Museum Archipelago

112. In Relooted, You Steal Back What Museums Won't Return

It's the year 2099, and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high-security museum in Europe. One of the targets: the Kabwe skull, a roughly 300,000-year-old early human skull found in present-day Zambia in 1921. This is Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop, where your job is to steal back looted artifacts by mapping entrances and exits, positioning your crew, and making it past robot security using your parkour skills. Several things about this are unrealistic. For one, the actual Kabwe skull, currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might not need such an elaborate plan. But there is a damningly realistic fact at the heart of the game: every single one of the roughly 70 objects you steal was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western museum or private collection. And the way museums in the game wiggle out of a fictional treaty to return stolen artifacts doesn't sound fictional at all. It mirrors the real-world tactics that have kept the Kabwe skull in London for over a century, despite Zambia's repeated requests for its return. In this episode, Ben Myers, CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and Mohale Mashigo, the studio's narrative director, talk about why heists are the perfect genre for a game about repatriation, what they found when they visited the real artifacts in person, and why their video game often does a much better job telling the story of these objects than the museums that hold them. Image: The Kabwe skull as it appears in a Relooted heist briefing. Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Relooted 01:30 "We overstated the security capabilities on museums" 01:45 Meet Ben Myers 02:50 Meet Mohale Mashigo 03:04 The Kabwe Skull 04:45 Labels and Missing Context in Museums 06:08 A Digital Museum 06:53 Treaties and Red Tape 09:37 Prosperous Future Africa 12:05 Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum on Episode 39 12:16 Museum of Black Civilizations 14:50 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 112. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript It's the year 2099 and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high security museum to steal the Kabwe skull. This moment occurs halfway through Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop. Your job is to map all the entrances and exits, position your crew members strategically, use cybersecurity techniques to break open the door, steal this artifact, and make it out of the museum past the robot security force using parkour, which fortunately, you're quite skilled at. “Video game excerpt: " Please look out for the Kabwe skull. For many years, the Zambian government tried to have the skull repatriated back from the United Kingdom. What's the security situation? Nothing you haven't experienced before. Robot guards, lasers, security shutters, pressure plates, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Several things about this moment in the game are unrealistic. For one, the actual skull, which is currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might actually be easier to steal. Ben Myres:  I've seen a couple of the ones in our game, in person now, and the first thing I noticed, is the Kabwe skull or broken Hillman in the Natural History Museum. That'd be very easy to steal. We've very overstated the security capabilities on museums. I have a video of, it's only 20 seconds long of the distance from the skull to the exit. I'm like, wow. Okay. That wouldn’t be very fun. This is Ben Myers, the CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and one of the developers of Relooted.   Ben Myres: Hello, I'm Ben Myers, CEO, and creative director at Nyamakop. I like to be known for making cool video games. But there is a very realistic -- damningly realistic -- fact at the heart of the game. The Kabwe skull is just one of about 70 real-world objects you heist during the game. And every single one of them was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western Museum or private collection. Ben Myres:  I think there was a French government report that came out in maybe 2018 and that estimated that 90 to 95% of all African cultural heritage is kept in museums off the continent. So the scale of it is like really absurd. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pieces. In like Western museums. So the, the major problem was like not, you know, finding artifacts, but which ones? Mohale Mashingo:  There were so many artifacts, really. So many, but we couldn't put them all in the game. Otherwise, this would be the world's longest game. This is Mohale Mashigo, narrative director at Nyamakop and one of the developers of Relooted. Mohale Mashigo:  Hi, my name is Mohale Mashigo. I'm the narrative director at Nyamakop, and I like to be known for telling great stories, living in a fishing village and having a cute dog. The Kabwe skull was discovered in 1921 by miners in the Kabwe mine in Zambia, then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. The skull is roughly 300,000 years old, predating modern humans, and was promptly shipped to the Natural History Museum in London, which at the time was a department of the British Museum. About ten years after Zambia became independent from colonial rule, in the early 1970s, the National Monuments Commission formally requested the skull from the museum. That hasn’t happened, and the museum's own display undermines its case for keeping the original. Ben Myres:  So the Kabwe skull is interesting because Zambia has been asking back that back for quite a long time. And what was interesting about the Kabwe skull is it's surrounded by replicas. Like it's this sort of history of, you know, humanity from all these fossils and like skulls. But most of the skulls they have in that exhibition aren't. Real. So it just speaks to how like it's completely unnecessary for them to have that exact skull. When all the other ones surrounding them aren't real either. And most of the people going to the museum aren't gonna notice that anyway. Mohale Mashigo: I've been to a lot of museums in Europe and have sort of seen these things, but they feel so out of context. You know, it's kind of like, this is the name of the thing, A very small writeup that it doesn't feel humanizing or it doesn't feel human. And then actually working on them in the game is, oh my goodness, this is, this is a big deal to a community of people and how it's taken is also a big deal. So being in a museum, and I love going to museums, it felt so disconnected, seeing it, but actually. Writing about it and learning about it was something entirely different. The Kabwe skull is one of the higher-profile repatriation cases, but many of the 70 artifacts in Relooted don't have that kind of visibility. When Ben visited the British Museum, he noticed how the quality of wall labels depends on how much public pressure a museum is under to return those artifacts. Ben Myers: I think the captioning around the Benin Bronzes is actually pretty good. They use the word looting, they speak about where it happened, how they got hold of it. But I think what's interesting is when there isn't that external pressure or awareness, the way museums talk about artifacts in the collection is not as great. In the far corner, away from the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, there is a display of something called an Ndome shield Mohale Mashigo: Yeah, Ndome shield from Kenya. Ben Myers: From the Kikuyu people in Kenya. We learned — we have one of them in the game — and when I was reading about the research, it became clear that these are passed down from father to son as an initiation ritual. It's a deeply personal familial object and none of that is really mentioned in the caption. It's either consciously or unconsciously getting away from the question of why do you have this and why is this here? Because if you understand that it's this deeply personal familial object, you might be a little unsettled about it being there and being displayed in the way it's displayed Both the Benin Bronzes and Ndome shield are artifacts you can steal back in the game. Before every heist, you and your team hold a briefing. Mohale and Ben built the game's artifact displays and dialogue to detail information about the object. Mohale Mashigo: We made a very conscious effort to say, this is what's so important about this artifact. How it was taken and the repercussions of it having been removed from where it's from. So in many ways yes, it's like a digital museum. And the fact that a heist briefing inside a video game does a better job at contextualizing these objects than the museums that currently hold them is another damning detail that the game designers didn't have to invent. In Relooted, you play as Nomali, a young woman in 2099 Johannesburg whose grandmother, Professor Grace, spent years trying to get stolen artifacts returned through official channels, and got stopped every step of the way. At the beginning of the game, she explains the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, an agreement signed by the world's powers to return stolen artifacts to African museums. This Treaty is also fictional, no such agreement has been signed, but the way Professor Grace describes museums wiggling their way out of actually returning artifacts sounds very real. “Video game excerpt:  There's an old clause in the treaty that uses the words public display. “Basically saying all artifacts that are currently on display to the public need to be returned.” “Museums are now using that old clause to basically remove artifacts from public display under the auspices of changing exhibits, maintenance, et cetera.They don't intend to put these artifacts back on display and are also not disclosing what they have in storage. They intend to have this on display for private viewings instead.” Can't give back what you don't have. Exactly. But that also means they cannot report the artifacts missing or stolen. Stolen? Who’s stealing them? Us! In the real world, these types of slow-rolling shenanigans are exactly what museums do. The British Government agreed to “negotiate” on the Kabwe skull in 2019, but no progress has been made. Ben Myers: It's so difficult to get these objects back. It's so complicated. And I think that's what it speaks to, but it also speaks to the dodgy ways they were acquired as well. Like the Kabwe skull — at the time it was taken, there was literally a British colonial law saying, do not remove human remains, do not remove cultural relics from the country. And they did that and then donated it. So even acquiring the objects sometimes broke the law that they themselves had. And the current UK defense for keeping the skull is that it's technically not human remains — it's too old to qualify — so the repatriation framework doesn't apply. So it doesn’t seem inconceivable that these museums will manage to hold on until 2099. Mohale Mashigo: There's been so much red tape, just constantly. And I thought, what if even a hundred years from now they're still doing it and they're still finding ways. Because right now it's, "you don't have enough museums" or whatever. Or "we couldn't possibly hand it over because then we'd have to hand over everything." And even if they're trying to do something, there'll always be fishy business going on. The setting of 2099 also allowed the game designers to do something that Mohale says is rare: imagine a prosperous African future. Mohale Mashigo: Very rarely do we have an opportunity to imagine Africa in the future. And I'm talking about Africans imagining it. Often it's like some kind of lo-fi, scrapyard junkyard or whatever. People are suffering. The world has fallen apart, but everybody's got holograms and they're selling body parts. It's always something very gruesome when people imagine Africa in the future. And we wanted to imagine a future that suited us. It was a rare opportunity for us to actually imagine a prosperous, happy Africa. One of the reasons the game works so well is because heists are fun, and we already have a shared cultural understanding of what goes into a heist: a crew, a briefing, a plan that goes wrong. Mohale Mashigo: What I love about heist is the fact that the best heist works when it's like the little guy stealing from the big guy. You really want to see them succeed. They don't ever steal from people who deserve that money. They don't steal from hospitals. They steal from the guy who's got too many casinos. You know, he's not gonna miss it. As a player, we certainly feel it. We’re not only breaking into museums, but also fancy private collections. The game does such a good job laying out the case for bringing the artifacts back that you can focus on the fun of stealing. And there’s a game design theory dimension to heists too. Ben Myers: There's a great book called A Theory of Fun. And what they talk about is that fun is the experience your body has when it's learning. The human brain just loves patterns. And heists are just like patterns that you, as the viewer, are trying to figure out the whole time until it's revealed. And when you see the pieces finally come together, it's incredible. So using the way video games employ patterns helps the gameplay: each heist is a little harder, but fortunately you're a little better at it. But patterns also help the story: each time you learn of yet another stolen artifact from all parts of the continent, you start to realize the bigger pattern. The museums in Relooted are mostly unnamed, relying on subtle or not-so-subtle references to real world institutions. Some, like Hans Sloane and the British Museum, come up by name, along with narratives about looted artifacts, enslavers, or investment in human trafficking companies. You can learn more about Hans Slone and the British Museum on episode 39 of Museum Archipelago, or by playing Relooted. But there is one real-world museum important to the narrative. As you and your crew start amassing the objects, you return them to the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. From here, they are redistributed to their home countries. The Museum of Black Civilizations was the dream of Léopold Senghor, Senegal's first democratically elected president. Ben Myers:  the game for a long time was called Senghor’s Rebels because Senghor was the first democratically elected president of Senegal. He was a poet before he went into politics. And so when he became president, he put all this money into the arts in Senegal, but his dream. Was to always have this one museum in Dakar, Senegal, where he could bring culture from across the continent into one place. And he died before he saw what happened. But that is the Museum of Black Civilizations. In Relooted, the game design team recreated the facade of the Museum of Black Civilizations, which at the start of the game is a vast, mostly dark hall. As you advance through the game and bring the objects back to the continent, a plinth lights up containing the artifact that's been returned. This cleverly serves the in-game progress bar. Ben Myers: When I was sort of reading interviews and doing research about it, it seemed to be that the curators were alluding to the fact that the museum had deliberately, largely been left empty because they were waiting for all the artifacts to come back from the West. Ben Myers: Someone did a review recently where they literally posted a video of them visiting it and it was just this empty space. Even on TripAdvisor there are like two-star reviews being like, there wasn't a lot to see. Relooted is a triumph. It's genuinely fun while also being one of the most effective pieces of advocacy for repatriation I've ever encountered. If you spend any time thinking about museums, go play this game. Ben Myers: " Working on the game definitely changed my relationship with seeing objects in museums because there's so much about these objects that isn't like put in the captioning. And I find it deeply unsettling now to go to somewhere like the British Museum because I feel like I'm just surrounded by the sort of scale of looting and lack of information about how this stuff got there. So I, I feel like physically uncomfortable in this space and I can't really last. So, yeah, it was very interesting how that changed my relationship. Relooted is available now on Steam and Xbox. This has been Museum Archipelago.

111. Why Software Hasn't Eaten Museums (Yet)

Museums today are filled with software, yet they've largely avoided being "eaten" by the tech industry. Unlike music or movies, exhibitions can't be downloaded or scaled infinitely. There's only one Mona Lisa. But if the wrong platform finds the right leverage, that immunity may not last. Which is why the kind of software museums choose matters. TilBuci is a free, open-source tool used by museums to build touchscreens, kiosks, and projections. It was created by Brazilian software developer Lucas Junqueira after watching too many digital exhibitions quietly break down once the opening buzz faded. Designed to be usable by museum staff long after developers leave, TilBuci treats software not as a product, but as infrastructure. In this episode, Lucas Junqueira talks about what it takes to build museum software that lasts. Through the story of a projection still running on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum in Belo Horizonte over a decade after it opened, we explore how open, locally controlled tools extend the life of museum systems, and what's at stake if a tech platform ever inserts itself between museums and their audiences. Image: A projection animates the façade of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) museum at Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lucas Junqueira's software TilBuci is running the projection. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Rise of Software in Museums 00:56 Software Eating the World 02:19 Why Are Museums Different? 03:16 Lucas Junqueira and TilBuci 05:09 Challenges and Innovations 08:09 The Flash Apocalypse 10:12 What's at Stake 11:48 Jurassic Park on Club Archipelago 13:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 111. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. If you've been to a museum lately, any museum big or small, you've probably noticed ever more software-driven experiences. Interactive touchscreens, projections, buttons, videos are all controlled by software. Lucas Junqueira: I've seen mostly all exhibitions have at least some kind of interaction or some pieces of the exhibition that require some kind of software to enable it. This is Lucas Junqueira, a Brazilian museum professional and software developer. Lucas Junqueira:  Okay. My name is Lucas Junqueira. I've been working on this exhibition museum scene for quite some time right now. It's tempting to see the increase of software in museums as another example of software eating the world. This phrase, "software eats the world", was coined by investor Marc Andreessen in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The idea isn’t that software replaces everything. It’s that software absorbs the value layer of company after company, industry after industry. In the "software eats the world" thesis, traditional music labels only exist to provide software companies (like Apple Music and Spotify) with content. The software, everything from how the app looks on your phone to what song is recommended next, sits higher on the value chain than the music itself. Even the network effects of which app your friends use, matter more than what you listen to. Netflix, Salesforce, and the game Angry Birds are some examples Andreessen mentioned back in that 2011 essay, plus plenty of other companies I barely remember. But the core of the thesis, even if it's not explicitly mentioned, is the zero-marginal cost nature of distributing software. Whatever the up-front cost of developing Angry Birds is, it doesn't actually matter since the company can distribute it to every phone on the planet for zero dollars. Once it exists, it can be copied endlessly, instantly, and globally. Which is exactly what museums can’t do. And this is where museums are different. Museums aren’t infinitely scalable, and they aren’t frictionless. You can't really download an exhibition in the way that you can download a song. You have to show up. There's only one Mona Lisa. And that's why software in museums is (so far at least) immune from software eating the rest of the world. Yes, there's more software in museums than ever, but that software rarely becomes the value layer. Museum software doesn't own the audience relationship, and it doesn't become the product like Spotify was able to do. Instead, it supports the product. As long as museums continue to control distribution, software remains infrastructure: a tool to help museums tell their stories. Lucas and I are both software developers, specializing in building exactly that infrastructure. One of Lucas's early projects was creating software to project images onto the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum, which faces Liberty Square plaza in the Brazilian town of Belo Horizonte. Lucas Junqueira:  We provided them a tool so they can make, a projection. They do have a projection on the front wall of the museum. It's a very big projection, and it is right in front of a square here in my city that is very crowded all the time. So they wanted to use this to show something they are exhibiting right now the museum is funded by a university, so they wanted to show some scientific evolutions. They want to use it like an information tool. They wanted to do that and provided them with the software used to produce the content to show on this big projection. Almost always, the cost of these projects is front-loaded: museums pay Lucas, or me, to create the software that projects the images and everyone is focused on that opening day. Lucas explains that this focus on new exhibitions is related to sponsorship funding. Lucas Junqueira:  We see that,, most of the museums had some requirements when they start a new exhibition, they usually have some kind of budget and some kind of funding to that. And that doesn't really happen when these institutions have to maintain their spaces. They can get some sponsors to new exhibitions, but they don't get so many sponsors when they are just keeping the museum open, right? And this is what happened to the projection on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum. Long after Lucas finished building the software, and long after the project had successfully finished, the museum wanted to update that projection to show new content. Lucas Junqueira:  And it was these, that, brought me the idea of creating a tool so the people on museum can use it without technical knowledge, because I felt they were needing to create some interactive content, but they needed to do it by themselves. Lucas wanted to make software that acted like infrastructure. Lucas Junqueira:   And I felt this need to create something that the museums and the, institutions can use to both create the big exhibitions, the big interactions for the new exhibitions, but also something that they can use, on by day, day basis. Lucas Junqueira: Because they don't have that sort of technical people or budget to fund these on a day by day basis. Right? And so when I started thinking about creating something that they can used for both things. They can use it when something new is coming and they can hire people to do it. They can hire technical people, they can hire developers to do it, but something that they can install on their computers and with minimal knowledge they can use to solve day by day problems. The result is TilBuci, a piece of software that Lucas developed on his own. It's a tool for helping build the software infrastructure a museum might need. The name TilBuci comes from Lucas's dog. Lucas Junqueira: His name is Busi He, he keeps company for me. He is always where I am. When I'm working, he's close to me all the time. So when I had to think about that name first I thought, that would be perfect, let's name after him! TilBuci, which you can download for free on any OS platform you want, is an impressive suite: capable of doing anything from slideshows, interactive menus with animation, dialogue systems, survey kiosks, and quiz games. Lucas Junqueira: It started growing slowly with the functions that started growing slowly because of course it's a free software and it's not funded by anyone. Well, it's funded by my own work. Right? So, I started creating like this. So when someone hired me to develop, for example, a kiosk and I had to build a, a in specific function instead of creating it somewhere else, I use it on that case, I create, I use it to create the code and incorporate it on the base software.And so the, the, the basis of, of TilBuci started that. It started growing from the day by day work, my of myself. But it wasn’t without setbacks. Lucas’s early code was written to be distributed on Flash. Flash Player was, for a long time, an easy way to make interactive media work on the web and in museums. It was a browser plugin developed and controlled by Adobe, and it allowed designers to build animations, videos, games, and interactive experiences that ran the same way almost everywhere. If you wanted something dynamic, visual, and relatively easy to deploy, Flash was often the answer. Museums adopted Flash for the same reason everyone else did: it lowered the barrier to making interactive content. But Flash was also a closed system. Museums didn't control it. When Adobe decided to end support in 2020, thousands of interactives simply stopped working -- not because the exhibitions had changed, but because the supporting software wasn't allowed to run. Lucas Junqueira: At  that time when we called the apocalypses, our digital apocalypse when we when the found problem of the Flash player. And what in about 2020 was kind of bad because it heavily depended upon the flesh player. I remember the Flash Apocalypse too. That moment exposed something important. Even when software is "just a tool," the kind of tool matters. Especially when museums don’t control it. And that's the problem Lucas was trying to solve in the first place. So Lucas switched course and made sure that his software was made with open source technologies. Lucas Junqueira:  I started thinking on ways to bring it back to life with something more open, some more open technologies. And that's when I started studying better the JavaScript and something like that. And then I could convert it, convert what we have done to what we have now. While museums have so far avoided software “eating” them, that doesn’t mean they’re immune forever. It's not hard to imagine a company offering museums free interactive kiosks in exchange for visitor data, or a platform that hosts digital exhibitions and starts competing with the physical visit for attention. The moment a third party controls the interface between a museum and its audience, the museum becomes the content supplier—just like the labels became for Spotify. Tools like TilBuci show a different path forward. Instead of extracting value, they extend the life of museum systems by keeping them editable, local, and owned by the institution, long after us programmers leave. They allow institutions to adapt, update, and respond over time — even when budgets shrink and staff change. And this brings us back to the projection on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum. That projection opened in 2012. And because of TilBuci, it’s still working today. Lucas Junqueira: In this example,this projection without the tool for them to create themselves, it would be closed some time after we left there or there, or it would just be used to show some static videos and so on. But with the train them to create interactive content gave some life to this projection for a bigger time, bigger time spent than it was, than it could have been without it. This has been Museum Archipelago.  They never call it a museum. Jurassic Park has a visitor center, a tour, a gift shop, fossils on display. It's curated, it's interpretive, it's full of didactic signage and high budget audio, visual material. It has a pulse visitor experience that begins with an introduction film, but nobody ever says museum. That's because museums are slow, they're dusty, they're institutions. Jurassic Park wants to be something faster, cleaner, cooler, a theme park, a show a miracle. But Jurassic Park is a museum movie. The dinosaurs are exhibits, living dioramas, engineered to validate a particular vision of science and nature and human knowledge. The tour is scripted. The narrative is highly controlled. That is until it isn't. The latest episode of our Bonus podcast, Club Archipelago is an hour and a half on 1994's Jurassic Park from a museum professional's perspective. It’s a good one. Listen at jointhe museum.club to join the club to support the show.

110. Revisiting The ‘Enola Gay Fiasco’ Today

For the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was restored to be part of a full exhibit, presented alongside context about the atomic bombing's mass civilian casualties. But that exhibit never opened. Instead, after years of script revisions and intense pressure from veterans' groups and Congress, the museum displayed the restored bomber's fuselage with minimal interpretation. The exhibit was primarily dedicated to the technical process of restoring the aircraft; as one visitor noted, "I learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but I did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb." In this episode, historian Gregg Herken, who served as Chairman of the museum's Space History Division during the controversy, recounts how the exhibit went from reckoning with the bomb's full impact to re-enforcing a patriotic narrative. He recalls the specific moments that led up to one of the museum industry's cautionary tales, like when the director agreed to remove evocative artifacts like a schoolgirl's carbonized lunchbox from Hiroshima from the exhibition plans, and how the Air Force Association demanded the exhibit say the bombing saved 1 million American lives and other assertions that have been challenged by generations of historians. Today, as a new presidential executive order dictates how the Smithsonian interprets American history, we realize the "Enola Gay Fiasco" isn't just a cautionary tale—it's the blueprint for a more aggressive campaign to justify anything. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Enola Gay in the 1980s 01:07 Gregg Herken 02:21 Initial Planning 02:40 Martin Harwit 03:48 Herken's Visit to Hiroshima 04:39 'The Lunchbox' 05:32 Initial Exhibit Script 06:26 Opposition and Controversy 07:15 Revisions and Criticisms 10:49 Air Force Association's Demands 11:59 Exhibit Cancellation 13:37 "Pale Shadow" 14:10 Reflecting on History and Censorship 20:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 110. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. By the late 1980s, the Enola Gay – the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – had been sitting disassembled at the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland for decades. What was once a beautiful shiny machine with four powerful engines, just powerful enough with the right banking maneuver to escape the hell it unleashed, was scattered and severed, with disheveled tubes where the wings used to be and the remains of birds nests in the turrets. Gregg Herken: It was shortly after I joined the museum and I went out to the restoration facility that the Smithsonian operates in Garber in Maryland. And they wanted to show me around. And since I was the new chairman of the Department of Space History, they said I could get into the fuselage of the Enola Gay. This is Gregg Herken, retired professor of American Diplomatic History at the University of California, and Chairman of the National Air and Space Museum's Space History Division from 1988 to 2003. Gregg Herken: Hello. My name is Gregg Herken. I'm a retired professor of American Diplomatic History at the University of California. Herken was part of the team planning the exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum that would feature the restored Enola Gay and of course he accepted the invitation and climbed up into the fuselage. Gregg Herken: So I sat in Tibbets' seat, in the pilot seat for a second, and then I sat in the bombardier seat. And off to the left was a panel that had, I think it was five toggle switches. And one of them had the label "bombs." And actually on the day of the Hiroshima mission, it would've said in a little tag underneath that "special." Gregg Herken: But I remember just thinking that I could sit in, I'm sitting in that seat, I could just reach over and flip that switch. And that was the switch that released the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima. And I thought there is bad juju with that. I did not want to touch it. At the other end of that switch was about 80,000 people, civilians of Heroshima. Herken was chosen to be part of the exhibition team by the museum's new director, Martin Harwit. Gregg Herken: I've written about and taught the subject of nuclear history, and that's why I think Martin chose me to begin at last the effort to get the Enola Gay on exhibit. Director Martin Harwit, who was hired in 1987, was a bit of a departure from previous National Air and Space Museum directors who tended to be pilots or astronauts. Harwit was an astrophysicist. Gregg Herken thought that it was a signal that the Smithsonian was interested in not just displaying but also interpreting the artifacts that represent the nation's past. The planned exhibition intended to showcase the restored plane along with multiple perspectives on the first atomic bombings in warfare – including their devastating human toll. Harwit still has his first written notes from when he first arrived at the museum and started thinking about, which show his brainstorm about the historical context of the bombing of Hiroshima in the escalation of bombing in World War II. "This is not an exhibit about the rights and wrongs of war," Harwit wrote in 1987, "about who started what, and who were the bad guys and who the good. It is about the impact and effects of bombing on people and on the strategic outcome of conflicts. Is bombing strategically effective? Are the costs worth the strategic gains? How great is human error?" As part of the early planning process, Gregg Herken visited the Hiroshima Museum in Japan in 1991. Gregg Herken: Yes, Martin asked me to go to Hiroshima. The exhibit was just getting started and really in the planning stages. And we wanted to see if we could get artifacts from the Hiroshima Museum. So I was sent there and I met with the director. And I was frankly a little concerned about how I'd be received, that the idea of shipping artifacts about the atomic bombing to the Smithsonian for an exhibit they didn't really know about. I thought they might be hostile or at least suspicious, but he was very welcoming. He was actually a survivor of the atomic bombing. The director offered to loan the Smithsonian any of the artifacts his museum had in its collection, for as long as the "Enola Gay" remained on display at the National Air and Space Museum. Gregg Herken: I do remember walking around the museum and there was one artifact that really stood out to me and we wanted to include it in the exhibit and we nicknamed it "the lunchbox" and it was just a ceramic tube that had contained rice and peas and it had been taken by a young girl to school as her lunch. And she obviously did not survive the bombing and the tube - you could see that the rice and the peas in it had been carbonized by the heat of the bomb. Gregg Herken: So we were never going to show any terrible pictures of burned bodies. We didn't need to. That's all any adult had to do was to look at this lunchbox, at the carbonized food in the little ceramic tube to realize what had happened to that little girl and what it must have been like to have been on the ground at Hiroshima at that time. Back in the United States the exhibition team continued developing their plans and by early 1994, the National Air and Space Museum had completed the script for the exhibit, now titled "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War." The team sought input from various stakeholders including veterans' groups and the Air Force Association. Initially, feedback seemed positive. Gregg Herken: The Air Force Association is basically a private lobby based in Washington DC for the Air Force. And we knew – the museum, Martin knew that they might be early critics, so they were brought into the planning of the exhibit as was the Air Force historian, Richard Hallion, and were shown the original exhibit script. And I remember we had a meeting in the director's conference room and everybody seemed to be, "Well, this looks good." But behind the scenes, an opposition was mobilizing. Gregg Herken: And then they all left. And then we found out that the Air Force Association had hired a public relations firm in DC to essentially stop the exhibit going forward, at least as it was conceived. Even though there had been no criticism at the meeting itself. This was the beginning of what would become a full-scale public relations battle over how the Enola Gay should be represented at the National Air and Space Museum. The controversy began to spill into the media, with accusations that the exhibition denigrated American heroism and technological achievement by focusing too much on Japanese suffering. Herken acknowledges that, in hindsight, some of the criticisms had merit, and the museum continued updating the script and the exhibition plans. Gregg Herken: Well, they felt that the exhibit really took the viewpoint of the victims of the bombing. Actually, in retrospect, I think there was a certain element of truth to that. One of the things that would've been in the original exhibit as you walk in from the mall, you would've turned to the right and basically toward the aeronautics section of the museum. And the first thing you would see is a giant photograph of a young child who had a smudged face. So that the first thing you would see is basically one of the victims. Gregg Herken: I think a lot of people that, okay, that this is going to be from the viewpoint of the people who were on the ground and not from the people who were in the plane, in the air. So that was problematic and that was changed and I think properly so. Gregg Herken: Also the original exhibit script had a line, and I think here what the curators were trying, I know what the curators were trying to do was present both sides kind of objectively. And unfortunately, I think the lead label was kind of tone deaf that it said for the Americans it was a war of vengeance because of Pearl Harbor - I'm basically paraphrasing - but for the Japanese, it was a war to preserve their sacred culture. Well, that's not the right way to begin things. And that of course was taken out too. And there was, I think, a reasonable objection to that original label. But there was a more fundamental objection to the planned exhibit that the exhibit team didn't find the evidence for in the historical scholarship: that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved a million American lives. I think about my own extended family members who served in the Pacific in World War II, and who died – fortunately relatively recently – convinced that the use of those atomic bombs saved their lives. The one million American lives was certainly how I was taught in history class in elementary and middle school compared with 80,000 or so at Hiroshima. This was taking a fact, the number of dead from the atomic bombing, and mixing it together with an assertion: how many would have died because of not using the bombing. Particularly since equating the two is a comforting thought that ties into America's sense of itself: "Other countries kill people for no reason. We kill people for good reason." That one million American casualties figure seems to have come from a February 1947 article in Harpers called The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Gregg Herken: Certainly the million American lives, that the bomb exclusively or decisively ended the war, ignoring the Russian entry into the war, which is a surprise to the Japanese. And there were alternatives including the continued strategic conventional bombing of Japan and the economic blockade of the islands, which was going forward. That there was the reason there was no alternative is because the invasion, the land invasion of the Japanese home islands was imminent. Well, no, it wasn't. It was planned for November and the bomb was dropped in August. Gregg Herken: Would the Japanese have surrendered in the meantime? It's a counterfactual question. It can't be answered because it can't be tested. But there is a mythos about the atomic bombing that continues today. An exhibit that sits in that question is a worthy exhibit. We always have choices. Countries have choices. There's very rarely only two choices. But that's not the exhibit we got. Herken recalls that the Air Force Association required the museum to say the following three things in the "Enola Gay" exhibit, and he and his colleagues were given to understand that these assertions were unequivocal and non-negotiable. They were: (1) The atomic bomb ended the war; (2) It saved one million American lives; and (3) There was no real alternative to its use. He continues, "all three of these claims have been challenged by generations of historians, citing documentary evidence from the time that contradicts or significantly modifies each one." Gregg Herken: I was actually new to the museum, so I can't say that it was, there's never been this sort of, ultimatum issued by people who were involved in, in the exhibits or might be interested in exhibits. But, um, it was certainly new to me. And, um, and I think, you know, all of, all of those assertions are somewhat problematic and, but that was made sort of pretty clear, I think, to Martin and the curators that the exhibit will not go forward. We will stop this unless these three things are clear in the exhibit scripts. By now, the exhibit script had changed many times and the title was changed again to The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. The Air Force Association and the American Legion continued its demands, including removing artifacts that they knew had evocative and emotional power – artifacts, like the lunchbox, that would help visitors consider the effects of flipping that switch. Gregg Herken: That was well along in the process where there was a lot of opposition from the Air Force Association and actually the American Legion to going ahead with the exhibit as we had, as we had planned it. And at one point I remember, Martin and the curators kept on, trying to deal with the criticism and with the critics. Gregg Herken: And, but that was one place I, I thought that we really needed to make a stand and that we can't have the Air Force Association tell us what we can exhibit and what we can't, what we can say and what we can't. But that's exactly what they wanted to do. And, When Martin agreed to take the lunchbox out of the scheduled exhibit, I knew that that was, you know, that was kind of the end of it. Gregg Herken: I kind of lost all hope at that point. Veteran groups called for the curators who wrote the labels to be fired. The lead curator received anonymous death threats. Eighty-one members of Congress called for Director Harwit's resignation or removal. The museum backed down. For the 50 year anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995, as the New York Times reported, the museum eliminat[ed] all of the 10,000-square-foot display except for the plane's restored fuselage and a small plaque. Gregg Herken: It was a pale shadow of what had originally been planned. I, I forget how many pages the original, the, the original exhibit script was, but it, it was kind of a, would've been, critics referred to as, uh, a book on the walls. Uh, it was, um, there was a lot of stuff in the exhibit and, and the original exhibit, and that was simply taken out. Gregg Herken: The exhibit was really given over to the restoration staff who are, who are really very good at their job and. Um, but there, the exhibit was primarily about the process of the restoration of the aircraft. Gregg Herken: I thought the best comment that was made was by a friend of mine who said that she learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but she did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb. The cancellation of the original exhibit and Harwit's resignation sent shockwaves through the museum world that continued rippling for a long time. When I started my career in museums in 2014, the "Enola Gay Fiasco" was something people would talk about – a cautionary tale. What began as an attempt to present a more complete historical picture of the atomic bombings ended with censorship. Gregg Herken: There was certainly a lot of reticence about doing anything that would be controversial as an exhibit after the Enola Gay. It had that sort of chilling effect. And of course, Martin was removed from his position as director of the museum and replaced by a retired Marine Corps general. Ultimately actually by, I think, by two military officers who were subsequent directors of the museum. Gregg Herken: So there was a censorship that was even, I think, self-imposed on doing anything at the museum that would be controversial. And instead the emphasis was really changed to, well, let's focus on the collection and not so much think about doing new exhibits. I think that's probably changed, but it's been a long time since the Enola Gay exhibit. It has been a long time, but the censorship seems more pressing than ever. Gregg Herken: I retired from the museums quite some time ago. I'm still in touch with some of the curators I worked with. But obviously the mood at the Smithsonian is not good now under the current administration and the edicts and the executive orders that are coming out of the administration. I wrote to Martin Harwit in February of 2018 – yes, I've been working on this episode for years – and he was kind enough to write back, saying he really had no more to say on the matter that wasn't already in his book, An Exhibit Denied. He then ended his email with this paragraph, "The main reason I'd even be willing to talk with you now, is that the actual use of atomic bombs is once again being seriously considered by a President of the United States. I believe that this would be a terrible mistake: Better than most people still alive today, I know what these weapons of mass destruction involve. As a young physicist drafted into military service, back in 1956, I participated in atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok and Bikini. The awful destruction wreaked by these weapons is unforgettably etched in my mind." I had to look up what was going on in early 2018 when I sent that email. Wikipedia summarizes it this way: "U.S. President Donald Trump responds to Kim Jong-un's claim of having North Korea's nuclear missile launch button on his desk, boasting that the size of the nuclear missile launch button on his own desk is larger and more powerful than Kim's. That feels a lot like a focus on the button itself, and not the consequences of that button. A few weeks ago, again president Donald Trump issued an executive order called RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY. NPR NEWS: [JUANA SUMMERS] The Trump administration continues to move swiftly to eliminate what President Trump calls anti-American ideology from America's cultural institutions. Yesterday, the latest executive order targeted the Smithsonian and the memorials and monuments overseen by the Department of the Interior [ELIZABETH BLAIR] The order is called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. It's essentially calling for an overhaul of the Smithsonian and an evaluation of federal monuments. The Smithsonian is a vast complex that includes the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Cooper Hewitt in New York and several other museums and research centers. The executive order claims that the Smithsonian has, quote, "come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology," and that it promotes narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. It makes sense that this censorship battle will continue to focus on museums. Museums use space, artifacts, sounds, and visuals to create powerful, lasting impressions. They're one of the few public spaces where we collectively encounter and process our shared history. The discomfort we feel when confronted with narratives that challenge our national self-image is precisely what makes museums so valuable. Walking into a room in the nation's capital and seeing evidence that contradicts the story you've been told – or the story you deeply believe – about American exceptionalism or heroism can be jarring. Gregg Herken: When you see the Enola Gay upfront, it is a powerful symbol. And it shows just the amount of effort and energy and money and resources and intelligence that went into the business of the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan. Gregg Herken: So I think that there is an emotive quality to seeing the actual object and that that cannot be conveyed by social media. And the way, what I would compare it to is like the Vietnam Memorial. If you've seen pictures of the Vietnam Memorial, you know, okay, that's, it's this granite wall, all these names on it. But it really is quite evocative to go there and to see. And because I was at the Air and Space Museum, I've walked down to the Lincoln Memorial in the Vietnam Monument at lunchtime, oftentimes. And to see the people there who were scratching the, basically, reproducing the names on the, on the memorial and leaving tributes and tennis shoes, flowers, above the beer was oftentimes the favorite beer of the person who had been killed in the war and was known by the person putting it there. Gregg Herken: That's a powerful experience and something that really can't be conveyed by photographs or videos or things of that sort. The fact that "The Last Act" never made it in front of visitors has created its own, much smaller counterfactual than what would have happened if the bomb had not been dropped on Hiroshima. We won't ever know what the world would be like if this exhibit had opened as planned, if the human consequences of the decision were displayed next to the plane. This type of censorship doesn't just symbolize our collective eagerness to look away from uncomfortable questions, it sets the stage, it lays the groundwork for more, bigger bullshit justifications. The power of an interest group or the president to dictate the conclusions of an exhibit, backed up by effective media furry, has leveled up since the Enola Gay fiasco in 1994. So when you walk into a museum, particularly one displaying weapons of war or tools of national power, ask yourself: what's been deliberately left out of this story? Look for the child's lunchbox, and ask why someone thought it was better or more patriotic to hide it from you. Gregg Herken: Yeah, well, I think it should say that American history is complex. And I agree certainly with Martin's assessment in his book, that the American people lost a chance to learn something interesting and important about the decision to drop the bomb. This has been Museum Archipelago.

109. The Rise and Fall of Enterprise Square, USA

For the last few decades of the 20th century, if you visited Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, you could have been serenaded by a barbershop quartet of audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders, as framed on U.S. currency. This was one of the many exhibits at Enterprise Square, USA, a high-tech museum dedicated to teaching children about Free Market Economics. The museum, which found itself out of money almost before it opened, shut down in 1999. Barrett Huddleston first encountered these exhibits as a wide-eyed elementary school student in the 1980s, mesmerized by the talking puppets, giant electronic heads, and interactive displays that taught how regulation stifled freedom. Years later, he returned as a tour guide during the museum's final days, maintaining those same animatronics with duct tape and wire cutters, and occasionally being squeezed inside the two-dollar bill to repair Thomas Jefferson. He joins us to explore this collision of education, ideology, and visitor experience, and how the former museum shapes his own approach to teaching children today. Cover Image: Children watch audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders, as framed on U.S. currency, sing a song about freedom. [Photograph 2012.201.B0957.0912] hosted by The Gateway to Oklahoma History Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Buzludzha Again 00:46 Enterprise Square, USA 01:32  Barrett Huddleston 02:05 The Origins and Purpose of Enterprise Square 03:09 The Boom and Bust of Oklahoma's Economy 05:47 The Disney Connection and Animatronics 07:54 The Decline of Enterprise Square 11:42 Huddleston's Reflections on Education 13:41 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 109. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. Buzludzha comes up a lot on Museum Archipelago. The monument was built in 1981 to look like a futuristic flying saucer parched high on Bulgarian mountains. Every detail of the visitor experience was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration. But within a year of Buzludzha welcoming its first guests, all the way across the world in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, another museum opened to promote the exact opposite message. And it even had its own flying saucer connection. Barrett Huddleston: The framing device of the museum is you have these two alien puppets that crash down in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and they need to get fuel for their spaceship so they can go back.  I saw these animatronic puppets and I was like, oh, well this is just like Disney World, except they're talking about having to commodify their space technology so they can buy gold to put in their spaceship so they can get back to their planet or whatever. This is Barrett Huddleston, who first visited Enterprise Square, USA as an elementary school student in the mid-1980s, and later worked there as a tour guide. Barrett Huddleston: Hi, my name is Barrett Huddleston. I am an educational enrichment provider. I own a business called Mad Science of Central Oklahoma and Finer Arts of Oklahoma. I travel all over my state and a few others, delivering STEAM based workshops and assemblies to elementary school students. But In this instance, I also worked as a tour guide for Enterprise Square USA for over two years. The story of Enterprise Square, USA begins in a boom, actually a few overlapping booms. In the late 1970s, oil had been found in the nearby Anadarko Basin and energy companies and money were rushing into Oklahoma City. As Sam Anderson puts it in his excellent book Boom Town, which is also where I first learned about this museum: Excerpt from Boom Town: “Capitalism had blessed Oklahoma City, and the city wanted to express its thanks. At the height of the boom, local businessmen pooled their money to create a brand-new attraction that, even by the standards of Oklahoma City, was spectacularly strange. It was an interactive museum, a kind of secular shrine to free enterprise, designed to help local children appreciate the sanctity of capitalism.” Barrett Huddleston:  And I think at that point in the state of Oklahoma, it was one out of every six or eight people were either directly or indirectly employed by big energy in one respect. Now it's way, way, way lower than that. And we've got a much more diversified economy. But Enterprise Square was also attached to an evangelical Christian university at a time where there was a lot of deregulation in education because of the Reagan administration. So if you were evangelical. And if you were pro laissez faire capitalism then you were definitely going to get the kind of funding that it would take from the donor class to build a museum for children that was pro free market. Huddleston also turned me on to a different kind of boom – the baby boomer’s children were beginning to go to college around this time too. Echo booms are always more diffuse than the original boom, since people choose to have children at different times. But pretty much any college or university in the country, including Oklahoma Christian University, which hosted the museum on their campus, could expect increasing enrollment year after year no matter what they did. Barrett Huddleston:  Enterprise Square opened in 1982, and I believe as early as first, second, or third grade, school trips were being taken there, and I must have been about seven or eight years old. So much of my childhood education was, sort of, that curriculum that was created between the Great Society and the Reagan administration. So a lot of the education that I got as hand me down education from the previous generation was very pro regulation, very pro safe market approaches, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that by the time that Enterprise Square came along, it was like, well no, we need to, we need to unlearn what these kids have learned in school and then retrain them about how bad regulation can be and how wonderful a free market can be and how they need to really pay attention to the weather forecast if they're going to make their own lemonade stands and that kind of thing. And it’s clear from the contemporary news coverage, like this one from Action 4 in Oklahoma City, that Enterprise Square, USA represented something different. Contemporary News Coverage: This is the first group to tour the nation's only museum devoted solely to free enterprise. The 15 million Enterprise Square, USA has been six years in the making. Every penny and minute of time spent shows up in a big way on the inside. It's an economic learning experience. And with a touch of animation. It's Disneyland in a classroom. But there’s more.  These digital readouts update all sorts of nationwide figures, minute by minute, on employment, taxes, traffic deaths, and so on. Dan Slocum, Action 4 at Enterprise Square. Disney comes up a lot in these discussions about Enterprise Square, USA. Epcot, Disney’s second park in Florida, opened just one month before Enterprise Square in October 1982. Barrett Huddleston: I think at that point, one of the mechanics that designed Enterprise Square was an Imagineer from Epcot Center. Even the museum’s name evokes “Main Street, USA”, a Disney themed area that’s an amalgamation of feelings or memory or history rather than a specific place. In the late 1950s, eyeing expansion of his Disneyland park, Walt Disney developed -- but never built -- a spur off of Main Street, USA that was to be called Edison Square, dedicated to all things progress and industry. It’s hard not to see the connection. Another connection is the audio-animatronics. Reading from Boom Town again: Excerpt from Boom Town: “Next to the world's largest cash register, four enormous paper bills hung on the wall, and their giant Founding Father heads sang a barbershop quartet about freedom, the animatronic faces jerking around like figures in a Chuck E. Cheese band.” [Singing barbershop quartet] Barrett Huddleston:  You've got a barbershop quartet of sort of the hall of president's heads of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, singing about freedom, freedom, freedom.  they're inside the paper currency. It's hollowed out. When I was, and. a tour guide. I remember on several occasions Thomas Jefferson had a tendency to just break down by that time because it had been 15 or 20 years. So because I was the smallest tour guide, they would remove his head and shove me through his 2 bill and have me get back there with a pair of needle nose pliers. Ian Elsner: Oh my god. Barrett Huddleston: Cut the blue wire so that Thomas Jefferson could sing about freedom again. Yeah Ian Elsner: That's amazing. I thought they were going to say they replaced the animatronic with you. The reason why these animatronics were in such rough shape has to do with the opposite of the boom: the bust. Even by the time Enterprise Square opened in November 1982, the bust had already begun. That July, one of Oklahoma's major banks collapsed. Barrett Huddleston:   Because of either oil sanctions or deregulation of oil in the Middle East. So all of our petroleum business in the state kind of went belly up. And after spending five years and I don't know how many millions of dollars putting Enterprise Square together, the museum suddenly kind of found itself in a situation where nobody could afford to go there. And the university that had established it really couldn't afford to keep it up. The museum that was meant to celebrate capitalism's triumph found itself out of money almost from the jump. Enterprise Square, USA was kept in its original form, with only a few small changes to the exhibits, until it finally closed in 1999. In that way, it outlived Buzludzha, which became a ruin when the Bulgarian communist government collapsed in 1989. Barrett Huddleston:   And it wasn't just that they weren't changed, but that they weren't maintained. So it was constantly putting duct tape on top of band aids, on top of string, you know, to get things to work. And by the end, we were having to manually change all of the statistics every day in the hall of statistics because, for example, the population rate was actually growing greater than what it said on the little ticker, uh, in the United States. It would add a person about every six seconds, and I think by the time that I was a tour guide, a person was being born about every four and a half seconds or something like that or It was during the last two years of operation that Huddleston started working at the museum. Barrett Huddleston: It was a work study position, and as far as work study positions go, you know, you weren't scrubbing toilets. it was, It's very rare that a school group would come in, so really you were just sitting behind a desk and reading Stephen King novels. I would say that on average, I had a two or three hour shift every day, and I would say I had about three tours that I would give every day. And my specialty was the donut shop, uh, because I could play off of the,animatronic donut shop ro donut shop robot pretty well. Ian Elsner: So this was the supply and demand donut shop? Barrett Huddleston: you go into the donut shop, it's just a series of small desks in which you're pressing buttons. It's kind of a lot like who wants to be a millionaire, you know, where you, you press buttons and all of the information that the audience presses goes up on this big board. If you're the tour guide, you're asking them questions about, you know, how many donuts should we make? You know, sugar costs this much and milk is costing this much, you know, we want to get this much profit. And then this robot comes out with a little chef's hat and he's about an eight foot robot. His name's doc. And you. You have a script in front of you, but, you know, after about four or five times, you memorize the script just out of habit. And, uh, you talk to Doc, Doc talks to you. What do you remember about the way visitors reacted? Barrett Huddleston:  There was definitely an age threshold. Like, if you were under 9 years old. Man, this is great. You know, there's talking puppets and I shot a turkey with a dollar bill and, you know, like that kind of stuff because, you know, it's, it's like Chuck E. Cheese and it's a day off from school. But if you were older than that, and I should say that. All of the students at Oklahoma Christian got quote unquote free admission to Enterprise Square. So, you know, if you're a kid who's being sent to Enterprise Square because you're in a freshman level business econ class, you can imagine [laughter]. For Huddleston, his time maintaining talking presidents and bantering with robot chefs has influenced how he thinks about education and authority. Today, Huddleston works as an educational enrichment provider, running workshops for elementary school students. Barrett Huddleston: My character name is called Professor Bungle Botch, and my shtick is that I do everything wrong so that the kids catch me and go, 'That's not right!  You're about to light something on fire. And so, I think that that probably began gestating as part of that disillusionment of, I want the kids to think as critically as possible. I want the kids to think as critically as possible. If they are put in front of an adult and suddenly they realize this adult doesn't know what they're doing, we might be in trouble. Not only does it make it more engaging for them, but now they've learned that they can do this with every adult. This inversion of authority feels particularly pointed given Enterprise Square's conviction in its message. But as my mother, who grew up in communist Bulgaria, often reminds me: people are pretty good at filtering through propaganda—particularly when it feels like propaganda. Barrett Huddleston: The smell test for me is always, are you expecting everybody to have an identical response to this? I think critical thinking begins with—and maybe that's why Brecht talks about alienation so much—is that if I'm performing, if I'm mad, then the audience is glad. If I'm glad, then they're afraid because I'm about to do something dangerous that I don't know what I'm doing. Today, both Enterprise Square and Buzludzha stand empty - twin monuments to competing economic visions. Where one used mosaics of Marx and Lenin to show the inevitable march of communism, the other used singing founding fathers to celebrate free market capitalism. Each was proud to share their simplified vision of the world outside their walls, and confidently used the latest in visitor experience design to deliver it. I'm willing to bet that the builders of each never came across the other except in their own imaginations.

108. The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life

The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant. The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence. The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences. Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Post-War Germany and the GDR's Vision 00:59 The Planned City of Eisenhüttenstadt 3:00 Andrea Wieloch 03:15 The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life 03:56 Daily Life in the GDR 07:35 GDR History in modern Germany 14:43 Future Plans for the Museum 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsener. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. After World War II, all of Germany was in ruins. Almost nothing was left standing after 12 years of Nazi rule and 6 years of war. Mass migration, hunger, and homelessness defined the immediate post-war period as millions of displaced people sought to rebuild their lives among the rubble. For the newly formed German Democratic Republic or GDR, the chance to start over – and demonstrate the utopia of the socialist system – took on a great importance. The East German government saw urban planning as a way to both solve the housing crisis and showcase socialist ideals through modern, centrally planned cities built from scratch. I visited one of these planned cities about an hour and a half east of Berlin. Andrea Wieloch: Where we are sitting now was basically forest 75 years ago, and then they decided to plant a steel factory and a city around it. It was back in the days where there was really everything destroyed by war. An island of a real utopia with nice housing and facilities for everyone. So people from all over GDR came here and when the city was first founded, it was called Stalinstadt. So, “city of Stalin”. Stalinstadt, which started being built in 1951, is now called Eisenhüttenstadt, which literally means Iron Hat City for the steel plant. Planning and building a new city and a steel factory in a place that was just a forest during the Nazi regime was a sharp break with the past – the planned city reminds me of parts of Bulgarian cities also built in the socialist times, and unlike most places I’ve visited in Germany, I’m not immediately on the lookout for dark signs of the Nazi past. I can imagine the relief of this place for the first people who moved here. Maybe, for a moment, it did feel like utopia. Of course, this utopia didn't actually happen, no utopia has. But the GDR lasted about 40 years and those 40 years covered a lot of daily life. I'm here to visit a museum that puts the tension of utopia right in the name: the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. Andrea Wieloch: I do like the space in between utopia and daily life. That is my focus, that tension or ambivalence. And I'm frankly not really interested in utopia, I think, because it's a mind fabricated thing and I do like the blood and flesh kind of reality. This is Andrea Wieloch, director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. Andrea Wieloch: Hello, my name is Andrea Wieloch. I am a German museum professional and I am the director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. The museum – a kind of documentation center of everyday life in the GDR – is built inside a former kindergarten which opened in 1953. The central staircase still features the original, very colorful, stained glass windows by Socialist Realist artist Walter Womacka depicting children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. Wieloch says that a big part of the collection comes from a public announcement for people to bring in objects that they wanted to save. Today the collection has 170,000 objects of everyday life and of every aspect of GDR life. The permanent exhibition, which opened in 2012, called Everyday Life: GDR, uses these objects to give the visitor an introduction to politics, society and everyday life in the country. Right inside the entrance to the museum, under the stained glass kindergarten scene, is one of these objects: a rusty TV antenna. Andrea Wieloch: The antenna you see in the front is a really great example for a life hack, basically, because someone did it himself. People living in Eisenhüttenstadt could fashion an antenna to get western television broadcasts in part because of their proximity to West Berlin and favorable terrain. It started as something you could do if you were brave enough to do something forbidden, but by the 70s, it became a special privilege. Andrea Wieloch: One privilege you would get here but only starting in the late 70s was getting West TV and radio, which was forbidden. But they needed workers, so that was a privilege here, not in other parts of the country. Amazing. Well, it also illustrates, so before it was a privilege, it was a hack. And I feel, feel like that is the bridge between utopia and daily life. It's because , in a true utopia, there would be nothing to hack because everything is already perfect. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah and that's a two-way street. You go from hacking to utopia again, because of course in the 40 years that the GDR was existing, there were really waves. And you've seen upstairs the new exhibition we are putting on with plastic furniture, that was a wave of utopia again, in order to also make people not jealously look at the West, but really a propaganda to really tell we are able here, we are future, we can send a man to the moon as well, kind of, you know. The privileges associated with working in the Steel Factory is an example of the centrality of work in the way this utopia was structured. Andrea Wieloch: All aspects of life in the socialist society were organized around work. Which means your housing was organized around work. The way you made holidays, where you would put your children to kindergarten or school, how you would spend your free time. There were club houses all over the city. There were artists coming into the factories and the worker was very well taken care of in the socialist society. And here in that city, it meant you had a beautiful flat, you had all the facilities that would really enable you to be a good worker, be at work and not think of anything else. Wieloch was born in 1983 in the GDR, and so has a better memory of the period after 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR dissolved, and the process of German reunification began. Andrea Wieloch: I was six years when the Wall came down and I was living with my family at the Polish border, so really far away from what was happening. And I remember my parents sitting in front of the TV and relatives coming in and that it was something special, I remember that. But besides that, I'm more shaped by the reality of the 90s, mass unemployment and lots of friends leaving the area with their families in order to look for better places and a more prosperous life. The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life, and the way it presents the history of the GDR, is unique in Germany. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think we are talking about a very young history. And it's – I hope I get the word right – it's a contested history. It's one that is not set yet. Where we know no history is set, but as soon as people who can talk about the history aren't there anymore, we rely on what we by then have agreed upon. And there are very different ways in which the history of GDR got told within the last, let's say, 30 years. Wieloch says that she’d classify four types of museums that interpret the history of the GDR in modern Germany. The first is the entertaining museum, places like the slick GDR Museum in Berlin which caters to international tourists and highlights the most daring escape stories. Then there’s the museums, mostly founded by the government, which talk mostly about GDR's dictatorship and the oppression. The third is so-called “wild” or “amature” museums, where individual people, often not tied to any public institution, just collect the things they love and, of course, entangle their own memory into their collections. Andrea Wieloch: And the fourth place kind of is our museum, which to look into all this life and find the ordinary and the extraordinary there, but also ask about structures and about various perspectives. And that way we attract not only visitors from all around the world. We also attract the neighbors, the schools, scientists, artists. Usually we attract people who are who like to read in between lines. All of them are getting into a really nuanced, interesting dialogue and it's always happening. And for me, the most exciting is, and then I really step back and just listen, when people who have experienced GDR talk to each other and they kind of compare their memories and they are not fixed with it. They are very open and flexible and they really get into questioning really what happened there, and did we interpret it right, or was it state ideology, and that's really awesome to see. I think it's just a great practice for life. In my discussions with Wieloch, she underscored her feeling that many people from former West Germany haven’t taken the time to understand the experience of growing up in the East – and that museums like the GDR Museum in Berlin, while entertaining, aren’t helping. Andrea Wieloch: We are very accepted by people who experienced the GDR because there's always this discussion, is that a western view on eastern history or is that something more outweighed? I don't know if that's the real – balanced. Is it more balanced? And, yeah, that's what you find here. Yeah. A lively discussion. I noticed this lively discussion while I toured the museum. Groups of older people telling younger members of their family that the coffee thermoses were exactly the same ones in their kitchen or the ubiquity of one brand of baby powder. Because material culture under the GDR was much more narrow than it is today, it is likely that your uncle had the exact same motorcycle, or your dad had the exact same portable radio on display. I toured with my mom, who was raised in socialist Bulgaria, and she noted the similarities in the outfits of the “young pioneer” uniforms she used to wear and the graphic design of propaganda posters. Andrea Wieloch: I want to create a space that raises questions. That's also a safe enough space for you to take the creative risk and maybe think twice and think if I just correlate your own memory and knowledge with it and and then get into a conversation. That's the aim that we have here. Therefore, we invite different people and in groups with their own practices and questions in order to really enrich the conversation, because it's complicated and we like it that way. You know, it's it's ambivalence. Ian (in room) yeah. And it's also noticeably different from the way that the. media in the GDR operated because it's complicated was not the message. The message was actually it's simple and these are the reasons and if you are a pioneer and that means that you enjoy sport and you love to be clean and you love your parents and you love the workers and there is no, there's no ambiguity in there. And I think it's also what you've demonstrated is that you can also have that same kind of simplicity on the other side of the wall. And so creating a space where you say it's complicated is somewhat radical in itself. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think it is. And we all struggle with being okay with all the ambivalences and with not knowing the right or wrong answer. And it would be a mistake to paint the history here too sweet now, just because we don't concentrate on the repressive aspects. But I think it's for those people who experience GDR. It was their life. Just imagine someone comes to you and tells you the way you lived, you loved, you raised your children, you worked, you looked at everything is wrong. I think it's as damaging as to tell someone you're always right with things. The museum seems so effective at addressing the audience of people who are familiar with the GDR, that it makes me wonder how the museum approaches today’s young people who never lived through it. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah. You're putting the finger right into our most vulnerable spot because it's mostly like that. A family comes in of different generations and then one teaches the other. That's how it works in the moment. But that is a big thing. But actually the new generation is very interested. So especially also foreigners, there are less clichés or less prejudice that way and big openness. So yeah, I have the feeling the interest is rather rising because people who lived here for a long time, they also want to see something new and not always circle around themselves. There are plans for a permanent exhibition, with a target open date of 2029. The revamp would use some of the adjacent buildings as a campus with more room for programs and storage. Andrea Wieloch: And we want to, first of all, give you a closer look into to our storage. And then we would like to really take all those questions and practices that all our cooperation partners brought here and discuss them with the audience to have different displays for parts of our collection that show the collection and show you already what is that material world that we are collecting in the museum world, we are really in the peripheral area. So Berlin is close enough for us to have visitors from a metropolitan audience too. But it is also too far away to be gaining from the prosperous big city. So we are in a city that was ahead a 56,000 inhabitants now has 24,000 inhabitants. 40% of them are over 65. And we have a wonderful task to address a metropolitan or even international audience, and then also be relevant for the community we have here. So you asked me for children, I can tell you our program for dementia. So we're working with the school that educates people in the care sector. And they have 600 students. And with them we developed a program with all day, everyday objects and from the GDR. And they bring them either to the care homes or people from care homes come here. And we do a lot of programming around that target group. I think that's really my focus. The museum as a set of cultural techniques, a toolbox to know the world, to get a hold of the world, and to also find a consciousness around those tools that you're using. So it's still a long way to go and a lot of money to collect. But yeah, that's what we do right now. The everyday experience of the person plotting their daring escape was different from the person just trying to get by and they both were different from the worker content to set up a better antenna to enjoy western TV shows. But in the GDR at least, they may have all been drinking out of the same type of coffee thermos. And you can see it at the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. This has been Museum Archipelago.