Extreme Collecting

Challenging Practices for 21st Century Museums

Graeme Were, J. C. H. King, Graeme Were, J. C. H. King

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857453648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

By exploring the processes of collecting, which challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice, this book debates the practice of collecting 'difficult' objects, from a historical and contemporary perspective; and discusses the acquisition of objects related to war and genocide, and those purchased from the internet, as well as considering human remains, mass produced objects and illicitly traded antiquities. The aim is to apply a critical approach to the rigidity of museums in maintaining essentially nineteenth-century ideas of collecting; and to move towards identifying priorities for collection policies in museums, which are inclusive of acquiring 'difficult' objects. Much of the book engages with the question of the limits to the practice of collecting as a means to think through the implementation of new strategies.

PART I

Difficult Objects

1
THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF PERSECUTION

Collecting for the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum

Suzanne Bardgett

The fragility of evidence

In December 2008, the Department of Holocaust and Genocide History received a call from Dr Ivor Stilitz of Muswell Hill, London, offering the Museum a tefillin bag containing a set of phylacteries with leather straps, the boxes painted black, such as Jewish men wear during prayers (Figure 1.1). The bag and its contents had been in his possession for many years, having been left in his parents’ house in Stoke Newington by a young engineer, who had rented a room from them over fifty years before. The lodger – Michael Maynard – had come to Britain as a refugee from Nazi Germany and Dr Stilitz felt that such an item surely belonged in the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust collection. We duly visited Dr Stilitz at his home and he showed us the phylacteries in their olive-brown velvet bag, intricately embroidered with bright yellow thread. It became clear that the Museum needed to track down their one-time owner, to be certain that he – Michael Maynard – was happy for them to be lodged here, and also to find out more about their history and why they had been left.

A Google search fairly speedily produced quite a lot of information, for Mr Maynard – who had grown up in the town of Alsfeld, in Hesse – had taken part in the BBC’s People’s War online project, whereby people who had lived through the Second World War submitted their memoirs electronically. Five chapters gave an account of Michael Maynard’s war years. We read how as a so-called ‘enemy alien’ he had been interned in 1940 in Shropshire and later on the Isle of Man – a period of confinement infinitely less harsh than the time he had spent in Buchenwald concentration camp some eighteen months earlier, but nonetheless vexing. Like many others who had fled Nazism, Maynard had gone on to serve in the British Army, and he described how he had worked as a tool-maker – rising to Instrument Mechanic, and later Armament Officer – in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, later known as REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers). Later, after D-Day, he was among the Allied forces who moved up through Belgium and Holland, witnessing the crossing of the Rhine by hundreds of gliders towed by aircraft, escorted by fighter planes – an extraordinary experience for all who were there, but particularly poignant for someone who had fled the Nazi regime.

In Part 2 of his online account Maynard wrote of how in July 1942 – by which time he was serving with the Northern Command workshops – he had learned from a Red Cross letter that his parents had been deported:

Figure 1.1. The tefillin bag brought to London by Manfred Moses in August 1939 and given to the Imperial War Museum in 2008

When I went to the Leeds Synagogue for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), I simply could not come to terms with the many prayers containing the term ‘merciful God’ contrasting (with) the horrible reality, and walked out of the synagogue, never to return to one for prayers. (BBC, The People’s War)

The abandoned tefillin immediately acquired a deeper meaning. We wrote to Mr Maynard and received back a typed account of his early years. His German name had been Manfred Moses. As a teenager he had been devout – learning to speak Hebrew fluently and attending services first in the synagogue of Alsfeld and later, after the Kristallnacht pogrom meant that the wrecked synagogue could no longer be used, in the home of the Stern family.

I now conducted the Sabbath services and read the weekly bible chapter from the easier-to-read printed bible, the scrolls having, alas, been destroyed during the arson of the synagogue. I even conducted a burial service of the only member of the congregation who died while I was still in Alsfeld. The official gravediggers were no longer allowed to dig graves for Jews: some of the fitter men, including my father, did the job. (Maynard, n.d.: 15; see also Jüdisches Museum Vogelsberg)

A visit to Mr Maynard produced yet more detail. The velvet bag had been embroidered by his mother for his Bar Mitzvah in September 1935. What would normally have been a lavish event had had to be scaled back because of restrictions brought in by the Nuremberg Laws, but Frau Moses had done the catering herself with help from friends. Wine and other alcohol had been easily supplied, for Herr Moses had been a wine-importer and maker of liqueurs. Maynard remembered regular deliveries of the raw spirit into the basement of their home by state-regulated suppliers, and his father mixing the liqueurs with essences bought from commercial travellers – an interesting glimpse of a bygone home-based industry.

Manfred Moses was an only child, so that his parents had just one Bar Mitzvah to make special and memorable. Being the centre of attention must have been tiring – by eight o’clock the thirteen-year-old had fallen asleep.

Back in this country and demobbed in 1947, Michael Maynard found lodgings in a terrace in Tottenham (where the Yiddish-speaking family made buttons for the rag-trade in their living room) and then later with the Stilitz family in Stoke Newington (where he is remembered taking an interest in young Ivor Stilitz’s schoolwork, lending him a special pen for his 11 Plus exam). In 1952, Michael Maynard married and embarked on a new phase of his life, leaving the Stoke Newington lodgings for a flat in Notting Hill. The tefillin bag and phylacteries – now a painful reminder of all that had been lost – stayed behind.

Thanks to Ivor Stilitz’s thoughtfulness and Michael Maynard’s readiness to probe his long memory, the Museum today has this graceful and historic object, whose many layers of meaning could so easily have been lost.¹

In this chapter, I will focus primarily on three-dimensional artefacts acquired for the Holocaust Exhibition both during its planning (1996–1999) and after its opening in June 2000 (Figure 1.2). As will be seen, the quest for such material dominated the first two years of the four-year project, and in the decade following the Holocaust Exhibition’s opening, collecting has continued, providing the Museum with a modestly sized – but qualitatively first-class – collection of three-dimensional objects on this theme.

The Museum has tried to give Holocaust collecting a similar status to other collecting initiatives and to familiarise our curators with the possibilities and issues it poses. It is a mainstream collecting area within the Museum now therefore. But insofar as the Holocaust was an extreme event, the term ‘Extreme Collecting’ certainly applies as it relates to the practice of acquiring objects related to genocide, suffering and loss.

Collecting relics of the Nazi crimes

The task of creating the Holocaust Exhibition was not without its anxieties, the availability of original material for the showcases being one of them. The fact that it was to be the principal exhibition on the theme in the United Kingdom, having received a £12.6 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, meant that public expectations were high. Two floors of the Museum’s about-to-be-extended building were given over to it – 1,200 square metres of space – the largest display the Museum had ever made at its London site. Yet within the Museum, the number of objects related to Nazi persecution – when laid out for the project team’s inspection – barely covered one table. There was plenty of ‘flat evidence’ in terms of documents, film and photographs relating to Nazi Europe and a lot of oral history interviews, but as regards artefacts which told the story of what happened to millions of families deliberately targeted for persecution and eventual extermination by the Nazis, we had very little.

Figure 1.2. Showcase in the Holocaust Exhibition’s section ‘Inside the Camps’, which tells the story of slave labour. By permission of the Imperial War Museum.

The team who made the Exhibition were mainly recent graduates – several with useful languages such as German, Czech and Polish, all with a total passion to do the best for the subject. Discussing what artefacts we could hope to find, our reference points were TV documentaries, films, books and photographs. We talked about the peculiar street furniture of Polish cities; the religious items that would convey the specific culture that had been lost during the years of Nazi oppression and mass murder; the desirability of having variety as the visitor progressed through the display. One of the team – Terry Charman – was a regular adviser to television productions on period detail. Another – James Taylor – had spent many years in the Museum’s library. Their high standards of verification were quickly transmitted to the rest of the team.

We developed a set of rules which required material to appear in the Exhibition only at its appointed place – there should be no pre-empting of the story – and which forbade artistic representations unless done at the time or very shortly after the event. We would resist pressure to highlight famous or distinguished figures: the persecution had affected millions of ordinary people, and this needed to be emphasised. Was it acceptable to show facsimiles? Here we took a purist approach. Our visitors’ experience would be richer and more penetrating if they knew that what they were seeing was original.

Clues as to the kinds of artefacts we might acquire could be found in existing exhibitions, although back in the mid-1990s there were fewer than today.² On a visit to the Auschwitz State Museum it was instructive to walk round the former prisoner barracks, which the museum authorities had allocated to different countries to curate their own accounts of the Nazi crimes. In the Belgian display, we sensed the potency of several dozen camp uniforms lined up together: one conveyed a single experience, a dozen spoke of the dehumanisation of many.

Nervous of whether we would succeed in acquiring sufficient strong material to fill the seventy or so showcases we had asked for, we ensured that other elements – notably the audio-visual monitors – would be richly conceived. Our team realised that words and phrases could themselves work as artefacts – when rendered as quotations in three-dimensional letters on the wall. But there was no escaping the fact that we needed a strong collection of artefacts, and finding these occupied our team for the first two years of the project.³

Staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington – opened in 1993 – told us how they had built up their collection. Edward Linenthal’s (1995) book about that museum, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum, gave insights into the often fraught discussions that had taken place as their team addressed what artefacts should be featured. One chapter describes how a watershed moment had been reached when both Jeshajahu ‘Shaike’ Weinberg and Martin Smith, the UK-based documentary maker, came together on the creative team.⁴ A conviction developed between the two that there had to be a ‘terrible immensity’ in order to tell the story of the Holocaust. With diplomatic intervention at a seriously high level, intergovernmental agreements had been set up which paved the way for major loans of key artefacts from museums in former Nazi-occupied countries (Linenthal, 1995: 140–66).

Meeting the USHMM staff, it became clear that their acquisitions programme had indeed been pursued with zeal, underpinned by scholarly research and fieldwork. The results were plain in the Permanent Exhibition, where notably large and striking exhibits punctuated the historical narrative. It was impressive, to say the least, to find one of the milk churns in which the Emmanuel Ringelblum archive had been buried in Warsaw in 1943, and a full-scale replica of the famous wall in Krakow that had been made from Jewish gravestones.⁵ The scale on which the USHMM had collected influenced our own efforts, and we followed their example of seeking support from the Polish Government for loans from their museums. The USHMM’s then Head of Collections, Jacek Nowakowski, generously let us have long lists of contacts in Europe. Realising the scale of effort that had been expended by USHMM on the ground in Poland, we fixed that one of the newly recruited research assistants – Kathy Jones – should be based in Warsaw for a full two years, a decision which bore fruit. The IWM’s exhibition has especially strong and diverse material from Poland – the result of Jones’s relentless research and following-up of leads.

We had a newsletter which was distributed through the small number of organisations and associations of former refugees and concentration camp survivors in this country. Produced to a high standard by a former Financial Times journalist, this allowed us to report progress on the making of the Exhibition. Readers could learn, for example, of James Taylor’s field visit to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and realise how deeply our curatorial staff were immersed in the subject.

When hearing of our appeal for material, many survivors sent us booklets about their town of origin and photocopied records acquired in recent years from German archives that documented their parents’ fate. There was no doubt about how large these documents loomed in their own families’ histories. But it was objects that we needed, and thankfully offers of these began to come in. One was a heavy tablecloth lined with deep yellow fabric from which the compulsory Stars of David had been cut by the family who had owned it. It was initially lent to the Museum by Menahem Steinmetz, whom one of our researchers, Alison Murchie, visited at his home in north London. Steinmetz had grown up in Mihaifalve in Transylvania, one of eleven siblings – seven girls and four boys. In August or September 1939, their region was returned to Hungarian rule (after being ruled by Romania), so the war did not affect them until March 1944 when the Nazis marched into Hungary. The family were deported to Ausch...