Nick (00:00):
Thanks, Tess. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Nick Misukanis. I'm a fourth year PhD candidate at the University of Maryland in College Park, and I focus mainly on German history. And so we have this really interesting debate within the historical field in general, but also within German history. And we have this question of privacy and the narratives told, and who has the right to tell these stories, in particular when we discussed the Holocaust and the victims who were murdered at the hands of the National Socialists. Now on this question of privacy, one can look to the case of the Max Plank Institute in Munich, and its discussion of the impact of the Nazis T four program. So just a little bit of context. During the Second World War, in the lead up to it, the Third Reich murdered over 300,000 people, including children who they deemed mentally disabled or mentally ill.
Nick (00:51):
They were unworthy of life according to the Nazi racial theory, and these murders were known as the T four program. Now, upon killing these individuals, murdering them, scientists would then analyze and preserve the brains of the victims. The problem, however, is that these studies didn't end in 1945 with the end of the second World War and the Nazi regime. In fact, the Max Plank Institute continued to allow studies on the preserved brains up until the 1970s. Oh, wow. In 2015, employees of the Max Plank Institute began an effort to try and catalog the brain slides of the victims and identify who these victims were. But as you can imagine, this is a monumental task when you have to locate and identify over 300,000 people. Furthermore, this raises a lot of questions. How do we discuss this historical episode and how do we discuss and portray the victims? So, for example, some of the family members had been notified, but they didn't want the legacy of the children, the other victims, to simply be one associated with murder or tools for scientific discovery. Mm-Hmm. . These were human beings. After all, they had hopes, they had dreams. They're more than just victims of the Nazis. Curious about our other panelists here. What similarities do you, do you see in your respective fields? And are there issues regarding privacy and recounting stories
RaRa (02:14):
That is interesting. I'm, I'm just sitting here with my mouth open, Because it just, nothing amazes me anymore when it comes to atrocities and just wrongdoing for, to people who are just trying to live. Right. And so I'm just sitting here like, Mm-Hmm, wow. That's, that's insanely intense. But what my first thought was history is told by the winners. That's the first thought that came to mind. Right. But we know that there are two sides, three sides, four sides to history, because everybody has their own interpretation of what happened. But I think the plight of history's past is that it's only been told by one group of people or one set of people, and the other renditions, what do we call it? The other,
Tess (03:09):
I think that that's, um, that's really great. RaRa. Like the whole piece of the puzzle thing. I think the problem with writing history, um, is that it is essentially a narrative, right? The thing is, this is a thing that we talk about a lot, um, in feminist scholarship, is that when you turn focus, right, the story changes. So you're using the same documents, right? Mm-Hmm. . But you turn your focus and the narrative changes, and you're not fabricating evidence. You're using the same evidence that always been, has always been there, but you're, you know, a famous art, historical example is there are two women total in the bayou tapestry. So if you just look at them instead of all of the battles, right? But the question here, and I wanna kind of bring it back to, um, that is mm-Hmm.  who gets to tell these stories, or
Vini (04:02):
I just wanna tap into that, that topic. Yeah. Um, because there's a very interesting thing here, which is something we don't problematize enough, maybe, uh, in terms of how narratives are built and how they are Yeah. Um, disseminated, which is the role of museums, we have been discussing more and more how museums work. Uh, there's been a, a, a strong claim for decolonizing museum practices, but they also tell a story that's not neutral because they cannot be neutral. Mm-Hmm. So, uh, the discussion of ization, which is the technical word, horrible word, uh, too long, uh, but the discussion over how you transform something, a set of events, a set of, uh, discourses of, uh, you know, experiences, uh, into an exhibition, into a museum collection, into an entire museum is not
Tess (04:56):
Discussed. Mm-Hmm. . And one of the things that, that museum curators grapple with, especially when per when, um, displaying religious objects or objects associated with trauma, is how do you provide a contextual experience? Because the idea of taking an object, any object and just putting it on a white wall, um, is an inherently white western and highly, uh, 20th century perception. Mm-Hmm. Of what art is. Right. Um, and it really, you know, there's a reason why many of us call the label next to an object, a tombstone, because once you put it in a museum, it's dead. It's a morgue. Um,  and, and, and in an effort to actually use museums as a more educational tool, um, and, and, and of course decolonizing the museum, um, I, I agree that decolonization should not be a metaphor. So I'm hesitant to even talk about decolonizing a museum, because a museum, again, is an inherently western concept for how you should appreciate things that sterile. Yeah. I could rant and rave about this all day, but I will move on. Nick. One of the things that, um, we've talked about in, um, some of my museum studies conversations is that contextualization, um, as a teaching tool versus almost getting into this icky territory of theme parking things. Um, and, and one of the things that, that makes people mm-Hmm,  that really divides people from, from all different backgrounds, walks of faith perspectives, is are holocaust museums, for example, that, um,
Nick (06:26):
Yeah. And actually talk a little bit just about how this memory and this conversation developed in German history. 'cause it's interesting, they, they made, there was a period right after the second World War where it was very much, let's sweep it under the rug. We don't wanna talk about these things, but there's this really, well, okay, I hesitate to say beautiful word in German, but it's, the word is Ang heights vego, which literally means coming to terms with the past. Mm-Hmm.  it means grappling with it. And it is this process that has really been the cornerstone of German culture after the sixties, which was, no, there is a, this, this act was unique in history, and therefore there needs to be a unique process of remembrance that comes along with this. Mm-Hmm. . Now it does become messy. You know, does this, is this something that should be remembered every time politics regarding Israel come up?
Nick (07:20):
Mm-Hmm. . And these are things that Germany is still wrestling with today. But what it is also is this conscious effort of German culture to say, no, we need to acknowledge the truth behind cer. Certain things are just not on the table for discussion. And that, that leads to things like kind of Holocaust denial or stuff like that is completely off the table. And so I, while I can't speak specifically to the museum studies, I can speak to the uniqueness of this particular moment, uh, mainly because this is something that in the US we could potentially learn a lesson about in terms of honest conversations about the past and unique efforts to try and go out of our way to remember it. Hmm. Um, 'cause Germany made that decision and it's, I would argue, has positively impacted both their culture, but also democratic institutions in general.
RaRa (08:05):
It's so interesting. It's so interesting because like, listening to you, I'm thinking about America's atrocities, right? Mm-Hmm. When we think about enslaved people, and in particular states, I won't name mm-Hmm. How it's being presented as something more pretty than what it was . Right. And I think that's something with the mayor, they all, they, they wanna make things better. They wanna make things look better. It's like there's nothing good, nothing pleasant about anything that's happened to any group of people that have been dehumanized and pulverized and killed and whatever. Right? There's nothing good about that. And I think that we have to accept that as it is and, you know, rip that bandage off and just let it live as it is. Right. The context, this is where we were, are we removed from that? Yes, we are. Right? And there are ways that we can talk about these things that shouldn't need to be more palatable.
RaRa (09:05):
Sure. But we can't rewrite history, right? Like they're doing, we can't do that because what they're doing is not accurate and is not fair to those people and their ancestors. I mean, I, my grandmother, I have friends whose grandparents or great-grandparents are still, who are still living that experienced segregation, right? That experienced, um, you know, integration. They're still living , right? They've lived this, this is their experience. And who are you to rewrite that and make it more pleasant than what it was? It's not that, you know, we have to rest in the atrocities, especially if we're not going to recognize them and atone for them and do the necessary work, whatever reparations may look like, right? Because we know that's not just financial. It's a lot of things. Right? If we're not gonna do that work, then we can't rewrite what's been done.
Vini (09:59):
What's more interesting about this like memory work is that it's always about context, right? So again, we're talking about a deliberate decision to remember to come to terms with, uh, because we need these to move forward. Um, coming out of the dictatorship in Brazil in the eighties, uh, the, the movements of those who were victims victimized by the, the, the dictatorship would claim a need for, okay, truth, memory. They would claim the need to truth, memory, and justice, uh, to move forward. That's what we would need to build our democracy or rebuild it. Um, and I'm not like wanting to compare things or anything, but we're talking about episodes that were traumatic to a particular country or even beyond that. Uh, and episodes that need to be discussed moving forward. The same thing goes for, uh, the, the, for January 6th in the, in the US or in Brazil, January 8th. mm-Hmm, 2023. We just had that happening, uh, just this week on Monday. We had the first year, um, anniversary, and we had to discuss this as a democracy, how we're gonna move forward once we had an attempted coup, uh, just a year ago. So the, these are very important discussions. We need to have to build the society. We want to, we want to build, this is a horrible sentence, but anyway, um, this is a discussion we need to have to build a better society, to build the society we actually want.