Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting

by Peter M. Mclsaac
Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania, 2007
322 pp., halftones. US $60.00 UK £ 43
ISBN: 978-0-271-02991-7.

Reviewed by Martha Patricia Niño
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

ninom@javeriana.edu.co

This book is the first attempt to explore the interaction between the dynamics of collecting and the German literary imagination since the appearance of public museums. Museums are institutions that transform what we understand by art history and identity. These institutions construct a discourse about objects that are linked in the book with both cultural discourse and literary symbolism. The text displays a research about the context of historical production, ownership and display of artworks in relation to noteworthy German literary imagination. The author holds that museums’ message is constructed upon what people have already in their minds and their previous cultural background. Therefore, the book has an interest in the topography of memory and how consciousness can be also subject to inventory.

Texts from writers such as Johann Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, Whilhelm Raabe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Siegfred Lenz, W.G. Sebald, and Durs Grünbein are analyzed. Goethe and Walter Benjamin are depicted also as avid collectors. The collector is portrayed as a privileged figure because he is able to communicate experience that can shape an identity.

Peter M. Mclsaac calls museums “managers of consciousness” that have the task of building and educating the population (Bildung) while making the world readable. Museums are also in charge of the construction of modern knowledge that will perpetuate our “inventoried consciousness”. This for McIsaac a taxonomic tradition already started by Michel Foucault in his book The Order of Things. This cultural backdrop has made possible the emergence of the current wide spectrum of art fields.

The book also explores the idea that literary discourse is still crucial for analyzing the imaginary construction of society. Thus, it needs to be constantly revised. Literary ideas do not fade just by the mere appearance of digital technology; instead, they still supply a special “aura” in the age of simulation. On the other hand, museums are not the total opposite to the digital innovations but their physicality questions what we understand by virtuality. They are a growing dominant cultural institution that shapes our thought and it is in constant feedback from what we understand as “new” media. The text underlines that this does not mean that the past must be reconstructed through some massive storage of records alone and not by the interaction of the human mind with the material world. Because when it becomes impossible to decide fact versus fiction, questions also arise about the general relationship of “memory” and “experience” to artifice. It is interesting to see in the book, Andreas Huyssen’s emphatic point that the advent of photographic and electronic reproduction has by no means spelled the end for the physical museum because paradoxically in the age of databases it is possible to register an increasing craving for material objects. It is difficult to think about the world today without museums and its contribution not only to arts and culture but history, science, tourism and heritage.

The text at some points seems to equal the museum’s discourse as being similar to narrative but the museum needs to maintain an effort in the veracity of the historical facts that it displays. It is also explored; the work of theoreticians such as Mieke Bal indicates that the realist novel flourished at the same age as the development of museums.

Another topic explored in this book is how leading museum architects and planners in the first third of the nineteenth century were clear-minded in their expectation that an organized display environment could profoundly affect the attitudes and behaviour of their visitors. The act of display can be seen as an uninterrupted exercise of power in the Foucauldian sense. The space is organized in a different way from the institutions of confinement such as the prison but yet both museums and galleries put the spectator in the position not only of the observer but the observed and surveyed but they grant their visitors the point of view of the “eye of power”. This constitutes some sort of panopticism applied to the figure of the museum visitor in order to educate him or her better. Other issues discussed in the book are whether the museum can cause acculturation or if it is possible to abuse culture by the display of violent facts or sordid biographies. The critical genealogy of the book results as refreshing and interesting for people interested in German literature and the arts.