Month: January 2021

A friend who knows me very well lent me this book recently: Museum der Erinnerung, that is, Museum of Memory, by Anna Stothard. (Thanks Anne!)

I liked it a lot and even made a video book review about it. Check it out! Below is the transcript and, at the bottom, some links for you to explore to your heart’s desire. Enjoyyyy!

So much for judging a book by its cover. What’s it about?

The book opens in the Natural History Museum in Berlin, one of my favorite museums.

The fictional protagonist, Cathy, works here as a specialist in insects and especially moths. She pins moths into boxes to preserve them for researchers and museum visitors. Her fiance works in the same museum – which I will say as a museum person, is a highly rare and enviable position for a couple working in the same field. Anyway we learn in the first pages how devoted Tom is to Cathy, bringing her coffee at her desk and generally being googly-eyed over her.

Gradually though we learn about Cathy’s dark history, revealed in flashback-like vignettes interspersed with the “now” time in the natural history museum.

Cathy grew up on a damp, salty, windswept part of the British coast that sounds about as forlorn and isolated as you can imagine. But Cathy loves it for the treasures of nature she can collect there as a kid. She is a collector, even a hoarder, of seashells, feathers, skulls and bones.

This tendency grows stronger through personal traumas that make Cathy’s life so painful, she seeks solace in her objects. I won’t tell you any spoilers, so I’ll just say that she is trapped in multiple abusive relationships and suffers numerous tragedies that exacerbate her hoarding, and expand it from natural things to personal things as well: toy soldiers, as on the book cover, scraps of newspaper articles, and sketches. Also miniature gin bottles and human teeth. Like I said, dark.

Now about the museum aspect.

I like the way Berlin’s museum of natural history plays a big role in the story. It’s not just a backdrop: its labyrinthine hallways, cavernous galleries, and countless exhibits are given a lot of love and attention. The story occupies the museum like a body, inhabiting it completely and activating all its parts.

This is why discovering the English title of the book was such a revelation for me: it makes so. much. sense. to think of Cathy’s collection as her private museum ABOUT HERSELF. It’s not just a collection of memories, the way the German title implies: it’s HER represented in objects.

This is a really cool idea to contemplate for all of us: to what extent do our objects define us? If you were to choose just enough objects to fit in a shoebox that were going to be your Museum of You, what would they be? How complete of a picture can they make? Probably not 100% complete, but perhaps metaphorically, symbolically representative nonetheless. Or not – maybe the shortcomings of what objects can represent becomes painfully obvious.

Now take that idea and apply it to museums you’ve been to. How much can the exhibited objects tell us about a given subject? Not everything, clearly; so the question is, is it representative? Sufficiently representative? Are there ways to make the objects more or less potent in this job of representation?

This is getting really deep, but it’s actually worth pondering because it’s at the root of what museums do, or try to do, or should do, or shouldn’t try to do.

In this respect, I would recommend as a complementary read Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. This catalog of his museum in Istanbul, like the museum itself, plays with the same convolutions of personal history and the museum format. It’s very exciting.

In conclusion: read this book! It is a good slow-burning psychological thriller, with loving and lively descriptions of both objects and Berlin’s Natural History Museum.

What good museum novels do you know about? Share in the comments below!

I’m thrilled to see an essay of mine appear on another awesome museum-community website, MuseumNext. Woohoo! MuseumNext gets museum people together both on- and offline (currently only online of course) to talk about pressing issues in the field, from new technologies to examples of best practices. Their yearly conference is being held this year online; maybe you want to join!

As the title of my essay implies, I chose the topic “Why 2021 will be momentous for social justice in museums” because I think there are some positive trends that started in 2020 and could make a real difference this coming year to making museums more conscientious and inclusive places. Take a look at the essay and see if you have any additions to the list!

While lockdown is keeping the museums closed for now, monuments are like the museum collection of the outdoors! I decided to get out of the city and visit Potsdam, the green oasis near Berlin. The extra nature there gladdens my heart: there is a lot more space and greenery than in Berlin proper, and much more water (the Havel river and its many bays). What’s more, this beautiful landscape is strewn with 19th-century monuments. Inspired by Slow Travel Berlin’s recent walk in this area, I planned a big loop hitting some of the major monuments along the way. With numerous quick photo shoots and a VERY quick picnic lunch in arctic temperatures, it took me 2.5 hours.

Babelsberg Palace was a summer home for the Prussian crown prince William I and his wife. It has a great view, but it’s sure windy on that hilltop.

The entrance to the Orangerie in the New Garden (point B on my map) contains Egyptian-style sculpture: a sphinx and two standing male figures. Quite relevant to the academic book I’m reviewing right now, Beyond Egyptomania!

Here’s a highlight reel of the monuments I saw! Astonishingly, the pyramid monument was actually used as a refrigerator: underneath it is a basement 5 meters deep that kept food and party ice from the local lake cold!

As learning institutions, museums are primed to help caretakers who suddenly find themselves trying to homeschool children during this pandemic. Many American museums have published resources to help their communities in crisis, including a huge number of smaller, local museums. What an amazing set of resources for even after the pandemic is over!

• The Job Carr Cabin Museum in Tacoma, Washington has some great worksheets for gradeschoolers. The one titled “Where was the Oregon Trail?” brought back fond memories of the OR Trail video game… But it is also well-designed to develop a variety of skills in a fun way.
• The Design Museum Foundation put out an exercise to design a chair for a customer with certain needs. It sounded a bit light at first, but the guiding questions reveal the complexities of the task. Great for working on real-life skills in realistic scenarios!

In addition, these websites are worth checking out:

• What a huuuuge catalog of museums with online learning resources! Categorized somewhat, but leaves you to do a lot of footwork on your own.
• Here is a roundup of art museum resources, including The Metropolitan Museum and MoMA.
• Te Papa Tongarewa in New Zealand has an incredible gallery of home-learning videos on many topics, in many formats, each labeled with the grade level it corresponds to in the NZ school system. Also, there is a large collection of online puzzles of images from the collections… feeding an addiction that I think many of us have developed during lockdown!
• Oakland Museum of California has posted a bushel and a peck of home learning options, including art projects that need not be just for kids!
• The Smithsonian offers an immense array of learning resources, of which this document seems to me the best starting point. I’m not sure why these pages are in Google Docs instead of integrated into the website, but that’s not a big deal.

This list is by no means exhaustive; it is just a tiny portion of the resources out there, selected by my own whimsy. I would love to hear about your own favorite resources for learning at home!

Here in Berlin, as in some other parts of the world, measures to combat the pandemic are not only continuing but increasing. So how are museums responding?

By now it’s clear that the pandemic is not going to be short-term. Not only has it been affecting our daily lives for nearly a year, but despite the vaccine on the horizon, it will continue to do so for months to come. Institutions are responding to the mandatory closures in different ways – and unfortunately, most museums are not exactly on the forefront of innovative thinking here. In many institutions there is a hunker-down-and-wait-for-it-to-blow-over mindset that is highly, tragically regrettable.

BUT!

There are some shining lights in the museums landscape: institutions who have embraced the digital to connect with their communities despite the lockdowns. Here are two of my favorites:

One measure of how actively museums are exploring new directions to reach people is simple: are they on TikTok? It might sound laughable, but it is dead serious! In this respect Berlin’s Museum of Natural History is a frontrunner. Its TikTok channel is full of short videos, some made of clips from videos on other platforms, pepped up with cut-out animations and stickers pasted over the top, not to mention of course the ubiquitous music of this platform. Within 1-2 minutes you can learn something significant, and it feels like an accident!

The video tours are also great fun, led by young and charismatic guides (Sebastian Demtröder is a hero!). One video series is formatted like a cabaret/variety show, with the lights turned low and the participants in black eveningwear, doing various acts like drawing, storytelling, and other performances – all about natural history, of course. Although for me the talking parts were a bit long, I absolutely love the idea and especially the fact that the museum is trying such a wild new format!

The museum also made a podcast series – and another one especially for kids! Many of the digital offerings are conveniently listed on one page of the website. It’s all in German so far; maybe they will expand to English at some point to reach further audiences.