Oradour-sur-Glane and the Memorial Museum: A Site of Reconciliation

Abstract

When a community has a suffering memory, within the memory-oblivion mechanisms characterizing every form of social stability, the interventions of musealization of a specific landscape can usefully contribute to the “trauma elaboration” process, being the only helpful expedients to turn the painful events that the community is not able to cope with into a “shared commemoration”. However, based on the experience from the Charles de Gaulle Memorial in Colombey, the museal interpretation can determine a touristic earning power which can often overwhelm the more expected “duty of memory”. Every new museal insertion, being a place fit for the building of the community mind, has in fact to fulfill an educational role, using every tangible and intangible aspect, with the purpose of either teaching or leading to discussions, but at the same time it has to be instrumental in its civil role, to promote a critical conscience while being emotionally effective. In this contribution, we shall see how these topics were quite on a high profile at Orador-sur-Glane, a village cruelly martyred by the SS Das Reich division, where a “Memory Centre”, built in June 1944 and initially perceived as a place of controversy, was later a great help in the recollection of the lost memory, thus becoming a place of conciliation where to set distinctive identity dynamics.