The Imperial War Museum’s Work To Safeguard Its Collections During The Second World War (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum
2020
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org The Open Access book is available at www.degruyter.com Knowledge Unlatched ForP riya Acknowledgements This book is the resultofmore than nine years of research into the narrativesand representations of war and history museums, which originated in the summers of 2009 and 2010.While visitingm useums in Berlin, London, Warsaw, and Kraków and looking for patterns in representations of the Second World Warindifferent historiographical media, Ib ecame fascinated with visitors'' readings' of museum space in contrast to readerso ft ext and viewers of film. Ir ealized the potential in using aesthetica nd narratological reading techniques to analyze the reception of exhibitions as well as the constructive and performative nature of collective memories. This eventuallyled me to conductfieldwork in 157 different museums and independent exhibitions on both of the world wars, the Holocaust and otherg enocides, human rights, wara nd military history,a nd some more general history museums and exhibitions. These exhibitions werel ocated in fifteen countries,and the fieldwork was conducted between July 2010 and August 2019. The research for this book was generouslys upported through an Insight Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and through several internal grants facilitated by the Universityo fM anitoba. This book would not have been written in this form without the help of an umber of people. This includes curators and staff in the various museums in which I conducted my field research. Iwould like particularlytothank Gorch Pieken, Andrea Ulke, MonikaB ednarek, Klaus Hesse, Thomas Lutz, Dean Oliver, Jeff Noakes,M élanie Morin-Pelletier,a nd Anna Mulleri nt his regard. All twelve corem useums analyzed in this book wereg raciouslyw illing to assist me with numerous questions and allowed for the reproduction of photographs from their exhibitions. Ip resented ideas that made it into this book at around twenty conferences and guest lectures, and in doing so receivedvaluable feedback from discussants and anonymouspeerreviewers of my museum research. The ideas receivedover the years from the German Studies Association (GSA) "Wara nd Violence" interdisciplinary network, which Ico-chaired between 2013 and 2017,wereinvaluable. Ia lso cannot thank my colleagues enough at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the Universität Trier,wheree ach Is pent long spans of my year-long research leave in 2017-2018 and found the quiet and inspiration to finallyw rite the majority of this manuscript.Aparticular thanks goes to Sabine Gross,M arc Silberman, WolfgangK looß, Ralf Hertel, and Herbert Uerlings. It would be impossible to name all of my colleagues, friends, and family members who helped enable the completion of this project.I np articular, I OpenAccess. ©2 020 Stephan Jaeger,p ublished by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
Exhibiting the War; Approaches to World War II in museums and exhibitions
Historizing the Uses of the Past, editors: Helle Bjerg, Claudia Lenz, Erik Thorstensen , 2011
Traditionally, war exhibitions have functioned as media for officially sanctioned narratives of sacrifice and victory. After World War II another kind of exhibitions has developed, balancing between moral messages and research based narratives. What does this development mean for museums‘ role in shaping historical consciousness?
2024
This book explores museum crises. Through an investigation into the experience of the Imperial War Museum during the Second World War era, 1933-1950, it considers how crises disrupt museums and the contrasting defensive and revolutionary strategies which museums must adopt when mitigating crises. It is situated in a small but emergent literature concerning museums and crisis. Existing works mainly comprise contemporary studies on difficult museum experiences, predominantly financial difficulty, wherein the term crisis has been applied to describe an institution’s general state of malaise. This book, by contrast, presents an innovative and groundbreaking historical case study on a single museum facing wholesale physical and ideological collapse, deploying original crisis concepts to analyse different critical situations and the pathology underlying them.
Status Quaestionis. Language, Text, Culture (special issue): Narrating World War II. Transcultural Articulations of Postmemory in Literature and Other Media, 18, 2020
This article examines from different angles the memory and postmemory of the Allied liberation and consequent occupation of Italy in the years 1943-1947 by selecting and "reading" a series of objects among the Imperial War Museum holding. The relevance of the museum's collection and display lies in its capacity to narrate history through highly significant objects, linking past and present, memory and postmemory, individual and collective remembrance. Taking my cue from Aleida Assmann's parallel between remembering and forgetting, and the museum's two faces of the display and the store, I intend to consider IWM's role as a bridge between the generation who first retained, used and donated their own cherished testimonial objects, and the new generations who experienced the war only by interacting with those items.
Protective Measures Before the 1954 Hague Convention: The Case of the Imperial War Museum, 1933-1950
Safeguarding Cultural Property and the 1954 Hague Convention: All Possible Steps, 2022
1 The author uses 'museum' to refer to both museums and galleries. 2 The Imperial War Museum is abbreviated in this chapter to IWM: the abbreviation was formally adopted as the Museum name in 2011 (IWM 2011a). 2 national institution to strive to represent ordinary people and treat everyday items as significant (Wellington 2017, 242). In doing so, it sanctified war dead, and framed objects there as 'sacred relics' (Cornish 2004, 46). Moreover, it accrued the most important modern British art collection-even more important than the Tate (Malvern 2000, 188). The following chapter critiques specific elements of the Convention and Second Protocol, focussing on those germane to the IWM's in situ protective measures and protective measures carried out at refuges during the Second World War. It does not consider this retrospectively. Rather, it uses the case to evaluate them: how could they be applied today? Accordingly, the chapter comprises two parts. The first sets out the case, exploring the IWM's evacuation of certain collection items from its premises to various country houses and the implications this policy had. After that, the chapter explores the institution's in situ protection measures for those collection items which remained. The second part then discusses the implications of the experience for High Contracting Parties (HCPs) today. Before doing so, however, the Convention's foundational considerations must be established. The provisions of the Convention and its Second Protocol revolve around two core considerations which are applied to cultural property. Article 1(a) defines cultural property as the 'movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people'. Examples include religious or secular monuments; archaeological sites; historic or artistic buildings; artworks; books; objects of artistic, historical or archaeological interest; and revolutionary scientific instruments, or significant replicas. Crucially, this definition includes 'buildings whose main and effective purpose is to preserve or exhibit' cultural property, such as museums or 'centres containing a large amount of cultural property', regardless of their historical or artistic merits (Article 1(b)). Interpreting what constitutes cultural property falls to the owning HCPs. Following UK ratification of the Convention and both Protocols in 2017, the British government declared that, as a state sponsored institution, IWM is categorised as 'immovable property of great importance' (DCMS 2017, 6). Articles 2-4 of the Convention contain the two key considerations that HCPs must undertake: 'the safeguarding of and respect for such property' (Article 2). They must 'prepare in time of peace for the safeguarding of cultural property situated within their own territory against the foreseeable effects of an armed conflict' (Article 3), and 'respect cultural property situated