Clara Mansfeld
Clara Mansfeld studied Modern and Contemporary History, Economic and Social History and Cultural Anthropology in Freiburg and Basel (CH) from 2006 to 2013. During her studies, she worked as an intern and did freelance work in numerous museums and memorials across Germany and abroad. Furthermore, she was a long time research assistant at the history department of Freiburg University and at FRIAS (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies). From 2013 to 2016, Clara Mansfeld worked at the Buchenwald memorial, first as an academic trainee, then as a research associate, where she was part of a team preparing the new permanent exhibition about the history of the concentration camp Buchenwald (Buchenwald. Ostracism and Violence 1937 to 1945). From 2017 to 2020 she has been a research associate and a doctoral candidate at the Europäisches Kolleg Jena.
Contact
Research project
The Imaginary Visitor. German Museums and their Public (working title)
Starting point for this project was the observation that the significance museums ascribe to their visitors has changed considerably in the last decades.
The project looks from a historic perspective at the relationship between museum staff/curators and the visitors. This relationship was not problematic as long as there were no extensive differences in the milieu between the two. In a way, the museum staff addressed their exhibitions ›to themselves‹.
Using History Museums as a case study, this project aims to reconstruct the conceptual and institutional conditions that lead to a fundamental change in the practice of increasing attentiveness towards the visitor in West Germany between the 1950s up to the 1990s. To whom did the curators address their exhibitions? What implications did that have for the conveyance of content and knowledge? Who pushed towards more visitor-orientation?
This project does not focus on the visitors but rather on the perception of the visitors that influenced the curators’ work and therefore concepts and designs of the exhibitions. Focusing on a changing audience through the lens of the curator may also help get a historic perspective on the status quo of exhibition and museum projects today and may also reveal possible courses of action for Historic Museum in a changing society.
Research interests
Museum and Exhibition History
Historical Education
National socialism and the Holocaust
History of West Germany
Select publications
(with Kornelia Konczal) Tagungsbericht „Regions of Memory. A Comparative Perspective on Eastern Europe“, 26.11.2012–28.11.2012 Warschau.