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EXHIBITING OBJECTS OF MEMORYAntonio MonegalPublished online: 16 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Antonio Monegal (2008) EXHIBITING OBJECTS OF MEMORY, Journal of SpanishCultural Studies, 9:2, 239-251, DOI: 10.1080/14636200802283761

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636200802283761

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EXHIBITING OBJECTS OF MEMORY

In December 1943, well before World War II ended and more than a month beforethe blockade of Leningrad was lifted, the military council of the Leningrad frontdecided to found a museum dedicated to the siege. The exhibition Heroic Defence ofLeningrad opened just three days after the siege was lifted on 27 January 1944, havinglasted nearly 900 days. In January 1946, the exhibition acquired permanent status asthe Museum of the Defence of Leningrad: it housed 37,654 items in 37 galleriestotalling 40,000 square meters. Those included authentic planes, tanks and heavyartillery, as well as photographs, drawings, posters and private mementos of thecivilian experience of the siege: the daily ration of 125 grammes of bread made withmixed-in sawdust, tobacco pouches sewn and dedicated by the women for their menat the front, and a music stand used to direct Dmitri Shostakovich’s LeningradSymphony at the 9 August 1942 performance broadcast from the besieged city.

Because of the paranoid politics of the Stalinist years, this immense and uniquedisplay was closed in 1949 and completely dismantled in 1953, its contents liquidatedand its director executed as part of the infamous ‘‘Leningrad Trials’’. It was notreopened until 8 September 1989, during the period of perestroika, with only a fractionof its original holdings, and it is now officially known as the State Memorial Museumof the Defence and Siege of Leningrad. The last part of the museum’s history reflectsthe circumstances of a very specific political context, but its origin illustrates how theawareness of the necessity for a museographic enterprise around a historical event canstart very close to the time of the event itself.

The Leningrad blockade is historically exceptional, in its duration and the direnessof its conditions, but the early origins of its museum not so much so. The ImperialWar Museum in London was founded when World War I was still in progress andAllied victory was uncertain: the first steps for a ‘‘National War Museum’’ were takenduring the early months of 1917, and in March a committee was formed andentrusted with starting the collection. The first exhibition of the museum-to-be washeld at the Crystal Palace in 1920. Two different wars, two different countries, twodifferent ideologies and political systems, but the same sense of urgency in addressingthe need for a museum of their war experiences: no such sense has been felt in Spainin relation to the civil war.

This urge for documentation, commemoration and remembrance that theestablishment of a museum institutionalizes is a common denominator of manywars, though not of all. And the reasons for having a museum are more often than notas political as the reasons for not having one, or for closing one. As Chris Caple hasexplained, in a museum ‘‘objects of the past are used to educate or to convince thosewho view them, to see and understand the world as the collecting and displayingauthority does, i.e. the past as proof’’ (205). The personal past, made up of individualmemories, is confronted with an authoritative past that acquires its collectivesignificance in the form of an institutional construct: ‘‘This has led every interestgroup, every industry and every nation to tell its story, prove its importance andjustify its present/presence with a museum’’ (Caple 206). The museum plays a

Antonio Monegal

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 9, No. 2 July 2008, pp. 239�251ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2008 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636200802283761

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political role in the construction of collective identity, and the memory of warsendured is a decisive component of such identity, for both the vanquisher and thevanquished. Whatever the story, it must be told: ‘‘The past is not simply there inmemory, but must be articulated to become memory’’ (Huyssen 3).

Most of the discussions about the politics of memory in contemporary Spain areconcerned with doing justice to forgotten voices and forgotten victims, which includesthe issue of the exhumation and identification of bodies in mass graves. Another sideof the debate involves the dangers of conservative revisionism, which is trying torewrite the history of the civil war and the dictatorship to exonerate Francoism.1 Butthere is a different aspect of the problem that while rarely discussed is inextricablyconnected with the two issues already mentioned: the lack of a museographic strategycapable of exhibiting a discourse of memory about the civil war, and*along with it*the lack of a strategy for treating places of memory, such as battlefields or graves.What is missing is a concerted effort to provide Spain with a spatial and materialculture of memory, with resources and institutions analogous to the ones involved inthe process of memorializing the First and Second World Wars in different countriesand parallel events such as the Holocaust or the Hiroshima bomb. The concern is thatwe may be excavating the graves of the past with the laudable intention of reburyingthe corpses in a more dignified manner, only to bury memory with them.

This article addresses the absence of a policy in Spain for dealing with the materialinscription of the memory of the war by trying to answer questions such as: What cana museum do? What can its social function be? What are the models available? Howdo its discursive practices work? and, specifically, How do objects mean? I will notdiscuss the issue of what story such a museum should tell about the civil war, as I amneither a historian nor a politician. On all other matters, my considerations are drawnmostly from the experience of having co-curated, together with Francesc Torres andJose Marıa Ridao, an exhibition entitled At War, organized in 2004 by the Centre forContemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), which did not focus specifically onSpain but on the culture of war throughout the twentieth century. The research anddesign of an exhibition of such an ambitious scope provide valuable lessons on how toaddress the political implications of any museographic representation of war, as wellas its rhetorical and narrative aspects. An essential part of the process has to do withthe way objects and original documents are made to speak within the discourse of anexhibition, and thus become readable thanks to the context that frames them.

As part of the research for the CCCB exhibition, I was able to visit a number ofmuseums in Spain and elsewhere. The principal museum visited in Spain was theMuseo del Ejercito, which is the main depository of objects associated with Spanishmilitary history. In spite of the wealth of its collections, it still today presents a one-sided narrative of the civil war. The reason is fairly obvious and self-perpetuating: it isstrictly the showcase of an Army that continues to view itself as the heir to the victorsof that war, and the ideological orientation of the museographic discourse discouragesany veteran from the defeated side, or his/her descendants, from donating personalitems or collections. The recent move of the museum from Madrid to the Alcazar ofToledo, with its epic connotations for Francoism, does little to alleviate this bias.2 It isa common mistake to confuse a museum about war with a military museum. Thereare, of course, some museums under military supervision all over the world thatmanage to provide a comprehensive view of the experience of war, and are designed

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as historical tools in the service of society as a whole, whatever their ideological bias.But in other cases military museums can be a showcase for self-glorification of thearmed forces, telling only the epic story of the soldier. The goal of a comprehensivemuseum of the Spanish civil war should be, at the very least, to represent theexperience of the different segments of the population, both at the military front andon the home front, with written, visual and recorded documents, testimonies andobjects from both sides of the war, which does not preclude teaching history,discussing causes and effects, assigning responsibilities and espousing a politicalposition.

In the course of my discussion, I will draw by way of example on a variety ofmuseographic models and remembrance strategies specifically centred on the memoryof wars, embodied in a number of institutions visited in the course of preparing theCCCB exhibition: the Imperial War Museum, in London (and the recently-createdImperial War Museum North, in Manchester); the Central Armed Forces Museum, inMoscow; and the Historial de la Grande Guerre, in Peronne, opened in 1992 in theFrench region of Picardie, department of the Somme. These museums respond tovaried models, aims and institutional commitments. The Imperial War Museum is anational museum that has been under civilian responsibility since its foundation, theRussian one is a military museum under military direction and the Peronne museum isa regional institution with an international scope, as it is supposed to encompass theexperience of all the countries that fought at the battle of the Somme, one of thebloodiest of World War I. Each of them was founded in a different historical period,at a lesser or greater remove from the events represented, commands different levelsof resources and houses collections of very different magnitude, but from each we canderive profitable lessons.3

Museums, exhibitions and memorials are ways of constructing an experience ofknowledge that differs substantially from that transmitted by history books, and whichhas the potential to reach a wider audience. A French critic writing in 1925 about theopening of the Bibliotheque et Musee de la Guerre at the Chateau de Vincennes,which started as a private collection, commented that, in spite of its goal of historicaldocumentation, it would appeal to ‘‘tous ceux qui ont conserve la faculte des’emouvoir devant les souvenirs douloureux de la guerre’’ (all those who can still bemoved by the painful memories of war) (qtd. in Sherman 56). Particularly in the caseof permanent museums, their impact can affect generations and, through their use aseducational tools, play a durable role in the cultural legacy. Once the generation thatcan bear witness has passed away, the familiarity with history that can act as a checkon the manipulation of the past can come only from institutional strategies ofremembrance. In Spain, the concern with how little younger generations know aboutthe civil war has not led to any measures designed to correct this ignorance, andtelevision (particularly through documentaries) has become the main instrumententrusted with the popularization of historical learning and a privileged agent in theconstruction of the discourse of memory. In Spain there is no national museum of thecivil war, or any concrete project for one.4 Nor is there yet a unified memorial for thefallen, aside from a feeble attempt to reread in inclusionary terms the unrelentinglyfascist Valle de los Caıdos, making it represent all of the fallen from both sides in thewar and those killed by the repression that followed.5 Most of the official

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interventions have been tactical, and reactive: removal of Francoist signs, of statues ofFranco himself, attempts to regulate popular initiatives, etc.

The so-called ‘‘Ley de Memoria Historica’’, approved on 31 October 2007, aftermuch debate and negotiation, has a limited scope and is not in fact about all aspects ofmemory but about doing justice to victims, as its full official title explicitly states:‘‘Ley por la que se recogen o amplıan derechos y se establecen medidas a favor dequienes padecieron persecucion o violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la Dictadura’’.Part of the law is devoted to the creation of a Centro Documental de la MemoriaHistorica, which will be responsible for the Archivo General de la Guerra CivilEspanola, and article 24 regulates the acquisition and protection of documents aboutthe civil war and the dictatorship, to be incorporated into the Archivo General. Whatthe law understands by documents can be inferred indirectly from its reference to themeans to collect or reproduce ‘‘palabras, datos o cifras’’. In article 23.2 we also findthe very worthy, though tragically overdue, goal of the ‘‘compilation of oraltestimonies’’ for the Archivo General. But no reference whatsoever is made tocollecting objects as such.

Objects, on the other hand, can tell us a story. Much of the media attention hasfocused on the issue of the excavation of mass graves, which is the task undertakenparticularly by the Asociacion para la Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica. Thepurpose is to identify the dead and return them to their families for proper burial. TheARMH is thus driven by a humane objective more than a historical or memorializingone, but in the process it fulfils other functions and unearths other information thatcontributes to our knowledge of historical events. In Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep,Francesc Torres has documented one of the excavations of the ARMH in Villamayorde los Montes, Burgos,6 and in this example we can see how treating the site as anarchaeological dig allows objects to add to our understanding of what took place. Thesite contained the remains of 46 civilians killed by Francoist paramilitaries: thepersonal objects found next to the bodies were the kind one would take whenthinking one is going to prison; the reading glasses show many of these people wereliterate, the educated segment of this small village; the beer-bottle caps next to thebullet casings tell us what the executioners were doing while finishing off theirvictims.

In the installation version of this project at the International Center ofPhotography in New York, Torres chose only one object to be shown among thephotographs of the exhumation: a pocket watch without hands found next to one ofthe corpses. This watch inside its display case in the middle of the room anchors allthe images in reality and lends them the aura of its physical existence. It is an exhibitin more than one sense: an exhibition item and forensic evidence. And it signifies in avariety of ways: it is an index to the event and a metonymy of the victim who ownedit, as well as a metaphor. Its missing hands can mean time stopped in death, or theconfluence of past and present in the action of excavating the grave, or theimpossibility of recuperating the past. All these meanings are not a given of the object,but are extracted from it by the discursive construction of the installation. As AndreasHuyssen has stated:

Objects of the past have always been pulled into the present via the gaze that hitthem, and the irritation, the seduction, the secret they may hold is never only on

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the side of the object in some state of purity, as it were; it is always and intenselylocated on the side of the viewer and the present as well. It is the live gaze thatendows the object with its aura, but this aura also depends on the object’smateriality and opaqueness. (31)

This dual status of the object, as a potential container for meaning and as a mute thingin itself, is always a component of its process of semioticization. It is a sign unlikemost others because it is not just a sign. It displays its autonomous existence outsidediscourse as well as its position within it, an existence that is meaningful preciselybecause it holds a unique relationship to the event, akin to that of the eyewitness: itwas there. These indexical, metonymical and metaphorical readings depend on theauthenticity of the object, on the fact that it truly has come out of the grave.Otherwise, it does not work, there is no aura. And it is both its signifying capacity andits referential connection to the event that makes this watch the kind of object thatbelongs in a museum.

A small personal item can speak of the experience of a victim, a survivor or asoldier. To avoid the limited perspective and old-fashioned approach of the Museo delEjercito, it is important to evoke, by means of their physical and documentary traces,the memory of civilians as well as that of the military. This requires different kinds ofmaterials to be displayed, which in each case identify whose story is being told. Theexperience of war is not only that of the combatant; thus a war museum true to itscalling should encompass a variety of viewpoints. Instead of displaying only uniforms,weapons, medals and flags, it needs to include small objects, documents andtestimonies of everyday life at the battle front and on the home front. Only such acollection can claim to represent the collective experience of war for society as awhole.

To achieve this ambitious goal, everybody must participate. An example of howthis is done can be found in an appeal that the Committee charged with starting thecollection for the Imperial War Museum published in the press in April 1917: ‘‘Thepersonal factor will be of a great importance in this collection, and it is for things suchas letters, photographs, drawings, souvenirs etc, found on the battlefield, recreationsand the arts and crafts of trench life that the Museum Committee appeal’’ (qtd. inCornish 38). This first call for contributions did not meet with sufficient response, soanother one was published in January 1918:

a great multitude of small objects of the highest interest to the public, both nowand in years to come, has drifted into the hands of private individuals. Theholders of such mementos should realise that they hold them in trust and that thebest way to fulfil that trust will be to present them as soon as possible to the WarMuseum and thus to secure their safe preservation for the future. If the Museumis to fulfil its purpose well it must be with the active co-operation not merely ofthe fighting forces but of their friends at home, into whose hands objects of greatinterest have already passed. The Museum is to be a public possession. Thepublic must help to make it. (qtd. in Cornish 39)

The Committee was already gathering an amazing amount of samples of all kinds ofweaponry, ordnance and equipment, and had additionally sent an agent to the

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continent to collect military items from the other allied forces and, throughintermediaries, even some enemy pieces. But what makes the collection of theImperial War Museum so extraordinary is its ability to recall the experience ofcivilians as well as combatants, thanks to the donations it received following theseappeals and after later conflicts. From World War II, civilian activity during the Blitzand the resourcefulness with which the population solved its everyday needs areextensively documented with objects invested with the memories of actual people,and thus capable of touching ‘‘tous ceux qui ont conserve la faculte de s’emouvoir’’.In addition, the museum holds an immense archive of personal photographs, letters,diaries, and recorded oral testimonies. This combination of sources explains theImperial War Museum’s double condition as a centre for historical research and as adepository of popular memory.

It may appear that it is already too late to promote this kind of enterprise in Spain,but in fact the time elapsed since the end of the civil war is practically the same as thatseparating World War I from the initial collecting stages for the Historial de la GrandeGuerre at Peronne. The mission was less ambitious than that of the Imperial WarMuseum, but the appeal to the public was launched with a similar premise:

‘‘Faites entrer votre nom au musee’’ [Put your name in the museum], theHistorial’s organizers urged potential donors to its nascent collections in 1987.This appeal to memory functioned on many levels: not only in the promise todonors that their names would become part of the record of the Historial’sactivities, but in the assertion that the results of their search through memories,attics, and drawers would become an ‘‘inalienable’’ [inalienable] part of the‘‘patrimoine historique national’’ [national heritage]. (Sherman 66)

Both institutions conceive their service to memory proceeding from the individual tothe collective narrative, making a museum for the people with materials contributedby the people, and with which they can identify. The object is charged with emotionalvalue, while simultaneously functioning as a didactic tool. There is thus a move frommemory to history, as Jay Winter, one of the scholars who participated in the designof the Historial, has pointed out: ‘‘War museums mediate between history andmemory . . . it is in these sites that family history and world history come together’’(222).

The blindness towards objects that is prevalent in discussions about the politics ofmemory in Spain reveals not only their underrated status as signifying loci but also thelack of a conceptual framework through which to approach them. To understand howmemory can invest itself in objects, and how objects can function as signs in adiscursive system, it is essential to acknowledge the notion of material culture. Thisperspective has been slow to sink in, in spite of the advances of semiology since thecontributions of Roland Barthes, because its application to wars requires a wide rangeof expertise. As Nicholas Saunders has explained:

The study of the material culture of conflict embraces an almost endless varietyof disciplines. In the past, this has led to another layer of fragmentation imposedon the subject by the differing concerns and prejudices of different academictraditions. Until recently, anthropology largely avoided twentieth-century

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industrialized war, as did archaeology; art history ignored the phenomenon oftrench art; museums (even those dedicated to war) often appeared to marginalizeeverything except weaponry and uniforms, and military history concerned itselfalmost exclusively with grand strategies and tactical battles. In the intersticesbetween this array of compartmentalised approaches exists a virtually unexploredand infinite number of overlapping worlds, where human experience isembodied in the relationships between people and objects. (‘‘Material Culture’’21�22)

One of the key concepts here is experience, because that is what we need to read in anobject. Experience is of course never present in representation, but only signified.The point is thus to devise protocols for reading objects. Anthropology andarchaeology have traditionally been better equipped to interpret human experience interms of the relationships between people and objects, but this is also the basis of thecollecting and exhibiting processes that define the activity and role of museums:

The passage of time and generations creates different interpretations of, andresponses to, the materialities of war as they journey through social, geographicaland symbolic space. A museum’s collection comes alive through interpretivecontextualization that identifies object and individual (or a succession ofindividuals) who come into contact with each other*each adding a layer tothe accretion of meanings. (Saunders, ‘‘Material Culture’’ 6)

In a way, the experience embodied in the object finds its distant echo in an experienceof interpretation and even of affective contact when encountering the object in thecontext of a museum. The pairing of experience and interpretation, differentlydefined, recalls the dilemma described by Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the TateGallery, in his 1996 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture. Serota was talking aboutmuseums of modern art rather than historical or military museums, but the challengeposed is in many aspects relevant to other forms of museographic discourse.

According to Serota, from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1980s, theconventional approach in museums of art was to organize collections in a way thatpresupposed a specific interpretation of the history of art, hanging works by schools ormovements in a linear succession at eye level. It was a step forward from the cabinetof treasures approach, which covered the walls with paintings from floor to ceiling,but the didactic ordering that made the museum into a history book was based oncuratorial interpretation of the works, combining them to provide a particularhistorical reading. The opposite tendency, championed by museums of modern artsince the 1980s, has been to underscore the aesthetic experience ‘‘by a display whichfavours presentation of single artists’ work seen in depth and isolation’’ (Serota 42).While discarding the encyclopaedic function of the museum, Serota suggests the needto overcome the dichotomy between interpretation and experience by combiningboth approaches in a dialectical way, ‘‘to promote different modes and levels of‘interpretation’ by subtle juxtapositions of ‘experience’’’ (Serota 55). Suchcombinations will mean a move beyond both historical arrangement and the singleartist’s display in favour of alternative and daring associations between works from

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separate periods or schools that will be experienced in relation to each other, and willthus encourage a distinct interpretation of art originated in a curatorial exercise.

In the case of museums devoted to wars and other historical events, the categoriesat stake are not generally identified as interpretation and experience, but as historyand memory, though it can be argued that both pairs have much in common. Memoryis rooted in individual experience, while history provides us with an interpretativeframework with which to construct a collective narrative:

Every war museum . . . begins with a conception of ‘‘memory’’ as something tobe both used and tamed. Objects can trigger memory in Proustian ways, which isto say unpredictably: yet if memory, in this view, consists of an assemblage ofimages personal to each viewer, it has enough common elements to be construedas collective. Construed both as the mass of heterogeneous objects the museumneeds to arrange and as the familiar ordering system that visitors bring withthem, memory is the material each museum attempts to transform into history.(Sherman 52)

In his comparative study of three French war museums, Daniel Sherman has describedtheir use of history in terms of ‘‘emplotment’’:

History, in other words, is the plot that weaves together the museum’s objects,infusing them with meaning, constituting them as representation; objects, withthe access to the real they promise, in turn help to legitimate history’s truth-claim. This production of memory as history seeks not to annihilate memory butto transform it, to produce in visitors a new and different set of memories as thebasis for a collective identity. (52�3)

Mieke Bal has also defined the museum as a discursive practice, which materializes innarrative form: ‘‘Discursivity, most notably rhetoric imbricated with narrative, is ineffect a crucial aspect of the institution’’ (205). And to make the point clearer, thenarrative often has a textual expression: ‘‘whatever the intrinsic interest or visualpower of the objects it displays, the museum needs to communicate its own messagethrough a variety of textual means’’ (Sherman 52).

Nowhere is acknowledgement of the political dimension of the discourse of themuseum as explicit as in Russian military institutions. The authorities in charge of theCentral Armed Forces Museum in Moscow, for example, make sure that the legaciesof their civil war and of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) are treated withutmost respect when items are loaned for foreign exhibitions and that there is nothingobjectionable about the political reading of the displays. Some objects are consistentlyregarded as ‘‘sacred’’ because of their memorial value, and this commemorative aspectof the museum is quite active, with items captured from the Nazis still presented asthe spoils of war. One is also reminded by the staff that every object comes with itskereHla, which literally means the label with its description that accompanies thedisplay, but also implies a legend or narrative that is integral to the object: anembroidered handkerchief, for example, tells the story of a woman who sold manysuch handkerchiefs she embroidered herself, and with the proceedings bought a tank,with which she fought and died in Smolensk.

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Objects anchor discourse in reality while they themselves are endowed withmeaning by their inclusion in the context of the museum and the textual support thatguides interpretation. But not all of them fulfil the same function. Stephen Greenblattdistinguishes between objects that elicit wonder because of their uniqueness and thosethat resonate with information about their context. The former have an affectiveimpact, while the latter advance learning, while he concludes that it is ‘‘easier in ourculture to pass from wonder to resonance than from resonance to wonder’’ (54).Huyssen recognizes as well that ‘‘The need for auratic objects, for permanentembodiments, for the experience of the out-of-the-ordinary, seems indisputably a keyfactor of our museumphilia’’ (33). The singularity of the object allows, in a way, foran excess of meaning that appears to compensate for the impossibility of recoveringpast time.

The authenticity of the object becomes a factor in our reception, even as weacknowledge that ‘‘longing for the authentic is a form of fetish’’ (Huyssen 33).However, as Huyssen also notes, to dismiss the attention to real objects as a fetish failsto take into account the capacity of fetishes to convey meaning and to transmitexperience:

The museum fetish itself transcends exchange value. It seems to carry with itsomething of an anamnestic dimension, a kind of memory value. The moremummified an object is, the more intense its ability to yield experience, a senseof the authentic. No matter how fragile or dim the relation between museumobject and the reality it documents may be, either in the way it is exhibited or inthe mind of the spectator, as object it carries a register of reality that even thelive television broadcast cannot match. (33)

The object becomes thus, in the context of the museum, a privileged place ofmemory, a lieu de memoire in its own right. The memorial function of spaces isgenerally recognized, and it can be argued that objects deliver a similar affect,inasmuch as their physical presence can be linked to a lost experience, or anexperience of loss. In Jay Winter’s formulation, ‘‘this kind of approach to history isabout real absences, irreplaceable losses, a void in the societies waging war whichcould never be filled’’ (232). While history is concerned with providing an organizingand explanatory ‘‘plot’’, which accounts for the interpretative dimension of themuseum or exhibition, memory appeals to a level of experience that is inscribed notonly in words, but in spaces, images and objects as well. The historian is not expectedto be at a loss for words, but the experience of a visitor moved by a memorial is oneof meaningful silence.

This position between history and memory, which characterizes most warmuseums, is very much at play at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, located in aregion full of lieux de memoire.7 More modest than the other two examples mentioned,the Historial nonetheless provides a very effective model for dealing with thecomplexities of the representation of war. It follows a set of basic principles:‘‘rejection of reconstructions, an insistence on originals rather than reproductions,and a broad confidence in the communicative potential of objects’’ (Sherman 66). Inaddition to these premises, the museum employs some innovative display strategies:artefacts related to the home front from France, Britain and Germany are placed on

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parallel shelves along the wall, while objects representing combat*empty uniformsand weapons*are in rectangular pits in the middle of the room, recalling graves,instead of the conventional standing mannequins. The choice of a horizontalarrangement, both for the comparison between civilian objects of different nationalorigin and for the military paraphernalia, is in direct opposition to the verticalityassociated with the heroics of combat and with the monumental glorification of asingle nation: that is, with the epic narrative of traditional museums. The Peronnemuseum still offers a historical reading but, as a result of its approach, ‘‘for somevisitors at least these carefully installed objects have a paradoxical effect. The veryordinariness of many of them, the highly personal character of some*letters, diaries,trinkets*seem to provoke some resistance to the narrativizing the institution enacts.That resistance takes the form of a kind of return of the repressed: memory’’(Sherman 69).

Another museum worth mentioning for its innovative approach is the Manchesterbranch of the Imperial War Museum, designed completely from scratch, as a buildingand in its exhibition concept, by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2002. Its model isless historical than that of the London museum and attempts to represent war as acomplex phenomenon by using a multi-dimensional and multi-media display strategy.Along the walls of the main exhibition space, objects are displayed following thechronological order of the conflicts represented, the timeline providing a historicalnarrative. In the middle of the hall there are six enclosures called ‘‘silos’’ (because oftheir height and the association with missiles) that contain thematic exhibits aboutdifferent aspects of the experience of war: war and memory, women at war, war inthe media, colonial conflicts, etc. The third mode is audiovisual: visits are interruptedevery hour by the darkening of the hall and the screening on all its walls of a shortmulti-media presentation. The different images that alternate and change betweenwalls, and the very large scale of the projections make visitors feel completelyenveloped by the audiovisual experience. The discourse of the museum is thus putforward in three divergent but complementary ways.

Each of the institutions discussed can contribute different lessons on how toorganize a possible museum of the Spanish civil war: about collecting policies, aboutthe need for awareness of the political dimension of the discourse, about the storiesobjects tell and how to read them, about the interplay between history and memory,and about innovative display strategies. The CCCB exhibition can contribute lessonsof a different sort. A temporary exhibition without a historical perspective and notlimited to specific conflicts, its representation of the Spanish civil war responded notonly to the overall conceptualization of the exhibition, but to the particular challengeof portraying the one war that was closest to home for both the organizers and themajority of visitors. Objects, documents and images played different roles. A varietyof items were present at different stages of the exhibition, next to samples from otherconflicts, to illustrate aspects of the experience of war for both civilians andcombatants: children’s toys made at the time by both sides, Queipo de Llano’s radiomicrophone, religious amulets worn by Francoist soldiers, photographs by AgustıCentelles, drawings made by children, a painting by Philip Guston inspired by thebombing of Guernica, the original proclamation of the end of the war signed byFranco, a drawing by Josep Franch-Clapers of Republican refugees crossing theborder, and a video testimony of a woman eyewitness to the battle of Ebro.

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In the section of the exhibition devoted to the memory of wars there was a smallinstallation also related to the Ebro front that spoke of the silencing of memory andthe absence of a strategy of remembrance in Spain. In a very long, low, narrow displaycase, with the bottom made of rusted iron, reminiscent of the colour of earth, therewas a spread of objects salvaged from the battleground area, belonging to a privatecollector: helmet, artillery shell casings, a hand grenade, a water flask, metal cups anddishes, cutlery, combs, toothbrushes, a campaign stretcher, etc. The point was todemonstrate that still today, in the Ebro area, just beneath the surface, one can findvestiges of the battle that took place there. The explanatory label to the display, itskereHla, read:

On 25 July 1938 the most important battle of the Spanish Civil War began, theBattle of the Ebro. It covered a front 150 kilometres wide and 45 deep. It lastedalmost four months, with a toll of 14,000 dead and 60,000 wounded. Even todaythe material remains of that tragedy may be found when working a field orpoking around in an old trench. Sixty-five years after the end of the war, nothingof what is found there is officially considered or protected as historic heritage.

The objects that represent the material culture of the war have been abandoned andforgotten as if they were the garbage of history. It is true that wars leave behind a lotof opaque debris. Whether we treat it as trash or as the relics of memory depends onwhat kind of meaning we are prepared to read into it. As Saunders remarks: ‘‘War isthe transformation of matter through the agency of destruction, and industrialized warcreates and destroys on a larger scale that at any time in human history’’ (‘‘Art ofWar’’ 119). The question at stake is whether we are willing to let the destruction thatcomes with war destroy memory as well, by erasing the material traces of history.

Notes

1 In the last decade, there has been a surge in historical revisionism from the right,spearheaded by writers such as Cesar Vidal and Pıo Moa, who have achieved medianotoriety and produced bestsellers blaming the Republic for provoking the civil warand justifying the military uprising and Franco’s dictatorship.

2 The decision to move the Museo del Ejercito was made by the Aznar government in1996, but the implementation of the move has continued under the PSOE. TheMadrid location closed on 30 June 2005, and the inauguration of the new museumhas been announced for 2008. The defence of the Alcazar de Toledo under thecommand of General Moscardo was considered by Francoists one of the heroicepisodes of the civil war and became part of their mythology.

3 Other possible cases for comparative discussion are the Museum of Peace inHiroshima or the Holocaust Memorial Museums in Washington or Berlin, but theirinclusion would have taken this article in a different direction without addinganything substantively pertinent to the representation of the Spanish civil war.

4 There are a few local and regional museums that deal with specific aspects of thewar. The Ebro front, for example, is covered by institutions such as the COMEBE(Consorci Memorial dels Espais de la Batalla del Ebre) or the CEBE (Centre

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d’Estudis de la Batalla del Ebre), both in Gandesa; the latter includes a historicalmuseum and was founded by a group of private citizens, scholars and localcollectors in 1998. The most recent official initiative to co-ordinate all theseprojects is a plan presented on 25 April 2008 by the ‘‘Memorial Democratic’’, a unitof the Catalan government, to create and fund a network of spaces of memorywhich will give support to existing private or local organizations.

5 One of the provisions of the ‘‘Ley de Memoria Historica’’, in article 18.3, says: ‘‘LaFundacion gestora del Valle de los Caıdos incluira entre sus objetivos honrar lamemoria de todas las personas fallecidas a consecuencia de la Guerra Civil de 1936�1939, y de la represion polıtica que la siguio, con el objeto de profundizar en elconocimiento de ese perıodo historico y en la exaltacion de la paz y de los valoresdemocraticos’’. No acknowledgement is made of the history of the monument itself,the political reading of its architecture, or the fact that it was built with the forcedlabour of Republican prisoners of war.

6 See the contribution by Francesc Torres to this issue.7 Peronne is situated on the River Somme and close to it there is a whole circuit of

World War I battlefields, cemeteries, mass graves and preserved trenches that stillhold remains of the fallen, together with memorials such as the one at Thiepvalwhich commemorates 73,000 Commonwealth soldiers missing without burial. Theregion of Picardie includes other battlefields and memorials, in addition to the forestof Compiegne where the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.

Works cited

Bal, Mieke. ‘‘The Discourse of the Museum.’’ Thinking About Exhibitions. Ed. ReesaGreenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne. London: Routledge, 1996. 201�18.

Caple, Chris. Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past. London: Routledge, 2006.Cornish, Paul. ‘‘‘Sacred Relics’: Objects in the Imperial War Museum 1917�39.’’

Saunders, Matters 35�50.Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘‘Resonance and Wonder.’’ Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics

of Museum Display. Ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1991. 42�56.

Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London:Routledge, 1995.

Monegal, Antonio, and Francesc Torres, eds. At War. Barcelona: CCCB/Actar, 2004.Saunders, Nicholas J., ed. Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World

War. London: Routledge, 2004.***.‘‘Material Culture and Conflict: The Great War, 1914�2003.’’ Saunders, Matters

5�25.***.‘‘Art of War: Engaging the Contested Object.’’ Substance, Memory, Display:

Archaeology and Art. Ed. Colin Renfrew, Chris Gosden and Elizabeth DeMarrais.Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004. 119�30.

Serota, Nicholas. Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art. London:Thames and Hudson, 1996.

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Sherman, Daniel J. ‘‘Objects of Memory: History and Narrative in French WarMuseums.’’ French Historical Studies 19.1 (Spring 1995): 49�74.

Torres, Francesc. Dark is the Room Where We Sleep. Barcelona: Actar, 2007.Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth

Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.

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