1.1 Objects in Focus
In 2016, when the JĂŒdisches Museum Hohenems in Austria celebrated its 25th anniversary , it exhibited a miscellany of 25 objects, each accompanied by a curatorâs note.1 The following year, the body in charge of museums at former concentration camps in the state of Brandenburg celebrated its 25th anniversary with a book subtitled â25 Jahre Stiftung Brandenburgische GedenkstĂ€tten in 25 Objektenâ. Each object was introduced by a different author in a short essay.2 With their echo of Neil MacGregorâs A History of the World in 100 Objects, such object miscellanies create a space for reflection on museum practices and on human relationships to objects.3 This can also take more lasting forms in the museum. When a newly built visitorâs centre opened at the GedenkstĂ€tte Mauthausen in 2003, its first permanent exhibition included a module titled âObjekte erzĂ€hlen Geschichteâ (âObjects Narrate Historyâ), which reflected in unusually abstract terms on the role of objects for museum work and for visitors. Two other major museums, the JĂŒdisches Museum MĂŒnchen and the GedenkstĂ€tte Buchenwald , both discussed in later chapters, have since chosen a similar self-reflective approach, devoting separate exhibition modules to the object as museum medium.
While it is thus now common practice for museum professionals to reflect critically on their curatorship of objects from the years 1933â45, a book about museum objects from the National Socialist era still needs to justify itself on three fronts. First, some might see Dokumentationszentren (âdocumentation centres â), which display documents and photographs rather than objects, as the key new development in Germany in recent decades. Secondly, the epochal shift towards digitization and virtuality might lead us to seek the cutting edge of museum practice in those areas, not in the analogue world of things.4 Thirdly, given that the key outcomes of the National Socialist era were millions of deaths and untold human suffering, objects might seem an irrelevance. The reality of German and Austrian museum practice counters these objections in various ways.
There is no doubt that this field of German museum culture is somewhat polarized, with documentation centres largely deploying so-called Flachware (âflatwareâ), that is, documents and photographs, and museums or memorial sites working extensively with objects. Axel Drecoll , formerly head of the Dokumentation Obersalzberg and now Director of the Stiftung Brandenburgische GedenkstĂ€tten, identifies two basic types of exhibition about the years 1933â45, characterized either by their âObjektbezogenheitâ (orientation towards objects) or their âObjektverzichtâ (renunciation of objects).5 In practice, these divergent public history formats are not in competition with each other and readily operate in tandem, but object-free documentation centres are in the minority of exhibition venues as a whole, and some documentation centres have moved into object collection. In the context of its expansion to meet tourist demand, the documentation centre at Obersalzberg, which has until now relied largely on display boards, launched a media campaign to solicit objects from local people and plans to display 350 in its new exhibition, set to open in 2020.6
Obersalzberg is not alone. Over the last twenty years, exhibition-makers have unearthed, preserved and displayed tens of thousands of objects that relate to the Third Reich and its aftermath. Germanyâs two national history museums, the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), boast of having 800,000 and 900,000 objects in their collections, respectively, most of them accessioned since the early 1990s. While only a proportion relate to National Socialism, these nevertheless number in the thousands.7 If objects are at the conservative end of the spectrum of museum practice, then Germany has been involved in a monumental conservative undertaking of object collection , which needs to be studied on its own terms. Austria may lag behind in sheer numbers of objects, but practices are no different for individual museums and exhibitions there.
Digital technologies play a role in most of the museums and exhibitions in this study, notably in the display of witness testimony . However, even supposing that this were a study of the cutting edge of exhibition technologies , which it is not, Zeitzeugen testimony is hardly at that cutting edge. As Steffi de Jong has shown in the first major study of the use of Zeitzeugen testimony in museums, film-makers have established a stable genre aesthetic for witness testimony that precludes anything other than the plainest recording of the speaking subject.8 While de Jong demonstrates convincingly the need to analyse how testimony is remediated in a museum context, her title âThe Witness as Objectâ reflects her interest in how video testimonies âare adapted to the rules of the institution museumâ; her argument is not that they redefine the museum.9
Even leaving testimony aside, the graveness of the topic tends to militate against experimentation with virtuality and digital manipulation , with the notable exception of art installations. Silke Arnold-de Simine has rightly argued that, in the post-witness age into which we are stepping, museums will need to find emotional and sensory as well as factual ways of communicating the Holocaust to those who were born later, and she explores some uses of digital technologies to achieve understanding by experiential and empathetic means.10 At the same time, the main response of German and Austrian museums to this imminent generational shift has been to collect objects from witnesses and their descendants and to record what they meant to them. This studyâs focus on the object should not, therefore, be attributed to a lack of interest in new communication methods in the post-witness era but rather to a belief that witnessesâ experiences will be projected into the future not just hologrammatically but through detailed knowledge about, and discussion of, objects .11
The introduction that follows outlines the context in which history exhibitions about the years 1933â45 are produced, situates this study within its broader scholarly context and explains some choices of scope and terminology.
1.2 The Exhibitionary Routine
In scholarly study, German memory culture has often been structured as a series of shifts: after the end of the Cold War, once entrenched positions on the past were abandoned; victim groups that had been forgotten were publicly honoured; and previously private memories came out into the public sphere.12 Such research has tracked developments in culture and politics and identified watershed moments. This book takes those chronologies as read and starts from the premise that practices of socially critical public history are now thoroughly routine and mainstream in Germany. It examines history exhibitions about the years 1933â45 and their aftermath as one element in that routine.
The study analyses exhibitions at museums, documentation centres and memorial sites (occasionally also other venues) whose subject is the National Socialist era, including the Second World War and Holocaust, and post-war memory of those events. In 2009, when I published an initial survey of temporary exhibitions, it seemed possible that this was a short-lived phenomenon and that I, too, would be writing about a phase in memory culture.13 Instead, in the intervening years, public money has been committed long term to new institutions and exhibition spaces that will, barring the unlikely event of closures, produce new history exhibitions well into the future. At the same time, temporary exhibitions continue to be produced in significant numbers, reaching a kind of apotheosis in 2013, in Berlin âs commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Nazi accession to power and the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht . A year earlier, the city had celebrated its own 775th anniversary under the banner of âdiversityâ. Now, under the title âZerstörte Vielfaltâ (âDiversity Destroyedâ), it put on a year-long programme of events that included more than fifty history exhibitions with topics ranging from the fate of Jewish architects to the Gleichschaltung of local transport. The programme was so complex that it was itself drawn together in an exhibition, which centralized and miniaturized the component exhibitions, each presented through a single object.14
In an age when all the key historical facts can be found with a few clicks of a mouse, absorbed passively from history documentaries, or picked up at the railway station in the form of a popular history magazine, it is not a given that so much time, energy and creativity should be devoted to mounting history exhibitions in public space. Yet, compared with other cultural forms that engage with Germanyâs National Socialist pastânotably memorials, literature, film and artâhistory exhibitions remain relatively under-researched. While this study is not primarily concerned to explain why Germanyâs and Austriaâs exhibition culture is thriving, a few reasons can be sketched out, to show that the often remarkable objects I discuss in the main chapters function within a nexus of increasingly routine and standardized practices.
The single most forceful âmultiplierâ of history exhibitions is arguably National Socialism itself, since its crimes were so geographically widespread, the targets of its inhumanity so diverse and its culture so thoroughly pervasive, that every institution, every profession and every town in Germany can ask itself what its predecessors did in the Third Reich, while al...