Are we remembering to forget or are we keeping memory alive?

Recently there has been an increased focus directed towards how Britain remembers the Holocaust - emphasised by David Cameron’s launch of the Holocaust Commission. The pledge is that ‘the commission will work to ensure Britain has a permanent memorial to the Holocaust and educational resources for future generations’. As Andrew Pearce puts it - within the ‘last quarter of the twentieth century’ the remembrance of the Holocaust has undergone ‘a profound transformation in Britain’. However, Britain’s Holocaust consciousness is more complex than first thought because teaching aims within schools and within exhibitions, such as the Imperial War Museum, have adopted a national master narrative that limits our ability to ask difficult questions.

The focus at a recent conference “Between Obsession, Routine, and Contestation: Remembering the Holocaust in Europe today” revealed how some publications have suggested that ‘the Germans have had enough of Hitler and the Holocaust’. Harold Welzer has stated that, “Hitler can be forgotten”. While Ulrike Jureit has illustrated that ‘the Holocaust Memorial was more of the 1968 generation’s pathological identification with Jewish victims than of anything else’. There seems to be a contrast between Germany and Britain: is one forgetting while another is keeping memory alive? However, this question is too simplistic because Britain as well as other countries up until the 1970s experienced, as Barbie Zelizer points out, the ‘period of amnesia’. This period saw an increased interest in survivor’s memories that had largely been previously ignored. When we discuss remembering to forget it could be that through the creation of many memorials to the Holocaust we have grown to think more in-depth about their purpose and who is doing the remembering and on behalf of what group?

The next questions to consider are - will the current debates within Germany affect Britain and will Britain’s new energy to memorialise and educate impact upon Germany? Here we will consider the affect of transnational memory on these two countries, especially with regard to Britain. Today, survivor’s memories are now at the forefront of memory because we are able to watch them recount in documentary films, read their memoires and listen to them speak at events, which are produced in many countries. But with regard to memorialisation of the Holocaust has Germany reached a moment of fatigue? As previously stated there are numerous memorials in Germany but very few in Britain, although one memorial that is visible in Britain is the memorial to the Kindertransport in Liverpool Street, London. This memorial is physically imprinted onto Britain’s consciousness because it is outside a busy train station but is increasingly having a mental impact due to the national curriculum, the Holocaust commission and through the work of Beth Shalom, The National Holocaust Centre and Museum.

‘While countries around the globe are moving the Holocaust to the centre of their historical and memorial consciousness’, Britain has an opportunity to ask questions that have previously been too taboo to ask or considered too complex to address within schools and museums. However, Beth Shalom’s exhibitions are making us think about topics that have previously adopted the national narrative in a new way. It is important to keep this memory alive – the topic of the 2015 Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain – but we have to ask more challenging questions. For example, if we consider the Kindertransport how do we reflect upon Britain’s role as both a rescuer and a bystander? How do we ‘commemorate’ the perpetrator – we remember their crimes – but how do we represent this in a museum exhibition and in a memorial? 

This post was written by Amy Williams. Amy is currently undertaking an internship at Culture Syndicates and studying for her MA in Holocaust and Related Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is blogging about her experiences with Culture Syndicates on their Linked In page: http://linkd.in/1Mqo46v

Midlands Tweet Up: cross-regional networking tackles some big questions (and cake!)

The second in what (we hope) will be an ongoing series of regional tweet ups hosted by the Museums Association was held this month in Birmingham.

Since the new group of MA reps was appointed last year, we have made a conscious effort to find new ways of bringing people who work in museums together. It is clear that we can all benefit from the opportunity to meet other people in the same situation as us, who face the same issues as us, and to share our experiences. We aren’t all lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend formal network meetings in office hours, and it can be refreshing to get that opportunity in a setting that isn’t quite so formal. This is particularly true for those that work in small museums, or are volunteers.

Our first tweet up at the Old Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham in October was a great success. It was held in one of Nottingham’s most significant historic buildings, and we were kindly offered tours of the medieval caves under the building. But even considering this, it was still basically an evening meeting in a pub, and it was great to have that experience with people who are so keen to talk about the possibilities that come with working in our sector.

It was suggested that we hold the next event in Birmingham. While it is obviously out of our region, it would be a great opportunity to meet our counterparts in the west midlands, at a time when the call for papers for the 2015 MA conference in Birmingham was open. In any case, the opportunity to meet new people working close to our region was a welcome one. 

I met countless new people, who worked in a variety of roles in museums of completely different sizes and aims. It was great and refreshing to speak with volunteers, directors, curators and freelancers, all on the same level about the issues we all face as organisations: How do we react to funding cuts? Are front of house staff treated fairly? What happens when we run out of storage space? How much cake is too much?

These are (mostly) unanswerable questions, and we all have different angles to address them. But I found speaking about them with new people to be a great way of getting a more rounded feel for the spirit in the sector, and that can only help me do my own job better.

This post was written by Simon Brown, Artefact Loans Officer at Nottingham City Museums and Galleries and the East Midlands member representative for the Museums Association. He manages the 11,000 strong Access Artefacts handling collection, based at Wollaton Park.

He graduated from NTU in 2004 with a BA in Heritage Studies with Human Geography, and has since gone on to work in various roles for Nottingham City Museums and Galleries and Nottingham Contemporary, including as a museum assistant, curator and documentation assistant. He is currently studying for the AMA.