Is a Misleading Museum Better than No Museum?

How to respond to the manipulation of historical narratives

I recently read a fascinating dissertation about debates over Albanian historical memory, and I’ve been mulling over this question ever since. Here’s the issue:

1) There are 2 museums about Communism in Albania’s capital, the House of Leaves and Bunk Art. If a tourist doesn’t visit one of these museums, they could easily pass their entire trip without every learning about Albanian Communist history.

2) The House of Leaves was created by the government while it was run by the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party is basically the new Communist Party; they don’t advocate for going back to the old system, but the members are largely drawn from the old Communist elite. Same goes for the other political parties here. Thus, everyone in power in Albania today isl invested in the idea that there should be no historical “reckoning” with was done under Communism. Every one of them agrees: secret police files should remain closed.

This museum is designed to create a narrative that serves the former Communist elite. It emphasizes how people were surveilled, not who did the surveilling or what happened to people if they were caught doing something against the regime. It supports the idea that everyone was a victim of Communist, everyone was just a cog in a machine. There’s truth to that, but it’s not the whole truth—and this museum can make a visitor think it is the whole truth.

3) The Bunk Art museums (partly government funded) present Communist history as fundamentally separate from modern Albanian life. Their physical locations emphasize this: One is under the streets of the capital, the other is in a mountain on the edge of the city. Both are isolated from the world outside. They present an “exotic” Albanian history targeted at foreign visitors. “Ooooh look, you can go into the dictator’s old apartments;” “Listen to how many Albanians got sent to prison camps, isn’t it awful, here’s a multimedia display about it';” “Do you want a Hoxha tshirt?” And they lack any coherent narrative, slamming visitors with such an overwhelming volume of facts that everything is depersonalized.

Look, I’m a huge museum nerd. I’ve been to more of them than I can count, from India’s national museum to the museum about the Russian community in Potsdam, Germany. When I fantasize about going to grad school, museum studies is often what I think about.

So, the idea of recommending people not go to a museum when traveling to a new country just seems nuts to me. I don’t really know how to resolve this. Countries that don’t reckon with their historical traumas create problems for everyone, not least visiting tourists.

Today, plenty of young Albanians tell surveys Communism in Albania wasn’t that bad. Veneration of Albania’s dictator, Enver Hoxha, is gone, but plenty of people will report a positive opinion of him. When an individual’s psychological trauma is buried, it expresses itself through disease and twisted memories. Countries aren’t so different. I guess my little question can be seen as my fragmentary, miniscule share of the challenges rising from the buried pain that seeps into so much of modern Albania.