A Visible Sign with a “Quiet Gesture”? The Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation in Berlin
Résumé
Starting from the analysis of the permanent exhibition of the newly opened Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, this paper sets out to understand to what extent the Documentation Centre succeeds in offering a new approach to the place of remembrance “Flight and Expulsion of the Germans”, within the federal German museum landscape and in the museum landscape around flight and expulsion of Germans. Finally, I suggest that the diverse and contradictory expectations placed on the Documentation Centre results in a permanent exhibition that meets the wishes of the memory milieu (expellees and their descendants) to address their suffering and responds to the government’s mandate to anchor the topic in the centre of society (also outside the memory milieu) and to create a space of reconciliation, between memorial, museum, archive, and meeting place; although at
the expense of understanding the specificity of the flight and expulsion processes.
Domaines
Science politique
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte
licence : CC BY SA - Paternité - Partage selon les Conditions Initiales
licence : CC BY SA - Paternité - Partage selon les Conditions Initiales