'In the museum's ruins: staging the passage of time'

In her walk through the museum's ruins, in Chapter 21 of this volume, Michaela Giebelhausen addresses the museum's complex relationship with time, highlighting temporal and material gaps. She explores time and history's destructive forces as wrought on the Neues Museum, Berlin (recently revealed and celebrated) and uncovers a poetics of ruination described by Denis Diderot as 'sweet melancholy'. She argues for a mature attitude to the past, and an aesthetic and intellectual compromise between memory and forgetting.