Peter M. McIsaac – författare

Museums of the Mind is the first book to explore the evolving relationship of collecting and the German literary imagination since the invention of the public museum. This study shows that in addition to redefining categories of art, history, and identity in modernity, the museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives. Using new categories, Peter McIsaac constructs a critical genealogy using key texts by Johann Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Siegfried Lenz, W. G. Sebald, and Durs Grünbein and the material record of Germanophone museums. McIsaac rethinks how fundamental cultural “truths” define what it means to belong to acculturated communities, showing that the activation of meaning in museums depends foremost on what people bring, in their minds, to those real and imagined environments, resulting in what McIsaac calls museums of the mind. This notion elucidates the vital shifts wrought by museum culture over the past two centuries and illuminates how museums, literature, and digital media shape thought and behavior today.

While scholars recognize both museums and films as sites where historical knowledge and cultural memory are created, the convergence between their methods of constructing the past has only recently been acknowledged. The essays in Exhibiting the German Past examine a range of films, museums, and experiences which blend the two, considering how authentic objects and cinematic techniques are increasingly used in similar ways by both visual media and museums.This is the first collection to focus on the museum–film connection in German-language culture and the first to approach the issue using the concept of “musealization,” a process that, because it engages the cultural destruction wrought by modernization, offers new means of constructing historical knowledge and shaping collective memory within and beyond the museum’s walls. Featuring a wide range of valuable case studies, Exhibiting the German Past offers a unique perspective on the developing relationship between museums and visual media.

While scholars recognize both museums and films as sites where historical knowledge and cultural memory are created, the convergence between their methods of constructing the past has only recently been acknowledged. The essays in Exhibiting the German Past examine a range of films, museums, and experiences which blend the two, considering how authentic objects and cinematic techniques are increasingly used in similar ways by both visual media and museums.This is the first collection to focus on the museum–film connection in German-language culture and the first to approach the issue using the concept of “musealization,” a process that, because it engages the cultural destruction wrought by modernization, offers new means of constructing historical knowledge and shaping collective memory within and beyond the museum’s walls. Featuring a wide range of valuable case studies, Exhibiting the German Past offers a unique perspective on the developing relationship between museums and visual media.