Simulating the perspective of children has always been an important memory tool in immersive and empathetic representations of past atrocities and violence in literature, film, fictional autobiography, and museums to achieve an emotional proximity between past and present. This paper will analyze how recent museum exhibitions create collective perspectives of children actors in war and genocide, how such exhibitions are designed to influence different age audiences emotionally, shape collective national (and possibly international) memory, and educate about the past both in form of factual information and in form of emotional connections to the past. The paper will employ a variety of methodological approaches in literary, cultural, and museum studies in understanding museum design and the cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic potential for visitor experiences and learning by discussing concepts such as empathy, experientiality, implication, and difficult knowledge.
The theme of historical and political convergences of memory is particularly prevalent in children exhibitions of war and atrocities because they aim to express universal experiences of moral challenges and actions as well as existential feelings – e.g. hunger or the loss of close family members – that run the risk of universalizing individual historical cases and of diminishing the specificity of the historical context. How relevant is it for creating empathetic engagement whether the depicted characters were real historical people or fictitious (but probable) characters? How do they align with the perspectives of victimhood, resistance fighters, bystanders, collaborators, or even perpetrators? Does Michael Rothberg's concept of "implication" offer a more dynamic way for museums to avoid a trivialization of the perceptions and feelings during wartime, since it allows for synchronic entanglements of the past and diachronic overlap of past and present?
My paper will look primarily at two case studies: the children's exhibition in the Museum of the Second World War (Muzeum II Wojny Światowej) in Gdańsk (2017) and the Junior exhibition at the Resistance Museum (Verzetsmuseum) in Amsterdam (2013). Other exhibitions briefly considered include among others Daniel's Story in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and children exhibitions in the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. With a particular emphasis on empathy under conditions of occupation, this paper aims to understand whether such empathetic approaches for children and young visitors lead to national, transnational or humanistic memory. Does the Gdańsk exhibition enhance a national, an East-European or a transnational memory of the Second World War in Poland?The final part of my paper will address the potential and the challenges of historical convergences of memory through analyzing the question how such staging of children experiences of the war and the Holocaust translates to immersion of other atrocities by example of the depiction of refugees and indigenous genocide, among others in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.
