Peter Muir: The Exotic Museum of an Extinct Race and the identity of a new Europe Centre for European Studies University College London

Peter Muir: The Exotic Museum of an Extinct Race and the identity of a new Europe: Centre for European Studies University College London

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By engaging with a series of photographic palimpsests in relation to a set of propositions outlined initially by Walter Benjamin in his ‘On the Concept of History,’ this paper considers the development of European identity in the aftermath of The First World War. Of particular relevance here is Benjamin’s understanding of reparation for loss through personal and collective redemption (Erlösung: or secular redemption). The paper argues that there is an ambiguous relation in history that is retained by such images; a relation that has to do not only with an opening out towards the future, but with historicity and the obligations of memory. As Benjamin writes, ‘the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search these image for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous trace where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back may discover it.’ By juxtaposing the material archive of images represented by August Sander’s photography of Weimer Germany (in the 1920s and 1930s), and the imagined archive of The Exotic Museum of Extinct Races proposed by German Fascism (1930s and 1940s, to be built in Linz, Austria), this paper develops a tension that attempts to reveal this trace, this landscape of subjectivity, a terrain marked by objectification and destruction as well as materialism and Utopian idealism. The paper invites the viewer of these palimpsests to play the part of curator, sifting and selecting evidence of tyranny and extreme action as well as tolerance and diversity in order to project the possibilities of a new and redemptive European identity that coincided with the creation of EEC.