Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 16 January 2017 issue)

Hey Kam,
Is it my imagination or are museums really boring?
History buff

Whenever I travel, I try to go to a military or war museum because I think they best reflect how that nation views its history. The best ones that I have visited are those in Hanoi and the unpronounceable Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna.

I’m in London at the moment, and I’ve visited the Imperial War Museum. Although I used to live very near it, I never visited the museum because, you know, I was a real Londoner and we didn’t go to the tourist places. But now that I am a tourist, I do touristy things like visit museums. Every museum I’ve been to in London has been packed with tourists, except for the Imperial War Museum, where locals outnumbered foreigners. The museum was a “father’s revenge” because there were many very bored wives and daughters who had the exact same look that men have when they obediently accompany their womenfolk around clothes shops. Finally, dad had a chance to spout the arcane dimensions of the Japanese Zero fighter plane while his teenage daughters stared at their phones and his wife yawned.

The Imperial War Museum gives itself an unusual task. In every other country I have visited, its wars and its army are synonymously remembered but in London, which also has a National Army Museum (sadly closed for renovation at the moment), the Imperial War Museum is dedicated just to the gory story of war. A long time ago, it was used to catalogue the triumphs of Imperial Wars but now that the British Empire is no more, the museum now likes to call itself the IWM. Abbreviations are very popular in Britain, which now likes to call itself the UK, and the UK does not know how to represent its Imperial past, perhaps because that was something that Britain did, not the UK.

I find British museums quite boring and the IWM is no exception. British museums have a tendency to use a single small item to represent an entire age, which is not emotionally evocative. At the IWM, a major battlefront during the First World War was represented by a single bullet. The ammunition could have been chillingly evocative if it had been grandly and reverently presented, but it was hidden away. But this battlefront that claimed the lives of several million people was in faraway Serbia, so I guess nobody cares anyway.

There were exhibits that attempted an emotive evocation through the dramatic combination of lights, sounds and objects, but these were to illustrate historical moments that British visitors would already have a strong emotional response to. For instance, the mud and blood of the Western Front trench warfare during World War I.

I have been to several museums in Berlin and if they are representative of all German museums, then they have a very different approach to the museum experience, and it is one that I prefer. The Berlin museums tend to evoke more and explain less through the use of grand scale, space and artwork. The history they tell may be as wrong as the one the British tell but you walk away from a Berlin museum not with a full understanding but with an emotional response and a desire to know more because the imagination has been inspired. For example, the Pergamon Museum has stunningly huge recreations of gateways and altars from Ancient Babylon and Greece that are awe-inspiring and evocative.

The hot, boring and crowded British Museum was originally designed to house the artifacts acquired by the rich and vast British Empire. The artifacts are often quite small because they were found by soldiers, civil servants and explorers who bequeathed their little collections to the museum. The original intention was to fill the visitor with awe of the civilising majesty of the empire as much as it was to teach him about faraway lands. Nineteenth-century Germany (which only became a single nation in 1871), did not have an overseas empire and it was late to the game of plundering archaeology but, when it finally started, it did it fast and big (almost entirely in the crumbling Ottoman Empire where a bribe went a long way), taking huge hauls back to the capital city of Berlin, which wanted to rival Paris and London as quickly as possible. This is why Berlin now has entire ancient cities on display. It was originally meant to be a very “in your face” display of 19th-century German wealth and power whereas the British had a more understated approach, whereby a single pot actually represented that nation’s domination of India.

Post-Brexit UK is a pale shadow of Imperial Britain and post-war Germany has its own struggles. The tempers of both nations are far removed from the confidence of the 19th century but their museum collections and the style in which they are presented have not changed greatly. The history they tell might have changed (according to the IWM, there never was a British Empire) but the use of artifacts is the same.

The question for Malaysia is how should we make our museums? Even if the history we tell is a load of nonsense.

Reprinted with the kind permission of