ABSTRACT
The museum is a place for individual and collective identities, and both can be traced through the memories of wartime visitors. These recollections provide indications of visitors' immediate reactions to museum but also demonstrate the longer-term effect of individual encounters with museums and objects. Cultural historians have examined the connections between history and memory in studies such as Raphael Samuel's Theatres of Memory and David Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country. The creation of memory and the assignment of meaning are implicit in the museum and its collections but also reside in the responses of its visitors. Memory and meaning in the visitor's experience can create an emotional engagement that goes beyond imparting and receiving factual information. The evidence of visitor responses to the wartime museum uses this model to show that the connection between memory and the museum is not a recent phenomenon and that recollections of past can add new dimensions to the original meaning of collections.
