Wednesday at Freedom Center

[working doc]
[ i cannot finished it, because our new logins doesn't work in the Langsam-Library (state of the information: 08/19/09 10:00 pm)]

Today we visit the "Underground Railway Freedom Center". It is a museum, where are a lots of different sections which describe different aspects of the slavery in the United States.

The "Brother of the Borderland"-section really impresses me. The section was about the hard part of journeys of slaves who want to be free: the situation around the crossing of the Ohio River.
There exists 2 different rooms. In the first room introduce Ophra Winfrey in the major topic. This dark room with less light had [sitzpolster] and 4 flatscreens. After this short movie with an short description of the [flcuht]-story, we had to leave room one and go through a door. After the door, there was a long dark tunnel with noises of a night like [raschelndes Laub] or [grashuepfer]. After the tunnel, there comes an another big screen with a view from one [ufer] of the ohio river to the other. Then the story from the first room continued and we see, how hard it was to cross the river and [fliehen] from the slave-hunter.

(b) Circa 10 yaers ago, I went to the "KZ Buchenwald". Unfortunetly I cannot remember details of this visit.

The general problem is, that it is a little bit difficult to compare the holocaust with the slavery.
[...]
You are able to name the holocaust places, but it is hard to find the central places of slavery, because this happened ofer many years in an big area of America.

As far as I can remember, in Buchenwald was not as much as different media sources than here in the Freedom Center [...].

(c) In my opinion it is essentially to kkep the memorys of the [greultaten] of the [vorfahren] alive. The more [leute ansprechen] the better. This should prevent, that such things happen in the future again.

Conclusion:
All in all, I think the whole Freedom Center has reach their target: they inform about the slavery years ago, about actual slavery in the world and motivate to engage to do something. Compared to my [erinnerungen] to Buchenwald, I found the play with different media types here better than in germany.
I think, to attract enough people and leave a footprint in their head, a museum-designer have to use the possibilities of the today to keep the emotions and memories of yesterday alive.