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Steffi de Jong

Within its exhibition section on World War II, the Royal Army Museum in Brussels shows a rather peculiar oil painting by the Russian artists Pavel Boyko and Arkadi Lebedev (Figure 4.1). The picture is called The Battle of Kursk: A History Lesson and was offered to the museum in 2001 by the Russian embassy. It shows the interior of a museum with a large painting of the battle. Before the painting, a Russian colonel gives a history lesson to representatives of the allied forces: a French lieutenant-colonel, a British navy lieutenant, and an American major. A German Bundeswehr soldier is shown at some distance from the group looking at the painting, his back turned toward the viewer. Behind the group of younger soldiers being given the history lesson, a Russian veteran in a wheelchair is pushed toward the painting by his daughter, who is also dressed in an army uniform. His granddaughter is lagging behind, contemplating the statue of a Russian hero. A Red Army flag and some photographs can be seen in the back in another exhibition room.

Here, I will not go into the rather blatant memory-political message of the painting. What interests me are the different forms of transmission of history that are shown. Such a transmission happens on a first level through the exhibited objects, documents, and artworks. The latter are, on a second level, interpreted and explained by the guide – in this case the Russian colonel. On a third level, we see a transmission of memory from one generation to another in the veteran’s family. The veteran in the painting does not talk, nor does he seem to listen to the Russian colonel’s history lesson. The official transmission of history is therefore shown as separate from individual memory. In this, the painting contrasts with the Royal Army Museum’s own representation of World War II. In the same exhibition section, the museum makes veterans – and other witnesses of the war – speak: in video testimonies. Their individual memory is part of the exhibition, and thus of the first level of transmission of history.

FIGURE 4.1 Pavel Boyko and Arkadi Lebedev, The Battle of Kursk: A History Lesson.

© Royal Museum of the Army and of Military History, Brussels.

Like the Royal Army Museum, more and more museums integrate video testimonies into their permanent exhibitions. This is especially but not only the case in Holocaust and World War II museums such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, or the Bergen-Belsen and the Neuengamme Memorials. The Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn (literally, House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany, but known as the German National Museum of Contemporary History), a state-run museum on the post-1945 history of Germany, has renewed its exhibition in 2011 to include, among other things, more video testimonies. The Villa Schöningen, Haus an der Glienicker Brücke, a museum in Potsdam positioned on one of the bordering bridges between East and West Berlin, has based its exhibition primarily on video testimonies. Video testimonies were also given a prominent role in the Museum of Europe’s exhibition on European integration It’s Our History! (De Jong 2011a).

This use of video testimonies in museum exhibitions raises the question of their musealization. How are video testimonies turned into museum objects? What functions are video testimonies given in museums? In order to answer those questions, I will draw on my research into the collection and exhibition of video testimonies, as well as on their didactic uses, in Holocaust and World War II museums in Europe and Israel (De Jong 2011a; 2012; 2013). I will also take a look at the Haus der Geschichte, mentioned above, which deals with more recent historical events. I will consider the collection of video testimonies, their use as exhibition items, and the didactic functions that they are given. I will show how personal memory has become part of the official transmission of history – and thereby been put on one footing with the first and second levels of transmission of history in museums as shown on the oil painting in the Royal Army Museum in Brussels: material remains and museum guides. Referring to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of collective memory, I argue that the musealization of video testimonies is postmodern society’s attempt to turn communicative memory into cultural memory.