Storytelling transforms education at the Museum of Danish Resistance

Many people, bored senseless on school trips to museums, carry an ambivalence towards them through

their lives. Though their experience is the polar opposite of mine, I do understand. Museums have traditionally been austere, academic places with items stuffed in glass cases or hanging on walls. Context and appreciation was left to the viewer. A new storytelling approach to museum design is overturning that world, and Copenhagen's newly reopened Museum of the Danish Resistance is an excellent example of what's possible.

I was a good test case. Though I'm happy in any art museum or temple to ancient cultures, my eyes start to glaze with boredom when we get to World War II. No offence meant to that particular conflict, it’s just that my interest in all history and culture fades from the Industrial Revolution. But this was one of my husband's happy places, and accompanying him was only fair after dragging him through Rosenborg yet again. 

Several of his relatives had been significant players in the resistance, and this was a favourite museum of his childhood. He and his family were devastated when the place was destroyed by a fire set by an arsonist in 2013. Most of the collection had been saved, but the museum site was beyond repair. Over the next seven years curators and architects totally re-invented the museum, with a new building and a new way of telling the resistance story.

I loved it. And the reason, undoubtably, is that the curators have put storytelling at the heart of the museum.

It all starts with architecture to set the scene. The rather grim, round, almost windowless stone building is inspired by military pillboxes, and definitely looks like a defensive bastion was dropped in the middle of an otherwise peaceful park. The outside walls are strung with wires, clearly anticipating a camouflage of vines to come. If you think it looks entirely too small to contain a museum, you’d be right. The tower only holds the entry lobby, ticket office, gift shop, and cafe on the floor above. The museum itself is in a much larger basement excavated below the park.

Underground … a suitable location for a museum to deeds done in secret … you start your visit in an empty government office in the wee hours of the morning of the 9th of April, 1940, as the Germans occupied the country with high speed and low resistance. Danes woke up to a new overlord, though their local government institutions would stay in place for four more years. Some Danes were angry, some ambivalent and some enthusiastic; the museum does an excellent job of showing how confusion and hesitancy hardened to dislike and active resistance with time.

The galleries step through that timeline using artefacts, news reports, videos and atmospheric sets to trace this history. But the real storytelling is left to five individuals: two students, two communists and one collaborator with the Germans. We see them as shadowy silhouettes but hear them tell their stories. For the first half of the experience I suspected these were fictional composites, so compelling were they. But gradually the words seemed so sincere and the actions so honest I suspected the curators had found five “truth is stranger than fiction” narratives and built the museum around real people. And, sure enough, that’s the truth. The very last gallery provides the photos and the epilogues for the individuals you’ve come to know. There’s all the tragedy, retribution and joy you could ask for from a streaming series, but it’s here in a museum instead.

The most moving gallery for me was, unsurprisingly, the one about the evacuation of the Jews. In what many consider to be the Danes’ finest hour, the population and the resistance came together to smuggle the majority of the nation’s Jews out of the country just before the Germans were due to round them up. The gallery has photos, clothing and mementos from people who escaped, but the emotion lies in standing next to a full sized fishing boat, in atmospheric half light, watching the silhouette of our new friend Jørgen pace the dock as he tells us about the dangers of the evening. It’s like being inside history.

The most interactive and entertaining bit was the gallery on intelligence operations, where you could get hands on with several activities to test your spying skills. At one set of desks you could translate intercepted messages using a coded system to which you’d been given a key. At another you could tap phone lines and get points for spotting key pieces of information worth passing on. It was great fun, though any merriment is kept in check by the true story of a resistance member who chomped a cyanide tablet when caught on a mission rather than risk giving up information to the Germans under torture.

Someday all museums will be like this, and the world will be better for it. Meanwhile, if you’re in Copenhagen head to the Resistance Museum to see how historical storytelling should be done. If you’re going to see the Little Mermaid (underwhelming but required for first timers) you’ll be walking right by it. As long as you’re in the area, you can double down on national tradition and have a Danish lunch at Cafe Petersborg. While you’re at it, raise a glass of snaps to those brave men and women who wedged thorns into the sides of the German occupiers for five long years.