Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
I Blame Berlin
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Sweat tickles the small of my back. Stuck to my chest, my shirt is clammy.
Studying a handheld, polished silver mirror from an 18th Egyptian Dynasty, my face stares back at me. My eyes have dark circles. My uncombed hair needs a barber.
I blame Berlin. I especially blame Museum Island. This is where my career started unraveling.
Museum Island’s crown jewel, Pergamon Museum, displays artifacts from classical Greece and Rome, Near Eastern antiquities and Islamic art. Massive sections of ancient city walls like the Roman market at Miletus and the Ishtar Gate from Babylonia with its glazed bricks in blue, green and gold hues are preserved.
As a teacher, I need museums. Under one roof, they assemble works of art and bits of history that would otherwise be out of reach for me. They are the PR departments for ancient civilizations, bringing moldering voices into my time and through me to my students.
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.
Those were my thoughts as I sat on a park bench outside the cathedral Berliner Dom, the sun warming me, boats floating by on the Spree River. Leather journal in hand, I jotted notes for my high school history classes.
When the school year started, I asked my students to imagine running a museum. Write a 500-word essay to the museum board arguing for or against museum labels containing input from diverse ethnicities, nationalities and races.
If your museum wants to reflect contemporary 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 meaningful impact, merely a way to pacify complaining constituencies, another form of marginalization?
Is your museum democratizing the visitor experience or dumbing it down in response to political pressure? Are you succumbing to the tyranny of the ignorant mob? To cite a famous example, should passengers get to vote on how to fly the airplane?
Do all untold stories matter equally? If artifacts seized by colonial powers include label comments from indigenous peoples, will you also invite white supremacists to comment on artworks seized by the North during the Civil War?
As word spread about my assignment, 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.
Even the local newspaper got into the act. In an interview with a local reporter, I could not stop myself from pointing out that Hitler resolved the museum labeling dilemma by banning ‘degenerate’ art, thus, automatically abolishing the Third Reich’s politically incorrect art labels.
As I learned from many sleepless nights, intolerance masquerading as tolerance is exhausting. With a brave face, my resignation letter—my final history lesson—closed with advice that first appeared in 1862 in an African Methodist Episcopal Church publication. "Sticks and
Of course, I was lying. Museum label words do hurt. They broke my backbone.
Today, I’m back at Pergamon. I read museum labels differently now.
