, so that he cannot remain indifferent to what he has seen. The representation of the main character of the story seems to be even more suggestive if we compare the way non-Jewish Dresdeners and Jewish Dresdeners are presented in the exhibition. Voting for National Socialism in 1933 meant that Dresdeners chose an ideology that introduced a racist division into their community which lead to multiple fractures across the, until then, more or less cohesive society. The fate of Dresden’s Jews is presented as a subtext within the section of the narrative entitled ‘Destructions’. In the form of a chronology of discrimination, oppression and extermination of the Jewish population, the history of Dresden’s Jews under Nazi rule is presented (Figure 3.5). Along an eight-metre strip, the visitor is presented with forty-seven dates, from 31 March 1933 to 16 February 1945, containing information on the measures taken by the Nazis in Dresden and in Germany against the Jewish population. Above and beyond the chronology, historical documents are presented that illustrate the individual steps of the process of constructing and oppressing the Jews, identified by the Nazis as ‘enemies’. The chosen dates demonstrate the meticulousness and absurdity of the anti-Semitic policies. The dates also show that the bombing on 13 February saved some of Dresden’s Jews from deportation. There are also twelve short audio tracks (from 1:15 to 4:15 minutes long) read from Victor Klemperer’s diary, which document the Jews’ exclusion from society. They cover the time between 21 February 1933 and 19 February 1945, one track for each year of Nazi rule, and provide a good illustration of the atmosphere in the city at the time, as well as insight into the social conditions in Dresden from when the Nazis took over power until the bombing. Visitors who listen to all the tracks (altogether half an hour) gain a detailed impression of anti-Jewish measures, fear and desperation, hope and disgust, as well as the individual steps by which the Nazis gained support and power, and how they (ab)used it. It is also an interesting analysis of the process of constructing a scapegoat, even if the perspective is one-sided; it does not present the points of view or the feelings of those who committed the exclusion. As a consequence it is the Jews of Dresden, and not the Nazi supporters, that the visitor identifies

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Figure 3.5. Chronology of anti-Semitic measures taken by the Nazis. Photo by Zuzanna Bogumił.

with and who are, in fact, the main characters of the museum’s story in this part of the narrative. The arrival of the Nazis into power not only marks a change in the narrative, it also determines the further identity of the hero of the story. So far, the hero has been all the residents of the city. Even if the exhibition emphasised the heterogeneity of this group, it likewise emphasised their cohesiveness and the fact that their common action in the development of the city was the crucial element which connected and forged the collective subject of the story. The change in the exhibition’s narrative ceases to encourage the visitor to identify with all the city’s inhabitants. Instead, the Jews become the main subject of the story. This strong accentuation of the Jewish fate is not accidental, and is another outcome of the impact of the 1990s debates, which were dominated by such concepts as the Holocaust, or the ‘Final Solution’. This led to the marginalisation of other victims of the Nazi system, such as the Roma people and homosexuals (Jabłkowska and Żyliński 2008: 31), which is also reflected in the museum’s narration. There is very little information, for instance, on the persecution of communists and other minority groups that occurred in Dresden after the Nazis took over (cf. Ten Dyke 2001: 80).

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In contrast, in-depth presentations on the fate of the Jews, therefore, do not result from talking about microstories of marginalised groups, but stems from the important place of the Holocaust in official German memory. According to Aleida Assamann (2006: 188), this event constitutes the normative framework ‘into which all the other memories have to be integrated’. Thus, by presenting the fate of Jews, the exhibition raises the important theme of suffering, and so introduces the visitor to the room ‘Dresden as a Symbol’.

The ‘Dorian Gray Effect’ and the Problem of the Hostile ‘I’ The Bombing of Dresden is presented mainly in the ‘destruction and memory room’, located in the middle of the exhibition of the ‘twentieth century’. It significantly differs from other parts of the exhibition, not only because of its spatial distinction and different design, but because the information presented here seems to belong to another order. Even the name of this subsection, ‘Dresden as a Symbol’, suggests that it is mainly about the memory of the bombing and on how it developed in the postwar period, and not only about the history. Thus the event considered crucial for the contemporary identity of the inhabitants of the city is not presented within its complex historical context. Until this moment, the enemy’s presence is widespread, even though he is anonymous and elusive. His nature is perfectly expressed in how the symbolic embodiment of the enemy is presented, such as a bronze eagle located hidden inside the wall of the central installation in the section dedicated to the history of the extermination of the Jews (Figure 3.6). The eagle is a symbol of Nazi ideology, which informs the way in which visitors understand the past (cf. Pearce 1992: 192). Its meaning is mainly shaped by its spatial location. As Bill Hillier and Kali Tzortzi (2011: 283) write, ‘space is not just the background to human activity and experience, but an intrinsic aspect of it’. Thus it is important to analyse ‘the configurational relations between each spatial element and all, or some, others’ (ibid.: 285), because only such a complex analysis will permit comprehension of the created meaning. The eagle, with spread wings and a swastika in its claws, recessed into the wall, does not dominate the exhibition, and is invisible if one does not stand right in front of it. It therefore shapes comprehension of the nature of the enemy. However, the enemy is not simply the ideology, because ideology needs some patterns of thinking, which affect the way people act and perceive reality. The eagle in the wall, therefore, means that the enemy was something that people could not

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Figure 3.6. Bronze eagle hidden in the wall, which presents the chronology of anti-Semitic measures taken by the Nazis. Photo by Christian Ganzer.

escape from. He was not external to people, or some invader from another country, but was hidden somewhere in their psyche. He is a ‘death drive’, a slumbering Thanatos, to use psychoanalytical language, who at any time may disclose his destructive power. The enemy is the shadow within the human psyche, it is a hostile ‘I’ striving for self-destruction, which may be activated under some circumstances. As the exhibition shows, this self-destructive energy, to use Freud’s language, slowly mastered Dresden’s city dwellers from the elections in 1933. The viewer learns indirectly about its growing strength from the memoirs of Victor Klemperer, and directly, by seeing images of the changes wrought in Dresden’s cityscape. This reference to changes in urban space is a deliberate curatorial strategy. The exhibition dedicated to the nineteenth century clearly showed in the museum narrative that urban architecture constitutes ‘the collective memory of its people’, and shows what city inhabitants are and how they differ from others (Rossi 1982: 130–31). If one agrees that buildings signify ‘a complex of beliefs, ideas and values’ (Ehrentraut 1995: 216) and act as an extension of the human and social body (Mazzoleni 1993: 289), then the architectural beauty of a city may be treated as a metaphor for the condition of its inhabitants. The appearance of Dresden reflects the deeds

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and spiritual health of its residents. Hence, the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’ utilises the crimes and sins committed as a motif linking the stigma of them to the villain, which cannot then be hidden under the mask of innocence, as is well known from literature, such as the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ([1890] 1998). The difference is that in the museum narrative, crimes committed by Dresden’s residents are reflected, not on the portrait as in Wilde’s novel, but on the actual appearance of the city, which gradually became hideous. The visitor who views the chronology of the Holocaust, or the collage of pictures located at the end of the room, will see images of the city disfigured with flags and banners calling for a boycott of Jewish shops, and devoid of the synagogue, which was burned down during Kristallnacht (‘night of broken glass’) in 1938. However, unlike the Oscar Wilde novel in which the emotions of the main character are revealed at the news of the suicide of his beloved, Sybil Vane, the exhibition does not present the reactions of Nazi supporters to the changes wrought in their urban space. There is no reflection of non-Jewish Dresden citizens on the process of destruction of the beautiful ‘Florence on the Elbe’. Only the previously mentioned Christmas decoration with the words Heil Hitler testifies to the profound deterioration of the residents as a result of their total subordination to the doctrines of National Socialist ideology. Even if the way the Christmas decoration and other objects are presented stimulate thought about the past, they are still only ‘dumb objects’ (Crew and Sims 1991: 159), suffused with socialised and subjective thoughts inscribed in the labels by the curators. As Kevin Moore (2000: 142) writes, ‘we can only fully appreciate and understand material culture when we gain some awareness of its meaning, whether now or in the past, for the people who created or used it’; but this aspect of human relations to the Nazi objects is missing in the exhibition. Thus, the viewer only looks on from a distance at the process that transformed the ‘Florence on the Elbe’ into the ugly Nazi city it became. In contrast, on entering the ‘Bombing room’, while the viewer is not a direct eyewitness to the destruction of the city, the enormity of the destruction is revealed by pictures of human corpses, and the ruination of the city is presented at the beginning of the subsection, ‘Dresden as a Symbol’. It is a moment in which the narrator’s voice falls silent, and the viewer comes face to face with the photographic testimonies of the past, which clearly speak with the authenticity of their images. Similarly, as with many other war exhibitions, the Dresden City Museum uses the ‘affective impact of the massing of photographs of victims to perform, both literally and metaphorically, the scale of atrocities’ (Edwards 2010: 28).

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A characteristic feature of these images and of this entire part of the exhibition is a real absence of the enemy – as if he was buried under the rubble of the city. Neither in the remainder of this section nor in the second part of the exhibition dedicated to the GDR, will he return to the narrative. The enemy does not just disappear, but there is also no clear, moral assessment of his former activities. It is true that, until the moment of the bombing, the exhibition is strongly rooted in the discourse of guilt, and consistently fulfils its assumptions. This is primarily reflected in the fact that the city’s destruction began in 1933, and not 1945. However, the subsection ‘Dresden as a Symbol’ tells only about what has happened with the memory of the bombing after the war, and not about the entire period of National Socialism. What is more important, the representation of different interpretations of the destruction of the city, although they involve the deconstruction of certain myths connected with the bombing, does not constitute a clear assessment of what happened. It shows rather how difficult it is to talk about and personalise responsibility for the destruction of the city. Up until the bombing, non-Jewish Dresden citizens are presented as the ones responsible for the Holocaust and the slow damage to the cultural heritage of their city. However, the exhibition has a real problem with imparting any sense to the death of non-Jewish Dresdeners resulting from the bombing. Moreover, as the pictures of dead bodies are presented in the moment when exhibition loses sight of the enemy, the issue of innocence of the victims seems to be possible. The way in which pictures of the Dresden ruins are presented in the context of other war-damaged cities appears to support such an interpretation. Slide projections on the end wall of the installation show the Bombing of Dresden in association with the pictures of other destroyed cities, starting with Guernica demolished in 1937 during Spanish Civil War, and then Rotterdam, Coventry, Leningrad, Warsaw, Hamburg and other European cities bombed during the war. One may, therefore, suppose that the exhibition is trying to engage visitors with such photographs to make them think they see what others saw (Watson 2010: 215) and, in such a way, provoke empathy for the suffering of the others. In this way the exhibition confronts the myth of the ‘unprecedented tragedy’, by showing that Nazi Germany was the first to resort to carpet bombings. However, as Simon Knell (2004: 21) writes, a ‘museum collection can sit on the boundary between communities’, because different groups may interpret it in different ways. The presentation of Dresden next to other damaged cities may be read as an attempt to explain the fate of the city by applying the strategy of ‘irrational rationalization’ described by Theodor Adorno. He refers to the ‘settings

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of accounts, about guilt, as if Dresden made up for Auschwitz’ (Adorno 1986: 116). Nevertheless, such a comparison is primarily problematic because it equates Dresden with these cities as symbols of the annihilation of innocent victims. Even if the former part of the exhibition shows that the city was not innocent and in this part Dresden is presented only as a victim, the possibility of interpreting it as an example of an ‘innocent victim’ is very probable. This is because the ‘victim’ and ‘innocent victim’ discourses are closely linked to one another. Such an over-interpretation of the narrative message is, therefore, even more probable, because the exhibition uses the same means of presenting the fate of Dresden – in the context of other damaged cities that became symbols – that was used by GDR propaganda for the memorial at Heidefriedhof cemetery. Thus, the exhibition refers to the language of representation, which is used in the ‘innocent victim’ discourse. Such an interpretation may also be a result of the fact that the exhibition presents the innocent character of the suffering of one group of Dresden inhabitants – the Dresden Jews. Until the moment of the bombing, the exhibition strongly focuses on presenting the tragedy of the Jews of Dresden, by describing (starting from 1933) their feelings and emotions caused by their experience of discrimination and witnessing extermination. Such an individualised presentation of the suffering of the Dresden Jews, juxtaposed with an anonymous presentation of the Nazis, may be understood to result from the fact that, intrinsic to current German identity, the experience of the Holocaust is fundamental. Thus it is possible to talk, at least partially, about the uniqueness and innocence of the suffering sustained by the inhabitants of Dresden. However, this inability to work through Dresden’s image as an innocent victim may be explained by the presence of contradictions between the official and private/local memory in Germany, as mentioned above. Germans’ self-perception as both executioners and victims does not make the process of deconstructing the myth easier. Thus, the way the consequences of the bombing are presented shows that the exhibition’s shape, even if the curators did not want it, is influenced by the discourse on German wartime suffering.

Reconstruction of the City The second part of the exhibition, which presents the history of the GDR period, does not return to the problem of the ‘old’ enemy, but shows a slow reconstruction of both the society and the urban architecture after the war. The first exhibits concerning this matter are four images in a photo-collage

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at the beginning of the second half of the exhibition. They document the spiritual new beginning of both Jews and Christians in Dresden and the clearing of ruins in residential districts and factories. One could also interpret some objects in the section ‘Liberation and a Second Dictatorship’ as examples of this slow restoration of former values by common effort: a poster presents the Red Army as helper, bringing food supplies to the city; another shows jolly singing youngsters, calling others to join the state youth ‘Freie Deutsche Jugend’ (FDJ).12 The exhibition, therefore, indicates how society is recovering and developing, even if it acts under the conditions of the ‘second dictatorship’. The visitor again sees scientific and cultural progress, and new architecture, which is presented in a similar way as the ‘Golden Twenties’. The emphasis is also laid on the ordinary people and their struggle to return to normality. Only the objects in the centre of the room made from wartime scrap metal for civilian purposes demonstrate that there were some difficulties on the way. With the sections ‘Niches and Escapes’ and ‘Departures into the Present’, the narrative emphasises the disaffection of large parts of the population with the political and economic situation. Only when the GDR joined the FRG in October 1990 did a total rebirth become possible. This recovery is symbolically presented by the project to rebuild the famous Frauenkirche church in the city centre. With this form of presentation the curators closed the circle, and the narration tied in with the story about democracy and the functioning of society before the destruction wrought by the Nazi period. The last picture shows the retrieval of the cross, once decorating the cupola of the Frauenkirche. As with the image of the burning city at the end of the previous half of the century, this photograph is larger than the others and simultaneously marks both the end and the continuation of the history. The cross on top of the church symbolises the final accord in the history of ‘rebirth’. The church destroyed during the period of dictatorship and destruction, lying in ruins throughout the period of the GDR, was reconstructed after the two ‘dictatorships’ had ceased to exit. Dresden returned to its own life: life with values, democracy, freedom and a united society. Thus, Dresden is reborn and its residents are united, which suggests that they together constitute a collective hero in the story, the same as at the beginning. But is this so? It becomes doubtful when one notes that the exhibition omits to also present the project to reconstruct a new synagogue – a symbol of the rebirth of the Jewish community after the trauma of the war – as if their feelings and emotions were no longer relevant. This omission is even more surprising when one recalls that the destruction of the old temple was an important part of the story of the Nazi dictatorship, and the Jews were

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the main hero of that narrative. This discrepancy in this part of the exhibition suggests that, even if Dresden residents are reborn, their memory is perhaps selective. More likely, though, is that we are seeing the exhibition narrative adapting to the context and circumstances of political discourses of this specific period. In contemporary Germany, discussion about the Second World War is not possible without reference to the Holocaust. However, memory and narratives of the time of Germany’s reunification do not include these references, thus ‘things Jewish’ are silent in the part of the exhibition dedicated to the 1990s and Germany’s reunification. This inconsistency also reinforces the notion that Dresden holds a special position in German memory, and that the Bombing of Dresden is so strongly linked with German wartime suffering discourse that presentation of the city’s destruction in a new light with respect to the nuanced German ­discourse about the past is very difficult (Vees-Gulani 2011: 113).

Conclusions In contrast to the two earlier exhibits analysed above, Dresden Museum did not face the problems of modernising its exhibits and could create them in accordance with new exhibition standards, which may be understood as a ‘shift from displaying grand histories of nation states to focusing on everyday themes, experiences, and memories. Topics covered have ranged from working-class life to women’s recollections of war, fight, or expulsion, to the history of the human body, health and hygiene, and death’ (Rosemarie Beier-de Haan 2010: 187). The Dresden Museum’s exhibition presents all these topics but, as a forum museum, it also does more. It creates a platform for critical discussion about the myths relating to the Bombing of Dresden that were born in the last weeks of the war and grew up during the period of the Cold War. The narrative tells a story opposed to the myth-making that dominated the GDR decades, and invites the visitor to think about the society – its past, present and future. It is the story of the city that was destroyed because the majority of its inhabitants chose the way of a National Socialist dictatorship during the democratic elections of 1933. The price of this choice was enormous: thousands dead and a ruined city, not to mention the destruction caused in foreign countries through Dresdeners’ participation. The exhibition brings to the fore the question of people’s responsibility for their actions during the Nazi period, and in such a way that faces the problem of morality. However, it is not the same moral tone imposed by disciplinary discourse well known from temple museums. Here the morality

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means openness on ‘real people’ (Moore 2000: 142); not the heroes of ­unprecedented features, but ordinary citizens, Jews, their feelings, fears and reflections about the annihilation they were experiencing from their ordinary neighbours. Thus, the curators do not present the enemy as an external and ­dehumanised creature, as is often the case in ‘enemy discourses’, nor do they reproduce the well-known images of the enemy created by the Nazis. The real enemy of both the city and the citizens are the citizens themselves. They took decisions which caused the destruction of their own city and the deaths of many of their fellow citizens: Jews, communists and others who they ‘chose’ as the enemy. The society created these ‘imagined enemies’. As we have shown, the exhibition depicts the enemy as the hostile ‘I’, which psychologically is an inherent part of each personality and can be revealed or activated, especially under an oppressive merciless regime. In consequence, the exhibition is not stamped by fierce images of ‘the other’ (regardless of who invented them), but shows the enemy as a self-­destructing power lurking within the people. When this destructive power was activated during the election of 1933, it began to destroy what Dresdeners had built for centuries: cooperation, democracy, freedom, art, and the preservation of national treasures. All values, assumed to be ­essential components of the identity of this bourgeois city of ‘European spirit’. However, even if the exhibition demonstrates the involvement of Dresden’s inhabitants in the National Socialist movement, and confronts the myths that were generated around the Dresden bombing, it does not succeed entirely in their deconstruction. The curators opted to attempt to deconstruct the myth of the uniqueness of the Dresden bombing by displaying a mixture of photographs of cities also destroyed during the war by the action of the German Luftwaffe. This approach suggests to visitors that it was the Germans who started the annihilation of entire cities and, by juxtaposing the fate of Dresden alongside that of Rotterdam, Coventry and Leningrad, the curators are depicting all these cities as equal victims of the war, and thereby demonstrating that Dresden’s experience was not unique. However, such a presentation is problematic because, as Elizabeth Edwards (2001: 183) claims, photographs may not function as a critical voice within the museum space, ‘blurring and transgressing the traditional boundaries’, because ultimately Dresden’s inhabitants did actively participate in their own destruction. Even if most of the exhibition is embedded in the discourse of German guilt, its part in the ‘Bombing room’ is also influenced by German victim discourse, which in some ways overshadows the significance of the earlier story about the responsibility and moral guilt of Dresdeners. It is true

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that this part of the exhibition does not deny that the enemy is inherently located within the inhabitants, but it does not expand upon this concept. Instead, the enemy becomes obscured in the narrative and the focus turns to the ruins of the ‘Florence on the Elbe’, a city built over centuries by the joint effort of all its inhabitants, a city of European origin and meaning. This clear reference to the myth of Dresden as a Baroque pearl of Europe urges that the destruction of Dresden should not only be considered a loss for the city’s residents, but as a disaster for all Europeans. As Susanne Vees-Gulani (2005: 146) writes, when analysing the process of the reconstruction of cities in Germany after the war, ‘for many, to accept the destruction of such sites would have meant the loss of a national and cultural identity, as these spaces were now viewed as their very essence’. Thus, ‘by rebuilding their heritage, many Germans tried to redirect attention from a dark past to a happier one. In this way, restoration also became a symbol for the refusal to reflect on the recent past’ (ibid.). This perception is particularly visible in what Elizabeth Ten Dyke has called the ‘Dresden syndrome’ – the inhabitants do not see the city the way it is now, but merely see its Baroque buildings. As one of her respondents said: ‘They think of the myth of what the city was and they hope, dream, of what it might be again … someday’ (Ten Dyke 2001: 97). The exhibition refers to the same dream. Its continuous references to the urban architecture and discourse of ‘Dresden as Florence on the Elbe’ show that the process of contending with and resolving the Nazi past is only ostensible, and the exhibition itself is much more strongly rooted in the discourse of Germans as the victims of the war than it would seem to be at first glance.

Notes   1. ‘[P]olecam go (ten film) mojej ukochanej walentynce kamili w dniu sw.walentego i w rocznice slynnego nalotu …’  2. http://film.onet.pl/forum/drezno,0,20779,1270257,czytaj.html   3. Original title: ‘Der Tod von Dresden. Ein Leuchtfeuer des Widerstandes’.   4. Roland Schwarz, the chief curator of the exhibition of the Dresden Museum, confirmed this assumption of the exhibition during our conversation (Dresden, July 2007).   5. From the exhibition text ‘Departure into the Present’.   6. From the introductory text to the exhibition ‘Twentieth Century’.   7. From the introductory text to the exhibition ‘The Bourgeois City – The long Nineteenth Century’.   8. From the introductory text to the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’.

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 9. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly called the Nazi Party), existed in Germany from 1920 to 1945. After its success in the parliamentary elections in 1932, and Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, the Weimar Republic was transformed into the dictatorship of the Third Reich, and the Nazi Party began to control every aspect of the lives of citizens. 10. Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) was founded in the aftermath of the First World War and was repressed by the Nazis under the regime of the Third Reich. 11. From the introductory text to the exhibition ‘Democracies and Dictatorships’. 12. The ‘Free German Youth’ was the state youth organisation in the GDR.

Conclusions The three museum exhibitions that we have analysed relate a ­narrative about the destruction of their specific home city and, as we have tried to convey, each of them has constructed and used the image of the enemy differently. In conclusion, we would like to look at the three exhibitions together to extract any general principles in the creation of the image of the enemy by the museum’s narratives. We will also refer to some other significant museums dedicated to the Second World War in Russia, Poland and Germany in order to show that the role of the image of the enemy has nowadays become more important because of the global change of the paradigm of the historical narrative. Finally, we will point out some possible dangers in the image-making function by referring to the role that historical museums play in contemporary societies. As already mentioned, the first factor that influences the enemy’s image in historical exhibitions is images of the wartime enemy which were created by the propaganda of the war period and have been uncritically recreated by the exhibitions’ curators. This was obvious in the cases of Warsaw and St Petersburg, where the historical images of the political and military intruder constitute the narrative base for the construction of the enemy in the exhibition. They are revealed in the categories used in the descriptions, and in the selection of objects put on display. Historical artefacts, such as uniforms, guns and pictures of armed men – the invader – all establish the military profile of the enemy. Both these exhibitions present the enemy through the lenses of the war propaganda of the societies affected, using, for instance, in the case of Warsaw, such historical sources as anti-German posters and caricatures. Nonetheless, the Dresden example shows that it need not always be the case that the historical enemy is transferred into the exhibition. Here the image of the enemy as the military intruder is deconstructed: the Allies who destroyed the city during the Bombing of Dresden in February 1945 are not presented as the main perpetrator. Instead, the exhibition refers to the Nazis, and the German population that voted them into office in 1933. Thus, the image of the enemy in Dresden is more rooted in the contemporary memory discourses of the Second World

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War – which stress responsibility for crimes against humanity – than in the way that the wartime reality was perceived by the Germans during the period of National Socialism. However, this is not to say that the enemy’s images in the Warsaw and St Petersburg exhibitions are not embedded in the political discourses prevailing at the time the exhibitions were constructed, or are any less nuanced. On the contrary, the enemy’s image in both cases possesses some significant features of these discourses. It is, for instance, visible in the terminology used by both exhibitions: St Petersburg mostly exploits the term ‘fascists’, widely used in the time of the Cold War when the exhibition was constructed; while the post-1989 version of the Warsaw exhibition replaced the communist term ‘Hitlerists’ with the term ‘the Germans’, commonly used in Polish contemporary political history. The enemy’s image is, therefore, a mixture of the wartime images of the enemy and their subsequent modifications. Nevertheless, the political discourse seems to be more influential than the history because it has the power of upholding, altering, or even challenging the image of the historical enemy. Specific cultural stereotypes and beliefs, intertwined with political discourses, are the next factor affecting the image of the enemy. The Warsaw and St Petersburg exhibitions exploit the stereotype of the Germans as a well-organised, disciplined nation. It is visible in the hierarchical world of the enemy shown in the St Petersburg exhibition, as well as in the corridor in Warsaw with SS helmets that resemble German soldiers standing in ranks during a muster. Moreover, in the Warsaw exhibition, the way the Nazis are presented possesses many stereotypical features associated with the popular images of the German invader. Whenever Nazis are displayed, they are male, military figures, with characteristic attributes, such as the swastika. The exhibition presents neither their ordinary life nor German women and children, despite the fact that they also lived in Warsaw. In the St Petersburg and Warsaw exhibitions, it was also argued that the construction of the enemy possesses deeper cultural features. In St Petersburg these derive from the archetypical image of the enemy as representative of another species – a quasi-human creature of ferocious nature who comes from a primitive society. The St Petersburg exhibition also constructs the image of a Fascist as a Homo ferus, whose physical as well as moral features stand in total opposition to those of a member of the Soviet/Russian community. His world is negatively validated and is presented in a very simplistic way. The Warsaw exhibition is heavily embedded in Christian symbolism, and the enemy becomes associated with an eternal and anonymous evil.

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The Dresden exhibition also refers to some cultural notions connected with the figure of the enemy, but does so in a very different way. Above all, it deliberately explains the historical, psychological and sociological mechanisms of the enemy-making process, instead of repeating historical and cultural patterns. This is noticeable most of all in the way in which the exhibition presents the fate of the Jews of Dresden. It refers to them as ‘scapegoats’, showing that Dresden’s non-Jewish community found an innocent group ‘guilty’, irrationally blamed it, and unjustly punished it. The exhibition makers’ awareness of the pitfalls of simplifying the image of the enemy is also visible in the way the Nazis are presented in the exhibition. They are not stigmatised, in the sense that they are not picked out as a homogenous group to be blamed for all of Dresden’s misfortune, and neither are the Nazi authorities considered as the only culpable group. On the contrary, the mechanisms by which the society of Dresden became involved in the Nazi ideology are demonstrated. It is also worth noting that, in addition to these three elements that most significantly determine the image of the enemy in the museum narratives, there are also other influential factors still alive among witnesses’ recollections of that period. These are the memories of the circumstances that arose as a result of the enemy’s action. In the St Petersburg exhibition’s narrative they are separated from the main presentation of the enemy, and visible in the way ‘the people’s enemy’ is presented. In this case, the perpetrator’s image does not contain any human or animal elements but takes the inanimate forms of a bomb, hunger or the cold that imperilled the life of the Leningraders. In such a representation, the exhibition refers to the testimonies of survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, who often stressed that starvation and cold were the most difficult to bear and the biggest threat to their survival. These circumstances were, in their experience, the ‘real enemy’. In the cases of Warsaw and Dresden, people’s testimonies and memories of their wartime experience do not take independent form, but enrich and supplement the way that the image of the enemy is constructed. The testimonies of Warsaw survivors emphasised the omnipresence of fear. In occupied Warsaw the population were threatened with different punishments – the death penalty chief among them – for breaking the Nazi rules. In consequence, the city dwellers felt permanently insecure. Thus, the terror room can be read as the symbol of ubiquitous fear. The Dresden exhibition also recalls the atmosphere of the time in order to enable the visitor to feel the ambiance of the omnipresence of ideology in the city of that time. This is presented by means of objects from ordinary life, some of which are signs of Nazi propaganda; the best example is the Christmas

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tree decoration, which can be read as a symbol of the ‘banality of evil’, and signifies ordinary people’s espousal of the new ideology. This idea is strengthened and developed by Victor Klemperer’s diary, which transmits the ambiance of life in the city between 1933 and 1945. Finally, the inner dynamics of the exhibition narrative are important, in particular the way the relationship between the enemy and the hero of the story is constructed. Looking at the image of the enemy from this perspective, we suggest that in all three cases this relationship plays an important, even fundamental role in the overall narrative. In the case of St Petersburg, the fascist enemy is a kind of Demiurge1 thanks to whom the story of Soviet heroism can be told. Even if the enemy does not play the main role in the on-going narrative, the story could not be told if there had not been the enemy attack. Thus, the presence of the enemy affirms the validity and necessity of the story. In the case of Warsaw, the relationship between the enemy and the hero takes the forms of the struggle and the suffering, which shape the whole narrative, whereas in the Dresden case, the existence of the enemy is also fundamental, but does not appear overtly in the story’s construction, instead taking on a philosophical meaning that concerns the message of the exhibition. By recalling and presenting the ideological and social situation of Dresden in the Nazi period, the exhibition gives the visitor the opportunity to reflect upon the role and construction of the figure of the enemy. This relation between the hero of the story and the enemy seems particularly important because, as already stressed in the Introduction, the dichotomy between ‘we–other’ is a fundamental element of imagined social order. War is a time when this dichotomy reaches its extreme, and the historical exhibitions use all their abilities and existing strategies of display to present these ‘extremes’ in a most persuasive way. However, the way the museums present these extremes differs, and strongly depends on the type of narrative ‘that we like to tell ourselves about our past’ (Todorov 2001: 29). According to Tzvetan Todorov, ‘every community needs to present its past in the form of a story filled with moral judgments in which it plays a favourable role’, but as he adds, ‘the form of these stories can diverge’. He argues that globally we are now witnessing the transformation of the narrative paradigm from a story about our heroic deeds and triumph over opponents, which dominated public discourses until the middle of the twentieth century, to the ‘melancholy tale in which we play the role of victim’ (ibid.: 21). If we agree that such a global change of paradigm is taking place, then we should consider what the influence of this change will be on the role of the image of the enemy in general, and on the way it is exhibited in museums in particular.

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The Narrative Paradigm and the Image of Enemy That change of paradigm is visible in the city museums in Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg. If we were to place their narratives on an axis with one end determined by a story about the victors and the defeated, and the other end determined by a story about the victims and the perpetrators, the story of St Petersburg would be situated close to the former as a story about heroic acts. As has been demonstrated, it is most of all a story about the Soviet people fighting with the military enemy, which is nothing else but a narrative about winners and losers. However, the St Petersburg exhibition also offers another story: the Leningraders who suffered as a result of actions taken by the people’s enemy, which is a story about victims and perpetrators. In consequence, the St Petersburg exhibition would not be on the very end of this side of the axis, but close to it. The story of Dresden, on the other hand, would find its place on the opposite side of the axis, seeming to be a perfect example of a narrative about victims. Meanwhile, the Warsaw exhibition should be set between these two narrative types, perhaps somewhere near the middle of the axis, as although it is a narrative about victims, it is more in the sense of heroic sacrifice. Depending on the narration type, whether it is a story about the victors and the defeated or about the perpetrators and their victims, the image of the enemy changes and plays a different function throughout the story, which is perfectly demonstrated in the St Petersburg exhibition. The paradigm shift, however, is not just about changing the enemy’s image, but is also a move towards a dichotomy that has a strong ethical dimension. Victory meant that the victor’s despicable deeds were forgotten and no one would shed their tears over the defeated, as they were cast in a shadow at the moment of defeat. As social psychology ascertains, ‘we tend to think that those who suffer somehow deserved their fate, so their current plight is justified’ (Bilewicz and Jabłońska 2010: 35). This negative image of those who suffer may change if the culture or religion of a given community favours such a situation. In this case the suffering, which merely served as a background to heroism, becomes an important currency (Ostolski 2009: 66–67). Korean historian, Jie-Hyun Lim (2010) writes that the shift from stories about victors and defeated (i.e. expansionist megalomania) towards stories about victims and perpetrators (i.e. victimhood-type megalomania, or ‘victimhood nationalism’) means the appearance of two distinct types of new story character. Developing this line of argument, the Polish historian Jan M. Piskorski claims that on the one hand one has to do with sacrifice,

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which is often construed at the national level as meaningful and worthy of the blood shed (Piskorski 2010: 6); on the other hand, Piskorski (after Jie-Hyun Lim) recognises the victim par excellence in the sense of nameless victims that are ‘driven to slaughter, killed in the course of city pacifications and fights, dying in civil wars of religious and ethnic p ­ rovenance’ (ibid.: 7). The story’s character varies depending on which victim type is the subject of narration about suffering. In the case of the Dresden exhibition, whenever there is reference to Jews murdered by Nazis, it is a reference to nameless and unnecessary victims par excellence, whose death, however, requires understanding which cannot be found in religion or culture, and therefore it is sought in the mechanisms that govern human psyche. These mechanisms explain the total destruction of the city and the extermination of its inhabitants, whose death in the flames of the bombarded city appears to be a kind of victim par excellence. However, as we have demonstrated in the analysis of the ‘destruction and memory room’, narration is interrupted here; the narrator withdraws for a moment from the story, as if he was afraid to say directly that the victims were pointless, instinctively sensing that surely some of the visitors will see them as a kind of sacrifice. In the case of the exhibitions in St Petersburg and Warsaw there is no doubt that the victims were a sacrifice. Leningraders dying of hunger and cold in the besieged city were a sacrifice which led to the final victory in the war. The Warsaw story in turn imparts an eschatological meaning on the fight and death of the insurgents, thus putting a stop to any discussions around the purposefulness of the 1944 Uprising, and giving it a status of the highest sacrifice. Whenever there is a mention of sacrifice, the museum narratives must above all clarify beyond any doubt that the purpose was worth the price. In such instances it is important to bring out those features of the enemy which pose a threat to the values for which the sacrifice was made, otherwise it will seem that the sacrifice made no sense. In other words, regardless of the type of victimhood narrative represented at a given exhibition, it may not be detached from the presentation of the enemy. Under the old paradigm, it was possible to talk about the victors without mentioning the vanquished, but in the new one the enemy’s image determines the message of the museum narrative. To confirm our claim that in times dominated by the paradigm of victimhood narratives, the enemy’s image has a fundamental impact on the shape of ‘narratives that we like to tell ourselves about our past’, we would like to explore several examples of other ­exhibitions in Germany, Poland and Russia.

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Enemy and the Museum Narrative In Russia, the way the enemy is presented in historical and regional museums had been officially decided and defined by the USSR authorities during the 1940s. According to the Russian museum researcher, Ekaterina Melnikova, who worked on the Great Patriotic War, a decision was already made in 1943 that historical exhibitions in regional museums should show ‘the enemies’ faces in all their manifestations’ (Melnikova 2015). The instruction was so detailed that, apart from photographs of looting, destruction and violence, it recommended that such ‘vivid personal documents as the correspondence of German soldiers where some Harry Kelschsbaum receives the “order” to send shoes and some wife thanks Fritz for the skirt and asks him to send her stockings’ (Komarova in Melnikova 2015) should be exhibited. At the end of the 1940s the decision was made that every regional museum, even if there was no warfare in that region, must demonstrate ‘the region’s participation in the defence of our homeland’ (Ignat’eva in Melnikova 2015). In consequence, every regional museum in the USSR presented the Great Patriotic War, and each did so very similarly. The situation changed during Perestroyka when this vision of the past became blurred. The absence of a new coherent interpretation at state level prompted, as French researcher Sofia Tchouikina (2011: 110) writes, the historical museums to perceive their role as ‘a complement of the family and cultural memory, without explanation of what has happened’. She also stresses that the abolition of museum censorship meant that museums became more autonomous, and therefore could, if they wished, present the past in a new way. The regional museums in the Komi Republic and in Karelia in north-western Russia serve as good examples. During Soviet times, museums of the Komi Republic told stories about the heroic fight of the region’s citizens in the Great Patriotic War, just like museums in other regions of the USSR. Since the war there had been little change in the region, and the enemy was practically absent in those exhibitions. Just as in the case of the Leningrad exhibition, the enemy’s image was reduced to the role of a demiurge, which made it possible to tell the story about the fighting citizens of the Komi Republic. It helped to underscore that their fight on the ‘labour front’ was equally heroic and brave as the struggle of the citizens in besieged Leningrad or that of the soldiers in Stalingrad or Kursk. At that time, the museums of the Komi Republic were silent about the intensive development of Soviet forced labour camps, which had been built there during the Second World War (Bogumił 2012: 175–85; 2014).

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The memory of the Gulag was reactivated during Perestroyka – the first monuments were raised to commemorate the victims of repression, the first exhibitions about repression were organised in museums, and the authorities of the Komi Republic officially considered Soviet repressions as part of the region’s memory (Bogumił 2012). However, despite numerous exhibitions providing information about the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop protocol of 1939, and about deportations of the citizens of the Baltic States, as well as repressions and forced labour camps, these newly discovered facts did not alter the main line of the narrative about the Second World War, which is still about how Komi citizens helped the country. It seems that in the wake of the economic crisis experienced by the Komi Republic in late 1990s the narrative on progress and victory was a chance to confirm the image of the republic as a place that played a vital role in Russian history. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Soviet narrative is not in force everywhere in Russia, and the regional museums in Karelia are a perfect example of this. The ethnically and religiously versatile Karelia has for years been a subject of rivalry between Russia and Finland. The Finnish part of the region was annexed by the Soviet Union as a result of the Winter War of 1939–1940. This event, however, was kept silent during Soviet times, when regional museums focused on telling the story of the Great Patriotic War. The situation changed in the 1990s. Some museums were closed, and although some still present the Soviet stories there are some which changed their narratives dramatically, such as the Pitkyaranta Local Museum (Melnikova 2015). This museum not only presents the Winter War, which during the Soviet regime was a taboo theme, but as Melnikova writes, ‘although the museum was created in order to remember the Great Patriotic War, this memory is reduced here to the memory of the Russian–Finnish campaign’. What seems especially noteworthy, though, is that the images of the hero of the story and of the enemy possess very similar features. As Melnikova writes, ‘Here the Finnish side is represented and visualized alongside the Soviet side. Both are represented by photographs of ordinary people and examples of their clothing’. In the Finnish corner there is even a model of a ‘cuckoo’s nest’, from which Finnish snipers shot Soviet soldiers and which became a symbol of fear among Russian soldiers. Interestingly, both Soviet and Finnish soldiers are displayed as ordinary people. The exhibition is also characterised by the absence of Soviet heroes (Melnikova 2015). Melnikova stresses that the way this museum presents history is unique, not only for Karelia, but for the whole of Russia, in the sense that it pays so much attention to present local history, omits the national one and

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proposes a very complex and human image of the enemy. Even though the Pitkyaranta Local Museum is so unique, it confirms that in Russia where the memory of the Second World War is ‘a substitute of “culture” – a sensible field, where the most important contemporary themes are displayed’ (Gudkov 2005: 99) – it is possible to deconstruct the image of the enemy and give him a more human face, if only there is the curatorial will. It is worth considering how it was possible to present such an exhibition in a country where the memory of war is a constitutive element of the modern identity? Surely it was not related to the enemy’s ethnic identity, because as Senavskaya (2006) demonstrates, even though the image of the Finnish enemy is different from the German one, it is equally distinct and strongly formed historically. The reason may lie in the breakdown of a coherent vision of the past, which happened in the times of Perestroyka and resulted in the fact that the official memory of the Second World War is not the same as it used to be, even though the authorities have been doing their best to uphold the Soviet myth. The question about the limits of possibility of changing the enemy’s image, and the consequences of such change for the whole story, seems particularly important with reference to a martyred narrative. Historical exhibitions in Poland indicate that a story about a nation’s own suffering cannot exist without a clearly defined enemy. In Polish culture there is a historically formed image of a ‘familiar enemy’, who is an ethnic German and is characterised by a whole range of stereotypic distinctive features, such as anonymity, military nature, heartlessness, and mechanical following of military and police orders. Analysing war narratives in three Warsaw museums, Bogumił and Wawrzyniak (2009) demonstrated that all these exhibitions made references to the image of a ‘familiar enemy’. Although the exhibition ‘Faces of Totalitarianism’, presented at the History Meeting House until 2007, sought to deconstruct the image of a familiar enemy by means of oral testimonies showing, among other things, the crimes committed by Poles against Germans during the war; and thus, by presenting the enemy’s suffering, it damaged the idea of a homogenous group of innocent heroes. At the same time, however, the exhibition used the image of a ‘familiar enemy’ to represent the Soviets, and thus transferred stereotypical representations to a different group of enemies. Furthermore, the Warsaw Rising Museum, opened in 2004, uses the image of a familiar enemy, but gives it a new, predatory form that ­highlights even more the inhuman and murderous nature of the invader, at the same time making the story’s hero even more heroic and brave. Anthropologist

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Iwona Kurz (2007: 155) writes that the narrative proposed by the Warsaw Rising Museum is unambiguous and ‘reheroizes’ the past. The a-historical nature of this museum’s narrative is best evidenced with the example of the educational room for children and youth, entitled ‘The Room of the Little Insurgent’. Its walls are adorned with figures holding guns aimed at the visitors and signed ‘GERMANS’. According to Adam Ostolski (2009: 83), ‘immortalised images of the enemy place the uprising outside of historical time and in the eternal present’. Ostolski also draws attention to total subordination of the narrative to heroic ideology. It is most visible in the way the experience of the civilian population was presented, where ‘all manifestations of life … which could be interpreted as an expression of the will to survive … are presented as acts of resistance against the enemy and as an element of the insurrectionist efforts’ (Ostolski 2009: 82). He quotes the example of a shrine presented at the exhibition, bearing an inscription chiselled by someone as an act of desperation: ‘Save us Jesus, because we are dying’. However, the curators replaced the desire to be saved with the desire to fight, writing in the museum’s comments that mothers would pray at the foot of those shrines for their children who were fighting on the barricades (ibid.). The differentiation of death into heroic and unheroic, worthy and unworthy, is also visible in other parts of the museum. The exposition reconstructs the graves of four insurgents to give visitors the opportunity to honour the memory of the fallen in the course of their visit. The Wall of Memory located in the Freedom Park, which is an integral part of the museum, serves the same purpose (Żychlińska 2009: 94); whereas civilian death is merely presented to illustrate sadistic behaviour of the enemy. As Bogumił (2011b) writes, when analysing the museum’s basement where the story about ‘Germans in Warsaw’ is located, the way oppressors and victims are presented is reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade’s rhetoric of the world of superhumans and subhumans. ‘Just like Sade sketched descriptions of Masters – liberals focusing on the relish they felt when inflicting pain, the exhibition presents with the name and surname all Nazi criminals and describes in detail the crimes they perpetrated’ (Bogumił 2011b: 160). The victims on the other hand – civilians murdered in one of the Warsaw districts – remain anonymous; they form a mass, the thing that is left of the ‘sadistic orgies’ (ibid.). It is worth noting that, compared with other newly opened museums devoted to the period of Second World War, the Warsaw Rising Museum is the one that is most emphatic about valorising death and presenting ‘reality’ by way of binary oppositions. In contrast, Dulag 121 Museum opened in 2010 in the Warsaw district of Pruszków, and devoted to the

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history of a transit camp for the citizens of Warsaw after the capitulation of the Warsaw Uprising, when a decision was made to destroy the capital, does not present the past in such black and white tones. This is despite the fact that it was established in cooperation with the employees of the Warsaw Rising Museum. One of several Germans identified by their name and surname, and whose biographies appear in the exhibition, was Dr Adolf König, a representative of a medical committee in the camp. The museum’s comment reads that admittedly he was characterised in a ‘course manner’, but ‘he was kind … towards Poles. He turns a blind eye to the illegal activities of the Polish camp staff who help refugees to get out of the camp’. The enemy was thus endowed with human traits, which are absent in the narratives of the Warsaw Rising Museum and the analysed Historical Museum of Warsaw. Another example is the exhibition dedicated to the German occupation of Krakow, presented in Oskar Schindler’s Emalia Factory (a branch of the Historical Museum of Krakow). This too is a story about the struggle with the occupier. Just like in the other museums, it is dominated by the images of military parades and anonymous soldiers executing their military functions. However, this stereotypical image of a familiar enemy has also been broken here. The exhibition shows certain scenes from the life of the Krakow Germans – buying from street vendors or taking sightseeing tours in the city, opening the first German school or ‘distance weddings’ concluded by German women living in Krakow and soldiers fighting on the front. All this information, even if selective, paints a more complex picture of the occupant that forces the viewer into deeper reflection, rather than just trusting the curator that the enemy is a ‘beast’ and not a human being (Bogumił 2011b: 164). The story about the enemy’s everyday life at Oskar Schindler’s Factory is the outcome of placing the exhibition in a different setting of public debates that were held in Poland after 1989. The exhibitions of the Warsaw Historical Museum and the Warsaw Rising Museum seek to critically analyse communism and deconstruct the myths established in that period, while the museum in the Oskar Schindler’s Factory draws on the debates devoted to changes in relationships between European states, and strives to develop a new European identity (Bogumił 2011b: 166). It is also worth noting that one of the most spectacular museum projects in Poland nowadays, the Second World War Museum, which is under development in Gdansk, dissociates itself from the method of presentation offered by the Warsaw Rising Museum and plans to represent various East-Central European perspectives of the war (Machcewicz and Pac 2010). However, this does not mean that the idea of presenting Polish

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heroism has been totally abandoned. It is declared that the new museum is going to be a story about ‘heroes and victims’ because this is in line with public expectations. Its director Paweł Machcewicz points out that representative social polls carried out for the museum revealed that as many as 93 per cent of the respondents believed that Poles experienced a lot of suffering during the war, but it is not suffering that is the reason to be proud of (only 7.5 per cent of respondents), but ‘bravery, as well as courage and heroism’ (ibid.: 80–81). The study confirmed that future visitors to this museum consider some stories about the past more important than others, and they have very specific expectations of the presented image of victims. It seems that in the case of the enemy’s image, the refusal to break the existing cultural patterns and taboos is even stronger – even more so if the enemy is the main character of a story. The problems with reception are best shown in the way Germany tries to settle with the past; for example the famous exhibition by Hannes Heer ‘The War of Extermination: The Crimes of the Wehrmacht in 1941 to 1944’, which was presented in 1995 by the Hamburg Institute of Social Research. That exhibition paved the way towards a cultural change the results of which we can see today. The limited space of the exhibition that deconstructed the positive myth of the Wehrmacht, according to which it was involved in an honorary fight (as opposed to the SS), presented pictures showing ‘all the horror of the twentieth century: holes filled with corpses, people hanged, people waiting to be shot, people being brought to execution or tormented, humiliated – and beside them, the self-satisfied, smiling executioners’ (Madievski 2003: 247). Some of the boards were arranged ‘to form an Iron Cross, the symbol of the German armed forces, and the visitors were also walking on an Iron Cross painted on the floor, which was deliberately provocative, considering the respect for this military decoration in the German society’ (Korzeniewski 2007: 71). The exhibition had a strong impact on German discourses because the atrocities of the Wehrmacht became widely accepted as a known fact. However, direct reactions of visitors varied enormously, from feelings of trauma to personal relief among veterans, who finally saw the possibility to talk about deeds they had witnessed or committed. Many visitors got motivated to learn more about the history of the ‘war in the East’ and the role their family members had played within it in general (Kirchberg 2012: 175). The exhibition was closed in 1999. Historical unreliability was stated as the official reason behind the closing, because it turned out that some of the crimes were in fact committed by the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal

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Affairs of the Soviet Union, the ‘Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del’) (Korzeniewski 2007: 72). However, the basic dispute around the exhibition and hence the main reason behind its closure was not those few photographs or the fact that Wehrmacht war crimes have not taken place, which is indisputable, but it was a matter of the extent of guilt and responsibility for these crimes (Assmann 2005; Korzeniewski 2007: 73–80) – in other words, of the ‘image of the enemy’. By shifting the blame from generals to ordinary soldiers the exhibition of Hannes Heer ‘visually extended the group of perpetrators’. As Samson Madievski points out, ‘More than 1.7 million men who could have served in the Wehrmacht now live in Germany. And the ones who passed on to a better world have left millions of widows, children, grandchildren, other relatives’. Those who had been considered victims of war because of the Soviet war crimes and the Allied bombings were called guilty of the most horrific atrocities by the exhibition. The message was all the more painful due to the fact that the majority of the photographs presented crimes committed in Belarus and Ukraine. According to Korzeniewski (2007: 78), ‘it was an attempt at touching those aspects of the memories which comprised the German trauma of the war on the Eastern Front’. In the years 2001–2004, a new improved version of the exhibition was presented, better contextualised and above all fitted with written sources. Madievski (2003: 247) writes that it even became a ‘chain of texts’; the guilt was again put on the generals as the ones who were able to stop Hitler. That is why Hannes Heer (2004) accused the new exhibition of the ‘disappearance of the perpetrators’. Still, both exhibitions were symptoms of new trends in presenting German history and strongly divided German society. Commenting on this, Aleida Assmann (2005: 127) writes that the stories ‘handed down in the German families will not disappear just because we deem them politically incorrect’. If we are to influence individual memories, it should be done through critical display of historical sources rather than by raising emotions in public. The exhibition of the Dresden Historical Museum that we have analysed in this book is very much in line with such a historical, critical practice of display. The Berlin ‘Topography of Terror’, opened in 2010, is another perfect example. It is a museum of National Socialism in Germany, of ‘its organizational forms, methods of operation, elites and victims; a museum of atrocities and extermination, but also a museum of the “national community” which carried out or tolerated those atrocities, responded enthusiastically or was happy to endure’ (Andreas Kilb 2010, quoted in Mazur 2011: 217). Even though it is a ‘museum of perpetrators’, located in the

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very place where the Gestapo headquarters stood, in the vicinity of the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the exhibition ‘shows a ­picture of the past that is scientifically correct, but all in all surprisingly cool, even if the pictures and documents speak of terrible things’ (ibid.: 231). Just as in the case of the Dresden exhibition, ‘Topography of Terror’ tells about the enthusiastic attitude of German society vis-à-vis the regime, showing ‘fascination with the concept of “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft)’ (Mazur 2011: 225). The majority of pictures show anonymous ‘enthusiastic crowds cheering for Hitler’, or a gathering of people participating in public humiliation of Jews, and the sheer number of direct perpetrators is estimated to be around two hundred thousand (ibid.: 228). Just like at the Dresden exhibition, in Berlin the enemy seems to be assuming the form of the ‘hostile I’ which sits in the human psyche and is ‘the dark side of personality, a dormant Thanatos which may manifest its destructive power at any time’. Since the enemy is present in people after all, it can be harnessed; an individual can feel remorse and regret, and thus stop the dormant destructive power. It is evidenced by the postwar biographies of some Nazi war criminals presented at the Topography of Terror exhibition. It shows Theodor Saevecke, responsible for murdering Italian prisoners, who then made a career in the criminal police after the war; Reinhard Gehlen who led the German Army’s military intelligence on the Eastern Front, and afterwards developed the West German intelligence services; as well as numerous other ‘minor criminals who often became high-ranking officials in the West German state’ (Mazur 2011: 227). However, there is also another, competing memory pattern. The strong dichotomous division between perpetrators and their victims which came to light at the first exhibition about Wehrmacht crimes is weakened by the recent development of the framework that allows to talk about German war suffering – not in small Heimat museums, but in the most prestigious public space. This situation took place in 2006 when ‘two exhibitions devoted to escape and expulsions existed opposite each other for seventeen days at Unter den Linden’, the main street of Berlin (Assmann 2007: 10–11). The first one, entitled ‘Escape, Expulsions, Integration’, was compiled by the House of History of the German Federal Republic in Bonn, while the other one, entitled ‘Forced Ways – Escape and Expulsion in the 20th-­century Europe’, was by the Foundation Centre against Expulsions. Both these exhibitions sought to present the expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe after the Second World War in a broader

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European context, painting a vision of the twentieth century as the ‘century of expulsions’ (Weger 2007: 37). Both exhibitions also showed the shared responsibility of Germans for expulsions. However, they were significantly different in terms of their composition (Assmann 2007: 11). In spite of various allegations – addressed in particular at the exhibition which had been prepared by Erika Steinbach from the Foundation against Expulsions – both exhibitions made a contribution towards broadening the interpretation of the past. They also made it necessary to answer such questions as ‘Is it about complementing or revising the picture of the past?’ and ‘Should the collapse of civilization, which the Holocaust constitutes, give way to expulsions as a distinctive feature of the twentieth century?’ (ibid.). These questions do not only apply to the German memory and the way of presenting war in German historical museums. The expositions in the city museums of Dresden, Warsaw and St Petersburg, as well as the quoted examples of other museums and exhibitions in Russia, Poland and Germany, show that stories about own sufferings have been coming to the fore in each of these countries in a more and more distinct form, while at the same time there are declarations of will to create a joint European memory of war. In this context, the question arises of whether it is possible to reconcile the paradigm of a martyred narrative with a pan-European empathic story about sufferings experienced by individuals and ethnic groups, and while the enemy is being presented in a non-­reductionist and non-stereotypical way? These questions seem to be important, because as Sharon Macdonald noted, ‘some pasts loom especially large in both official and popular memory within Europe’, and ‘World War Two is perhaps the largest and loomiest’ (Macdonald 2013: 217), albeit more difficult to display. The image of the enemy is not easy do deconstruct, although the Dresden exhibition or the quoted example of the museum in Karelia show that it is possible. Museums are institutions which can help to transform the existing social rules (Bennett 1998: 30), if only the people who work there make such an attempt. Thus, in the final part of these conclusions we want to pay more attention to the way the image of the past depends on the way the curators decide to present the narrative; whether they decide to tell a story by adopting the paradigm of the museum as ‘temple’ or as ‘forum’.

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Temple, Forum and Curatorial Power In our case studies we have argued that the museums in Warsaw and St Petersburg, by imposing one-sided interpretations which reflect the dominant historical and political discourses, form what can be deemed as contemporary national temples. The St Petersburg exhibition builds its narrative around the problem of a community of struggle and mutual aid, which transforms the exhibition into ‘The Temple of the Heroic Community’. Even though the exhibition was constructed in the 1960s, the cultural pattern about the victorious heroes still seems to be current and widely exploited in contemporary Russia. Similarly, the Warsaw exhibition becomes the ‘Temple of Romantic Martyrdom’, in which Polish suffering and struggle – or rather Polish ‘images’ of the struggle and the suffering – come to fulfilment. The Dresden case, on the contrary, offers a different approach. While drawing on the general framework for interpretation, it gives visitors a chance to construct their own understanding of the event. However, the Dresden exhibition is also rooted in historical and political discourses, and reflects the diversity and contradictions that are present in contemporary German society. The fact that the museum can be either a temple or a forum determines its social role as well as the significance that a given museum confers to the image of the enemy and to the qualities of the main character. The Warsaw and St Petersburg exhibitions – as temples – have many common features in the way that they construct their narratives. They concentrate more on national history than on the local one, and thus the cities become the scenes of national dramas. These exhibitions present real dramas about brave heroes who, due to their high moral values, are able to confront the enemy who in turn is perceived as the ‘incarnation of evil’. Both narratives have very clear plots which come to fulfilment in the last rooms of both exhibitions. The Warsaw story finishes as pure sacrifice, and that of St Petersburg as total victory. Even if the stories have completely different endings, they both affirm the immortality of the community: the former in the spiritual world, the latter in the secular one. Both exhibitions are based mainly on national memory, and only use history and historical artefacts to validate their one-dimensional story. They may be interpreted as promoting ‘an uncritical patriotism which numbs our ability to understand and communicate with other nations’ (Walsh 1992: 1). The fact that the temple exhibitions pay so much attention to the creation of an image of enemy as inhuman and wild, provokes the question: what would have happened if we gave a voice to the enemy or showed

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him in a humane way? The Dresden exhibition seems to try to provide an answer. If we permit the enemy to express his point of view, we can begin to deconstruct his image. Giving a voice to the extreme version of the other is to weaken his inhuman status and include him within the community of human beings. Such a situation is problematic for temples because they argue that the historical enemy was a ‘true’ enemy, therefore they cannot present the enemy in a different way. Such argumentation comes from the temple-makers’ assumption that there is only one historical truth and this is represented in the exhibition. The second problem concerns the fact that the deconstruction of the image of the enemy weakens the existing dichotomy and, in consequence, the hero of a story also becomes less heroic and less influential. In turn this could mean that the visitor does not necessarily identify with the hero as the curators want him to, but with the other. In consequence this could bring an unwelcome relativity to the past, which would be a danger to the temple’s very existence. Such variability stands in conflict with the temple; it threatens both its fundamental assumption and its role as an institution of power, having the right to validate a certain interpretation. In case of temple museums, refusal to share the voice not only concerns the enemy, but any ‘other’, and the Warsaw exhibition’s presentation of Jewish history in a small box serves as a good example. In consequence, the excluded groups, whose voice is concealed from the exhibition, and for whom the applied cultural patterns are unintelligible, might not treat the narrative as ‘ours’, but as ‘theirs’. Moreover, if visitors are embedded in another discourse they may even receive the impression that the exhibition is ‘against them’.2 In consequence, the temple museum’s exhibition seems to be a space for an ‘own better self ’, which does not invite others to the dialogue and might even give rise to misunderstanding and new conflicts. Looking at the influence of the exhibition from this perspective, the forum museums appear to be in a better position. Even if researchers have shown problems associated with these institutions, they at least try to be inclusive and so not exclude other groups, but outline a wider context and present diverse discourses. Thus, visitors can look at a problem from different perspectives and become acquainted with various, sometimes contradictory, opinions. In the ideal situation, the forum museum is not forcing him or her to identify with a certain group, but invites them to understand the motivations of different people. It does not necessarily evoke empathy for the perpetrators of mass crimes, but rather encourages more general reflections on ‘the banality of evil’ and the diversity of the processes that can influence its appearance. This is the case with the Dresden exhibition,

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which shows that in certain historical circumstances nearly anyone is capable of committing crimes against the other. The exhibition narrative is, therefore, not about great and tragic national wartime events, but about ordinary people’s decisions, which are the reality of war and which can lead to the real inferno. The exhibition unveils the difficult truth that behind the wrongdoing stands no animal monster, but the most ordinary human being. However, such a conclusion brings us to another reflection that, in the face of a ubiquitous ‘banality of evil’, there is not much of the ‘banality of good’; the acts of kindness, support and help from ordinary people, which we usually consider normal for human nature, and which are a core message of the temple museums, largely disappear. The forum museum believes in the visitor and assumes her or his willingness to use a hermeneutic posture in forming judgement. However, this strong belief in the visitor, which is a significant advantage of the exhibition, at the same time seems to be the most problematic element of a forum-type museum. Its narrative is constructed in such a way that it supports the construction of the reflective society. However, this process is possible only if the visitor perceives the exhibition as a reflective space. As César Graña (1971: 107) argues, we in fact do not know how the visitor perceives the exhibition, defines the role of the museum and understands his/her own relationship to it. This is a fundamental question because the visitor can refuse to make the reflective step towards the exhibition and only look for those elements which would confirm his or her judgements. This problem is apparent in one part of the Dresden exhibition which leaves a lot of freedom for the interpretation of a very controversial event. The curators tried hard to destroy the myths surrounding the Bombing of Dresden and, by doing so, to change German discourse. However, while destroying the myth about an ‘unprecedented attack’ they unwittingly fostered an interpretation that would follow the German victimisation discourse. The message of the chapter ‘Dresden as a Symbol’ could therefore be read as: ‘Germans were victims of the war – like everyone else’. Thus, it is the visitor who decides how she or he will read the exhibition. In c­ onsequence, as with the temple, the forum can be a space of conflict. However, the significant difference between the forum and the temple is that in the case of the forum the conflicts concern different ways of reading the exhibition, but do not extend outside the exhibition space as can happen in the case of the temple. The forum opens its space to diverse discourses and so resigns from its role as the institution of one dominant power. The temple, on the other hand, guards and nurses its significance as

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an institution of objective truth, and thus any kind of opposite perception can endanger its very foundations. Furthermore, as temples are generally embedded in one concrete discourse (mostly the dominant state one), an attack on the museum’s interpretation might be understood as disagreement with the national history (or critique of the national fate). Thus, the dispute might take a wider form and encroach beyond the museum space, because the various sides understand the situation differently and have diverse assumptions about the role of the museum. However, we want to emphasise that through our analysis we do not find that the museums, which show acts of national bravery and drama, necessarily stimulate conflicts. Any problem lies rather with the way a story is constructed and presented, as well as the force of meaning which is given to the narrative. It is important to stress once more that the reading of the exhibition not only depends on the curator’s aims, but also on the visitors’ interpretations of a given historical event, as well as on their understanding of the museum as a public institution. Thus we believe that certain representations of the past may, more than others, better support the construction of reflective and democratic societies, as well as promote common understanding. History shows that some representations can be problematic and lead to conflict, so in creating a new historical exhibition it seems important to appraise the influence of each factor. The way to success lies in an approach which supports understanding rather than promotes conflict. The problem of identifying and realising such a way of representation seems especially important at a time when historical exhibitions are mushrooming. This is particularly the case in Central and Eastern Europe against the background of an unprecedented process of rewriting the memory of the Second World War. In fact we stand at the crossroads where new significances are being given to the events of the Second World War. Herman Lübbe (1991: 7–29) may be still right that our present is much more linked with the past than ever was the case before, and that therefore we are the witnesses to an unprecedented process of musealisation. As we do not know where this process will lead us, museum displays, which present the history of the war, should be constructed more carefully than ever before. This is because cultural institutions are unable ‘to resolve conflicts that have existed for generations’ (Yeingst and Bunch 1997: 154) and because, as our research shows, images of the enemy, which are an essential element of wartime narratives, may still have a vivid impact on visitors’ imaginations.

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Notes   1. In the philosophy of Plato, the term ‘Demiurge’ meant the creator of the physical universe. Colloquially, the term is used as a synonym for artisan, craftsman or producer, but is also a ‘creative force’.  2. This was the impression that the Russian participants of our project had when they visited the Warsaw Rising Museum.

Appendix

Museum Descriptions The Second World War and City History Most of Dresden’s museums are dedicated to art, the sciences and the ancient past of the city. Only four institutions could, therefore, be considered to be relevant for our research: the Military Historical Museum of the Bundeswehr, the Deutsches Hygienemuseum, the Hausmannturm and the Dresden City Museum. Knowing of the Military Historical Museum of the Bundeswehr, we expected to find extensive material in this museum. It is thematically orientated on war and it is ‘on the spot’. But when we visited the city in July 2007 the museum was under reconstruction, and only a small interim exhibition was open to visitors. We were informed by the museum’s curators about plans for a future permanent exhibition (that was opened on 14 October 2011), but could not include this museum in our study since there was no current exhibition on our topic. The Deutsches Hygienemuseum exclusively presents short-term exhibitions. At the time of our research there was nothing there connected with our theme. The exhibition ‘Mythos Dresden’ was unfortunately closed in December 2006, some six months prior to our arrival. In the ancient Hausmannturm, a part of the famous Dresden Castle, there was an exhibition on the topic of the bombing comprising text and photographs. The installation was merely a booklet one could walk into: many long texts with illustrations. The only museum that dealt with the Second World War and the Bombing of Dresden was the Dresden City Museum. Left without a choice, we decided to include it in our project, but it was not only the lack of choice that led us to the decision to conduct our research in this museum. It is well visited, and a central attraction for tourists and young people of school age in Dresden. The February bombing is included in the

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general history of the city and, while the exhibition in the Hausmannturm was not intended to last long, the Dresden City Museum presented a permanent museum exhibition. The selection of a Warsaw museum for further analysis was predetermined by the decision we made in Dresden to focus on city historical museums. The Historical Museum of Warsaw contains the permanent exhibition ‘Seven Centuries of Warsaw’, which presents the history of the city dating from the Middle Ages. Each room shows a different epoch. We concentrated only on the exhibition on the third floor, dedicated to the Second World War. Nonetheless, to gain more substantial background on the city’s commemorative culture, we visited two other museums. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened in 2004 during the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. It was the first narrative historical museum in Poland and still has a huge impact on newly established museums. Various multimedia and interactive communication techniques are used to present the story of the Polish insurgents. In the museum we had the opportunity to discuss its content with the vice-director, Dariusz Gawin, and an employee, Hanna Nowak-Radziejowska. We also suspected that some commemorative aspects of the city’s history might be displayed in the Museum of the Polish Army. There we found traditional displays of military items, with the Second World War presented in a few rooms: September 1939, the Polish Underground Military Formation, the Home Army, and the Polish Soldiers on the Fronts of War, together with some information about military events in Warsaw. Unfortunately, the Independence Museum, which has two branches referring to the period of German occupation of Warsaw – the Museum of the ‘Pawiak’ Prison and the Museum of Struggle and Martyrology in Aleja Szucha – was closed for renovations during the period of our research. We knew in advance that in St Petersburg there existed a ‘city museums network’ dedicated to the Second World War, so we decided to visit all of the museums to get as much information as possible and to obtain a historical and cultural context. The first museum visited was the museum of The Siege and Defence of Leningrad. It was the first museum in the city on this topic, opened at the end of the war. But following the repression against the Leningrad Party Committee it was closed for over fifty years. In the 1990s, all the objects that had previously belonged to it were brought together again, and it was finally reopened in 2003. The museum shows not only the fighting but also the daily life of people in a city that was cut off from the rest of the country. Besides the personal items, documents that illustrate the fate of the citizens and new documents concerning the

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‘dark’ side of the Leningrad Blockade are also presented. Although the museum was interesting, we wanted to find an exhibition comparable, in terms of the historical themes presented, to the Warsaw and Dresden city museums. The second museum we visited was the Historical Memorial Museum Smol’nyy. In this museum we saw a small exhibition, ‘Smol’nyy: Days of Siege’. The exhibition had no special display place of its own; it was arranged in a corridor on the second floor near a memorial to Lenin, and shows some documents and items explaining the role of Smol’nyy as the administrative centre during the siege, and the role of the city’s leaders. We also decided to see the memorial complex, the Monument to Defenders of Leningrad, that is a branch of the State City Museum of St Petersburg. The monument was opened in 1975 as the place of memorial to defenders of the city, and consists of ‘surface’ and ‘underground’ complexes. The surface complex includes a monument and an eternal flame, while the underground complex resembles a mausoleum, with glass cases in the form of tombs and displays showing the different heroic stages of Leningrad’s struggle. The nine hundred lamps on the wall of the memorial room symbolise the nine hundred days of the city’s heroism in resisting the enemy. Finally, we visited the branch of the State Museum of St Petersburg in the Rumyantsev Palace, where exhibitions on the Soviet period of the city’s history are presented. The exhibition about the siege comprises twelve rooms, and presents the fight at the front as well as the city’s struggle during the war. We decided to choose this exhibition for our analysis as it presents the siege as a part of the city’s wider history. We also visited another branch that is situated in Peter and Paul Fortress to see exhibitions about city life before the revolution of 1917 in order to gain a better understanding of the overall concept of the museum, and of the context of the war exhibition.

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Notes on contributors Zuzanna Bogumił is Assistant Professor at the Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education in Warsaw and a member of the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Her recent book is Gulag Memory (Universitas, 2012). Joanna Wawrzyniak is Head of the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Among her recent books is the co-authored oral history documentary, Rebels: The 1970s and 1980s in Poland (Świat Książki, 2011). Tim Buchen is a research fellow at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His PhD dissertation on anti-Semitism in Habsburg Galicia won the Immanuel Kant Award from the German Federal Representative for Culture and Media (2012). Christian Ganzer is a PhD student at Leipzig University, Germany. His publications include a monograph on the Museum of the History of the Zaporozhian Cossackdom in the Ukraine (ibidem-Verlag, 2005). Maria Senina is a historian at the Museum of the Political History of Russia in St. Petersburg. Her main academic interest is the history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Index Terms that occur extremely often, like St Petersburg (Leningrad), Dresden, Warsaw, enemy, exhibition, museum, the Second World War, the Great Patriotic War, the German-Soviet war, and the names of the museums that we have analysed are not included in this index

Adamovich, Ales’, 33. See Daniil Granin Adorno, Theodor, 126, 127 air raid, 27, 33, 38, 81, 88, 99, 100, 101, 104, 108, 113. See also bombardment See also Dresden (television drama) Aleja Szucha, 63, 154. See also the Museum of Struggle and Martyrology in Aleja Szucha Anderson, Benedict, 3 Anti-Semitism 70, 97 architecture, 2, 24, 33, 53, 64, 79, 88, 101, 102, 104–106, 111, 124, 127, 128, 131 archive: documents, 74; materials, 35; visual, 101 army: German army, 27, 38, 44, 60n16, 95 Red Army, 2, 39, 60n, 64, 77, 79, 105, 128 See also Home Army See also Wehrmacht artefact, 3, 11, 20, 35, 39, 76, 80, 81, 112, 133, 148 Assmann, Aleida, 123, 147 Auschwitz, 41, 42, 104, 106, 127 See also concentration camp See also death camp Austria, 65 Bach-Zelewski, Erich von dem, 64 Baltic States, 35, 36, 140 Barbarossa Plan, 41 Barthes, Roland, 121 Beck, Ulrich, 9 belief, 7, 10, 13, 114, 124, 134 Benedyktowicz, Zbigniew, 13 Bennett, Jill, 76 Bennett, Tony, 3, 11, 147 Berggol’ts, Ol’ga, 52, 60n22 Berlin, 146, 147 Berlin Wall, 4, 9 Białoszewski, Miron, 67 blockade. See Leningrad Blockade See also Siege of Leningrad

Blockade Museum in St Petersburg/ The Siege and Defence of Leningrad Museum, 28, 34, 154 Blokadniki, 34, 48, 52, 54 Błoński, Jan, 72, 73 body, 50, 56, 76, 97, 124, 129 Bogdanova, Irina, 52 Bogumił, Zuzanna, 141, 142. See also Joanna Wawrzyniak bomb, 28, 46, 135 bombardment/ bombing, xii, 2, 17, 38, 46, 99, 102, 103, 104, 106 the Bombing of Dresden, 19, 23, 25n11, 99, 100–106, 108, 111, 116, 121, 123, 125–127, 129–30, 133, 150, 153, 154 See also air raid See also Dresden (television drama) bombers: Allied bombers, 99, 103, 105 Brandt, Willy, 73 Bratny, Roman, 67 Budapest, 62, 76 burzhuyka (tiny stove), 28, 49, 52 Bystroń, Jan Stanisław, 13, 47 Cameron, Duncan, 5, 24n2, 95 Cameron, Fiona, 6, 9 catastrophe, 2, 19, 36, 89, 104, 110 Cathedral St Isaac (in St Petersburg), 50, 53 catholic symbols, 23, 63, 69, 89, 91, 93, 97 See also Jesus Christ See also symbol Chopin, Fryderyk, 84 Christ of Nations, 65, 91 Cichy, Michał, 73 civil disobedience, 63, 86 Clapperton, James, 48, 58 cold, 2, 28, 33, 38, 40, 48, 49, 105, 135, 138 Cold War, 9, 32, 55, 103, 129, 134 coming to terms with the past, 101, 103 commemoration, xii, 2, 3, 4, 17, 36, 57, 67, 68, 71, 103, 106, 108

172

Communism, 3, 5, 65, 143 Communist bloc, 62 Communist ideology/propaganda, 2, 3, 35, 75 Communist Party of Germany, 132n10 Communist Party of Poland (Polish Workers’ Party, Polish United Workers’ Party), 65, 66, 71 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 31, 35 Communists, 31, 65–67, 71, 77, 78, 118, 122, 130 community, 9, 10, 12, 13, 19, 23, 24, 34, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 62, 70, 76, 89, 96, 102, 121, 128, 134, 135, 136, 137, 146, 148, 149 heroic community, 27–61, 148 concentration camp, 41, 73, 78, 100, 106 See also Auschwitz See also death camp conflict, 2, 4, 9, 31, 40, 43, 97, 114, 149, 150, 151, 152 conflict of memory, 31, 68 Conrad, Joseph, 65 Coventry, 126, 130 Crane, Susan, 120 death camp 70, 106 See also Auschwitz See also concentration camp democracy, 3, 66, 114, 115, 116, 117, 128, 130 Deutsches Hygienemuseum, 153 dictatorship, 23, 68, 109,110, 111,114, 115, 125, 128, 129, 131n8, 132n9 discourse, 3, 7–9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 29, 32, 33, 95. See also Michel Foucault German victimization/ victim/ victimhood discourse, 101, 107, 108, 130, 150 memory discourse, 2, 3, 7, 63, 69 Polish discourses, 66, 69, 73, 79, 80 political discourse, 11, 16, 17, 22, 53, 54–56, 57, 58, 69 romantic discourse, 63, 65, 80, 95 Dobrotvorskiy, N., 31, 32. See A. Shishkin drawings (on historical exhibition), 18, 21, 33, 102, 148 Dresden (television drama), 99–100, 101, 102 See also air raid See also bombardment: the Bombing of Dresden Dudley, Sandra, 14 Dulag 121 Museum, 143 Durand, Carine A., 6 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic (GDR). See also Germany Ebbrecht, Tobias, 101 Edwards, Elizabeth, 21, 38, 111, 130 Elbe (river), 114. See Florence on the Elbe Elizabeth II, Queen, 108 emotions, 4, 10, 19, 46, 66, 76, 77, 81, 82, 89, 90, 93, 96, 101, 125, 127, 128

Index

Ernst, Wolfgang, 5 everyday life, 23, 24n6, 33, 52, 54, 55, 78, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 111, 143 fascism, 30, 32, 39–40, 59n4, 78 fascist movements, 70 fascists 27, 66, 78, 134 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)/ West Germany, 107, 109, 101, 103, 107–110, 128, 147. See also ­ Germany Fiebig-von Hase, Ragnhild, 9–10, 24n4 Final Solution, vii, 92. See also Holocaust Finger, Evelyn, 99 Finland, 140 First World War, 109, 110, 115, 132n10 Fleming, David, 4 Florence on the Elbe, 23, 114, 115, 125, 131. See Elbe (river) forgetting, 49, 71 forum (museum), 5–6, 15, 21, 24, 49, 99, 116, 129, 148–150. See also temple (museum) Foucault, Michel, 6–8, 24n3. See also discourse Fox, Thomas, 108 Frank, Hans, 82 Frauenkirche (Our Lady’s Church in Dresden) 100, 101–102, 106–108, 128 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 124 Friedrich, Jörg, 108 future, 32, 53, 107, 129, 144, 153 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 17 Gazeta Wyborcza (journal), 73 Gdansk, 144 van Gennep, Arnold, 111 generation, 32, 33, 35, 65, 68, 76, 89, 152 a generation of Columbuses’, 66–7, 84 genocide, 73, 107, 120. See also Holocaust German Democratic Republic (GDR)/ East Germany, 78, 104, 105–107, 109–111, 126–129, 132n. See also Germany German guilt, 99, 100, 103, 130 German suffering, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104 Germany, ix, 2, 3, 44, 66, 74, 97n5, 100, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 110, 118, 121, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132n, 133, 139, 144, 145, 146, 147 See also Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)/West Germany See also German Democratic Republic (GDR)/ East Germany See also Nazi Germany See also Prussia See also the Reich/ Third Reich See also Weimar Republic Gestapo, 63, 97n6, 146 Ghetto, Warsaw 2, 69–73, 91–94, 96 Glantz, David, 29, 32, 59n11 globalisation, 5, 9 Goebbels, Joseph, 50, 104

Index173

Goldberg, Simon, 99 Göring, Hermann, 50 Granin, Daniil, 33. See Ales’ Adamovich Great Depression, 70 Green Circle of Glory, 33 Gross, Jan Tomasz, 73 Gudkov, Lev, 58 Gulag, 4, 140 Graña, César, 150 Grass, Günter, 108 Gray, Dorian, 24, 116, 123, 125 Hamburg, 103, 126, 144 Hausmannturm, 154 Hebditch, Max, 4 Heer, Hannes, 144, 145 Heidefriedhof Cemetery, 106 Heimat museum, 120, 146 Hellberg-Hirn, Elene, 12 heritage, 12, 72, 104, 108, 109, 126, 131 Hero of the Soviet Union/ Soviet heroes, 29, 39, 40, 48, 52–58 Hillier, Bill, 114, 123. See Kali Tzortzi Himmler, Heinrich, 50 Hiroshima, 60n19, 104, 106, 108 Hirsch, Marianne, 76 History Meeting House (in Warsaw), 141 Historical Memorial Museum Smolny, 155 historical policy, 2, 29 Hitler, Adolf, 29, 31, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 50, 64, 81, 102, 103, 104, 110, 116, 117, 125, 132n9, 145, 146 Hitlerites, 47, 78 Hobsbawm, Eric, 110 Holocaust, 4, 69, 71, 72, 73, 93–4, 96, 99, 100, 102, 122–3, 125, 126, 127,129, 147 See also Final Solution See also genocide See also Nazi crimes Holocaust Memorial Museum (in Washington), 76 Home Army, 64, 66–68, 73, 77, 78, 85, 88, 98n7, 154. See also army Homo ferus, 43, 51, 56, 134 Hooper- Greenhill, Eileen, 14, 15, 24n3 Hösler, Joachim, 58 House of History of the German Federal Republic (in Bonn), 147 House of Terror (in Budapest), 76 hunger 2, 28, 33, 38, 48, 49, 55, 135, 138 identity, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13, 25n, 33, 34, 57, 68, 95, 96, 100, 105, 107, 115, 116, 122, 123, 127, 130, 141, 143 cultural identity, 1, 3, 10, 131 imagination, 8–11, 19, 46, 51, 52, 76, 84, 106, 152 Imperial War Museum (in London), 76 Independence Museum (in Warsaw), 154 Inferno Dresden (book), 106

Iron Curtain, 2, 9, 62 Israel, 74 Jacobson, David, 13 Janion, Maria, 71 Jarecka, Urszula, 40, 43, 46 Jesus Christ, 13, 89, 91, 142 See also catholic symbols Jews, 13, 23, 135, 138, 146 in Germany, 99–100, 102, 114, 118, 119, 121–123, 127–128, 130 in Poland, 63, 69–73, 91–96, 97n2 See also Things Jewish Jewish Fighting Organization, 94 Kaczyński, Jarosław, 69 Kaczyński, Lech, 69 Kansteiner, Wulf, 100 Käppner, Joachim, 99 Karelia, 139–141, 147 Kavanagh, Gaynor, 49 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 54 Kharkov, 120 Khrushchev, Nikita, 32 Kirschenbaum, Lisa, 34 Klemperer, Victor, 102, 121, 124, 136 Knell, Simon, 14, 57, 96, 126 Kohl, Helmut, 107 Komi Republic, 28, 58n1, 139–140 Korczak, Janusz, 92 Kott, Jan, 65 Krakow, 62, 143 Krause, Kurt, 119, 120 Kremlin, 39, 53, 60n25 Kursk: the Battle for Kursk, 39, 140 Kurz, Iwona, 142 Kuznetsov, Aleksey, 31 legend, 8, 62, 63, 66, 80, 84, 85, 98n7, 105 Leningrad Blockade/ blockade, 2, 17, 19, 23, 27–39, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54–58, 154 See also The Siege of Leningrad Leningradskoye delo (the Leningrad Affair), 31, 59n14 liberalism, 97n, 114, 115 lieu de mémoire, 73, 105 Lim, Jie-Hyun, 137–138 London, 58, 66, 67, 76 Lübbe, Herman, 25n12, 151 Macdonald, Sharon, 11, 14, 147 Machcewicz, Paweł, 144 Madievski, Samson, 144, 145 Magdeburg, 99 Maleuvre, Didier, 4, 5 Markova, Katya, 52, 60n23 Marshall, Christopher, 21, 111 Marstine, Janet, 14, 15 Martial Law, 68 martyr, 71, 88 martyrdom, 23, 65, 67, 88, 89, 95, 148

174

Mary Magdalene, 91 Mary Virgin, 89, 91 Mauth, Anna, 99 Melnikova, Ekaterina, 139–141 memorial, 33, 36, 69, 90, 106, 127, 155 See Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery See Pokrova Bogoroditsy Memorial Society (in St Petersburg), xii, 19 memory projects, 30, 32 metronome, 27, 28, 38 Military Historical Museum of the Bundeswehr, 153 Miłosz, Czesław, 72, 93, 96 Moeller, Robert, 108 Molotov-Ribbentrop protocol, 44, 140 Moore, Kevin, 125 monument, 3, 25n8, 33, 34, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 106, 140, 146, 155 Ghetto Monument (in Warsaw), 71, 73 Monument Rodina-Mat’ (Mother Motherland), 33 Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, 33, 155 Monument of Heroes of Warsaw: 1939–1945, 68 Monument of the Little Insurgent (in Warsaw), 68 Moscow, 25n, 39, 53, 55 the Battle for Moscow, 39 motherland, 31–35, 44, 53, 59n10, 61n26, 65, 84 movie, 25n11, 80, 87, 97n1, 99–102 musealisation, 25n, 151 museology/ new museology, 3, 14–15, 74 the Museum of the ‘Pawiak’ Prison, 154. See also Pawiak prison Museum of the Polish Army, 154 Museum of Polish Jews (in Warsaw), 73 Museum of Struggle and Martyrology in Aleja Szucha, 154. See also Aleja Szucha Mussolini, Benito, 35, 36 Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), 108 National Museum (in Warsaw), 74 National Socialism, 23, 121, 126, 134, 146 National Socialist, 117, 118, 125, 129, 130, 132n9 Naumann, Michael, 107 Nazi crimes, 30, 41, 63, 101, 107, 118, 120, 145. See also Holocaust Nazi Germany, 2, 41–43, 59n2, 127. See also Germany Nazis, 2, 23, 41, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 78, 84, 94, 100, 107, 115–118, 121, 122, 127, 130, 132n, 133–135, 138 neo-Nazi, 108, 122 / neo-Nazi demonstrations, xii Neva–2 Operation, 39 Nevskiy Prospect (street in St Petersburg), 27, 33

Index

Newman, Robert, 99 NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), 145 Nola, Alfonso, 49 Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika (New Economic Policy), 36 Nuremberg Trials, 30, 59n3 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 7 object, 3, 6, 7, 11, 20, 21, 42, 48, 49, 52, 54, 57, 74, 77, 83, 96, 98n7, 111, 112, 114, 118, 125, 128, 133, 135, 154 Operation Spark, 30, 38, 39, 51 Operation Tempest, 64 Order of Lenin, 30 the Oskar Schindler’s Emalia Factory Museum (in Krakow), 143 Ostolski, Adam, 142 painting (on historical exhibition), 38, 51, 74, 102, 147 Palmiry cemetery, 63 partisan, 52, 53, 56, 61n26 Pawiak prison, 63, 154. See also the Museum of the ‘Pawiak’ Prison Pearce, Susan, 14 People’s Republic of Poland, 2, 71, 75, 78, 79 Perestroyka, 34, 59n14, 139, 140, 141 Peter and Paul Fortress, 155 photograph (on exhibition), 11, 18, 21, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 50, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 102, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120–21, 125, 126, 128, 130, 139, 140, 145, 153 Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, 33. See memorial Piskorski, Jan M., 137–138 Pitkyaranta Local Museum (in Karelia), 140–141 pogrom, 70, 94 Pokrova Bogoroditsy Orthodox Church (the Memorial of the War and the Siege), 36. See memorial Polak-katolik, 93 Polish Cavalry, 80, 97n5 Polish Council to Aid Jews (Żegota), 91, 94 Polish Government in Exile, 64, 66 Polish Requiem, 91 Polish Thaw, 66, 67 Polish Underground State, 66, 67, 77, 78, 83–85, 94 Polish United Workers’ Party, 66 See also Communist Party of Poland Poręba, Bohdan, 80 Prague, 62 propaganda, 2, 12, 29, 30, 32, 35, 40, 43, 44, 48, 54, 81, 85, 86, 87, 97n6, 104, 105, 106, 109, 117, 118, 127, 133, 135 German Propagandaministerium, 104 Prussia, 13, 65, 84. See also Germany Pruszków, 143 public space, 34, 67, 146

Index175

Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, 12, 24n6, 25n8 Rapaport, Nathan, 71 Rauser, General, 44, 45 reality, 7, 33, 49, 77, 89, 119, 120, 123, 134, 143, 150 reconciliation, 101 Red Army. See army Reich/ Third Reich, 64, 78, 104, 109, 132n9 See also Germany remembering, 32, 49, 58, 79 remembrance, 3, 5, 57, 111 Ricoeur, Paul, 41 Road of Life, 38, 39 Rotterdam, 106, 113, 126, 130 Rumyantsev Palace/ the State Museum of St Petersburg, 35, 36, 59n13, 155 Rusinova, Olga, 33 Russia, 2, 3, 12, 13, 29, 36, 58, 59n, 65, 97, 133, 139–141, 148 sabotage, 63, 84–87 Salisbury, Harrison, 48 Saxony, 108, 110, 114, 115 Schmitz, Helmut, 118 Schwarz, Roland, xi, 25n10, 109, 110, 131n4 Senyavskaya, E., 45 Shishkin, A., 31–32. See N., Dobrotvorskiy Shostakovich, Dimitriy, 52, 60n21 Siege of Leningrad, 23, 27, 31, 35, 36, 38, 59n9, 135. See also Leningrad Blockade Simonov, Konstantin, 47 sledge/ child’s sledge, 28, 49, 52 Smolensk, 69 Solidarity Movement, 68, 72 Sontag, Susan, 120 Soviet heroes. See Hero of the Soviet Union Soviet society, 32, 33, 54 Soviet Union, 1, 9, 29–32, 35–37, 39–44, 55, 58, 66, 67, 140, 145 Sovietisation, 105, 106 Spalding, Julian, 36 Sparing, Rudolf, 104 Stalin, Joseph, 29, 31, 32, 40, 50, 59n7, 64, 67 Stalingrad, 2, 120, 139 Battle for Stalingrad, 39 starvation, 2, 28, 30, 40, 52, 59n3, 70, 135 Starzyński, Stefan, 80 Steinbach, Erika, 147 stereotype, 9, 11, 12, 13, 71, 85, 102, 134 Stroop, Jürgen, 71, 92 Süddeutsche Zeitung (German newspaper), 99 Suso Richter, Roland, 99 Svyashchennaya Voyna (Holy War), 35 symbol, 23, 27, 28, 29, 32, 36, 39, 49, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60n19, 60n21, 60n24, 63, 69, 73,80, 83, 89, 101, 104, 107, 118, 123, 125–7, 128, 131, 135, 136, 140, 144, 150 national symbol, 1,2 See also catholic symbols

symbolism (catholic, Christian), 23, 89, 91, 95, 134 synagogue, 125, 128 szmalcownictwo, 94 taboo, 24, 33, 34, 108, 140, 144 Tchouikina, Sofia, 139 temple (museum), 5–6, 15, 21, 24, 35, 42, 49, 55, 56, 78, 95, 96, 128, 129, 148–151 See also forum (museum) Ten Dyke, Elizabeth, 131 Thanatos, 124, 146 Things Jewish, 102, 129. See also Jews Third Rome, 55 Todorov, Tzvetan, 136 Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna, 16–17 The Topography of Terror (museum in Berlin), 146 Toporov, Vladimir, 55 tradition, 6,7, 12, 36, 62, 65, 67, 72, 84, 94, 95, 97n5 Treblinka, 70 Tzortzi, Kali, 114, 123. See Bill Hillier Umschlagplatz, 70 Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, 66 uprising, 2, 17, 19, 23, 63–75, 77, 78, 88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97n5, 98n8, 142, 143, 154 See also Warsaw Ghetto Uprising See also Warsaw Uprising Vees-Gulani, Susanne, 100, 101, 108, 131 Vergo, Peter, 14 victim, 80, 104, 127 Victory Day, 33 Vistula, 64 Volksgemeinschaft, 103, 146 Wajda, Andrzej, 66, 80, 97n Wałęsa, Lech, 72, 74 Wańkowicz, Melchior, 80 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 23, 63, 64, 69–71, 78, 91, 94. See also uprising Warsaw Rising Museum, 141–144, 154 Warsaw Uprising, 2, 23, 63, 64, 65–75, 88, 91, 94, 143, 154. See also uprising Watson, Sheila, 19, 58 Wawrzyniak, Joanna, 141. See also Zuzanna Bogumił we–other/ we–other relation, 10, 12–14, 136 Wehrmacht, 2, 41, 64, 79, 119, 120, 144, 145, 146. See also army: German army Weimar Republic, 102, 109, 112, 115, 116, 132n9. See also Germany Wertsch, James, 12, 53 West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) Widera, Thomas, 104, 105 Wieczorkiewicz, Anna, xii, 17 Wilde, Oscar, 125

176

Witcomb, Andrea, 11, 39 Wola district, 64, 68 Yad Vashem Museum (in Jerusalem), 76 Young, James, 64, 71

Index

Zahorska, Stefania, 65 Zhdanov, Andrey, 31 Zörner, Ernst, 118