Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Blame Berlin
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
I blame Berlin. Primarily, I blame Museum Island.
Museum Island’s crown jewel, Pergamon Museum, displays art and artifacts from classical Greece and Rome, Near Eastern antiquities and a sublime Islamic art collection. Entire sections of ancient city walls are preserved: the Roman market gate from Miletus and the Ishtar Gate from Babylonia with its glazed bricks in blue, green and gold hues.
As a teacher, I need Western museums. Under one roof, they assemble works of art and bits of history that would otherwise be unavailable to me. They are the PR departments for ancient civilizations, carrying their moldering voices forward to my time and through me to my students.
Largely, the Pergamon collections are a consequence of 19th and 20th century German archaeological expeditions—some say colonial imperialism, some say outright theft. Critics charge the museum itself is a form of neo-colonialism. It’s not a compliment.
These were my thoughts as I sat on a park bench outside the cathedral Berliner Dom, the sun peaceably warming me, boats floating by on the Spree River. Spiral notebook in hand, I jotted notes for a debate topic for my high school history classes.
Back in my classroom, I asked my students to imagine running a museum of antiquities. As museum director, I prompted them, are you in favor of rewriting museum labels to include input from diverse ethnicities, nationalities and races?
If you do that, is your museum democratizing the visitor experience or dumbing it down? To combat implicit bias, are you succumbing to the tyranny of the ignorant mob? To cite a famous example, should passengers get to vote on where or how to fly the airplane?
If your museum wants to reflect contemporary, changing values—and surely change is good, does including heretofore hidden voices on museum captions create meaningful change? Or is it a politically correct placebo without impact, a way to pacify complaining constituencies, another form of marginalization?
Do all untold stories matter equally? If artifacts taken by colonial powers have label commentary from indigenous peoples, will you also invite white supremacists to comment on artworks from the Civil War era?
The day after a heated class discussion, as word spread, a firestorm of student activism, parent anger and censorious school board posturing exploded. Pickets and petitions appeared like a bad case of teenage acne. Overnight, I became toxic, alone, without allies.
A week later, I closed my resignation letter with "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” The idiom first appeared in 1862 in an African Methodist Episcopal Church publication. Seventy-five years later Hitler solved Germany’s museum labeling problem by banning ‘degenerate’ art.
That was five years, two months and three days ago. Today, I’m back at Pergamon.
Studying a handheld, polished silver mirror from the 18th Egyptian Dynasty, my face stares back at me. My eyes have dark circles. Hair is shaggy. There’s a grease spot on my shirt collar.
Sweat tickles the small of my back. My shirt is clammy against my chest.
I read museum labels differently now.
