ABSTRACT
The rapid increase in the number of museums, sites of memory, monuments and their increasingly important social function, is usually interpreted as an expression of a certain cultural attitude or tendency. Pierre Nora describes this commemorative need as the will to remember.1 The rate of musealisation in our period is not merely an expression of the common belief that the palpable past is represented through monuments and museums, and that these play a key role in individual and collective identities. Recent decades have been marked by a denite transformation of relations to the past. The expression ‘era of commemoration’ is not groundless, as expansive musealisation is one of its symptoms.2
