Ver para creer. Los museos sobre el comunismo como espacios simbólicos

José Carlos Rueda Laffond

doi:10.3989/arbor.2023.809006

Authors

José Carlos Rueda Laffond Universidad Complutense de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6138-2968

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2023.809006

Keywords:

Communism, museums, political symbols, memory, representations

Abstract

This article proposes an overview of the main museums dedicated to communism in Central and Eastern Europe. It approaches the interpretations of these institutions in relation to public history, transnational policies of post-communist remembrance or the influence of other practices about the Holocaust. The text suggests that these institutions should be read as narratives of memory based on an elaboration of meanings of disparate materials. They operate through an intense re-symbolization through different strategies -spectacular, empathetic, immersive-, mainly aimed at commemorating a traumatic past, but also at giving it a nostalgic patina. Based on this assumption, in the second part of the work a flexible classification of the centres studied is proposed: the museums understood as narratives of suffering, those configured from the symbolic authority of place of memory or those that offer an exhibition focused on daily life during socialism. The result is a multifaceted image that includes representation of totalitarianism and genocide, historical absurdity, banal culture or kitsch icons.

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