The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality. By Stephan Jaeger. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. xiv + 354 pages + 30 color images. $99.99 / €86,95 hardcover, e-book (open-access).

Published in de Gruyter’s Media and Cultural Memory series edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Stephan Jaeger’s extensive study of the Second World War in contemporary museum exhibitions aims to understand how museums “can help prototypical visitors from diverse cultures comprehend or experience the past in the twenty-first century” (8). As the author explains, this question becomes increasingly urgent and important as we enter the post-witness era. Providing analyses of twelve permanent exhibitions in six countries (Belgium, Canada, Germany, Poland, UK, and USA), Jaeger’s project is, on the one hand, wide-ranging, but, on the other, quite specific. It focuses on the representation of the Second World War—even where institutions have a longer historical reach—and it deals with permanent exhibitions that opened after 2000. Furthermore, it is concerned primarily with European memory and refers to North America as a point of contrast (35).

What interests Jaeger is the interaction of visitors with the exhibition space and experience, a relationship that, in the midst of a global pandemic that has forced museums to close their doors to the public, appears all the more crucial to the meaning of these institutions. In order to understand the relationship between visitor and exhibition, Jaeger draws on the narratological concept of experientiality, developed by Monika Fludernik and defined as “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’” (Fludernik quoted in Jaeger, 48). Where in narrative, the protagonist is key to this idea, in the museum the visitor “becomes significant as a mediator [… ] for experientiality” (49). According to Jaeger the concept of experientiality is needed to “understand the representational effects of an exhibition” which might restrict the visitor to passive observer or engage them as “mediating consciousness” (50). Museums can produce primary experientiality through simulations that “claim to mi- metically bring the visitor close to historical experiences” (53), or secondary exper- ientiality through “networking techniques” (58) that encourage the visitor to participate in a more open and proactive process of interpretation, and moreover, generate an awareness of the constructedness of the past presented in the museum. However, where exhibitions adhere too strictly to a closed “master narrative” (61) they severely limit the potential for experientiality.

Jaeger illustrates these modes in three chapters: in Chapter Three, he shows how the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, the Warsaw Rising Museum in Warsaw, and the Imperial War Museum London produce only restricted experientiality; in Chapter Four, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory in Kraków, and the Bastogne War Museum in Bastogne, Belgium, provide examples of primary experientiality; and in Chapter Five, exhibitions at the Bundes- wehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, and the Topography of Terror in Berlin are analyzed as examples of secondary experientiality. While Jaeger broadly aligns the exhibitions at these museums with one of his three categories of experientiality, he explains that the concept “can only be discussed as a sliding scale between overlapping layers” (98). This can be seen especially clearly in Chapter Five, which considers how museums that can be called transnational might “break up the dominant perspective of a nation state [and] find other ways of structuring the history and memory of warfare” (17). The German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst is shown to produce “constellations” that engage the visitor beyond the framework of competitive national memory (182); in the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk Jaeger finds both elements of what Michael Rothberg has termed multidirectional memory that produce experientiality and the restrictive effects of political change within and outside the museum; and in the House of European History in Brussels, which one might expect to be the “ultimate ‘transnational’ museum” (203), the “national master narrative” is simply replaced by an equally closed, single story of European integration. Following the individual discussions of the twelve museums included in the study, Chapters Seven through Nine offer very interesting and more dynamically comparative analyses relating to the presentation of the Holocaust, the Air War, and of artworks in the different exhibitions. Since the question of how to integrate the Holocaust and the Air War in Second World War exhibitions is especially fraught, Jaeger’s concept of experientiality offers a particularly useful tool for understanding how museums create emotional and intellectual connections with visitors.

Crucially, Jaeger’s study works not with empirical visitors, but an “ideal visitor,” a concept developed from work by Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich and which—like experientiality—draws on a narratological concept, that of the “ideal reader” (44). For some, this might seem too abstract a figure to understand exhibitions analyzed in such empirical detail, and especially where the discussions have shown so convincingly the effects of museums’ national frameworks and transnational networks, one might ask about the effects of visitors’ own national or cultural connections and coordinates on their museum experience. Moreover, if the study is motivated by the new challenges to memory and history posed in a post-witness era, the question of what these exhibitions mean to a young generation for whom the Second World War is an emphatically historical event also seems particularly pressing. For Jaeger, however, experientiality is key to “dissecting the narrative, semiotic, aesthetic, and critical potential of an exhibition” (307) and offers a new mode of understanding museums that might be productively combined with empirical visitor studies.

The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum makes a valuable contribution to memory studies and museum studies. By bringing together such a range of exhibitions, Jaeger offers an impressive and timely assessment of the role museums play in representing the Second World War today, as well as provoking important questions about the practical, political, and ethical challenges such institutions face now and in the future.