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Sentimental Education. Sound and Silence at History Museums
Stef de Jong*
Abstract
Using an interdisciplinary approach, this article analyses the uses of sound
and silence at three Polish history museums: POLIN – Museum of the History
of Polish Jews, the Warsaw Rising Museum and the Historical Museum of the
City of Krakow’s exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945. It argues
that in these museums sounds and silence serve a sentimental education. They
are used both to impart historical knowledge in a sensory way and to affectively
engage visitors. Diegetic sounds thereby generally serve the communication of
historical knowledge, whereas non-diegetic sounds are used as affective triggers.
In this way, a sonic immersion is achieved that induces visitors to feel as if they
were in the past as well as inviting them to emotionally engage with this past.
Keywords: sound, silence, history museum, memory, immersion, affect
Prelude1
Warsaw 2015: I am standing in a hail of bullets. All around me, I hear machine guns and
explosions. Every ten minutes or so, a bomb falls right next to where I am standing. Amid this
commotion, I hear another sound – a beating heart. I feel the sound going right through me,
leaving a strange feeling of unease. Around me, I hear people walking, talking and laughing.
I also hear the sound of voices and musical scores emanating from television screens.
Warsaw 2015: I am on a market square. I hear birds singing. I hear horses and people
walking on gravel. I hear them talking in languages that I do not understand and cannot quite
make out. I hear coins falling onto tables. From a tavern next to the market I distinguish popular
music and clicking glasses. The sounds are appealing. I have only just escaped from an attack
by the Cossacks that was accompanied by the sounds of burning houses, whinnying horses,
rattling swords and gloomy music.
Krakow 2015: I am at a train station, listening to announcements. A steam train is
arriving and I hear a barrier closing. I will not take the train, I will walk right into the city under
bombardment. Bombs are falling around me, sirens are howling, machine guns ring.
Despite the sounds of war and conict, I remained relatively calm in all the scenarios
described above. I was not afraid, running for shelter, or otherwise trying to protect myself.
Nor were the people around me. The sounds did not have a visible or sensible impact either:
the machine guns and bombs did not destroy anything, no houses went up in re, no horses
stormed past me, the train and the barrier remained invisible, the ground did not vibrate and
I could not smell the smoke of burning houses and explosives. The scenarios did not take
place in the streets of Warsaw and Krakow: they took place in the exhibition rooms of POLIN
– Museum of the History of Polish Jews (hereafter POLIN) – The Warsaw Rising Museum
and the exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945 in the former buildings of Oscar
Schindler’s enamel factory.
What I have described is only one side of my experience in the museums: the aural one.
Soundscapes have been explicitly produced for the museums’ main exhibitions. The exhibition
makers of the three museums (and of many more that I will not look at in detail here) decided
Museum & Society, March 2018. 16 (1) 88-106 © 2018, Stef de Jong. ISSN 1479-8360
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that they could not convey their messages through objects, images and text alone. But why
did they resort to sound? What messages do they wish to convey in this way? And what effect
can sound have on visitors’ perception of the exhibitions?
The use of soundscapes serves what I – with apologies to Gustave Flaubert – will call a
‘sentimental education’. 2 The word sentimental goes back to the Latin verb sentire – to perceive,
to feel. Etymologically speaking, sentimental describes both experiences made through the
senses, as well as emotions as a response to those experiences. It is in this double sense
that I will use the concept: in the museums sounds are used to impart historical knowledge in
a sensory way, but also to affectively engage visitors and induce them to remember. It serves
both historical learning and cultural memory. As I will show, this sentimental education is
achieved through the use of immersive strategies.
Furthermore, I contend that the use of sounds in museums can only be studied in
an interdisciplinary way. Despite the importance of sounds in rituals of memorialization, for
example in music, dances or – the opposite – minutes of silence and the increasingly frequent
use of reproduced sounds in museum settings, both memory studies and museum studies
have so far largely neglected sounds. While historical studies analyzing the sounds of the past,
although still scarce and pointing out the visual bias of historiography, have abounded over the
last twenty odd years (cf. Smith 2004; Rosenfeld 2012; Müller 2012), studies on how sounds
are remembered, re-enacted, re-mediated, reproduced – and forgotten – by individuals and
communities remain rare (Eckert 2008; Bijsterveld & van Dijk 2009; Maier 2011; Morris 2001;
Meyers & Zandberg 2002; Landsberg 2010; Neiger, Meyers & Zandberg 2011). Museum studies,
which long concentrated mostly on questions of education, representation or material culture,
has lately started to look into a ‘sensory museology’ (Howes 2014: 259) and to concentrate on
‘feeling’ rather than on ‘meaning’ (Message and Witcomb 2015: xlvii, cf. Smith 2015). However,
with a few exceptions (Martinz-Turek 2004; Lane and Nye 2005; Jakubowski 2011; Kunz-Ott
2012; Byrne 2012; Cluett 2014; Binter 2014; Bubaris 2014; Koenig 2014; MacKinnon 2014;
Schoer 2014; Voegelin 2014; Cox 2015; Bijsterveld 2015) the uses of sounds and silence in
museums are hardly ever touched upon. In this article, I will therefore refer to other disciplines
in which sound has been a topic such as cultural sound studies and sound history, as well as
cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.
Sound and Immersion
Visiting the three museums feels like walking through a series of stage or lm sets. Indeed,
the exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945 was designed by theatre director
Michał Urban and scenographer Łukasz Czuj. The chief curator of the core exhibition at POLIN,
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, describes the exhibition as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’3 or a ‘theatre
of history’ (2015). To her, the exhibition is ‘a continuous visual narrative that is organized in
acts and scenes, much like a play’ in which the visitors ‘nd themselves on the stage and in
the scenography, not on the other side of the proscenium’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2015: 58). All
three museums are spaces where the past is experienced – rather than only being exhibited
through original objects: they are spaces where visitors are induced to immerse themselves
in the past. Even if Kirshenblatt-Gimblett speaks of a ‘visual’ narrative, the soundscapes are
an integral part of this experience. They are, as Olga Szlachcic, one of the sound designers
of the soundscapes in POLIN puts it, supposed to give a ‘feeling of the time’.4
Immersion has, since antiquity, been the goal of the creators of media aiming at
temporarily lifting people out of their everyday environment and plunging them into an ‘unreal’
or virtual elsewhere. Attempts to induce such immersive experiences can be found in frescoes
in ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy. They were perfected in dioramas, panoramas and
period rooms in the nineteenth century, and more recently in lm, computer games and virtual
reality (Grau 2003). At the moment, immersion is probably most hotly debated among game
designers and the producers and analysts of virtual reality. The concept is generally used in
a prescriptive way (cf. Kearney & Pivec 2007; Fencott 19995; Grimshaw 2012): immersion
is what the designers want to achieve. It has been dened as human beings’ ‘ability for not
being mentally present in an environment in which they are observably physically present’6,
as a ‘break in presence’, dened as ‘the moment of switch between responding to signals
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with source in environment X to those with source in environment Y’ (Slater 2002: 435) or as
‘a process, a change, a passage from one mental state to another’ (Grau 2003: 13). Thus,
immersion happens at the moment in which we – generally temporarily – forget where we are
in time and space, and start feeling affectively and emotionally engaged in an elsewhere that
is suggested through the immersive medium. There are debates about how immersion actually
works (Grimshaw 2012: 356). However, most scholars agree that in order for immersion to
occur, the virtual representation needs to include several ‘codes of realism’ (Grimshaw 2012:
358) and that the more senses it addresses, the more convincing the experience is (Grau
2003: 14f). Arguably, the designers of the nineteenth century panoramas were aware of this
when they added sound, wind and smoke effects to their visual illusions (Grau 2003: 70).
In the three museums, although many of the (mostly not original) exhibits can be
touched or sat upon, and although POLIN, in its restaurant, offers some traditional Polish
Jewish dishes, the sounds are most pertinently used as immersive triggers. The museums
follow the example of other immersive media such as panoramas, lm or virtual reality in which,
after visual effects, the sound effects are most elaborate. Thus, Mark Grimshaw (2012: 359ff)
has shown that in rst person shooter games, sound is crucial for involving players, whereas
Michel Chion (1994: 5) argues that for lm, sound functions as an ‘added value’ that decides
the ‘denitive impression’ made by the image. In fact, cognitive psychologists argue that in
spatial awareness our visual and auditory awareness work together to create a holistic picture
(Blesser & Slater 2007: 46ff). In other words, we need sound to ‘see’ properly.
Despite this interplay of the senses – or maybe because of it – hearing is often opposed
to the sense of vision for its lack of boundaries and its intangibility. Hearing counts as the
‘immersive’ sense because it envelops us and we are therefore less likely to achieve critical
distance. Marshall McLuhan (2004: 71) dened the ‘acoustic space’ (as opposed to the ‘visual
space’) as ‘both discontinuous and nonhomogeneous’, ‘related with centres everywhere
and boundaries nowhere’, while Don Ihde (2007: 82-3) has dened the ‘auditory eld’ as
‘omnidirectional’. The visual by contrast is often conceived as clearly demarcated, directional
and requiring distance and perspective. Sound scholars like Jonathan Sterne (2012: 9) have
rightly criticized this ‘audio-visual litany’ for ‘misattributing causes and effects’. However, as
we will see, it is exactly such an idea of hearing as immersive that comes into play in the
exhibitions. The immersive effect of the soundscapes is generally enhanced by masking their
sources. Played over hidden loudspeakers and often lling a whole exhibition section, the
sounds envelop visitors. They can be heard even when visitors engage in relatively distanced
cognitive actions such as reading museum texts.
In the museums, as in computer games or lms, two expressions of immersion through
sounds appear. On the one hand, visitors are induced to feel present at the time and place
that is represented. On the other hand, visitors, by being affected, are induced to engage
emotionally with this time – either by emphatically mirroring what are imagined to have
been the feelings of its protagonists or by emotionally evaluating it from the present. Those
expressions of immersion relate to the two facets of sentimental education mentioned above:
the construction of historical knowledge in a sensory way and the affective engagement with
the past for the sake of memory. They also roughly relate to what in lm and game studies
are called diegetic and non-diegetic sounds.
Diegetic sounds stem directly from action that can be seen on screen such as the
sound of footsteps or the sound of a shot. Non-diegetic sounds or acousmatic sounds, on the
other hand, lack visual representation on screen, as with the musical underscore (Grimshaw
2012: 349). Nikos Bubaris (2014: 394), who has adapted these concepts to the museum
setting, denes diegetic sounds as sounds that ‘refer to the set-up of the exhibition and the
immediate relationship between the visitor and the exhibition’, whereas non-diegetic sounds
‘refer to the presentation of actions that causally unfold outside the space-time of the visit,
but frame the visitor’s experience and its derived meanings’. For Bubaris (2014: 394-95), the
narrative voice on an audioguide is a perfect example of a non-diegetic sound, whereas ‘oral
histories, audio, audio-visual and multimedia exhibits and the soundscape of displayed cultures’
would be diegetic sounds. While those sounds are always in the foreground, Bubaris denes
in addition diegetic and non-diegetic ‘background’ sounds that ‘enhance a presentation’ such
as background music or the sounds of an exhibit once the visitor has moved away. I will not
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consider the acousmatic voice on the audioguide. Like Bubaris, I contend that, although the
direct sources of the soundscapes in museums are rarely visible, we can speak of diegetic
sounds where the soundscape represents the exhibited space and event. This typically happens
in displays that resemble dioramas or period rooms, such as the train station in the exhibition
Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945 or the market square in POLIN. Non-diegetic sounds
primarily communicate an atmosphere or emotions. They are generally musical or abstract.
Non-diegetic sounds are typical where the affective side of sentimental education is given
precedence, while diegetic sounds are used where sensory historical learning is foregrounded.
As in lm or computer games, there are exceptions to these rules and numerous instances
when both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds are mixed. For the sake of analysis, let us rst
consider both separately.
Recreating the Soundscapes of the Past
The concept of ‘soundscape’ was introduced in the late 1960s by the World Soundscape
Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and especially by R. Murray Schafer’s (1977)
inuential eponymous publication. Schafer coined the term in relation to landscape. Fully
aware of the eeting nature of soundscapes and their rapid change through what it considered
‘noise pollution’, the World Soundscape Project toured Canada and ve European villages to
record sounds. The museums I analyze try to represent such past soundscapes. The problem
that such representations pose is that sound recordings are much scarcer than pictures of
past events and only available for times since the phonograph was invented in 1877. Sound
historians and designers must resort to other media in order to obtain an idea of how the past
might have sounded. Karin Bijsterveld (2013: 14, italics in the original), who has reproduced
the soundscape of the Dam square in Amsterdam on three different dates for the Museum of
Amsterdam observes:
Our knowledge of past soundscapes, transient and intangible as they are, is …
largely dependent on historical texts in which people described what they heard
and what these sounds meant to them. At the same time, however, our imagination
of such soundscapes has been nourished by the soundtracks the makers of radio
plays and lms created for their productions.
Museums can be added to those creators of our imagination of what the past sounded like. When
inducing visitors to immerse themselves in the past, they resort to strategies of authentication
including techniques of sound reproduction, volume, spatialization – and, more rarely, they
use original sound documents.
Original Sound Documents
Although the three museums deal – either exclusively or inter alia – with contemporary
history, they use original sound documents sparingly. These original sounds are often mixed
with other, reproduced, sounds. When they are not combined with other sounds, they are
generally played in the open, their sound bleeding into other soundscapes and mingling with
sounds made by visitors. Like reproduced sounds, original sounds are used to give visitors an
immersive experience. Often, the nature of the sounds is not made explicit either. At POLIN,
fewer and fewer reproduced sounds are used the closer the narrative moves to the present,
as more sound documents were available. For many of those ‘audio artifacts’7, the origin is
made clear. For others, however, it remains in the dark. Thus, in the section on the opening of
the Great Synagogue in Warsaw, original recordings of the singing of the cantor are played.
When I visited the museum for the rst time, I heard the singing; I only learned its source when
I interviewed Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, chief curator of the museum’s core exhibition.8
Thus, original sounds are not yet treated on an equal footing to original objects, for which the
provenance is made clear. However, the museums intends to add notes specifying the origins
of all of its audio documents in the future.
The centrepiece of the Museum of the Warsaw Rising is a steel monument from which
emanates the sound of a beating heart – a feature that I will return to later. Through several
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‘bullet holes’ sounds from the Warsaw Uprising can be heard. Reports from the radio station
Lightening are mixed with re-recordings of insurgents’ songs and battle sounds. ‘One should
touch the Monument and listen to it – various sounds and tunes of subsequent days of the
Rising can be heard from every bullet hole, recreating the atmosphere of those days’, the
museum text accompanying the monument reads. The heart in the Museum of the Warsaw
Rising exemplies the immersive use of sound documents. Through the congruence between
the sound documents played into the open, reconstructions and original objects, the visitors
are made to feel ‘the atmosphere of those days’. Whether the sounds are originals or not is
secondary to the creation of this atmosphere.
In fact, in order to represent past soundscapes, sound documents might not be the
best means. Joshua Waletzky, an expert on Yiddish music, put together a loop representing a
Jewish wedding at the end of the nineteenth century for POLIN. He used recordings of songs
performed by Polish migrants in the US and Canada in the mid-twentieth century from the
collection of folklorist Ruth Rubin, as well as older recordings from theatrical presentations.
The recordings were historical but not contemporary to the time represented in the exhibition.
Nor were the recordings performed for the occasion represented. Plays often made fun of the
original wedding songs through exaggeration. In order to make the songs t the exhibition,
therefore, Waletzky cut out those parts of the songs that were too theatrical. He pointed out
that if he had produced the loop for a chapter on Yiddish comedy, he would have kept those
elements.9
In general, sound has been recorded selectively and explicitly in order to be reproduced
for specic purposes such as radio, lm or television broadcasts, scientic studies or personal
entertainment. Such sound documents can represent past soundscapes. At POLIN, original
musical recordings recreate the atmosphere of a café in Warsaw in the interwar period. In
general, however, recorded sounds only give a vague idea of the past and require, as Waletzky’s
soundscape exemplies, adaptation and reworking before they can be used to represent past
soundscapes. First, recording devices inevitably distort sounds and voices. Hitler’s voice,
used by many museums, although less by the ones under scrutiny here, has become an icon
because it was amplied by a microphone for speeches in front of large audiences (Epping-
Jäger 2013). Secondly, it is difcult to reproduce a listening experience. By the Second World
War, it had become clear that it would be impossible to reproduce the sounds of war by simply
recording ghting, for example. For newsreels, sounds were recreated in recording studios.
Those sounds still determine our acoustic memory of the war (Ulrich 2013: 245). Finally, for
listeners, recorded sounds became part of a more encompassing soundscape and might even
have served as background noise. Radio broadcasts, for example, might have been listened
to over dinner with the accompanying clatter of dishes. They might have been commented
on, or ignored when other conversations were more important. Playing sound documents in
the open, integrating them into soundscapes and letting them bleed into other sounds might
therefore come close to original listening experiences. However, it also makes it difcult to
concentrate on the documents as such. It means relinquishing the sound documents’ character
as sources to the detriment of immersion.
Sound Reproduction
Such an immersion is primarily constructed through reproduced sounds. While the curators of
the exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation and the Museum of the Warsaw Rising mainly
used sounds that were easily available, POLIN applied an elaborate strategy of authentication.
The museum hired the dubbing studio Sonica for the production of most of its soundscapes. In
order to create an accurate representation of the soundscapes of the past, the producers only
chose sounds which they were sure existed at the time. Those sounds were reproduced with
contemporary devices. Thus, old coins were used for the sound of coins falling onto a table
or a car from the 1920s for the sound of a car driving on cobblestones on pre-war Zamenhofa
Street in Warsaw.10 This practice differs greatly from the production of sound effects in lm.
Here, sound is often exaggerated in order to make it sound more authentic and reproduced
with different devices than those seen on screen (Whittington 2014: 369f).
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Many of the soundscapes at POLIN include speech. Here, sound designers were
faced with the problem that, especially for events that happened a very long time ago, it
is not always clear what language the people spoke. Nor is it clear what a given language
sounded like at that time. In what language did the Jewish merchants that came to Poland
in the tenth century communicate? For the chatter of voices in the soundscape in their rst
exhibition room representing a marketplace in the Middle Ages, the sound designers therefore
mixed soundbites of people speaking in Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish. The speech has been
rendered indistinguishable. The aim was to create a feeling of the language rather than to
present the language itself, Olga Szlachcic, one of the sound designers pointed out.11 The
closer the exhibition moves to the present, the more distinguishable the voices become. In
the soundscape of the eighteenth century market square described at the beginning of this
article, which incidentally does not sound very different from the soundscape for the medieval
marketplace, some of the words of people speaking in old Yiddish are distinguishable – provided
visitors understand the language.
A similar strategy was used for sound stations in which historical documents are read
aloud. Here, the museum returned to old versions of the languages rather than to their modern
variants. Thus, extracts from comments that the Ashkenazi rabbi Moses Isserles, called the
Remu, wrote on the Sephardic code of Jewish law by Yosef Karo are heard in old Polish or old
Hebrew. Similarly, reproductions of musical pieces were recorded using original instruments.
Sonica re-recorded tavern music for the exhibition section on the Jewish town in the eighteenth
century, for example.
Hence, at POLIN, the authenticity of soundscapes is guaranteed by the means
of reproduction rather than by their historical origin. This practice corresponds to what
Elisabeth Mohn, Christian Strub and Geesche Wartemann, reecting on different concepts
of authenticity, have called a ‘dilemmatic authenticity’. According to dilemmatic authenticity,
every representation is trapped in the dilemma between a desire for an immediate relationship
between the ‘I’ and the ‘world’ and the realization that every representation is dependent
on the means of representation. According to dilemmatic authenticity theory, therefore, an
authentic representation tries to hide the representational character of the subject through
the means of representation (Mohn, Strub & Wartemann 1997: 4). For the soundscapes, the
musical pieces and the reading of documents in POLIN this means that, although they are
obviously reproductions, the means with which they have been produced veil their reproductive
character and disclose the reproductions as maximally truthful. This application of a dilemmatic
authenticity can also be observed in the museums’ visual representations. An example is the
main object – a wooden synagogue from Gwoździec, the original of which was burned down
by Nazi occupiers in 1939 and which was rebuilt during several youth camps using traditional
building techniques (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014: 166-167).
That the exhibition makers pay so much attention to truthful reproduction can be explained
by another concept of authenticity dened by Mohn, Strub and Wartemann (Mohn, Strub &
Wartemann 1997: 2): the ‘authenticity of authority’. It is probable that none of the visitors would
have noticed a less stringent application of the means of reproducing the sounds of the past.
However, museums count as maximally trustworthy institutions exhibiting originals and giving
an accurate account of the past (Rosenzweig & Thelen 1998: 12). Both in their self-perception
and in the perception of their visitors, museums are an authority that guarantees authenticity.
That having been said: while POLIN took its role as an authority guaranteeing authenticity
very seriously, the curators of the Museum of the Warsaw Rising and the exhibition Krakow
under Nazi Occupation paid little to no attention to techniques of reproduction. Even POLIN
offers no explanation of the production process of the soundscapes. The reproduction of
its visual exhibits, on the other hand, is made explicit within the exhibition, in the catalogue
and the articles that Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has written about the museum. Thus, the
soundscapes, although meticulously chosen and assembled, are not treated on an equal
footing with the objects and material reproductions yet. The effort put into the production of
sonic codes of realism for the experience of immersion remains veiled to the visitors.
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Space and Volume
‘It is still too quiet’, Ania Grzechnik, one of the conservators of the Museum of the Warsaw
Rising, told me while we were standing on the ground oor of the museum. I looked at her
in bewilderment. A massive bomb had seemingly just exploded next to us and after having
spent the whole morning in the museum I was weary of the sounds of ghting. She explained:
They were really toned down, because the natural ones are too dangerous.
Because many old people come here, many young people, they are not used to
hearing this. When you go to military training sites and you get to listen to this,
it is very different.12
Soundscapes are not only made up of different sounds. They are also made up of the volume
of those sounds and their distribution in space. How we perceive these volumes depends on
two factors. When considered from a sensory point of view, volume depends on our distance
from the sound source. From a cultural point of view, volume depends on laws and social
conventions (Blesser & Slater 2007: 31ff). In addition to the concept of soundscape, Barry
Blesser and Linda-Ruth Slater (2007: 22ff) use the slightly more precise term ‘acoustic arena’.
An acoustic arena is ‘a region where listeners are part of a community that shares an ability
to hear a sonic event’ (Blesser & Slater 2007: 22). Although the people within an acoustic
arena – the ‘acoustic community’ (Blesser & Slater 2007: 26) – will hear the same sounds,
they have diverging power over those sounds depending on their political or social position.
In other words, some individuals have ‘sonic power’ over others (Blesser & Slater 2007: 31).
The Museum of the Warsaw Rising tries to recreate the soundscape of a city during
ghting. Within such a soundscape, sonic power is unequally distributed. It depends on whether
one is part of the group of ghters or the group of civilians. It is also determined by who has
the weapons that make the most – or the least – noise (cf. Jean 2011). The potential of the
noise of ghting to traumatize those who are exposed to it has been recognised since the
First World War. During the Second World War, the German and Soviet armies manipulated
weapons to demoralize the enemy through the noise they made – or, as in the case of the V2
rocket, the lack thereof (Ulrich 2013: 244). Sonic power is further determined by the ability to
detect weapons by their sounds. Since the First World War, soldiers have received acoustic
training (Ulrich 2013: 242). Finally, sonic power is determined by the ability to negotiate a
cease-re and thus create silence. When recreating a soundscape, museums also recreate
power structures. Depending on which sounds they choose, how they distribute sounds in
space and where they establish sound barriers, they decide which acoustic community to
recreate and which social position to give visitors within this social community. In the Museum
of the Warsaw Rising, the visitor is turned partly into a passive observer, partly into a victim and
partly into a ghter of the Polish Home Army. It is impossible to escape the sounds of ghting
in the main exhibition space and, at least at the beginning of the visit, some of the sounds of
falling bombs come as a surprise. The sounds can be exhausting and threatening, but then
again, the songs of the ghters of the Home Army played at different points in the exhibition
are uplifting and can induce the feeling of being part of a heroic community.
However, what role visitors take is not only determined by the acoustic community that
is recreated, but also by their cultural background, their social position or their gender. Not
being Polish, I felt disconnected from the history presented. I considered myself as an outside
observer and experienced the sounds of ghting as noisy and disturbing. That the experience
of the museum was a different one for other visitors became clear when I watched a group of
young Polish men growing enthusiastic about climbing on top of a motorcycle and holding a
machine gun, imitating its noise: they clearly identied with the ghters and assumed sonic
power within the acoustic space of the exhibition.
Whereas museums can imitate sonic power through volume and the spatial distribution
of sounds, sonic power within the museum is, as the quote from Ania Grzechnik above shows,
held by those who have access to the volume regulator. In all museums I was told that the
soundscapes had been played at a higher volume at the openings of the exhibitions. The
volume was eventually turned down because visitors complained and because guides felt
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disturbed. Sonic power is also held by other, non-human, actors. Especially in contemporary
museums, technical gear such as computers, at screens and projectors tends to be quite
noisy. At POLIN, therefore, the curators tried to keep the upper hand over the sounds that
the museum already made.13 When choosing the volume for a soundscape, sound designers
have thus to negotiate between the past and the present; they adapt the wish for an authentic
representation to the needs of contemporary museums, which in turn means considering the
needs of guides and the sensibilities of visitors. Architecture can be another source of sonic
power. In the exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945, I could make out a sound
that was difcult to identify. It was louder than other sounds in the museum. I was soon to
realize that it emanated from visitors walking over cracking oorboards in the space representing
Oscar Schindler’s ofce. Talking to one of the curators, I learned that the cracking oorboards
had come as a surprise to the exhibition designers. They also drowned the sound of an engine
inside an art installation presenting the enamelware produced in the factory. By the time that
I had nished writing this article, the oorboards had been silenced.14
I have argued that in the sentimental education employed by museums historical
knowledge is imparted through diegetic sounds – sounds that are intimately linked to the
exhibits. In all of the examples given above, the exhibition and the sounds are used in tandem
to construct a representation of the past: the Museum of the Warsaw Rising uses original
weapons, but also a reconstructed cemetery and bunker in order to represent the city during
the Uprising; POLIN recreates inter alia a library, a market square and a wedding procession.
However, these representations are never full dioramas. They are broken through by museum
texts, glass cases or multimedia elements that underline their exhibitionary character. In the
case of soundscapes such a break does not take place as clearly. Although the volume, as
observed above, is not always fully accurate, and although some, now obsolete, sounds might
be missing from them, the museums have gone to great lengths to recreate soundscapes from
the past. Nor is the difference between original sound documents and reproduced sounds
made clear. For lms, Michael Chion (1994: 34) has observed that ‘sound, much more than
the image, can become an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation’. We will
look at affective manipulation more in detail in the next section of this article. As for semantic
manipulation, Chion observes that ‘sound has an inuence on perception … it interprets the
meaning of an image, and makes us see in the image what we would not otherwise see, or
would see differently’ (1994: 34). Often, it is only through sounds that we perceive a continuity
in the images; sounds make unrelated images seem part of a cohesive entity and mask cuts.
Similarly, in the exhibitions, sounds induce a feeling of immersion by creating an ‘atmosphere’
of historic time that masks breaks in visual representation. This immersion is intensied by
the fact that technical gear necessary for sound reproduction remains hidden – unless visitors
really look for it. Supposedly coming from everywhere and nowhere, a sonic representation
of a past space and time plunges visitors into the exhibit.
Affect and Memory
If volume, spatialization and techniques of authentication are used in order to construct sensory
historical knowledge, scholars of immersion generally agree that the feeling of immersion
involves emotional engagement. Thus, Oliver Grau observes that ‘immersion is characterized
by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in
what is happening’ (2003: 13). In museum soundscapes, the affective side of sentimental
education is strongest where the most difcult parts of history are represented. Here, the
museums generally leave phonorealist diegetic soundscapes and move to a more abstract
level, consisting of body sounds, ambient music and silence.
Body Sounds
The most compelling sound at the Museum of the Warsaw Rising is the heartbeat emanating
from the monument named above. The heartbeat – a deep, mufed sound – can be heard in
almost every part of the exhibition. The text reads: ‘The heart of the museum beats for those
who fought and perished – and for those who survived. It is a symbol of our remembrance
96
and a tribute to the Warsaw Rising and those who participated in it.’ At POLIN, the exhibition
chapter on deportation is accompanied by an intentionally ambiguous sound that reminds one
of the scratching of closing train doors, but also of heavy breathing.15
A beating heart and breathing are not just any kind of bodily sounds. They are the
sounds of life. They are also the sounds of silence: in a room deprived of all ambient sound
our beating heart and our breath are the sounds heard most acutely (Blesser & Slater 2007:
18). They are additionally private and intimate sounds: we need to get close to other persons
to hear their heartbeats or their breath. Finally, they are the sounds of fear or excitement: our
heart starts to race when we are afraid or excited, just as we start to breathe more quickly and
heavily. In movies or computer games, an accelerating heartbeat or heavy breathing typically
signify danger, fear or sexual arousal.
The sound of the heartbeat at the Museum of the Warsaw Rising and the sound of
breathing at POLIN throw visitors back on themselves, while at the same time intimately
engaging them with another invisible and unknown person – the historical subject. Bryoni
Trezise (2014: 9), analyzing the performance of feeling in memory cultures, has dened the
concept of ‘memory affect’: ‘a quality of reminiscence that invokes a feeling of embodied recall
that does not locate prior experience at its basis’. The concept of ‘memory affect’ captures the
idea that it is possible for some bodies – for example those of museum visitors – to feel other
bodies – generally those of the victims – to the point where they come to ‘recall’ their pain
without having experienced it themselves. From Sara Ahmed (2014: 6-8), Trezise borrows the
concept of ‘impressions’, which emphasizes that our emotions are generated through affective
contact with other objects – either in the past or in the present. Both Ahmed (2014: 7) and
Trezise (2014: 4), using visual tropes and primarily referring to the sense of touch, speak of
marks left on the skin.
One can also be ‘touched’ and ‘impressed’ by sound. In fact, biologically speaking,
the process of hearing a sound is set in motion at the moment when sound waves leave an
impression on the so-called tympanic membrane or eardrum (Goldstein 2007: 241). Like touch,
those impressions are closely linked to emotions. Neuropsychological studies argue that while
we use our sense of vision primarily for orientation and the identication of objects, we use
our sense of hearing for the communication of information and emotions (Kaernbach 2006:
138). What is more, people seem to react in a preferential way to sounds created by the body,
such as the human voice, but also yawning, laughing, or hammering and drilling (Arnott &
Alain 2014: 90). Through the use of body sounds, the curators of POLIN and the Museum of
the Warsaw Rising catch visitors’ attention by drawing it to the sensations of somebody else
so that memory affect becomes possible.
Memory affect is, for Trezise, linked to a sense of moral duty to feel the suffering of
others (Trezise 2014: 4; cf. Jureit & Schneider 2010; Arnold-de Simine 2013). Such a feeling
is generally referred to as ‘empathy’. Silke Arnold-de Simine (2013: 123) has observed that
‘empathy relies on the recognition of feelings in another person – feelings I know through having
experienced them myself – and this transfer is made on the basis that I presume this person is
and feels like myself’. Sara Ahmed has therefore dened empathy as a ‘“wish feeling”, in which
subjects “feel” something other than what another feels in the very moment of imagining they
could feel what another feels’ (Ahmed 2014: 30, cited in Trezise 2014: 16). In other words, in
imagining we experience somebody else’s feelings, we always only feel ourselves. However,
those feelings are generally triggered by the emotions of another person that have left an
‘impression’ on us. Thus, I might feel sad because I see and/or hear another person crying,
and I might feel happy because I see and/or hear another person smiling.
Alison Landsberg denes ‘prosthetic memory’, which is put on like a prosthesis by people
who have not experienced the events that are remembered. By making people experience
somebody else’s feelings, prosthetic memory makes ‘possible a grounded, non-essentialist,
nonidentity politics based on a recognition of difference and achieved through “strategic
remembering”’ (Landsberg 2004: 152). The museums clearly wish for such an identication.
Both the beating heart and the breathing sound induce at the very least a feeling of unease
in the visitors. At the Museum of the Warsaw Rising, it is at times difcult to make out where
the sound comes from – is it our own heartbeat or that of another person? Its mufed sound
can also be felt physically, going right through one’s body – something that Landsberg denes
Stef de Jong: Sentimental Education. Sound and Silence at History Museums
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Museum & Society, 16 (1)
as the ‘aural visceral’ (2010: 541). In this sense, the heartbeat might work as a prototype for
‘prosthetic memory’. It makes us feel close to another to the point where it may become difcult
to distinguish between that person’s sensations and our own.
The problem with empathy is that it will never be more than a ‘wish feeling’. With the
sound of the heartbeat and heavy breathing, the museums represent fear through basic somatic
reactions. In this way, they induce an identication with the suffering of others that is based on
an idea of emotions as anthropological constants: through the sounds of bodily reactions to fear
and excitement that any visitor will have experienced, the suffering of the victims of deportation
and the Warsaw Rising is presented as hearable, feelable, and therefore understandable.
Several scholars have indicated that an overemphasis on empathy and the accompanying
belief that all feelings can be understood might be problematic. Trezise (2014: 41) and Jureit
and Schneider (2010) observe that identication with victims precludes identication with
other actors such as perpetrators or bystanders and might thus prevent a full understanding
of injustice. Arnold-de Simine (2013: 123), going one step further, argues that empathy, ‘does
not help to understand that people in a very different historical or cultural context from my own
might have very different experiences and that these experiences depend on the way they
are treated due to their sex, class or “race”’. Over-emphasis on empathy could even lead to
what she calls (2013: 59, 63ff) ‘dark nostalgia’ or ‘traumatic nostalgia’ – the longing to have
lived through the suffering of others. Naturally, the precondition for such a ‘dark nostalgia’ is a
safe temporal distance from the longed-for events and the certitude that they will remain alien
to one’s own experiences. In this sense, prosthetic memory – the adoption of the suffering of
others – might not necessarily lead to the wished-for effect. In the end, empathy might merely
be a means to reassure ourselves of our own moral impeccability (cf. Jureit & Schneider 2010;
Welzer & Giesecke 2012). This is arguably what happens in the Museum of the Warsaw Rising
where visitors are induced to identify with civilians and the ghters of the Polish Home Army. It
is therefore necessary to observe that the sound at POLIN, unlike that at the Museum of the
Warsaw Rising, only resembles breathing. Although the museum has been accurate in the
reproduction of most sounds, it remains vague here. A full immersion or empathy is precluded
– a point that I will return to later.
The Voices of Witnesses to History
The most compelling bodily sound is the human voice. Through the voice, we communicate and
transmit messages. It is therefore the one sound that most often enters our long-term memory
(Zimmermann et al. 2015: 8). The voice is, as the philosopher Mladen Dolar (2004: 204) has
observed, ‘a means for the ascension towards the summit of meaning, that has however …
to be dropped once we have reached that peak’ (Dolar 2004: 204). In other words, the voice
is a means towards a meaning but meaningless in itself.
At The Museum of the Warsaw Rising and in the exhibition Krakow under Nazi
Occupation 1939-1945, the human voice is used extensively in audio or video testimonies.
Those testimonies impart messages in the form of memories of the past and lessons for the
future. I have analyzed the meanings of video testimonies in memorial museums extensively in
previous studies (de Jong 2012, 2018). Here I want to go beyond the content of the testimonies
and concentrate on the effects of the sound of the witnesses’ voices.
Dolar argues that the voice, while being meaningless for meaning production, at the
same time produces an exuberance of meaning. This exuberance can be found, inter alia, in
phenomena such as intonation, alliteration, assonance or musicality. Often, the sound of the
voice is considered to give access to something deeper or greater, something that cannot
be grasped by the meaning of the words that are uttered alone. For video testimonies with
Holocaust survivors, extra-verbal expressions such as sobs, sighs, pauses and gestures, are
often considered to offer access to the ‘real’ meaning of the testimonies. They are considered
to allow a peek at witnesses’ trauma (de Jong 2018: 101f).
If the sound of the human voice carries meanings that cannot be reduced to the content
of what it is uttering, then the effect of this voice is intensied if the body cannot be made out.
Dolar observes that the acousmatic voice – the voice whose origin cannot be localized – has
special power: ‘Exactly because it cannot be localised, it seems to come from anywhere,
98
from everywhere, it gains a sudden omnipotence’ (Dolar 2004: 211). Since the appearance
of recording devices, we have become used to acousmatic voices that seemingly come from
nowhere (Dolar 2004: 211). Nevertheless, we often grow nervous when we do not nd the
source from which a voice emanates. An exhibition section at the Museum of the Warsaw
Rising recreates the sewers through which the ghters moved. Sounds of dripping water can
be heard. At a certain point, the voices of former ghters of the Polish Home Army emanate.
In the dark, intimate space of the reconstructed sewers the voices appear powerful. Being
unable to localize them, I started moving around, irritated, looking for the speakers – a reaction
I had not had to the sound of dripping water which likewise seemed to come from nowhere,
but was diegetic to the sewer representation.
There is another element which gives the voices of witnesses to history a special
power: those voices come from the past. By now, many of them are also voices of the dead.
The recorded human voice and death have been aligned for a long time (cf. Weigel 2004).
Jonathan Sterne has shown that at the beginnings of sound recording, the recorded voice was
considered to always already be coming from the realm of the dead (Sterne 2003: 287ff). At the
turn of the nineteenth century large collections of recordings were set up to preserve the sound
of the voices (Felderer 2004: 15; Sterne 2003: 287-333). The content of the words was often
secondary. The audio and video testimony collections, recorded approximately a century after
the invention of the phonograph, can be seen as a continuation of this endeavour – this time
with a concentration on meaning rather than the sound of the voice. However, while the aim
is to record the memories of people who have experienced extraordinary events, something
else is recorded as well: the witnesses use words and expressions that are disappearing. Their
stories of expulsion and migration can often be heard in the accents with which they speak.
Words from languages little used today, like Yiddish, enter their speech, and they use dialects
and intonations that are disappearing. The voices of witnesses appear to be here and at the
same time not quite here anymore: they exemplify the passage of time while at the same time
freezing it. They are diegetic to the exhibition chapters – and at the same time they are not. It
is exactly from this position of in-betweenness that their power stems. At the Museum of the
Warsaw Rising, visitors can listen to testimonies through old-fashioned telephones. Next to
each telephone, a picture of the witness speaking is afxed. The museum marks pictures of
witnesses who have passed away with black ribbons. Listening to the voices of those witnesses,
often in poor quality recordings, is reminiscent of turn of the century necromancy and the
otherworldliness with which the rst sound recordings were associated. It is almost uncanny.
Ambient Music
Music can be a means towards an authentic representation of the past, as in the example of the
wedding procession or the café in POLIN. Music is also a powerful means to induce feelings.
Brain imaging research has shown that when listening to ‘emotional’ music, the limbic and
paralimbic systems are modulated. While ‘fast tempo and major chords [are] categorized as
“happy”’, ‘slow tempo and minor chords’ count as ‘sad’ (Arnott & Alain 2014: 90). Interestingly,
there might be a close connection between memory and emotions here as the limbic and
paralimbic systems ‘are thought to play a central role in determining a person’s emotional
state’ (Arnott & Alain 2014: 90-91). Especially important to this effect is the amygdala which
is ‘important for tagging particular memory events with an emotional valence’ (Arnott & Alain
2014: 91). Thus, ‘while happy music can decrease amygdala activity, sad music is particularly
effective at increasing the activation, possibly because it conjures up distressing memories’
(Arnott & Alain 2014: 91).
Even before music was studied from a neurological perspective, the idea that ambient
music could inuence people’s moods had been applied by the Muzak Corporation, beginning
in 1922. Muzak, the inventor of background music for public spaces, used ambient music
to increase productivity among employees or stimulate buying among consumers until its
bankruptcy in 2009 (Lanza 2004: 27; Neizert 2013). In the museums a similar effect is aimed
at by strategically placing different types of music. The tavern music was uplifting after the
slow-paced, low, gloomy music in the exhibition section on the Cossacks’ attack. However,
the emotional effect of music is most poignant in those exhibition sections where non-diegetic
Stef de Jong: Sentimental Education. Sound and Silence at History Museums
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Museum & Society, 16 (1)
ambient music is used. Thus, the very rst reproduced sound that visitors to POLIN hear is
soothing minimalist music combined with forest sounds. It is supposed to represent the myth
of the arrival of the rst Jews to Poland. The First World War is represented by an upbeat
dramatic score reminiscent of lm music. In the exhibition Krakow under Nazi Occupation
1939-1945, grave, slow-paced organ music is played in the nal room, the Hall of Choices. The
room serves as a hall of remembrance for the Righteous Amongst the Nations from Krakow,
who are here contrasted with examples of negative behaviours. The aim of the hall is to make
visitors reect on those choices – and by extension their own actions (Bednarek 2011: 51-55).
In a review of POLIN, Ruth Leiserowitz16 (2014) observes that the museum uses
‘cleverly arranged and technically brilliant sound elements, that subtly affect the visitors’. This
sounds like a comment on Muzak. Visitor studies on the effects of soundscapes on visitors’
moods are still missing. Even Robert D. Jakubowski (2011), who has studied the impact of
different soundscapes on visitors’ dwell time and the restorative outcomes of their visits to
an art museum and a natural history museum, did not consider the soundscapes’ impact on
visitors’ emotional engagement. However, if music affects listeners, as neurological studies
argue, then it is probable that the mood that music puts visitors in inuences how they encode
information from the exhibition. If ‘sad’ music conjures up distressing memories, then museums
throw their visitors back on themselves in sections with this music. As with body sounds, a
mirror effect is created in which visitors, remembering their own sadness, are invited to feel
for and with the victims.
The Sound of Silence
At POLIN, the so-called ‘Final Solution’ is represented through a corridor made of rusted steel
that brings to mind a train carriage, but also, possibly, a gas chamber. In contrast to other
sections, no soundscape has been put in place. The only sound is of visitors walking on the
steel oor. Planned, but not realized, was a ‘metaphysical break’. On exiting the rusted steel
corridor, visitors were to enter a pure white space so silent that not even their words could
be heard, an effect that was to be achieved by sound-mufing technology. It was never put in
place because of emergency exit requirements.17
Silence is a recurring theme in acts of commemoration. The most symptomatic use of
silence as a symbol for commemoration are minutes of silence, the rst of which was practiced
on Armistice Day (11th of November) 1919 in the United Kingdom (cf. Gregory 1994). Minutes
of silence are now common practice for commemorations of the Holocaust and the Second
World War and nd their most impressive expression on Holocaust Remembrance Day in
Israel when, cued by a siren, the whole country drops silent for two minutes (cf. Brown 2015).
This idea that silence can be a powerful ritual has precedents in religious worship. Sir
Percy Fitzpatrick, who initiated the rst minute of silence, compared the silent city to the ‘moving,
awe-inspiring silence of a great cathedral’ (cited in Gregory 1994: 9). Peter Burke, in his short
cultural history of silence, lists ‘silence of respect’, before the dead, before a monarch, but
especially before God (Burke 1993: 125f). Religious silence, observes Burke, is an expression
of knowledge about the limits of words. The silence in the steel corridor repeats the ritual of
minutes of silence. It also repeats the respectful religious silence. Like the cathedral, the
architecture of the dimly lit narrow steel corridor urges visitors to stay quiet. As in religious
services, this silence expresses knowledge of the limits of words.
In Holocaust discourse, silence also expresses the unrepresentability of Holocaust
memory. As already alluded to with regards to the vague sound of breathing, the curators
of POLIN took a very discreet approach to ambient sound installation in the section on the
Holocaust to avoid the impression of ‘sound effects’ and gratuitous theatricality.18 Paradoxically,
the decision to remain silent becomes a form of representation itself. The rusted corridor stands
out exactly because it is almost the only space in the exhibition that is left silent.
The crux with silence is, that it is only ever silent in comparison to other situations.
Silence is never completely silent. It can even be very noisy. ‘Try as hard as we may to make a
silence, we cannot’, observed composer John Cage (in Fallon 2015: 159). Cage demonstrated
this absence of silence with his piece 4’33’’, which involves a pianist not playing the piano. Like
the concert hall that served as a setting for Cage’s piece, the steel corridor in POLIN is noisy;
100
walking through it, visitors hear their own and others’ footsteps. As in Cage’s 4’33’’, they are
forced to listen to the sounds of silence. Analyzing the social technologies of minutes of silence,
Steven D. Brown (2012: 247) has observed that ‘what public silence displays intensely is the
immediate interactional order in which we are embedded, and something about the relative
ability of those around us to comport themselves with the proper respect.’ In the steel corridor,
visitors hear amplied body sounds in restraint. In this sense, the steel construction, like body
sounds and ambient music, induces introspection through external sounds.
Conclusion
In the museums analyzed here, sounds – and to a lesser extent silence – offer a sentimental
education through sonic immersion. On the one hand, diegetic sounds, sounds that directly
represent what is shown in an exhibition chapter, serve to give visitors an idea of what the past
has sounded like and, at the same time, to make them temporarily feel as if they were part of
that past. On the other hand, non-diegetic sounds, sounds that add an interpretative level to
the exhibition section, invite them to engage emotionally with and evaluate this past. Music
and body sounds inducing feelings of sadness and empathy can thereby work in a closed
circuit, making visitors feel somebody else’s pain by throwing them back on themselves. This
serves cultural memory in the form of an emphatic identication. However, it also precludes
a deeper engagement with the time and the reasons for suffering.
While mostly having been treated separately so far, diegetic and non-diegetic sounds
work together in many exhibition sections. In the section on the Cossack attack at POLIN, gloomy
music and the rattling of swords, together with the cracking of burning houses and whinnying
horses, can be heard. Diegetic and non-diegetic sounds also typically bleed into each other,
so that the visitor moves from the part of sentimental education focused on imparting historical
knowledge to the more affective one and vice versa. There is, moreover, an affective side to most
diegetic sounds. Thus, the sound of birds and the chatter of a market square are more pleasant
than sounds of shooting or a busy street. In this sense, while reproductive techniques, volume
and spatialization might serve as tools for authentication when recreating past soundscapes
and acoustic communities, the choice of which soundscapes and communities to recreate
inuences the way in which visitors receive certain exhibition sections. The acoustic message
of the Museum of the Warsaw Rising would, for example, be very different if the uplifting songs
of the Polish home army could not be heard. Visitors might be less likely to identify with the
ghters and their enthusiasm, and more prone only to identify with civilian victims.
Scholars of sound are quick to observe that, while we can close our eyes, ‘we have
no earlids’ (Schafer 2003: 25). For museums this means that while visitors can easily bypass
objects, only eetingly look at them or not read museum texts, they cannot decide to ignore
soundscapes. They cannot decide to be unaffected by them.
Sounds are clearly a powerful if subtle means to inuence visitors’ state of mind and
responses to exhibits. This becomes especially relevant where soundscapes have an effect
on visitor’s emotions. At the moment however, a deep reection on the uses of sounds – both
from practitioners and from theoreticians – is still largely missing. Sounds are a relatively new
phenomenon in museums and they are mostly used as an add-on rather than as an important
part of exhibition planning. Despite a movement within museum didactics towards self-reection,
generally neither the origin of sounds, nor the way in which soundscapes are produced is
disclosed to the visitors. A sentimental education through sounds can be benecial as it adds a
further layer to museum didactics. Museums should use this layer fruitfully by teaching visitors
how to listen to sound documents, for example, just as they teach them how to look at objects;
or by reecting on how researchers go about recreating past soundscapes. After roughly two
centuries of having been schools of seeing, museums could now become schools of listening.
Received: 16 November 2017
Finally Acceptd: 26 March 2018
Stef de Jong: Sentimental Education. Sound and Silence at History Museums
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Museum & Society, 16 (1)
Notes
1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are by the author.
2 Andrea Witcomb (2015: 322), in an article on affect and emotions in the ‘First Peoples’
exhibition of the Melbourne Museum uses the concept of ‘pedagogy of feeling’ to describe
‘the ways in which some forms of contemporary exhibition practices stage affective
encounters between viewer and viewed through the ways in which they use a range of
devices to promote sensory experiences that encourage introspective reection on the
part of visitors’. I prefer the concept of ‘sentimental education’ because of the double
meaning. Although the education that I refer to happens through sensory experiences,
those sensory experiences are not always meant to lead to an emotional engagement with
the represented. As shown in the rst part of this paper, they are sometimes used primarily
to impart historical knowledge.
3 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, chief curator of the core exhibition at Polin, interview by
author, 05 March 2015.
4 Olga Szlachcic, designer at Sonica, responsible for the soundscapes at Polin, interview
by author, 05 March 2015.
5 Fencott, C. (1999) ‘Presence and the Content of Virtual Environments’: http://web.onyxnet.
co.uk/Fencott-onyxnet.co.uk/pres99/pres99.htm
6 Fencott, C. (1999) ‘Presence and the Content of Virtual Environments’: http://web.onyxnet.
co.uk/Fencott-onyxnet.co.uk/pres99/pres99.htm
7 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, interview by author, 05 March 2015.
8 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, interview by author, 05 March 2015. .
9 Joshua Waletzky, lmmaker and musician, expert on Yiddish music, Skype interview by
author, 15 April 2015.
10 Olga Szlachcic, interview by author, 05 March 2015.
11 Olga Szlachcic, interview by author, 05 March 2015.
12 Ania Grzechnik, conservator at the Warsaw Rising Museum, interview by author, 04 March
2015.
13 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, interview by author, 05 March 2015.
14 Monika Bednarek, custodian and manager of Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, branch
of the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow, interview by author, 02 March 2015.
15 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, interview by author, 05 March 2015; Olga Szlachcic, interview
by author, 05 March 2015.
16 Leiserowitz, R. (2014) POLIN. Museum der Geschichte der polnischen Juden,
H-Soz-u-Kult: http://www.hsozkult.de/exhibitionreview/id/rezausstellungen-
210?title=polin-museum-der-geschichte-der-polnischen-juden&recno=1&q=Polin%20
&fq=&sort=newestPublished&total=1
17 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, interview by author, 05 March 2015; Olga Szlachcic, interview,
05 March 2015.
18 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, interview author, 05 March 2015.
102
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*Stef de Jong is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History at
the University of Cologne. Her research interests include museum studies, cultural memory
studies, sound studies, digital history and public history. She is currently working on affective
and immersive triggers in cultural memory and on the digital memory of the Holocaust. She
obtained her Ph.D from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2012. She
has published internationally on the gure of the witness, the museal representation of history,
sound in museums and digital memory. She is the author of The Witness as Object. Video
Testimonies in Second World War Museums. 2018. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Memberships:
ICOM
ICMEMO
COMCOL
Research Network Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe
Memory Studies Association
Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands
E-mail: Stef.dejong@uni-koeln.de
Address:
Dr. Stef de Jong
Universität zu Köln
Historisches Institut
Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Köln
Philosophikum, Raum 3.113
Tel.: 0221 470 1194
Website: http://histinst.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/948.html?&L=0
Stef de Jong: Sentimental Education. Sound and Silence at History Museums
