Why our Main Exhibition is not a Permanent Exhibition

The House of Austrian History opened in 2018 with an exhibition that offers an overview of Austria’s history since 1918. The museum’s statutes define it as an open “forum for discussion”. As a museum team, we took the deliberate decision not to call our main exhibition a “permanent exhibition” because we are always updating it. In doing so, we are taking our mission seriously, firstly to always have the present day in mind and, secondly, to show that history is not finished and complete, but is instead an object of discussion and negotiation. This understanding of history means we regularly look for opportunities to expand on certain aspects of the exhibition or even swap whole sections out, giving space to historical themes that are currently the subject of intensive debate. The Austrian constitution, for example, became famous overnight in 2019 during the “Ibiza Affair” for providing a stable foundation in a crisis and as a model of “beauty and elegance”. In response to this, the House of Austrian History was able to put on display the USB stick containing the “Ibiza Video” that was handed over to investigative journalists, and to add a new video to the section on the creation of the constitution, thereby expanding that particular topic focus. Another example is the COVID-19 pandemic. Objects relating to the pandemic were added to the exhibition, which then prompted us to include more about the pandemic of 1918-1920 in our main exhibition.

This open-endedness goes hand in hand with the way people talk about history, which is also always changing. Today we talk about Austria’s shared responsibility for Nazi rule as a matter of course, but for a long time this was taboo. Unthinkable today, in contrast, would be to present Austrian history as a uniform development with Vienna at its centre, thus overlooking the different perspectives of the other provinces. A similar example is the role of people in politics. In older exhibitions, political history was told primarily through the lens of individual politicians, or it concentrated solely on periods of time defined by politics (e.g. an “era” for each federal president). Today, historical exhibitions focus on people who are less well known in order to show that history is shaped by many people and not just by political office-holders. Depictions of gender have also undergone a huge shift in recent decades. Since the 1970s, historiography has emphasised the role of women as political actors. And since the 1990s, there has been a much stronger focus on the ways in which ideas about gender shape history far beyond the identities of individual people because it is impossible to separate key political ideas from images of masculinity or femininity—heroism and welfare, knowledge society and threat, to name but a few examples.

Identities beyond the gender binary have become more visible in society in recent years and exhibitions have also started to take note. The goal here is to do greater justice to historical and contemporary figures and provide a more accurate representation of history. After all, people beyond the gender binary have always been making history—for example people who wanted to fight in the Habsburg army but were not considered men by the military. More than a century ago, some individuals were already refusing to tie themselves unambiguously to one of just two possibilities: “male” or “female”. Likewise, intersex people whose bodies do not fit the two-gender scheme can point to a long history of struggle for visibility and recognition. Our main exhibition reflects this growing awareness.

The language used to write history has also undergone a shift. For this reason, following our exhibition on the relationship between gender, agency and politics, in May 2022 we invited our visitors to join us in discussions of how to reconcile historically accurate and fair representation with the need to make texts easy to read and understand. The outcome of this process was that since autumn 2022, we have been using the asterisk (*) to underscore the fact that gender is variable and ambiguous. This way of writing allows us to express the multiple possibilities that open up in the space between biological classification and personal gender identity. At no time in history did only two clearly differentiated categories of gender actually exist. When an exhibition about the history of Austria makes the diversity in how we define ourselves visible, our view of the past becomes much more comprehensive. In line with our sustainable approach to resources, older exhibition texts written between 2018 to 2022 will remain alongside the new texts using the asterisk. These older texts use the capital letter “I” within German words to denote both men and women. These will be gradually swapped out as changes are made.

Read more about our thinking on gender-sensitive language and the process of discussing it with our public in this blog article (only in German).