The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945 by Berber Bevernage & Nico Wouters

Author:Berber Bevernage & Nico Wouters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The second floor is dedicated to “the struggles for truth and justice,” starting with the beginning of the dictatorship until the 1988 referendum and the return to democracy, and ending with Patricio Aylwin’s victory speech at the national stadium. It is impossible to give a full account here of the richness and variety of the exposition, with all its documents and visual materials, as well as of its impressive setting (for a detailed description see Andermann 2012b). I just mention the spectacular terrace-shaped glass box that leans forward in the hall at the second floor, lighted by electric candles and facing a wall of photographs picturing the victims. In the box an interactive touchscreen allows the visitor to read the life story of each individual victim, with a wealth of information about his or her life and death (Fig. 22.3).

The second floor exhibition ends with the room of the “Nunca mas” (never again), still a somewhat empty space that does not appear fully integrated with the main exhibition. I return later to this particular space.

The third floor has undergone various transformations since the opening of the museum. The first time I visited it, in January 2011, it was an open space for temporary exhibitions, with a gift- and bookshop and a café opening onto a magnificent view of the Andes. In 2015 the coffee shop and bookshop were relocated to the ground floor, close to the museum entrance. Now the whole third floor has been transformed into an open space with sofa and screen to access the material of the huge archive of the museum, located underground, and composed of thousands of testimonies, videos and other documents recorded and made accessible to visitors.

The museum certainly constitutes an enormous achievement from a financial, archivist, aesthetic and educational point of view: a beautifully structured space endowed with an extensive mass of documents of all kinds, it can undoubtedly be considered a very rich “text,” open to multiple readings and possible interpretations. Yet, what most interests me in the present context is the kind of historical narrative that this state museum endorses and the possible readings of the past it suggests. We already saw how the transition to democracy in Chile was a long and controversial process during which, at different stages, the state sponsored different narratives according to the changing political contexts. The MMDH, which it is worth remembering was the first and only entirely state-sponsored memory museum in Chile , marks the conclusion of 10 years of socialist governments. Its opening, at the very end of Michelle Bachelet’s mandate had an obvious autocelebrative official character that did not go without criticism and discussion from the most politicized components of civil society.

Now, in order to better understand which narrative the state was promoting, which memory it was supporting and which roles it assigned to the opposite political forces, we first have to analyze what is the historic event constructed by the museum narrative.

As mentioned previously, events are not endowed with a natural

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