HIA Poland Fellowship 2015

“Constructive Engagement”: A Critical Approach to Museums and History

by Thuy Anh and John Esteban

It is perhaps difficult to reflect on a day replete with images, texts, and voices from the past—ghosts that are never fully absent and that remind us, indeed, that the past is ever infiltrating the present. Today, we had the opportunity to walk through 1000 years of Polish-Jewish history at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (MHZP), which gathers together an impressive array of stories, artifacts, and knowledge to portray the complex narrative of the Jewish community in Poland. Having already toured Warsaw and walked in the corridors of its collective memory, we already had the idea that Warsaw is itself a sort of “living museum.” Indeed, regarding the Warsaw Ghetto, we might say that Warsaw’s history has been pre-programmed, curated, and regulated, much like any other museum. Yet, as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 might teach us, Warsaw’s history is as much about population control as it is about voices of resistance to those policies. It is vibrant, multi-vocal, and multidimensional, indeed as a microcosm of Poland as a historical meeting place of various ethnic and religious communities. The MHZP is quite successful in embodying this multidimensionality and emphasizing history as processual, dynamic, and composed of many perspectives. It thus showcases the very multifaceted relationship of the Jewish community to the Polish notion of nationhood, both in the former’s crucial role as a “Significant Other” for Polish self_definition and as sometimes a vital and indeed integral part in its cultural, intellectual, and economic life. This is a story of much complexity—tension just as much as collaboration, oppression just as much as trade and exchange.

As the “epicenter of the genocide,” Poland bears a particular moral and social responsibility to shed light on not only what happened during the years of the Holocaust but also to trace out the why and the how leading up to that atrocity. Yet, while this burden informed the impetus behind the conception of the Museum, it has not wholly determined the contours of the Core Exhibition.  Program Director and Curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett made the deliberate decision to expand beyond the vision of the Holocaust Museum genre and its strict mission to make known and memorialize the Jewish genocide for the greater aim of equipping visitors with shields against intolerance, especially anti-Semitism. According to Barbara, the MHZP offers a different approach based on a model that she calls “constructive engagement.” Rather than pre-defining the purpose or “take-away” of the Museum and thus arbitrating programmatically visitors’ interaction with the exhibition, the Core Exhibition enables a freer exploration throughout history, and thereby prompts each visitor’s unique reflections. For those visitors who have found themselves in minority positions in their respective communities, a further possibility of finding themselves in this story is also available.

At the outset of this model, of course, is the hope that visitors come to the museum with good will and an openness to learn. In fact, it is this element of openness that is made manifest by the Museum’s minimalist design, what is basically a large rectangular box the exoskeleton of which are layers of imbricating glass panels that are sensitive to and respond to changes in light. This exterior in turn affects and transforms the interior by casting an ever-transforming ecology of shadows reflecting whatever patterns of light the Museum captures, thereby adding a performativity and vibrancy to the Museum. We learned from Barbara the meaningful story behind the spacious and exquisite, yet somewhat fragile architecture of the building, which also goes in line with the idea of balance, or of displaying both what is to be commemorated in death, and also what is to be celebrated in life. These core characteristics—minimalism, transformation, reflection, and balance—contribute to the model of “constructive engagement” by offering to the visitor the space to connect with history and to shape their experience intelligently.Below we will each share our own impressions about the Museum and our overall reflections of the day.

Thuy Anh’s Thoughts

For me, a walk through the Museum of Polish Jews was a way to put the recent tragic events within a context, trace the origins of the tensions back in the history, but most importantly to bring myself closer to the “Significant Other”, instead of seeing the history of distantly-known faces. It took me longer to explore the historical moments preceding the tragic events of the 20th century.

Texts, photographs, excerpts and interactive installations together conveyed an idea that there is nothing linear about history of– at some moments the social position of Jewish people was strengthened, such as in the case of the Statue of Boleslaw the Pious in 13th century, and at other moments they were turned into the scapegoats on whom to put the blame for economic problems and other misfortunes. Interestingly, those cycles of ups and downs were in parallel with the interest of those who were in power. It was pretty interesting for me to discover the fact that, at some point in the history, there was more diversity and religious tolerance in the Commonwealth Poland than in the Western Europe. Equally, it was ironically interesting to see how easily that attitude could change and the way Jewish people were perceived therefore depended on those who were in the position to shape the story. What was mentioned before as a “constructive engagement” have become even more meaningful – listening to the multiple voices, instead of one voice, bringing your own personal experience into analyzing a wide array of the information and trying to understand the “why” aspect of the history, instead of polarizing and putting people and ideas in the categories of “bad” and “good.”

Even though the whole exhibition was covering a thousand-year history, several days of exploring the presences and absences of the Jewish population on the streets of Warsaw made it logical at least for me to bring all the threads together to the events of 1940s and ask the question “why” – why did it all happen? While walking in the post-war exhibition war, I encountered a quote, which brought me a little bit closer to an answer: “The trials of Nazi war criminals had the great benefit of clearly exposing how few criminals it took to murder millions using those who were neither good nor bad, but simply passive, and, who were given the right circumstance, could become one or the other.”

If you go further from the individual actions to the way the whole story can be or could be told, the boundaries between “good” and “bad” start to seem uncertain too and are shaped by constructed presences and absences of actions, words, and stories. Telling a story from the past or preferring to keep silent becomes a part of history itself and what we see now in the museum might have not existed at all of some initiative and caring individuals would not choose to take an action. This day in the museum has made me think not only about the complexity of the historical events themselves, but also the challenge of telling the story and receiving it, choosing what exactly to say and how to say it.

John Esteban’s Thoughts

Allow me, if you will, to be a bit provocative, but let us at least have as our point of departure the claim that the MHZP is not a defensive or apologetic history of Polish Jews. This is not, as such, a “Holocaust Museum”, and thus it has a more expansive role in educating rather than regulating the thoughts and the lessons of its visitors. I was awed throughout my walk in history as my eyes glistened from the dazzling installations, the interactive maps, the replicated artifacts, the simulacra of salons, synagogues, and places of habitations, and so on, not only because these overloaded my sensory skills but also because, through them, I had a tactile connection to a history that necessitated much exploration. At its core, however, and despite resisting a dominant narrative, I found the Museum’s energies to be mostly devoted to raising, if not answering, the question—“Are integration and 

Jewishness compatible in modern nationalistic societies?”

The history is complex, so I will make no effort towards summarizing it. But even today, it seems the “Significant Other” continues to mobilize and animate the masses towards a conservative definition of who and what counts as a Pole. There have been ebbs and flows with respect to Polish attitudes towards this particular Significant Other, with monarchical protections of Jews creating much resentment towards them from the nobility, merchants, and peasants. Paradoxically, then, in an attempt to include them in order to benefit from their economic activities, Polish monarchs have also engendered and reified a special class of people perceived to have special alliances with power. It should come as no surprise, then, that when it came to the Solidarity movement, many were skeptical or wary of Jews who could potentially form part of the new power structure on the brink of the collapse of Communism. Our present historical moment finds itself dragged back into this 1000-year-old history. The task, therefore, is not to aspire to transcendence of the most difficult aspects of history as if we could simply overcome them but to bring out the ghouls into the light and expose the deep-seated roots of our prejudice. In my non-linear, non-progressivist view of history, generation after generation stands before history as one stands before a carousel, whose galloping horses appear blurry, shapeless, indistinct from a distance, but which induce vertigo upon proximity. I say this because, even as such histories are brought into focus exactly by the very transient and temporary nature of this clarity, what is redoubled by this metaphor is the interconnectedness and circularity of different knots of time and space; we are, to a degree, caught in the carousel of history and those of us who care for its material and often disempowering effects must accept its multi-directional complexity if we are ever to transform it.