Forced Migrations as a European Heritage and Resource for Enhancing Intercultural Cohesion

ABSTRACT

Social identity theory argues that conflict between groups diminishes if they discover they have something important in common, and if they can build a new hybrid identity together. With this premise in mind, the article demonstrates how present-day experiences of refugees, displaced ethnic groups, political exiles, foreign-born workers, diasporic populations and other migrants may be incorporated into the existing body of predominantly national historical landscapes and stories addressing expulsions, exile and forced displacement experienced by European populations in the twentieth century. It is argued that we should look closer at the compositional processes and orchestration of migrant heritage in Europe as an inherently political concept that may both amplify and interfere with social cohesion. The article discusses the compositional strategies (grafting, bifurcation and suture) that loosen up the structure of representations and have been used experimentally by four cultural institutions in Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland. The article maintains that series of hands-on small- and middle-scale experiments and compositional adjustments may be highly instrumental in enhancing the value of the heritage of forced migrations, not only as a domain of conflicting academic interpretations, but also as a factor of intercultural cohesion in a broader perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced migrations
• Expulsions‌
• European memories
• European heritage
• Museums‌
• Compositional strategies
• Cultural diversity‌
• Intercultural cohesion

Introduction

The massive influx of non-European immigrants to the EU in 2015 has been one of the most discussed and mediatized events of the 2000s. As often happens in periods of drastic transformations, imagery of comparable events was activated by various actors who turned to “contrasting memories of the past to argue for the inclusion or exclusion of new immigrants” (Glynn and Kleist 2012, 6). In particular, analysis of media coverage of the “migrant crisis” in four European countries demonstrates that comparisons with historical cases of forced migrations were a recurrent topic of mediatized advocacy campaigns (Berry et al. 2015). Although the arguments highlighting human rights and humanitarian concerns ranked much higher, historical reasons were nevertheless frequently voiced by pro-migrant groups and individuals (Cinalli et al. 2021).¹ Institutional opinion-makers and organizations working with refugees followed the trend and employed historicizing strategies in their pro-solidarity campaigns.²

Political instrumentalization of historical narratives and collective memories about European expulsions of the twentieth century have been attended in academic literature (e.g., Horsti 2019; Narvselius and Fedor 2021; Palmberger and Tosˇić 2016; Törnquist-Plewa and Petersson 2009; Törnquist-Plewa 2015), but mostly from the perspective of political conflict resolution, reconciliation, and promotion of transnational cooperation. Studies of previous asylum debates in Europe (Glynn and Kleist 2012; Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013; Steiner 2000) demonstrate that references to national histories of forced migration were regularly employed to promote more generous policies several decades after WWII. Allusions to national hardships do have a potential to spark solidarity with the newcomers as citizens whose grievances have to be respected (Cinalli et al. 2021, 3). In contrast, invocation of discomforting collective pasts of the receiving societies seems to be a shaky foundation for more generous reception policies in the present (Bretschneider 2019, 56; Glynn 2012, 185; Karakayali 2019; Neumann and Tavan 2021). Despite many gaps, the interest in the subject of the uses of the past continues to grow in migration studies. This in turn promises more insights into not only political and social, but also cultural incorporation of immigrants into the host societies (Glynn and Kleist 2012; Bennett 2011; Brettell and Hollifield 2014; Iervolino 2013).

Proliferation of migration museums over the past two decades indicates a growing awareness of the transnational, collaborative and assembled nature of heritage (Delanty 2018, 14). Is it feasible to make heritage of forced migrations a resource for forging intercultural and, in a broader perspective, social cohesion³ in the European societies that have recently experienced an influx of global migrants with dissimilar historical knowledge and historical consciousness? This question has been addressed to both old and new European cultural institutions exploring their collections from alternative viewpoints and aiming to promote democratic cultural outlooks (Iervolino 2013, 114).

In what follows, there will first be a brief outline of the conceptual foundations of the heritage of forced migrations, within the framework of European collective memories and heritage. The article proceeds with outlining several compositional strategies for connecting historical and present-day forced migrations, which in turn can facilitate inclusion of the nascent migrant heritages⁴ into the texture of European heritages. After that, using the field material collected during the Horizon 2020 SO-CLOSE project⁵, examples will be presented of how cultural heritage institutions in four European countries meet the challenge of opening up the local heritage of forced migration for the recent migrants and, eventually, for migrant heritages. Finally, the article reflects on possibilities of configuring heritages of forced migrations as a platform for cohesion and post-migrant epistemologies.

Heritagization of Forced Migrations. Seven Circles of European Memories

The notions of refugee, ethnic cleansing, and genocide constitute the toxic legacy of the twentieth century; a legacy that is pan-European in its geographical scope, global in its historical impact, and universal in its symbolic acknowledgement (Panayi and Virdee 2011). Since 2000, transnational migration has been increasingly presented in museums, and by now there is "a significant body of discourse on the museal representation of migration in Europe” (Kaiser, Krankenhagen, and Poehls 2014, 155, 173). However, the theme of historical forced migrations often resists the established universalizing frameworks of presentation and poses a challenge for public heritage institutions. Meanwhile, due to their universal significance as examples of violation of human rights and as consequences of toxic discriminatory policies, historical expulsions deserve the keener attention of heritage institutions.

A recurring feature of forced migrations in heritage contexts is victimology. The main personage is a suffering refugee, whose dignity has to be restored and humanity acknowledged. However, although this humanistic framing is fully justified, it may raise concers when becoming the sole principle of heritage initiatives and representations. Another aspect of thinking in normative terms for the purpose of configuring forced migrations as a heritage, is the readiness to envisage present-day transnational immigrants as a homogeneous group with whom one can claim solidarity. After all, “forced migration” is not a legal, but a moral concept in which the idea of “being forced” resonates with a dominant humanitarian dispositive of migration (Karakayali 2019, 200). However, on closer consideration, much contemporary migration from conflict zones to Europe, and, with the beginning of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war, also within Europe, is “mixed” by nature (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1995; Van Hear, Brubaker, and Bessa 2009). This makes the idea of selecting morally transparent and pedagogical cases for the purpose of heritage presentation quite problematic. At the same time, the complexity of the stories of involuntary displacement has great potential to trigger interest in broader audiences to extend their knowledge about the topic and invest into it emotionally.

Against a background of the ambiguous and transgressive nature of processes brought under the umbrella concept of forced migrations (Brun and Lund 2014) it makes sense to ponder conceptual frameworks that may be suitable for their heritagization. One of the obvious choices is dissonant heritage (Lähdesmäki et al. 2019; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996), as it has been assumed that “new migration within Europe challenges traditional unified understandings of heritage in the European context” (Pantazatos 2019, 128). As loss, disconnection and suffering are inherent components of forced migrations, it is also possible to rubricize their cultural and political presentations as a heritage of atrocity (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996, 95). Another useful scaffolding concept that in a similar vein brings to the fore barbarity and deprivation, but lays emphasis on their association with certain iconic places, is terrorscapes. In van der Laarse’s take (2013), these are sites bearing historical traces of state-perpetrated violence and massive loss of human lives. These locations function as a pinnacle of diverse and often conflicting memory narratives.

Public interest in the topic of national emigration has been growing over the past two decades, and found its expression in the opening of several specialized museums, such as the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, BallinStadt in Hamburg or the Emigration Museum in Gdynia. However, stories and histories of immigration, especially undocumented and mixed immigration, are usually presented by heritage institutions following an “additive model” (Gradén and O’Dell 2020, 17), and primarily addressed in one-time events and temporary exhibitions, as “an appendix to the theme of national emigration” (Goldhahn and Ricciardo 2021, 358). This is a significant detail, as “[r]epresentation in a museum becomes symbolic of [the new comers’] arrival and acceptance; a lack of representation signals denial and rejection” (Levin 2017, 12).

As a salient political and societal issue, new global migration increasingly transgresses an “additive” discourse and triggers the discussion about the post-migrant world and post-migrant Europe, as “we have already reached a point where migration experiences shape society as a whole, not just some individuals with an immigrant background” (Schramm et al. 2015, x). Migrant heritage, thus, has to be conceived not only as a sub-chapter or a special aspect of contemporary European heritage; it is increasingly emerging as its canvas, source and triggering mechanism. As Delanty (2018, 15–17) convincingly argues, although European heritage has been fruitfully interpreted through the lens of universalizing notions associated, most prominently, with remembrance of the Holocaust, an alternative line of thinking that highlights specific transnational connectivity and entanglements as the essence of European heritage is also fully justified.

Leggewie’s conceptualization of seven circles of European memory (the Holocaust; Soviet totalitarianism and GULAG; ethnic cleansings; wars and crises; crimes of colonialism; history of migration; European integration) gives a clue about the possible content of the corresponding heritage (Leggewie 2011, 14). It brings to the fore violence and destruction of diversity as a quintessential part of shared modern European experiences. However, although this model distinguishes the history of migration as a particular circle, it may be argued that forced migrations actually cut across all the circles and scaffold all the key European narratives. Starting from the “negative node” of the Holocaust, up to the “success story” of European integration, we encounter numerous cases of deprivation, suffering and atrocities, but also compassion and solidarity in the wake of mass flights and expulsions. In view of this, the present-day experiences and cultural baggage of refugees and other categories of forced migrants can be incorporated into the texture of European memories in multiple ways.

But how can multifaceted stories about the European past be loosened up and opened to include testimonies of present-day migrants, to make them relevant, moving and contributing to intercultural and social cohesion? As Delanty (2018, 22) puts it, “since the European heritage is not uniquely the legacy of Europe but was formed through myriad encounters with the rest of the world, … [the task is] to unravel the logic [my emphasis] by which identities and memories become entangled leading to new relationships between remembering and forgetting.” Taking a step further, it may be argued that it is not the normative EU messages of tolerance, peace, diversity and democracy that are the game changer per se. The crux is not simply to infuse the heritage content with certain values, but rather to review the compositional processes and orchestration of migrant heritage in Europe as an inherently political concept that may both amplify and interfere with social cohesion. After all, the core reasons of developing migrant heritage are not only transformative re-inscribing of “other” cultural expressions into the European context, but also facilitation of input and feedback from various stakeholders, among them, crucially, the migrants themselves (Levin 2017; Petersen 2021; Rekdal 1999; Swensen and Guttormsen 2020).

Compositional Strategies of Connecting Historical and Present-Day Forced Migrations: Grafting, Bifurcation, Suture

The aesthetic and epistemological platforms for (re)addressing experiences of historical and contemporary forced migrations are not limitless. Most typically, heritage institutions and cultural actors oscillate between universalist and particularist modes of presentation. The former is underpinned by the idea that forced migrations may be regarded as an extraordinary, but not unthinkable experience that can happen to anyone in times of crisis. An alternative approach is to present forced migrations as a unique experience triggered by and consisting of a patchwork of particular – catastrophic and tragic – events, and thus affecting some individuals and groups harder than others.

In various events curated by cultural institutions, both modes of presentation can be used simultaneously. Furthermore, they have to be assembled from various elements and structured in a way that triggers a range of cognitive and emotive responses from the intended audiences. For this purpose, both narrative and non-narrative presentations may serve as principles of coherence and guidelines of assemblage. The possibility of dissimilar interpretations and competing evaluations is a virtue of the narrative (Czarniawska 2004, 7; Norrick 2007, 128). In words of Meretoja, “the ethical potential of storytelling depends on the possibility of non-subsumptive understanding, in which singular experiences are not subsumed under what we already know, but shape and transform our understanding” (2017, 12–13). Hence, it is reasonable to expect that the migrant stories promoted by cultural institutions may facilitate formulation of altered narrative identities highlighting the particular, the individual, and the unfamiliar.

In an alternative, non-narrative approach, reflection and emotional engagement are triggered by efforts to make sense of bits and pieces, which harks back to oft-quoted ideas of Walter Benjamin about montage, de(re)contextualization and value of fragments (Ferris 2006, 6). In many ways, montage privileges affective, sensory, ephemeral quality of engagement with messy texture of reality and thus opens for diverse personal and even private forms of meaning-making (Roberts 1988; Rogers 2012; Suhr and Willerslev 2013). This approach resonates particularly well with the fragmented texture of accounts about forced migrations that can be read both as bounded stories exposing certain causality chains, and as aspects of more contingent and multidirectional accounts formulated across circles of European memory.

Multi-scalar experiences of historical displacements and present-day forced migrations can thus be approached with and made sense of by means of narrative, montage or hybrid forms deriving from them, such as, for example, “labyrinth” (Basu 2007, 53). As it simultaneously represents order and disorder, integration and disintegration, unity and multiplicity, labyrinth “purposely frustrates its visitors’ expectations, thrusting visitors back into the troubling […] realms of partial truths and uncertainties” (Basu and Macdonald 2007, 15–16), which requires cognitive and physical labors from the visitors. In this context, blank spots and transitory moments are charged with opportunities to expand the boundaries and weave new meaningful details into the texture of the existing cultural heritage products.

It is possible to distinguish several compositional strategies that may facilitate incorporation of knowledge and experiences of the recent migrants into the texture of European collective memories and historical accounts. Arguably, if the cultural institution in question works mainly with narrative modes of presentation, its core narrative(s) may be “grafted” with new migrant stories in some crucial joints. Grafting means basically that different texts and contexts are written onto and into each other (Culler 1983; Derrida 2000). Moments of “melodramatic memorability” (Rigney 2016), but also disturbing gaps, unexplained omissions and contested episodes may be well suited for de-hermitization and implanting novel elements and developing them thematically afterwards.

In the cases when a cultural heritage institution does not work with a certain well-defined story, but rather conveys a more complex and multifocal knowledge, embracing longer periods and multiple geographical locations making montage a more natural choice, the strategy of incorporation and “restorying” (Mishler 1999, 5) may be different. Rather, it may resemble a principle of a domino game in which every tile can be matched with a piece containing a tile of the same value wherever the players see an opportunity to add the piece. This mode may be called bifurcation. It this case, internal structure of the existing montage can be expanded by means of connecting different chronotopes and genealogies in a less logically consistent and more patchwork-like manner than in the case of grafting.

Yet another compositional strategy helping to destabilize the “additive model” evokes the metaphor of suture. This semantically rich and visually stunning concept has been interpreted in several philosophical and cultural-theoretical contexts, especially those building on psychoanalysis (Lennerfors and Murata 2021). Metaphorically, suture conveys the idea of stitching a wound, which means that the damage is repaired, but only as a temporary, provisional fix. Using ideas of film analysis, “suture is […] a matter of freezing or arresting the subject – but such fixing will never be definitive or totalizing. It will instead always be temporary and will adapt from moment to moment” (Rushton 2016, 204; see also Oudart 1977). Arguably, such situational identifications with relations, actions and dynamic parts of the suggested stories, mirrors the logic of searching clues to find a way out of the labyrinth. Suturing may be thus defined as a compositional strategy that tends to find its expression in uncertain hybrid zones between narrative and montage (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Main modes of presentation/structuring principles used by cultural heritage institutions, and compositional strategies suitable for opening them to migrant heritages.

Assembling Forced Migrations as European Heritage in Four Specific Contexts

The subsequent account focuses on four cultural heritage institutions – among them two partners of the SO-CLOSE project – whose compositional strategies of approaching both historical and contemporary forced migrations differ in terms of scale, content and purpose. Geographically, these institutions are located in different parts of Europe with their particular historical experiences of undemocratic regimes that triggered expulsions and involuntary displacements: Monte Sole in Italy, Museu Memorial de l’Exili in Spain, Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung in Germany, and Muzeum przesiedleńców i wypędzonych in Pławna Górna in Poland. Despite different institutional forms, target groups and core historical narratives, they have several features in common. All of them are typical memory sites, lieux de mémoire, as they “exist because of their […] endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications” (Nora 1989, 19). WWII, and corollary events shortly before and after it, is a key vantage point for all the four cases. The selected cultural institutions also provide interesting examples of activist memory that focuses on injustices and losses, but at the same time strives to avoid over-emphasis on victimhood (Rigney 2016, 93). The following empirical analysis of the four cases is derived from the desk-research and ethnographic observations, expert interviews and photo- and video-elicitation conducted during the course of several pre-arranged visits.

Monte Sole

The Historic Regional Park of Monte Sole, south of Bologna, is a heritage site that a common visitor does not directly associate with migrations. Nevertheless, relevance of the topic becomes apparent when one learns the details of the story associated with the physical surroundings. In the first place, Monte Sole has been a well-known destination for the annual outing to celebrate April 25 – Italy’s Liberation Day. The importance of this national holiday is difficult to overestimate, as it commemorates the end of Mussolini’s fascist regime and of the Nazi occupation of Italy. The celebrations convey a message of national perseverance in the face of the brutal mass violence of the twentieth century. One of its episodes took place in the mountain area of Monte Sole in September 1944, when German troops, aided by a group of fascists, launched a massive anti-partisan offensive. As the surviving partisans retreated, the local residents were left to their fate. In all, around 770 people, including many children, perished. The few survivors left the scathed area, which was never again repopulated. Thereby, the massacres stand out not only as the biggest slaughter of civilians in Italy during WWII, but also as a tragic story of abandonment of a naturally beautiful and once populated landscape that turned into a terrorscape.

Currently, the park that was established in 1989 under the auspices of the Emilia Romagna regional authorities, combines several heritage routes and hiking paths. However, although it incorporates features of a leisurescape (Naef 2014), the landmarks associated with the massacres stand out and define the character of the site primarily as a terrorscape. They are bound together in a pilgrim-like route, evoking uniform memorial aesthetics that allude to the Catholic Stations of the Cross. The religious message of martyrdom is inseparable from the civic message of peace, which is amplified by bringing together two main themes with universalist connotations: Christian ethics and anti-fascism. Within this general framework one may distinguish several mutually reinforcing narratives that can be grafted with analogies taken from recent contexts of global migration.

Aside from the key story about the course of the massacre, a corresponding story that evokes a broader associative context focuses on fighters against Nazism and fascism, red partisans and the Resistance. The fallen partisans of Brigata Stella Rossa were commemorated in Monte Sole with a monument bearing their symbol, the red star, soon after the war. They remain cult figures of the anti-fascist movement, even though survivors and their relatives tacitly circulated another narrative, according to which failing military tactics of the partisans and their close involvement with the local villagers triggered the massacre (Monicelli 2014, 166). Nevertheless, “the red partisan story” continued to be emplotted into the broader European context of heroization of pro-communist partisans in the Soviet Union, Southern Europe and France. Their prominent position is, however, to some extent counterbalanced by memory of another category of heroes, the stories of whom convey a stronger connotation of martyrdom and political neutrality, namely clergymen and nuns executed together with members of their parishes.

It took time before the Monte Sole massacres emerged as a catalyst for the novel focus on victims and reconciliatory rhetoric promoted by the EU. In this context, regular visits of official German delegations, and their tribute to the victims of Monte Sole initiated more than 50 years after the massacre, deserve special attention. Another significant development was a new emphasis on the youngest victims. This commemorative focus was reinforced due to recently published recollections of those survivors who, as children, witnessed massacres of their families and were later fostered far away from their native places, often in miserable conditions (e.g., Nannetti 2011). These shocking accounts reverberate in broader contexts, especially relating to deaths and traumas of children caught in the contemporary military conflicts and forced displacements.

The Monte Sole Peace School, Scuola di pace di Monte Sole, an NGO with an office on the territory of the historical park, is dedicated to fostering democratic values, respect of human rights and a culture of peace. Its pedagogical activities lend themselves to experiments with suturing and grafting the topic of contemporary migrations into the history of Monte Sole. In the course of their meetings with target groups of schoolchildren and youth, the curators address contemporary war crimes and “peace crimes”, including the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean.⁶ In particular, an open house event hold at Scuola di pace in connection to Italy's Liberation Day in 2022 was accompanied by onsite presentations at several key landmarks of the massacre: the church and cemetery of St Martino, the ruins of the village of Caprara di Sopra and the cemetery of Casaglia. The open-air discussions included stories of several newcomers from African countries who raised the topics of racism and discrimination of non-European migrants, but also issues of migrant home-making. A group discussing democratic participation was staged on the territory of the ruined cemetery of Casaglia where a prominent political figure, Guiseppe Dossetti (1913–1996), is also buried. Reference to this person, a lawyer who participated in drafting the post-war Italian constitution, was grafted in an engaged discussion about migrant citizenship and humanitarian policies of migrant reception.

Notably, on that particular day, involvement of the non-European migrants took another form that was not pre-arranged by Scuola di Pace or any other organization. Among the street vendors one could see a couple from Cameroon selling t-shirts with images of a wolf and an inscription in Italian “I am with the Wolf”, alluding to the local partisan leader, Il Lupo. Oftentimes, the lack of habit to participate in specific rites evoking a cult of tragic national history discourages migrants from using the heritage site in the conventional manner practiced by native Italians, who seem to manage a delicate balance between Monte Sole as terrorscape and leisurescape. However, ensuring various forms of migrant participation and, consequently, incorporation of new migrant stories might eventually facilitate suturing of these two symbolic landscapes with contrastive moral connotations into a heritagescape that would invite plurality of uses and interpretations. Admittedly, gradual opening of the canonized national narrative for comparison with migrant stories may imply risks of relativization. However, it also may inspire thinking about “the ways in which remembering the past and shaping the future can work together” (Rigney 2016, 93) and thereby reinforce cultural cohesion (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Discussion staged on the territory of the cemetery of Casaglia where Guiseppe Dossetti is buried.

Museu Memorial de L’Exili

Another instructive case of a heritage institution that bridges forced migrations of the past and present, can be found at Museu Memorial de l’Exili (MUME). An online presentation specially highlights its importance as “the first museum facility dedicated to the preservation of the memory of Republican exile and its legacy”.⁷ The vantage point of the exhibition is La Retirada, the exodus of nearly half a million defeated republicans following occupation of Catalonia by Francoist troops in 1939. The majority sought refuge in France, while some republican officials and intellectuals managed to reach Algeria, Mexico, USA or the Soviet Union. Similarly to the historical park of Monte Sole, MUME is located on an authentic site of the addressed events, in the Catalonian town of La Jonquera, on the same street that thousands of republicans passed on their way to mountainous passages on the French border. In this respect, it exemplifies a terrorscape of La Retirada.

The civil war of 1936–1939 is a key episode of contemporary Spanish history, but for a long time it lacked a definite closure. Due to the Pact of Forgetting introduced after Franco’s death, the conflict of memories was not settled even several decades after the presumable end of the civil war and the end of the Francoist dictatorship (Encarnación 2014; Graham 2004; Holguín 2015; Labanyi 2008). Nevertheless, since the 1980s local museums of Catalonia have positioned themselves as “engines driving Spain into democracy” (Holo 2000, 12) in a format that foregrounds regional specificity (Van Geert 2014), but that also underscores the European memories. Against this background, MUME faced an uneasy task of highlighting a defeat of democratic forces and the advent of the longest personal dictatorship in modern European history. How did MUME manage to approach the task of presenting this historical chapter? What did its exhibition spotlight and, on the contrary, downplay? And how can it open for experiences of present-day global migrants?

Although La Retirada took place shortly before the beginning of WWII, the exiles who crossed the French border most often met the same fate as millions of other Europeans who were targeted for persecution in German-controlled Europe. In that part, stories of the Spanish republican flight from Catalonia resonate with the core event of the European memory culture, the Holocaust. Many expellees were detained in internment camps in France and around 7,000 of them ended up at the concentration camp of Mauthausen. It cannot go unnoticed that MUME’s edifice that was inaugurated in 2007, also signals references to the Holocaust aesthetic. However, in a sense MUME’s approach provides a clear counterpoint to the main moral lesson of the Holocaust condensed in the motto “Never again!” On the second floor, the visitor faces an artistic installation featuring two superimposed photos of wartime refugees, one from the period of the Spanish Civil War, and one supposedly taken during the Yugoslav wars. Similar composition, postures and facial expressions of the crowded people facing the prospects of internment, violence and possible death convey an unsettling message of the repetitive nature of wars, genocides and brutal realities of the contemporary forced displacements.

Another episode connecting the wartime history of Catalonia with the topic of the Holocaust is the flight of German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin from France, and his subsequent suicide in a Catalonian borderline town of Portbou, quite close to La Jonquera. Transformation of the site of death of the prominent European intellectual into a tourist magnet in the 1990s is a curious example of what Rothberg (2009) calls multidirectional memory. On the one hand, “the re-evaluation of the Republican exiles’ significance […] made it easier for Benjamin’s fate to resonate with the discursive frame of the Spanish Republic’s defeat” (Alfaro 2020, 254). On the other hand, the memory of Benjamin and the republican exiles contain parallels with the predicament of contemporary refugees from the Global South crossing clandestine passages in the Pyrenees – the landscape with connotations of a terrorscape. In this fascinating case, three circles of European memory (the Holocaust, the wars and crises, the modern migrations) are interconnected due to the centrality of the refugee as a symbolic node of the modern European heritage and “a prototype for the intricate, multi-faceted identity cultures of the twenty-first century” (Gemie 2006, 39).

The heritagization of Walter Benjamin resonates with yet another thematic pillar in the story presented by MUME, namely the fate of exiled Spanish, and in particular Catalonian, elites: artists, intellectuals and political figures. The military attack against Catalonians, as well as the assault of their language and culture, is the topic foregrounded at MUME and its partner institutions in the region. In turn, the theme of the exiled cultural elite prompts yet another story, namely the leftist ideology of the republicans and their connections with the Soviet Union. This resonates with the second circle of European memories, which is Soviet totalitarianism, whereby military help to the Spanish republicans was part of the broader struggle for the communist ideological dominance. However, this part of the story remains underemphasized at MUME.

Enactment of disruptions and ambivalences is undoubtedly the core visitor experience at MUME. The labyrinth structure of the permanent exhibition and “broken” technique of projecting portraits of famous émigrés on multiple mirror prisms are especially memorable. Nevertheless, the bodily experience of confusion and uncertainty evoked by the maze-like space brings in another effect; it enhances the message of alertness and mobilization in the face of universal threats to personal integrity, cultural community, democracy and peace. When the visitor steps into the labyrinth-like area exhibiting historical objects and documents, she is overlooked by several large-size photos which blueprint the story of the republican exile: Hitler and Franco saluting the crowd; Spaniards onboard of a cross-Atlantic ship; and, finally, naked male internees from Mauthausen. This sequence of the brutally suggestive pictures presents an unequivocal chain of causes and consequences, and promises no “soft landing” or consolation for a sensitive visitor. However, individual exhibits in the labyrinth subtly counterbalance the dark aura projected by the “big history” and its terrorscapes. They re-direct the visitor’s attention to human agency, creativity, practices of care and other details highlighting ways of survival in internment and exile. Thus, on the whole, MUME’s narrative of the authoritarian “grand history” is juxtaposed with the montage of resistance of its victims, which eventually adds overtones of optimism to the exhibition.

Yet another juxtaposition grafted into the exhibited material is the one between history (collective, visualized, explicitly formulated) and memory (private, whispered, confined to the domain of rumours and family secrets). Memory is one of the conceptual pillars of MUME, which refers to breaking of the Pact of Forgetting on the atrocities of Franco’s regime at the beginning of the 2000s. Several exhibits convey the message of vanishing memory and a necessity to preserve it for the future. However, the museum holds back from promoting a triumphant message of a democratic closure and retrieval of uncensured and unabridged memories. Rather, the exhibition spotlights a slow mnemonic recovery – or, on the contrary, an unavoidable melancholic forgetting – symbolized in one of the exhibits through the word “memory” disappearing from a paper ark.

Acknowledgement of ambiguity of the circumstances, experiences and consequences of La Retirada opens for linking diverse experiences of migrants, either in form of grafting or suturing individual and collective stories, thematically fitting the key “joints” of the permanent exhibition, or in other ways that hold oud against the mainstream “additive model”. For example, during an open day in 2022, the MUME curators organized a creative workshop in which the topic of historical exiles and fates of the expellees was used as a trigger for personal memories and stories among the invited “friends of the museum” of migrant origin. The participants were free to choose among several pieces of Catalonian poetry of various periods addressing the topic of exile. Personal recollections, associations and emotions sparked by these texts were then conveyed into artistic collages and exhibited in the museum venue. This creative experiment was a timely reminder about the importance of creative encounters with and artistic interrogations of the local heritages that are consonant with the experiences of the contemporary exiles. Symbolic loosening of the texture of the local histories with the aid of montage techniques have a potential to become fertile soil for the migrants’ co-construction of their cultural stories and heritages (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Combination of the labyrinth and narrative of the republican exile at MUME.

Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung

Nowadays official memory discourses tend to portray Germans not solely as perpetrators of WWII, but also as its victims (Moeller 2003; Schulze 2006). This could not come as a complete surprise, since enhanced preoccupation with human rights, acknowledgement of the universality of human suffering, and the keen interest in previously silenced or less-known aspects of European dark heritage converged on the cusp of the twenty first century. Also, by that time various EU-funded programmes had enhanced academic interest in histories of expulsion and fates of the exiles (Calligaro 2013, 113–14). Nevertheless, when in 2003 Erika Steinbach, a leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Expellee League), proposed to establish a new educational and commemorative institution, Center against Expulsions, this sparked immediate controversy, both on the domestic front and abroad (Lutomski 2004; Troebst 2009). Finally, Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung (Documentation Center Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation, DZ) was opened in 2021 in Berlin-Kreuzberg as a part of the growing landscape of institutions dedicated to documentation of the European dark history that should never be repeated.

Unlike Scuola di Pace and MUME, DZ is a large institution positioned to highlight the forced migrations in modern history. As a major state-sponsored research and exhibition centre, it has a leverage to approach multiple cases of genocides and ethnic cleansings in a complex analytically-informed manner (Foundation 2012, 9). At the same time, DZ takes the German case as the key node connecting multiple stories, both historical and contemporary. Notably, a document describing the conceptual framework of DZ makes it clear that integration of the German expellees and refugees was a success story (Foundation 2012, 3). This, in turn, directs public attention to integration processes among the present-day global migrants coming to Germany.

Physically and thematically, the DZ exhibition is situated on two levels. On the first floor, the visitor is provided with research-informed explanations of, among other things, the nature of nationalism, spatial organization of expulsions, and juridical frameworks defining status of the migrants. Another part of the exhibition located on the second floor, delves into post-war expulsions of Germans through the optics of already introduced concepts and explanations. The division of the permanent exhibition on two levels thus reflects the juxtaposition between main conceptual principles of presentation: thematical/chronological, and montage/narrative. The restrained design throughout the exhibition space stresses the seriousness of the main topic, serving as a uniting framework.

Special attention is given to personal stories and objects that add intriguing details, which facilitate a multi-perspective and multiscale inquiry. A thought-provoking object from this context is a drawing of a Syrian boy visualizing his family’s trip to Germany. As a museum guide explained, this object triggers many discussions, especially among schoolchildren. What caused the flight from Syria; why are helicopters with US inscription? Was the journey particularly perilous; why are there sharks around the boat carrying refugees? Why is a group of refugees depicted as encircled and separated from the rest of the composition? The topic of witnessing is also introduced in this part of the exhibition in a more technically advanced way, with use of man-size digital screens on which currently living people of different nationalities and generations testify about their experiences as refugees in front of a camera.

The same principle of digital projection of individual stories is employed on the second floor where stories of the flight and expulsion of Germans are accompanied by animated projections. Here individual destinies are narrated through the stories of objects, whose tricky meaning can sometimes go unnoticed for visitors and thus need the help of a guide. For example, an elegant fur coat looks disproportionally short. Why? The story goes that the German woman who owned it had to cut off a piece that was too dirty after giving birth in a cattle wagon during the deportation. Another tricky object is picture with a religious motif popular among the Poles resettled to former German territories on the frontside, and a portrait of emperor Wilhelm II on the backside. The huge mount case exhibits nostalgic bric-a-brac as metonymies of the lost home, both profoundly individual and group-bounded locus of humanity. Thereby, the narrative and montage are once again sutured with cultural memories and entwined on several scales: personal, family, national, transnational and universal.

In DZ, digital animation and screen projections create a suggestive background framing the collective and the individual lines of narration. On the second floor, where the expulsions of Germans are in the limelight, a collective historical layer is symbolized by shadow-like projections of human silhouettes on grey half-dark walls. In contrast, individual cases emerge as coloured animated projections of the core protagonists that break against the background of the ghost-like faceless figures. All the lives and fates emblematized by individual objects are not only grafting the main narrative with unexpected additional plots, or bifurcating it in certain crucial moments. Rather, they demonstrate how “big history” may be projected on the texture of individual biographies and family stories – and be animated and comprehended through them. This conceptual approach may potentially open for inclusion of stories of recent non-European migrants. However, at the moment the impression is that the strong thematic focus on Germanness with ethnic overtones of shared history, language and material culture, facilitates a dispassionate knowledge-seeking, while the possibility of a more intuitive and emotional engagement of the non-German audience remains downplayed (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Individual cases highlighted as colorful animated projections at DZ.

Muzeum przesiedleńców i wypędzonych

The Museum of the Resettled and Expellees in an old Silesian village Pławna Górna lies quite far from well-trodden tourist routes around Wrocław. Unlike the cultural heritage institutions described above, the museum is a private establishment, opened on the initiative of the local multi-artist Dariusz Miliński. Thematically, the museum reflects a changed approach to presentation of the “regained territories” evident in Poland after the end of the communist period, when the previously hushed theme of German expulsions and “population exchanges” between Poland the Soviet Union suddenly attracted much public attention. The historical collage presented in the museum cuts across several national histories and addresses several circles of European memories: expulsions, Soviet totalitarianism, wars, and even to some extent colonialism, bearing in mind the ambiguous role of so-called Kresy, the eastern borderlands of Poland, akin to an internal colony, and also the status of socialist Poland as a Soviet satellite.

The exhibition is located in an eighteenth century German half-timbered house, in which the family of a local shoemaker, Dietrich, lived before the war. The building was renovated in 2012 and turned into a museum exhibiting numerous memorabilia referring both to Germans who were expelled after 1945, and Poles who were resettled to the “regained land” of Silesia from the eastern territories of Poland annexed by the USSR. The museum does not suggest a certain narrative, but rather presents a thematic montage of both made and found objects. It evidently emulates and plays with the stylistics of the ethnographic museum, a traditional type of museum popular in Poland since the ninetieth century (Lehrer and Murzyn-Kupisz 2019). However, the specimens on display are not accompanied by museum labels. Alongside authentic items collected in the area, the museum rooms are filled with mannequins arranged to present “scenes of local life” comprising both the pre-war and post-war times.

Although the reasons, circumstances and moral lessons of their forced displacement are substantially different, there are at least two common denominators that bring experiences of Poles and Germans under the same roof, namely nostalgic attachment to locality, and the experience of suffering (“Both those who had to leave their homeland and those who were forcibly settled in the unknown “Regained Land” suffered”).⁸ However, acknowledgement of suffering of Poles and Germans within the same framework is still quite a controversial move in the Polish context. Despite the message of the shared suffering, German visitors are reminded of the reasons for the disaster, as one of the rooms features mannequins in Nazi uniforms, presenting the last remaining members of the group Wolf, whose hideout was discovered in the vicinity.

In a way, the naive mimesis conveyed by mannequins placed in an original historical building with the aura of a curiosity shop distracts visitors from a fixation on controversies of the inevitably present historical-political context. Judging from the museum leaflets, online announcements and onsite impressions, the main purpose of the exhibition is both amusement and triggering of identification with the local past, which is basically presented as a kaleidoscopic succession of several professional groups, ethnicities and epochs, each one experiencing the periods of heyday and decay. As a museum leaflet put it:

You will see how some of them sowed the fields and passed away in despair, while others, harassed, confused and displaced, harvested after them. You will see original rags, documents and objects found in attics in Pławna, soldier coats, suitcases from Kresy, unique souvenirs from Lwów and Wilno. You will also see some scenes, for example, survivors of the fascist group Wolf hiding in a basement, people ploughing with oxen, or how people used to ski in Izera.

An online announcement appeals to an even more specific audience, obviously narrowing down the circle of the potential visitors to people of certain generation, class and upbringing:

Do you remember what … was the atmosphere in your grandparents’ room, an old clock hanging on the wall, a porcelain sugar bowl, a wooden table, … what was the old stove, which was used for daily cooking, what machines were used in the house and in the yard? Do you remember wooden skis, rag dolls or rocking horses? … In Pławna, you can return your memories to those times … ⁹

As these promotional texts imply, the exhibition targets first and foremost the older generation of middle-class Poles, readily identifying with vintage objects and numerous Christian religious items on display, and possibly also their descendants acquainted with family stories. German tourists are expected to pay attention to the pre-war bric-a-brac bearing inscriptions in German, and to the installations presenting local German peasants and craftsmen at work. In general, museum visitors are prompted to feel both moved and amused by the assemblage of various exhibits and theatrical displays of “scenes of local life”. Some are easy to make sense of, while others, like the one referring to the post-war digging up of “German treasures”, may be difficult to decode without a guide, as they presuppose knowledge of the local circumstances, rumors and folklore. Thus, intangible and ephemeral aspects of the objects on display speak to the visitor knowledgeable of local circumstances, but might pose a challenge for many foreigners and the newly arrived. However, with proper curatorial comment, such blind spots might trigger exciting insights and entries for discussion.

To recapitulate, the museum does not suggest a preformulated historically accurate narrative about resettlements and expulsions. It downplays an organized curatorial approach and limits the explicit curatorial commentary to the acknowledgement of shared suffering of all forced migrants. Nevertheless, its “naïve” artistic aesthetics does not only amuse, but also contains a blueprint of a contact surface and possible suture for new groups of visitors. This possibility of a “naïve” gaze may stimulate unexpected questions, interpretations and comparisons. Certainly, the vantage point of naivety and intuitiveness suggested for the visitors of the museum in Pławna Górna contrasts with positions of an initiated sympathizer encouraged by Monte Sole and MUME, or an inquisitive outsider advocated by DZ. Nevertheless, it also deploys the idea of democratic participation that is crucial for engagement of new groups of visitors, especially recent forced migrants. Refugees escaping the war in Ukraine might become a given target group of the museum in the near future (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Mannequins at the Museum in Pławna Górna presenting resettled Poles and Germans.

Heritage of Forced Migrations for the Sake of Intercultural Cohesion: Squaring the Circle?

Although iconography and discourse of contemporary global migrations is quite well-established, the task of forging migrant-sensitive heritage is not that easy to realize at a local level. The topic of migration is primarily addressed in one-time events and temporary exhibitions, following a kind of “additive model”. On a more general level, even quite established conceptualizations of multi-layered pan-European memories and heritages (“seven circles of European memories”) address migration as a separate topic, even though, as has been argued above, origins, mechanisms and effects of forced migrations actually cut across and entangle all of them. The additive model is not optimal for advancing social cohesion either, as it basically presupposes othering and separation of “the migrant stuff”. The key question is thus: how can the multifaceted stories about the European past be eased up, re-interpreted, co-interpreted and opened for stories of present-day migrants, to make them relevant, pedagogical and important?

As this study maintains, instrumentalizing migrant heritage for the sake of intercultural cohesion presupposes its plural incorporations with the help of various compositional strategies. Empirically, it is possible to distinguish grafting, suturing and bifurcating as compositional blueprints that enable or facilitate incorporation of migrant stories and iconographies into the texture of existing heritage presentations. As the cases discussed above demonstrate, narratives, montages and their intermediate forms (e.g., labyrinths) curated by European cultural heritage institutions can be re-configured, punctuated or “loosened” with the help of these compositional tools. This corresponds well to the argument made by proponents of the emergent post-migrant research paradigm that it is time to consider migration not just an external injection into European realities, but rather an inherent multi-scalar process whose mechanisms and consequences have (trans)formed the texture of European heritage over time.

The four empirical examples reveal that although each cultural institution in question experiments with similar compositional strategies, they incorporate the topics, imageries and issues pertaining to global “mixed” migration in their own ways. Their choice of strategies is also pre-conditioned by a range of dissimilar practical and ideological factors. Despite a profusion of general recommendations and value-based optics, the lessons the cultural heritage institutions may learn in respect to incorporation of migrant heritages is focus on details and serendipities, customization, individualization, and engagement of the target audiences into heritage interpretation. It looks as though squaring the circle may be a difficult task in theory, but chains of hands-on small- and middle-scale experiments and compositional adjustments may pave the way for strengthening the role of heritage of forced migrations as a factor enhancing intercultural cohesion.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme: [Grant Number No 870939 H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS].

Notes on contributors

Eleonora Narvselius

Eleonora Narvselius is anthropologist from Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests comprise Ukrainian memory culture, narrative analysis, heritage studies, ethnicity and nationalism. In the course of her academic career she has participated in several international research projects focusing on urban environment, memory cultures and cultural heritage of East-Central European borderlands. Among her core publications is Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L’viv: Narratives, Identity and Power (Lexington Books, 2012).

Notes

1 It does not obliterate the fact that anti-migrant actors also utilized historical analogies to pedal perennial fears of Islamization and Orientalization with new intensity.

2 See, for example, this UNICEF video from 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTk7a1s8vR8&t=49s.

3 Here, the following scholarly definition of social cohesion is applied: “Social cohesion refers to the extent of connectedness and solidarity among groups in society”. […] Social cohesion is a social process which aims to consolidate plurality of citizenship by reducing inequality and socioeconomic disparities and fractures in the society. It reflects people’s needs for both personal development and a sense of belonging and links together individual freedom and social justice, economic efficiency and the fair sharing of resources, and pluralism and common rules for resolving all conflicts (Manca 2014: 6026).

4 The nexus of migration and cultural heritage has been variously approached in academic publications, with its conceptual focus shifting depending on whether the analysts inquire into heritage of migrations, immigrant heritage, heritage of migrants, or migrating heritage; compare The Cultural Heritage of Migrants 2007; Innocenti 2014; 2017; Nikielska-Sekula 2019; Dellios and Henrich 2021; Swensen and Guttormsen 2020.

5 The project Enhancing Social Cohesion through Sharing the Cultural Heritage of Forced Migrations – SO-CLOSE lasted three years and ended in December 2022. It received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.870939.

6 On-line interview with Elena Monicelli, a coordinator at the Peace School of Monte Sole, 15 July 2021.

7 https://www.museuexili.cat/images/Documents/fitxa%201%20ang%20ok.pdf.

8 https://swieradow-zdroj.pl/atrakcje/muzeum-przesiedlencow-i-wypedzonych.

9 https://lwowecki.info/muzeum-przesiedlencow-i-wypedzonych-w-plawnej-zaprasza/.