Last weekend, my wife and I took a ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia. It's just a two-hour ride, but it was striking how much it felt like we arrived in a different culture. Finland suffered during and after World War II, but in Estonia, collective psychological scars seem even more fresh. That impression was shaped in large part by two powerful museums that we visited. Each shows freedom to be a wrenching personal question, one that was fought over, suffered for, and wrestled with in Estonia for a century and one whose meaning is still being revisited there today. Each institution asserts that museums are where Estonians should confront these issues and, too, that Estonians can learn a lot by listening to each other about what they have to say on the subject.
Both the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom (in Tallinn) and the Estonian National Museum (in Tartu) make freedom the explicit topic of exhibitions that feature extended personal testimonial and reflection. When one enters the Vabamu exhibition, titled Freedom without Borders, one sees three elderly people sitting silently in their living rooms. The scene feels live, but actually they are on video. Soon a voiceover in your headset explains. Each of these three people is 100 years old; they have lived the history that we are about to experience. A younger narrator then enters the frame, stands behind each person, and tells you about their lives--stories of pain and struggle, of children and parents killed, of exile, of ethnic persecution. In one way, it is uncomfortable to have this man telling these people's stories for them as they sit. Why do they not get to speak for themselves? At the same time, their silence has a powerful effect, too. One gets a sense of the history that Estonian people carry with them, the loads they bear as they lead their daily lives and the legacies the country carries as, since its 1991 independence, it builds a new identity.
After this introduction, a narrator in one's headphones guides one from room to room, charting a history of occupation, oppression and resistance through a series of stories about wrenching choices. Will one stand up for one's Jewish neighbor? send one's children to Sweden for safety? read the banned book? join in Soviet patriotism?
Echoing the initial room, one of the last sections features video interviews with participants in the "Singing Revolution" of the late 1980s-1990s. These people, now professionals and politicians and artists, are history-makers who walk among us:
The museum's description of this exhibit reads, "Freedom is beautiful. Freedom is fragile. It is not something you inherit, nor is it something that can be taken for granted." In a country that won its independence less than thirty years ago, these are not abstract statements. And yet, one senses a fear behind them: What if people forget? How can we share these stories need to be shared before they slip away?
A two-hour train ride away, in Tartu, the Estonian National Museum, too, seeks to personalize questions of freedom. The museum covers 11,000 years of history in its massive building (I spent six hours there), but its core exhibition, Encounters, starts with the present-day. Its first installation is a stunning series of first-person testimonials from unnamed Estonians of all ages who reflect on the meaning of freedom. I don't think I've ever seen longer excerpts of video oral history in a museum; I've never seen people sit and watch with more rapt attention.
The people featured are unbelievably articulate in talking about freedom and the legacies of the struggle for it. "Everyone understands why the grandparent's generation is broken," one young man says. "But we're broken, too. It's hard to talk about because we don't have the easy explanation of having lived through the war and occupation." Freedom ceases to be an abstract concept but rather one that people have contemplated, worried over, suffered for. There are few tears but several long pauses. At points, one can almost see the pain behind their eyes. The testimonials just keep coming. I watched for half an hour and saw no repetition, from the elderly to young hipsters to children:
Working backwards chronologically, the museum next focuses on the constraints that came with a half century of Soviet occupation. Part of the struggle was political, of course, but the museum focuses even more on culture. An interactive invites visitors to use floppy disks(!) to choose highlights from the 1990s and "remix" the culture of the time. The somewhat surreal result helps visitors revisit elements of the independence movement and, at the same time, invites them to recognize that the ability to pick, choose, and rework culture is an aspect of freedom that many of us may take for granted:
The chance to play with culture sets the stage for an earlier era when cultural-making was serious business. In exploring the 1940s-1970s era, the exhibit depicts the creation and consumption of Estonian-language books, plays, and music not as diversion but as a form of resistance.
In this atmosphere, even listening to the radio becomes a search for freedom. An interactive conveys how tantalizing tastes of Western culture came through via radio. As you turn the dial, you get fragments of news and music from major international cities, broken up by waves by static.
It's not possible to convey the relentlessness of the visitation experience and the earnestness of expression in these two museums. I was moved and exhausted. Behind these two projects lies incredible investment, belief in the power of ideas, and idealism about ability of museums to make a difference.
In North Carolina, we're just starting conversations about how to commemorate the U.S.A's 250th anniversary in 2026. How can we talk about freedom in a way that matters? Can it become more than just a catch phrase? Will our conflicted political situation bring power and relevance to the word on its own? Or is it up to us?
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