Abstract
My paper investigates the relationship between memory studies and museums as a way of working with memory. For the last fifteen years, academic interest in new approaches to museology has been growing.
These approaches are represented by the House of Terror in Budapest (opened in 2002), Warsaw Uprising Museum (opened in 2004) and Crossroads of Czech and Czechoslovak Statehood (opened in 2009). The most important question I raise is how have these new methodological concepts - connected with cultural memory studies - changed the museological praxis? Is it possible to speak about a "turn" from history to memory? How are new exhibitions different from traditional museums thought and built as "temples of national history?" I would like to demonstrate how the Czech applied memory studies approaches to museums.
The National Museum is a very traditional institution founded in 1818, but these days it houses the new exhibition on Czech and Czechoslovak Statehood, and new expositions about Czech history are in the making. There are also many smaller museums which work with memory (Ústí nad Labem, Tábor).
My goal is to demonstrate the importance of museums in processes of remembering, not only from the institutional point of view, but also as methodological crossroads of memory studies and contemporary museology. This connecting point may highlight common issues of Central and Eastern European memory studies.