Ver para creer. Los museos sobre el comunismo como espacios simbólicos

  1. Rueda Laffond, José Carlos 1
  1. 1 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Complutense de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR 02p0gd045

Journal:
Arbor: ciencia, pensamiento y cultura

ISSN: 0210-1963

Year of publication: 2023

Volume: 199

Issue: 809

Type: Article

DOI: 10.3989/ARBOR.2023.809006 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Arbor: ciencia, pensamiento y cultura

Abstract

This article proposes an overview of the main museums dedicated to communism in Central and Eastern Europe. It approaches the interpretations of these institutions in relation to public history, transnational policies of post-communist remembrance or the influence of other practices about the Holocaust. The text suggests that these institutions should be read as narratives of memory based on an elaboration of meanings of disparate materials. They operate through an intense re-symbolization through different strategies -spectacular, empathetic, immersive-, mainly aimed at commemorating a traumatic past, but also at giving it a nostalgic patina. Based on this assumption, in the second part of the work a flexible classification of the centres studied is proposed: the museums understood as narratives of suffering, those configured from the symbolic authority of place of memory or those that offer an exhibition focused on daily life during socialism. The result is a multifaceted image that includes representation of totalitarianism and genocide, historical absurdity, banal culture or kitsch icons.

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