©2011 magyarmuzeumok.hu Minden jog fenntartva.

Opinion closed in a box – the urge to classify

The first section of the permanent exhibition in the Museum of Ethnic Germans in Hungary (Ungarndeutsches Landesmuseum) opened on 18 April 2015. It is a thought-provoking journey under the title “We and the Others”.

One can call this exhibition - in the town of Tata, 70 km west of Budapest - an experiment in the best sense of the word. It is indeed an experiment to elaborate the theme and the collection of the museum, an experiment to classify the objects and also an experiment to understand the similarities, the differences and the co-existence of the Hungarian majority and the German minority. The exhibition, in fact, is an enormous cloud of questions, and visitors can get absorbed and lost in it. They can let this exhibition influence, unsettle or reassure them. In return it invites the visitor to think: Who are we? Who are they? Are the others like this? What are the others really like? Who is German and who is Hungarian? What is the museum? And what is an exhibition? And what is the object in it? What is the collection? And what is a museum object? And what is a German ethnic museum object? Questions, headwords, word clouds, “stichworts”, reflexions and self-reflections. Those of the museum, the Germans and the visitors.

Entering the exhibition the visitor is faced with a wall of objects which is the metaphor of variety and of the museum storeroom’s disorderliness. Next to that there is a list of the basic terms and dilemmas of the exhibition. For example, Why and how objects finally end up in a museum? What can an object show? What can a collection show? And what does this exhibition show? From here the visitor can proceed following the traditional linear order and can learn about the stereotypes about Germans: being religious, diligent, virtuous as well as the importance of the community and the phenomenon of migration. This gives a type of interpretive frame to the exhibition, however, visitors can understand the scenes even if they do not go along the chronological path. Because they can depart from the central installation, a fire place, and can seek after individual life stories. In the middle of the space, above a circle of questions, there are photos of adults, children and families. Judging after their clothing they are ethnic Germans, and to the trained eye even their geographical home is obvious. Nevertheless, we know nothing about their stories. The questions in the circle are: Who are they? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Where are they now? If we start the exhibition from here, it will be more plausible what these stereotypes meant to German people, how they influenced their lives, and how they tried to put their identities on display. Following this logic in the exhibition, at the end of the road, we can venture to find our own answers to those questions in the circle and can share them with other visitors on a board.

Besides the linear and the mosaic logic as well as the quest for individual life stories, a fourth path also prevails: the museologists’ and the curator’s way of thinking, and how they attempted to interpret, along the well-known stereotypes, an existing collection which was being shaped for a long time by the earlier practice of the museum. This way, five major themes were identified revealing the aim and the flaws of the collection, and in some cases, talking about the difficulties to match the larger themes and the individual objects of the collection.

Three examples to illustrate this: 1. The diligence box. There is a word bubble with the words: diligence, order, work, economy, modesty, sparing. The major stereotypical difference between Hungarians and ethnic Germans in Hungary has been for a long time their attitude to work. This box splendidly expresses the moral and ideological drives which organised German people’s everyday lives. The museum uses their existing objects, either household or work related, to illustrate this point, so in this case the collection and its objects stand for what they were actually collected for.

2. Another example is the moral box, whose key words are creation, honour, beauty, pride, cleanliness, independence, manners, clothing. This box massively touches upon the dilemmas of the collection and can talk about the culture itself to a lesser extent. What is more, its topic, the morals, cannot detach itself form the box next to it, which is diligence. The key to it might be self-representation which manifests itself in the culture of objects, but the real message of this box is to reveal the collection’s shortcoming: for a long time there was no concept along which the objects were amassed in the museum. This revelation is important in order to be able to ask the critical and self-reflexive question: How does the museum’s collection overlap with its field of collection? In other words, do objects and themes match?

A third box bears the title: community. The keywords here are: “handwerk”, owner, inheritance, family, village. The picture depicting the Holy Family or the word “village” refer to this sense of community, but then why to use objects like a beehive, a butter churn, a demijohn and hammers? The cradle that stands in the centre of the installation refers to the German system of inheritance, which offered three options for a son: either he inherited the land or studied or became a priest. In this structure, essentially there are two sub-topics, which could not get harmonized here. One is the community, which seems to be the main topic here, and is emphasised by the picture of the Holy Family. The other one is the constraints of the museologist, who tries to choose objects for this topic from the collection. The metaphor of the cradle is supposed to convey the idea of inheritance, but the use of other childhood objects in the scene pushes the concept of the “community” into the background. This is the point where it becomes obvious that the museum, which has been collecting since 1972, has no relevant objects to illustrate this key concept of the ethnic German life in Hungary: the community.

Self-reflection and self-criticism in practice. These are the two major strengths of this exhibition. It wonderfully illustrates how a museum has to reflect on its own shortcomings, and this way it encourages the visitors to do the same. Let’s think about ourselves. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we now? And where are we heading?