ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the role of memory: personal memory and national memory and the negotiation of multiple national identities, each of which might be simultaneously played out in the museum and the individual. It also focuses on the Koryo Museum situated in Kaesong, North Korea and demonstrates how museums can simultaneously mediate overlapping, and divergent group memories and identities. Drawing on some similarities to the German discourse of cultural nation as a contested unifying force in two statehoods: a socialist society in the North and a capitalist society in the South, the chapter aims to emphasise the very sensitive relationship between the narratives of state and nation and their possible deliberation in a museum. The foundation history of the Koryo Museum and the concurrent cultural-political developments in Korea reveal this close relationship and contextualise the interest and historical connection of both Korean states to Kaesong and the Koryo period.