The Preserving Machine: The "New" Museum and Working through Trauma -- the Musee Memorial pour la Paix of Caen

André Bazin's insightful essay on photography helps us to obtain a critical understanding of this drive to create "an atmosphere of recall" and its implications for working through historical trauma. In the realist representational aspirations of the plastic arts Bazin identifies what he terms a "mummy complex" rooted in a psychological drive to ward off death: simply put, "the preservation of life by a representation of life."(37) Thus, like a mummified body, realist representations ensure that the subject will enjoy a certain immortality. For Bazin, photography is the ultimate expression of this mummy complex. Unlike painting and sculpture, photography has a stronger claim to an unmediated reality. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, photos are "miniatures of reality."(38) They are the preservation and re-presentation of a past reality which transcend time. Although photos themselves age, their longevity and reproducibility are far superior to the human subjects they represent. As Bazin sees it, "photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time...."(39) The Mémorial's use of high-tech media has obvious similarities to the way Bazin understands the mummy complex of photography. As articulated by former Mémorial historian Denis Maréchal, these media have the capacity to "transmit knowledge and henceforth carry the past...[I]mages and sound archives instantly propel us into the past...[they] reach a whole new level of evocation."(40) Or as the guidebook ambitiously proclaims, they "allow us to live D-Day as though we were there."(41) For many, this preservation of the real through the virtual is a success, as revealed by comments in the visitors' book (Livre d'Or): "Here it's like the war was yesterday!" "A sense of reliving the event."(42) To apply Bazin's ideas to the Mémorial I suggest changing his language somewhat by using the term museumification.(43)
Many have rejected the message of the Mémorial outright in radical readings, or what might be more appropriately described as nonreadings. For example the secular ideology of the Mémorial may have provoked visitor Randy Cevera to write "World peace starts with individual peace and that can only be found in [Jesus Christ]."(56) The comment made by a certain Dr. Abraham Scherr even more vividly reveals this phenomenon. In response to the Mémorial's emphasis on sacrifice and heroic redemption, he wrote in the visitors' book, "and what if all those millions had lived to reproduce in our already overpopulated planet!"(57) While one can only speculate whether Dr. Scherr's reductive and brutally unsophisticated comment was articulating a Malthusian argument or ecological concerns, it does represent a total rejection of the humanist foundations of the museum. An equally oppositional comment was entered by "Perpetuel" when he or she wrote, "Germans, English, French are dead but the Jews are still here."(58) Whether "Perpetuel" was attempting to express an anti-Semitic or a Zionist feeling is unclear (a fellow visitor took strong issue with this entry by crossing it out and writing "sale con" [asshole] in the margin), but it was not elicited by a mimetic reaction to the museum. The writerly potential of the museum is also manifested in the comments of schoolchildren who use the visitors' book to inscribe graffiti. In what I call the "New Kids on the Block Rule!" syndrome, children often use the book to tout their favorite music groups instead of reflecting on their experiences in a way encouraged by the museum.(59) This might be read as a rejection of the museum's calling into being of a subject position rooted in the ideology of the Enlightenment in favor of one informed by pop culture.(60) Or, it would be equally plausible to see the New Kids syndrome as an act of resistance undertaken by schoolchildren against the authority of their teachers as represented by the museum. Visitor Nolan McFadden refused to engage the text of the Mémorial in a similar fashion when he wrote: "Walking on French golf courses in the night is awesome! Peace!"(61)