Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums by Yannik Porsché

Author:Yannik Porsché
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

In Sect. 5.1 in Chap. 5, we will see that on the day of its opening in the Kreuzbergmuseum, a public critique of “Fortress Europe” was possible, even though the EU financed the project. This funding body at no time interfered with or controlled the project. This might be due to the fact that practices in a neighbourhood museum did not receive much media attention. In contrast, the governmental authorities considered the main exhibition in the DHM to be taking a national stage and thus as important enough for last-minute interference (once criticisms of the EU and the nation were noticed). Regarding the Cité, some members of this museum thought the institution’s existence alone had an impact on public debate about immigration, while others in the Cité did not consider the young institution—at least not yet—to be a significant instigator of public debate or an academic reference. In their view, this is why politicians’ interest in the institution was limited. Yet in case the museum should become “uncomfortable,” they were convinced that “subtle forms of censorship” would occur, such as financial cuts or the creation and support of opposing cultural and academic institutions, like a French national history museum or a think tank on national identity—which the then president Sarkozy envisioned but never realised (see Bancel and Lebovics 2011).

Such debates concerning censorship did not occur in the press reviews of the exhibitions in the Cité and the Kreuzbergmuseum. However, in the Cité, the DHM, and the Kreuzbergmuseum alike, members of staff mentioned that they did not always feel able to exhibit what they wanted because of the explicit or presumed non-approval of the institutional authorities. The Cité curator stated that compared to the BKM-incident in the DHM, in the French Cité such decisions were more carefully managed. This was done by strategically placing people with favourable views on the relevant committees. Selection processes in the Cité occurred earlier on in the planning process and were called, by some members of staff, instances of censorship. For example, of six rap music videos that criticise racism in France and Germany that were supposed to be shown in the exhibition, only two were kept: A French one only articulated a moderate critique of France and a German one was the only one not thought to be too provocative, dealing with topics that had historically been dealt with by Germany. In the Cité, the curator, her assistant, and the project manager suggested including more politically engaged rap music (for example, about riots in the outskirts of Paris), which was disapproved of by the Cité’s president (that is, the head of the board of directors, called the conseil d’administration) on political or “simply” aesthetic grounds. Although informants claimed that in some instances the Cité president explicitly spoke out against certain artefacts, in many cases the curators merely thought they knew what the president would think about certain objects and thus preemptively decided against certain pieces of music or artefacts that dealt with the French colonial past.

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