Is This Us? The Construction of European Woman/Man in the Exhibition It’s Our History!

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the non-profit organisation Musée de l’Europe staged the exhibition It’s our history!. The subject of It’s our history! was the history of European integration from 1945 to today. The exhibition was intended to make European citizens aware that – as the exhibition’s manifesto stated: ‘The History, with a capital H, of European construction is inextricable from our own personal history, that of each European citizen. It is not the reserve of those that govern us. We all shape it, as it shapes us, sometimes unbeknown to us. It’s our history!’ One of the means that the Musée de l’Europe chose as an illustration of this supposed interrelation of History and history are video testimonies in which 27 European citizens (one from each European member state) tell their own life stories. The present article explores this use of autobiographical accounts as didactic means in It’s our history!. The article argues that through the 27 Europeans, an image of European woman/man and European integration is advanced that glosses over internal conflicts in Europe’s recent history, leads to the construction of a model European citizen and serves as a symbol for the slogan ‘unity in diversity’ in which Europe appears as more united than diverse

Untitled

“…These problems of the founding fathers myth in part explain why testimonies of living Europeans with their own stories of how they participate in integrating Europe in their daily lives have entered museum narratives of European integration. It is also important to note, however, that this representational strategy chimes well with the strong trend to utilize more and more eyewitness accounts in history (and other) museums, which started with museums and exhibitions on the Holocaust (Kushner 2001; de Jong 2011).…”

“…Video interviews in which ordinary men and women recount episodes from their biographies, like the ones shown in It's our history!, are an ever more frequent phenomenon in museums. For around a decade, Holocaust and Second World War museums and exhibitions in particular have been including video interviews with witnesses of the war and the Holocaust in their exhibitions (de Jong 2011). Eighty years after Tucholsky's visit to the museum in Vincennes, exhibiting people in museums on contemporary history has become normality, if in a different, less gruesome, form than the one suggested by the German author.…”

Museums of Europe: Tangles of Memory, Borders, and Race

“…To this end, I want to close with the hallmark of Brussels’ Musée de l'Europe key exhibition It's Our History! —namely, the testimonies of contemporary European citizens telling their own life stories and how they participate in making Europe (de Jong ). Here, European diversity is a national one.…”

European Heritage, Dialogue and Digital Practices

“…The cases examined exemplify representations of otherness and articulations of subjectivity in which 'the other' is a counterpart in dialogue. De Jong ( 2011 ) argues that the use of video testimonies in exhibitions dealing with European identity is pivotal to constructing a sense of shared history and modelling the European citizen. These affirmations of common history and values, however, collide with a rather undefined idea of Europe, whose main feature is to be an ongoing process of incorporation of national and regional entities ( Krankenhagen, 2011 ).…”

“…The second narrative centres on the shared memory of the Holocaust and the atrocities of the Second World War ( Levy and Sznaider, 2002 ). The origins of the EU's communitarian project are commonly framed as a response to these dramatic historical events ( Probst, 2003 ;De Jong, 2011 ). Consequently, Europeanisation is often associated with a set of values that are intended to guarantee the unrepeatability of war and genocide ( Kaiser, Krankenhagen and Poehls, 2014 , pp.…”