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 THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS CONTEXTS

Exhibiting the Nazi Past

Museum Objects Between the Material
and the Immaterial

Chloe Paver
The Holocaust and its Contexts

Series Editors
Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann
Loughborough University
Loughborough, UK

Ben Barkow
The Wiener Library
London, UK
More than sixty years on, the Holocaust remains a subject of intense
debate with ever-widening ramifications. This series aims to demonstrate
the continuing relevance of the Holocaust and related issues in con-
temporary society, politics and culture; studying the Holocaust and its
history broadens our understanding not only of the events themselves
but also of their present-day significance. The series acknowledges and
responds to the continuing gaps in our knowledge about the events that
constituted the Holocaust, the various forms in which the Holocaust has
been remembered, interpreted and discussed, and the increasing impor-
tance of the Holocaust today to many individuals and communities.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14433
 Chloe Paver

Exhibiting the Nazi

Past
Museum Objects Between the Material and the
Immaterial
Chloe Paver
College of Humanities
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK

The Holocaust and its Contexts

ISBN 978-3-319-77083-3 ISBN 978-3-319-77084-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77084-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947408

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Cover illustration: A casket in the shape of a heart, made by a Soviet forced labourer, 1943.
© Photograph by Thomas Bruns, Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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 Acknowledgements

I first began to study history exhibitions with the aid of a year’s grant
from the Humboldt Foundation. Their generous support not only
gave me time to study but also gave me the opportunity and confi-
dence to venture into a new field of research. During this time, I was
lucky enough to be mentored by Aleida Assmann, who gave me much
sound advice and access to a lively research environment. Herbert Posch
invited me to spend a few months at the IFF in Vienna, where I was
able to investigate the exhibition ‘InventArisiert’ and discuss my work
with his colleagues, including Roswitha Muttenthaler. Over the years,
the following exhibition-makers were kind enough to give me some of
their time: the late Burkhard Asmuss and Lydia Marinelli, Hanno Loewy,
Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Hannes Sulzenbacher, Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl,
Stephan Matyus, Insa Eschebach, Hans-Christian Täubrich, Bettina
Leder-Hindemith, Ernst Klein, Harry Stein, Margot Blank and Winfried
Nerdinger.
I owe a debt of thanks to my colleagues in German and in Modern
Languages at Exeter, who have supported my work through research
leave, discussion and reading of drafts. I also received very helpful advice
from Palgrave Macmillan’s peer reviewer. Three Ph.D. students whose
theses I examined (Clare Copley, Stephanie Bostock and Michaela
Dixon) informed and inspired me with their work on a wide range of
museums and sites of memory. Rick Lawrence of RAMM, Charlotte
Drohan and members of the University of the Third Age joined me for a
productive discussion about German and Austrian history museums.

v
vi    Acknowledgements

Finally, my family, including my father Allan and my brothers and sis-

ters, have been a constant support. This book is dedicated to the mem-
ory of my mother, Ann Paver (née Topping), who taught us to respect
books and always to turn the pages correctly.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Objects in Focus 1
1.2 The Exhibitionary Routine 5
1.3 Scope of the Study 11
1.4 Research Context 15
1.5 Structure of the Analysis 21

2 Between the Material and the Immaterial 25

2.1 Broken Glass 25
2.2 Objects as Signifiers and Fragments 30
2.3 Mentalities, Experiences, Emotions—and Objects 41
2.4 Object Life Cycles 53

3 Material Experiences, 1933–45 65

3.1 Jews and Heimat: Objects and Belonging 65
3.2 Mentalities and Materials 80
3.3 Hitler Busts and Nazi Symbols 98
3.4 Material Economies and Sign Systems of the Camps 107
3.5 Material Experiences of the Non-persecuted Majority in
Wartime 125

vii
viii    Contents

4 Material Collapse, 1945 143

4.1 The Sortie de Guerre: Objects Caught in Time 144
4.2 Vandalism, Disposal and Recycling 150
4.3 New Material Beginnings for the Victims 162

5 Material After-Lives Between the Attic and the Archive 171

5.1 Hitler in the Attic, in the Museum: How the Domestic
Spaces of the Majority Culture Have Yielded Up Objects 173
5.2 Hiding in Plain Sight: Remnants of National Socialism
in the Public Sphere 192
5.3 Resurfacing and Restitution: Victims’ Objects After 1945 205
5.4 Survival Among Objects 223
5.5 Michael Köhlmeier’s Story ‘Der Silberlöffel’: ‘Aryanized’
Objects in the Liberal Imagination 236
5.6 Coming to Terms with the Coming to Terms 247
5.7 Life Goes on in the Museum: The Continuation of the
Object Life Cycle 263

6 Conclusion 275

Bibliography 279

Index 295
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 A ‘gartel’ donated by Jewish villager Emma Ullmann to the

Schnaittach Heimatmuseum in 1933, with a handwritten
explanation of how it functioned, Jüdisches Museum
Schnaittach. Photograph: Chloe Paver 77
Fig. 3.2 Honey centrifuge in the collection of the Freilichtmuseum
Glentleiten, shown in the exhibition ‘Volk – Heimat – Dorf’,
2017. © Bezirk Oberbayern, Archiv FLM Glentlteiten 83
Fig. 3.3 Display of words at the exhibition ‘Sex-Zwangsarbeit
in NS-Konzentrationslagern’, Mahn- und Gedenkstätte
Ravensbrück, 2007. Photograph: Chloe Paver 93
Fig. 3.4 Mannequin dressed in lederhosen, with a photograph of
Hitler behind, at the exhibition ‘Volk – Heimat – Dorf’,
Bauerngerätemuseum Hundszell, 2017. Photograph: Chloe
Paver 105
Fig. 3.5 Part of a long table vitrine displaying objects dug up from
the ‘Halde II’ rubbish dump at Buchenwald, on view at the
permanent exhibition of the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, from
the mid-1990s to 2015. Photograph: Chloe Paver 110
Fig. 3.6 Charred toy panzer from the ruins of Dresden, placed at the
head of a parade of toys at the Militärhistorisches Museum der
Bundeswehr. Photograph: Chloe Paver 129
Fig. 3.7 Prosthetic hands and foot made by Oberammergau
woodcarvers, shown at the exhibition ‘NS-Herrschaft
und Krieg. Oberammergau 1933–1945’, 2015 at the
Oberammergau Museum. Photograph: Chloe Paver 138

ix
x    List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Nazi waste dug up from an allotment in 1998,

Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände.
Photograph: Chloe Paver 157
Fig. 5.1 Army mug of a former German armed forces soldier with a
dedication to his grandson, Berlin, after 1945, on display at the
Deutsch-Russisches Museum. Photograph: Chloe Paver 177
Fig. 5.2 Touchable exhibit at the NS-Dokumentation Vogelsang: a
souvenir made by an Ordensburg ‘veteran’. Photograph:
Chloe Paver 186
Fig. 5.3 Oil painting of the building of the U-boat pen at Rekrum,
a gift from one civic engineer to another, displayed at the
Denkort Bunker Valentin. Photograph: Chloe Paver 196
Fig. 5.4 Handbag given to a non-Jewish neighbour by a Jewish woman
about to be deported, Ehemalige Synagoge Haigerloch.
Photograph: Chloe Paver 209
Fig. 5.5 Cloth bought from a Jewish shopkeeper in 1938
and kept in a non-Jewish household, donated
to the exhibition ‘Legalisierter Raub’ in 2017.
Photograph: Chloe Paver 217
Fig. 5.6 Typewriter used by a survivor to write about his
experiences, Denkort Bunker Valentin. Photograph:
Chloe Paver 226
Fig. 5.7 Cardboard box used by Sammy Maedge to protest
at the lack of commemoration at the former Gestapo
headquarters, on show at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum
der Stadt Köln. Photograph: Chloe Paver 249
Fig. 5.8 Books by Albert Speer, donated to the
Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände
for an exhibition on Speer’s self-mythologizing (2017).
Photograph: Chloe Paver 253
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1  Objects in Focus
In 2016, when the Jüdisches Museum Hohenems in Austria cele-
brated its 25th anniversary, it exhibited a miscellany of 25 objects,
each accompanied by a curator’s 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 ‘25
Jahre Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten in 25 Objekten’. Each
object was introduced by a different author in a short essay.2 With
their echo of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects,
such object miscellanies create a space for reflection on museum prac-
tices and on human relationships to objects.3 This can also take more

1 Hanno Loewy and Anika Reichwald (eds), Übrig. Ein Blick in die Bestände – zum 25.

Geburtstag des Jüdischen Museums Hohenems (Hohenems, Vienna and Vaduz: Bucher, 2016).
2 Ines Reich (ed.), Vom Monument zur Erinnerung. 25 Jahre Stiftung Brandenburgische

Gedenkstätten in 25 Objekten (Berlin: Metropol, 2017).

3 A series of exhibitions entitled ‘Ein gewisses jüdisches Etwas’ (‘A Certain Jewish

Something’), for which members of the public brought in a single object relating to Judaism
and told its story, provides another example. The Frankfurt version was packaged as another
anniversary publication: Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main (ed.), Geschenkte Geschichten.
Zum 20-Jahres-Jubiläum des jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main:
Societätsverlag, 2009). I draw on this catalogue in Chapter 2. See also the catalogue for the
exhibition ‘Von da und dort’, discussed further in Sect. 4.3, in which writers were asked to pick
an object and respond to it imaginatively: Jutta Fleckenstein and Tamar Lewinsky (eds), Juden
45/90. Von da und dort – Überlebende aus Osteuropa (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2011).

© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Paver, Exhibiting the Nazi Past, The Holocaust and its Contexts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77084-0_1
2 C. PAVER

lasting forms in the museum. When a newly built visitor’s centre opened
at the Gedenkstätte Mauthausen in 2003, its first permanent exhibi-
tion included a module titled ‘Objekte erzählen Geschichte’ (‘Objects
Narrate History’), which reflected in unusually abstract terms on the role
of objects for museum work and for visitors. Two other major museums,
the Jüdisches Museum München and the Gedenkstätte 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 profession-
als to reflect critically on their curatorship of objects from the years
1933–45, a book about museum objects from the National Socialist
era still needs to justify itself on three fronts. First, some might see
Dokumentationszentren (‘documentation centres’), which display docu-
ments and photographs rather than objects, as the key new development
in Germany in recent decades. Secondly, the epochal shift towards digi-
tization 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 some-
what polarized, with documentation centres largely deploying so-called
Flachware (‘flatware’), that is, documents and photographs, and muse-
ums or memorial sites working extensively with objects. Axel Drecoll,
formerly head of the Dokumentation Obersalzberg and now Director
of the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, identifies two basic
types of exhibition about the years 1933–45, characterized either
by their ‘Objektbezogenheit’ (orientation towards objects) or their

4 As long ago as 2004, Elaine Heumann Gurian suggested that objects are no longer the

defining characteristic of museums. Elaine Heumann Gurian, ‘What is the Object of this
Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums’, in
Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift,
ed. by Gail Anderson (Lanham, NY, Toronto, and Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004), pp.
269–83.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

‘Objektverzicht’ (renunciation of objects).5 In practice, these divergent

public history formats are not in competition with each other and read-
ily operate in tandem, but object-free documentation centres are in the
minority of exhibition venues as a whole, and some documentation cen-
tres 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 cam-
paign 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. Germany’s 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 propor-
tion relate to National Socialism, these nevertheless number in the thou-
sands.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 exhibi-
tions 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 cut-
ting 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

5 Axel Drecoll, ‘NS-Volksgemeinschaft ausstellen. Zur Reinszenierung einer

Schreckensvision mit Verheißungskraft’, in Die NS-Volksgemeinschaft. Zeitgenössische
Verheißung, analytisches Konzept und ein Schlüssel zum historischen Lernen? ed. by Uwe
Danker and Astrid Schwabe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 105–22
(p. 113).
6 https://www.obersalzberg.de/neugestaltung/call-for-objects/; http://www.ifz-muenchen.

de/aktuelles/artikel/datum/2018/05/25/idyll-und-verbrechen/ [accessed 29 May 2018].

7 The DHM’s as yet incomplete object database returns 21,259 hits for the search term

‘Nationalsozialismus’, though this includes both documents and objects.

4 C. PAVER

other than the plainest recording of the speaking subject.8 While de Jong
demonstrates convincingly the need to analyse how testimony is remedi-
ated in a museum context, her title ‘The Witness as Object’ reflects her
interest in how video testimonies ‘are adapted to the rules of the institu-
tion museum’; her argument is not that they redefine the museum.9
Even leaving testimony aside, the graveness of the topic tends to mil-
itate 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 step-
ping, 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 understand-
ing by experiential and empathetic means.10 At the same time, the main
response of German and Austrian museums to this imminent genera-
tional shift has been to collect objects from witnesses and their descend-
ants and to record what they meant to them. This study’s 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 witnesses’ experiences will be projected into the future not just hol-
ogrammatically but through detailed knowledge about, and discussion
of, objects.11
The introduction that follows outlines the context in which history
exhibitions about the years 1933–45 are produced, situates this study
within its broader scholarly context and explains some choices of scope
and terminology.
8 Steffi de Jong, The Witness as Object: Video Testimony in Memorial Museums (New York

and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018). De Jong’s account of the very controlled framing and posi-
tioning of the speaking body (pp. 101–04) bears interesting comparison with the con-
ventions relating to busts that I discuss in Sects. 3.3 and 4.2. De Jong also discusses the
semantics of the German term Zeitzeuge, or historical witness (she prefers ‘witness to his-
tory’, pp. 32–34).
9 de Jong, p. 5.

10 Silke Arnold-de Simine, Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy,

Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

11 The New Dimensions in Testimony project, on permanent display at the Illinois

Holocaust Museum from 2017, is one of several projects aimed at creating holograms
of survivors giving testimony. This represents the newest generation of testimonial tech-
nology. However, as a remediated version of the USC Shoah Foundation testimony that
de Jong studies, it is directorially conservative, using a standardized question-and-answer
format.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

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 posi-
tions 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 1933–45 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 ini-
tial 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 exhibi-
tions continue to be produced in significant numbers, reaching a kind of
apotheosis in 2013, in Berlin’s 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 ‘diversity’. Now, under the title ‘Zerstörte Vielfalt’
(‘Diversity Destroyed’), 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.

12 Bill Niven’s introduction to a volume of essays on the suffering of the non-persecuted

majority of Germans can stand for many such arguments: ‘The end of the Cold War […]
made possible not just a more open and frank confrontation with the Holocaust, it also
prepared the ground for a less politicised confrontation with the theme of Allied bomb-
ing’. Bill Niven, ‘Introduction: German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millennium’, in
Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. by Bill Niven
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 4.
13 Chloe Paver, ‘Exhibiting the National Socialist Past: An Overview of Recent German

Exhibitions’, Journal of European Studies, 39.2 (2009), 225–49.

6 C. PAVER

The programme was so complex that it was itself drawn together in an

exhibition, which centralized and miniaturized the component exhibi-
tions, 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 maga-
zine, 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 Germany’s National Socialist
past—notably memorials, literature, film and art—history exhibitions
remain relatively under-researched. While this study is not primarily
concerned to explain why Germany’s and Austria’s 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 ‘multiplier’ of history exhibitions is argua-
bly 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 all areas of society have victims to mourn. Other factors
include the shift from grass-roots memorial activity to institutionalized
commemoration, Germany’s anniversary culture and the political struc-
ture of Germany, with its three levels of Bund, Länder and Kommunen
or central, regional and district government.
Taking these three in turn, memory of National Socialism has moved
so often along a well-worn track from the fringes to the centre that it
arguably no longer needs much of a push from the periphery. Germany’s
culture of Bürgerinitiativen or local activism has had considerable suc-
cess in ensuring that forgotten sites and histories of discrimination and
violence are given lasting memorial forms with public-sector support.
While the motivation of activists may be local and individual, when
viewed as a national pattern of activity this grass-roots pressure to
remember is fairly routinized. With each new protest, protest arguably
becomes less necessary, and, if successful, activists create the permanent
conditions for future cycles of exhibition-making. When the area of land

14 ‘Zerstörte Vielfalt. Berlin 1933 – 1938’ (‘Diversity Destroyed: Berlin 1933–1938’),

2013 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

 1 INTRODUCTION 7

known as the ‘Topographie des Terrors’ was first opened to the public,
with an open-air exhibition and tours, the event was intended to coun-
ter the positivity of the 750th anniversary of the foundation of Berlin.
Today, one would expect the federal region of Berlin to initiate such a
counter-memory, as it did with its anniversary project ‘Zerstörte Vielfalt’.
An exhibition shown at the site from 2005–2008 self-consciously evoked
the counter-cultural origins of the ‘Topographie’ by mounting its boards
on rusty sections of construction fencing.15 Yet this Bauzaunästhetik was
at odds with the professional production techniques of the exhibition
itself, and since 2010 exhibitions have been housed in a conventional
documentation centre, built to the highest design standards.
In Germany, anniversaries, often marked at five-year as well as ten-year
intervals, have helped set the rhythm for the production of history exhi-
bitions: in university towns on the anniversaries of the book burnings;
in cities that were bombed on the anniversaries of the most devastating
air-raid; in towns from which many Jews were deported, on the anniver-
saries of the main deportations; and so on. One aspect of this anniver-
sary reflex is that positive anniversaries, especially those that celebrate the
longevity of institutions, are, with increasing predictability, accompanied
by exhibitions about the organization’s role under National Socialism.
Where once these might have been put together by outsiders angry at an
institution’s perceived refusal to remember, they are now generally sup-
ported, indeed often initiated, by the institutions in question. Evidently,
institutions feel that social licence to celebrate their long existence is con-
ditional on their also acknowledging institutional culpability for events in
the Nazi era. The august Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg
celebrated its 350th anniversary, which fell in 2012, by mounting,
among other events, the exhibition ‘Geartete Kunst. Die Nürnberger
Akademie im Nationalsozialismus’ (‘Acceptable Art: The Nuremberg
Academy under National Socialism’) at the Dokumentationszentrum
Reichsparteitagsgelände. In 2013, the Munich suburb of Pasing cel-
ebrated the town’s foundation a remarkable 1250 years earlier with an
extensive programme that included the exhibition ‘Pasing im 3. Reich’.

15 ‘Das “Hausgefängnis” der Gestapo-Zentrale in Berlin. Terror und Widerstand 1933-

45’ (‘The “Private Prison” at the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin: Terror and Resistance,
1933–45’), 2005 at the Topographie des Terrors.
8 C. PAVER

In 2014, Salzburg’s Haus der Natur celebrated its 90-year existence with
an exhibition about its founding director’s role in the Nazi era.16
Having previously been slow to acknowledge their predecessors’ fail-
ings, the German and Austrian railway companies have embraced this
practice, both funding exhibitions about National Socialism and the rail-
ways to mark the 175th anniversary of the founding of the railways, DB
in 2010 and the ÖBB in 2012.17 The Austrian exhibition was part of a
programme that included parties at regional rail hubs, a competition to
envisage the next 175 years of railway travel, and a new train, liveried
in the colours of the Austrian flag. Yet, while the PR script interpreted
‘Tradition’ positively,18 the exhibition about the Nazi era was held on
company premises and opened by the Chair of the Board of Directors,
with the leader of Vienna’s Jewish community as a guest of honour.19
Another dynamic factor that keeps exhibition-making culture in
motion is the possibility for exhibition topics to move up or down the
scale between the local, regional and national. A proliferation of local
and regional exhibitions can sometimes justify the consolidation of
information in a national overview. As the team behind the first major
national exhibition on forced labour put it:

16 Norbert Winding, Robert Lindner, and Robert Hoffmann, ‘Geschichtsaufarbeitung

als Ausstellung. Das Haus der Natur 1924–1976 – die Ära Tratz’, Neues Museum, 14.4
(October 2014), 62–67.
17 ‘Das Gleis. Die Logistik des Rassenwahns’ (‘The Rails: the Logistics of Racial

Persecution’), 2010 at the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, and

‘Verdrängte Jahre. Bahn und Nationalsozialismus in Österreich 1938–1945’ (‘Years of
Repression: The Railways and National Socialism in Austria, 1938–1945’), 2012 in the
foyer of ÖBB Infrastruktur.
18 ‘Mit den Veranstaltungen [präsentieren sich] die Österreichischen Bundesbahnen […]

als modernes Unternehmen mit Tradition und hohem Zukunftspotential’ (‘These events
are intended to present ÖB as a modern company with a tradition and high potential for
the future’), https://www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20120621_OTS0195/oebb-
feiern-175-jahre-eisenbahn-mit-neun-bahnhofsfesten [accessed 29 May 2018].
19 Robin Ostow writes that when Munich celebrated its 850th anniversary the city’s insti-

tutions made ‘mostly celebratory programs’ and that only the Jüdisches Museum explored
‘The Dark Side of Munich History’ (as its exhibition was subtitled). If that was the case
(and the report at https://www.muenchen-transparent.de/dokumente/1626915/datei
[accessed 29 May 2018] seems to paint a more nuanced picture) then it was highly unu-
sual. Robin Ostow, ‘Creating a Bavarian Space for Rapprochement: The Jewish Museum
Munich’, in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. by Simone Lässig
and Miriam Rürup (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), pp. 280–97 (p. 289).
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Zuvor gezeigte Ausstellungen […] besaßen, so wichtig sie waren, über-

wiegend Ausschnittcharakter. […] Die Ausstellung “Zwangsarbeit. Die
Deutschen, die Zwangsarbeiter und der Krieg” integriert hingegen sol-
che Teilaspekte in eine Gesamtgeschichte der nationalsozialistischen
Zwangsarbeit.

(Exhibitions shown up to this point […], as important as they were,

tended to paint a partial picture. […] By contrast, the exhibition “Forced
Labour: The Germans, the Forced Labourers, and the War” integrates
such partial aspects into a comprehensive story of National Socialist forced
labour).20

Once this comprehensive overview had been shown in Berlin, the

German state used the exhibition in the service of cultural diplo-
macy, sending it to Moscow under the patronage of heads of state
Christian Wulff and Dmitry Medvedev, the very pinnacle of national
acknowledgement.
Following a series of regional exhibitions about the police force under
National Socialism,21 which reflected the regional governance of polic-
ing in Germany, the Conference of Interior Ministers, a periodic ministe-
rial summit, committed 1.3 million Euros to a project on the history of
the police under National Socialism, the cost to be shared between the
Bund and the Länder.22 While the exact dynamics of the decision-mak-
ing are unclear,23 publicity material suggested that the exhibition aimed
to get beyond the ‘lokale and regionale Ansätze’ (‘local and regional
approaches’) in research on this topic, which had reached only a limited

20 Volkhard Knigge, Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, and Jens-Christian Wagner, ‘Einleitung’,

in Zwangsarbeit. Die Deutschen, die Zwangsarbeiter und der Krieg, ed. by Volkhard Knigge,
Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, and Jens-Christian Wagner (Weimar: Stiftung Gedenkstätten
Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora, 2010), pp. 6–11 (p. 6).
21 These included police exhibitions in Hamburg (1998), Lübeck (2002), Cologne

(2002), Mainz (2003), Hannover (2003), and Jena (2009).

22 http://www.innenministerkonferenz.de/IMK/DE/termine/to-beschluesse/08-04-18/

Beschl%C3%BCsse.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2 [accessed 29 May 2018].

23 Papers from the Innenministerkonferenz record only the decision, but one of the

organizers has given an account: Detlev Graf von Schwerin, ‘Die deutsche Polizei im 20.
Jahrhundert – Dreimal Freund und Helfer?’ in Oranienburger Schriften. Beiträge aus der
Fachhochschule der Polizei des Landes Brandenburg 1 (May 2015), 7–11.
10 C. PAVER

public.24 The opening of ‘Ordnung und Vernichtung. Die Polizei im

NS-Staat’ (‘Order and Annihilation: The Police in the National Socialist
State’) at the DHM in 2011, with a speech from the Chair of the
Conference of Interior Ministers, might have been considered the end of
the topic’s journey towards national status, were it not that the national
project envisaged a re-dispersal to the regions. The project organiz-
ers produced a simplified version which could tour the regions and to
which regional authorities would be invited to add local material, a typi-
cal format for touring exhibitions about National Socialism. Meanwhile,
regional exhibitions about the police force under National Socialism con-
tinued to be produced independently of ‘Ordnung und Vernichtung’,
suggesting that the mechanisms that favour nationalizing a topic may be
weaker than regional cultural practices.25
In this way, the Kommunen-Land-Bund structure in Germany helps
to ensure the production of ever more exhibitions, not simply because of
the stratification of funding sources but because each level has perceived
deficits: a local or regional exhibition may be considered to confer too
low a status on a topic or reach too narrow an audience; but a national
or regional exhibition is always in danger of letting local citizens off the
hook by allowing them to consider the issues as distant and unrelated to
their world, so that higher-level exhibitions are sometimes re-localized to
repeat the admonitory mantra that ‘it happened here, too’. Inka Bertz
has noted a similar phenomenon in the case of Jewish museums, positing
a ‘dynamic relationship’ between ‘history from above’ and ‘history from
below’, where local action catalyses national action and vice versa.26

24 http://www.dhpol.de/de/hochschule/Departments/fost_1_6/01_projekt.php

[accessed 29 May 2018].

25 Bremen showed ‘Polizei. Gewalt. Bremens Polizei im Nationalsozialismus’ at the

same time as ‘Ordnung und Vernichtung’ in 2011; this was followed, in 2012, by a ver-
sion expanded to include Bremerhaven. Police exhibitions also appeared in Munich and
Hamburg in 2012.
26 Inka Bertz, ‘Jewish Museums in the Federal Republic of Germany’, in Visualizing

and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. by Richard I.
Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 80–112 (p. 105).
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

1.3  Scope of the Study

The study is based on first-hand knowledge of some 130 German and
Austrian history exhibitions and a good second-hand knowledge of
another 50 or so. In addition, I have collected basic data for some 500
temporary exhibitions since the year 2000. This year acts as a rough
starting date for the generalizations made in the study, though the exhi-
bitions I know at first-hand date from the beginning of my fieldwork in
2005. This limit to the retrospective reach of the analysis is largely prag-
matic: records of past exhibitions, especially those from the pre-Internet
era, are difficult to come by. Such records as exist rarely enable scholars
to reconstruct the appearance and dynamics of the exhibition room. The
chosen time frame is therefore not intended to obscure the decades of
exhibition-making that went before, not least because I am interested in
the fact that today’s exhibition-makers sometimes turn this earlier phase
of exhibition-making into an exhibit.27 A small but interesting body of
academic work makes some of these earlier exhibitions accessible.28 The
debates over the first of the so-called Wehrmacht Exhibitions in the
1990s act as an implicit prehistory to my study.29

27 For instance, in the exhibition ‘Forschung, Lehre, Unrecht. Die Universität Tübingen

im Nationalsozialismus’ (‘Research, Teaching, Dictatorship: The University of Tübingen

under National Socialism’), shown at the Museum der Universität Tübingen in 2015,
exhibition-makers showed a blown-up image of the local SA brigade. The caption identi-
fied this as one of the boards from a 1983 exhibition by the University on the subject of
its Nazi past. Together with more explicit statements elsewhere, this seemed designed to
defend the university against any suggestion that it was only just waking up to its responsi-
bilities in 2015.
28 Notably Cornelia Brink, ‘Auschwitz in der Paulskirche’. Erinnerungspolitik in

Fotoausstellungen der sechziger Jahre (Marburg: Jonas, 2000); Stephan A. Glienke, ‘Die
Darstellung der Shoah im öffentlichen Raum. Die Ausstellung “Die Vergangenheit mahnt”
(1960-62)’, in Erfolgsgeschichte Bundesrepublik? Die Nachkriegsgesellschaft im langen
Schatten des Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Stephan Alexander Glienke, Volker Paulmann, and
Joachim Perels (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), pp. 147–84; and Stephan Alexander Glienke,
Die Ausstellung ‘Ungesühnte Justiz’ (1959–1962). Zur Geschichte der Aufarbeitung nation-
alsozialistischer Justizverbrechen (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2008).
29 For my contribution, see: Chloe Paver, ‘“Ein Stück langweiliger als die

Wehrmachtsausstellung, aber dafür repräsentativer”: The Exhibition Fotofeldpost as Riposte

to the “Wehrmacht Exhibition”’, in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in
Literature, Film, and Discourse Since 1990, ed. by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg
Grote (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp. 107–25.
12 C. PAVER

However much they vary in topic, scope and ambition, history exhi-
bitions about National Socialism fall into one of two categories: perma-
nent or temporary. Dauerausstellungen are the primary embodiment of
a museum’s mission and ethos, showcasing the most significant objects
from its collection; Sonderausstellungen are much more diverse in format,
produced by both professional and amateur exhibition-makers, often as
short-lived responses to particular occasions. As historian Hans-Ulrich
Thamer acknowledges, Sonderausstellungen are able to take more risks
than permanent exhibitions: ‘Sie können argumentativ zuspitzen und
verdichten’ (‘They are able to make more pointed and concentrated
arguments’).30 While it pays to observe the formal distinction between
these exhibition types—since the resources devoted to them and the
purposes they serve are different—in practice, exhibition-makers often
work on both, applying a range of techniques across both. Besides, the
visiting public is unlikely to make a clear distinction between long-term
and short-term exhibitions given that they generally visit each once only.
For the purposes of this study, the two types of exhibition are treated as
equally valuable resources. At the same time, I recognize that while per-
manent exhibitions constitute relatively stable objects of study, enabling
the reader to visit them and test out my arguments, temporary exhibi-
tions, much like theatre performances, are accessible to the researcher
only in mediated form once they have reached the end of their run:
through the catalogue, if there is one, or through second-hand accounts.
To make it easier to challenge my arguments about temporary exhibi-
tions that can no longer be viewed, I give as much contextual infor-
mation about the displays as is possible in the limited space available,
so that in principle other inferences could be drawn. Where I know an
exhibition only through its catalogue or through accounts from exhibi-
tion-makers, this is made clear.
I include Austria in my study with the ready concession that I have
visited fewer museums and exhibitions there, but with the justifica-
tion that to exclude Austria for fear of not doing it full justice would
be to miss out on some of the most thoughtful, creative and provoca-
tive exhibitions on this topic. Austria has established memorials at former

30 Hans-Ulrich Thamer, ‘Die Inszenierung von Macht. Hitlers Herrschaft und ihre

Präsentation im Museum’, in Hitler und die Deutschen. Volksgemeinschaft und Verbrechen,

ed. by Hans-Ulrich Thamer and Simone Erpel (Dresden: Sandstein, 2010), pp. 17–22
(p. 22). See also Korff und Roth, pp. 21–22.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

concentration camps and at euthanasia centres; it has a number of Jewish

museums and a central Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen
Widerstandes. However, it has not built permanent spaces for exhibition
on the same scale as Germany.31 Beyond isolated examples such as the
voestalpine Zeitgeschichte MUSEUM, it has not followed the German
practice of opening documentation centres at sites of slave labour or the
administration of persecution. Yet, while the differences between the
German and the Austrian case must be acknowledged—particularly the
much slower and more cautious acknowledgement of Austrian respon-
sibility for Nazi crimes and persecution—exhibitions in both countries
are engaged in reflecting on similar issues and employ similar techniques.
Exhibition-makers such as Hanno Loewy and Bernhard Purin have
moved between the two countries.
The decision to include Jewish museums in the study also calls for
justification. Today, Jewish museums in Germany and Austria make it
their mission to relate the history of local Jewish life and culture from
its origins to the present day (even where little but the museum is left
in the present day). Some museums state explicitly that they are work-
ing against the tendency to reduce Jewish life and culture to its decima-
tion in the Holocaust. Yet the very existence of Jewish museums (and,
in most cases, their non-existence for at least four decades after 1945)
is inextricable from National Socialist persecution and genocide and
from post-war responses to those events. Writing about European Jewish
museums, Ruth Ellen Gruber puts it as follows:

Centuries of Jewish history are involved – not just the Shoah. Still, […]
in today’s Europe all Jewish museums are – to one degree or another –
Holocaust museums of a sort; what is presented is inevitably viewed
through the backward lens of the Shoah.32

If we accept this understanding of Jewish museums as ‘Holocaust muse-

ums of a sort’, which Gruber shares with many scholars and museum

31 For a list of Austrian museums and memorials see http://www.erinnern.at/bundeslae-

nder/oesterreich/gedaechtnisorte-gedenkstaetten/katalog [accessed 29 May 2018].

32 Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley,

CA, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 155–56.
14 C. PAVER

professionals,33 it would be perverse to exclude Jewish museums from

this study on the grounds that they engage with a longer historical
period or have a different cultural remit. Some of the most innovative
thinking about the display of objects from the National Socialist era, or
objects relating to its legacies, takes place in Jewish museums.
As this study is based in the arts rather than the social sciences,
it does not draw on data acquired from interviews with museum staff
or museum visitors. Nonetheless, it keeps in view the social context of
exhibition-making, including the public calls for objects mentioned ear-
lier in relation to Obersalzberg, exhibition proposals that are communi-
cated to the public during the development phase of museums and the
programme of events that accompanies exhibitions. While many such
activities surround the exhibition proper, informal discussions with exhi-
bition-makers have indicated that they still conceive of ‘the exhibition’
as a self-contained cultural product. Its clearly defined contours allow it
to be presented in a catalogue, in flyers and in press releases and to be
opened by a local politician. This boundedness (however artificially con-
structed) justifies the study, in this monograph, of the history exhibition
as a genre, largely independent of the many contexts and processes that
produce it, though not in ignorance of them and invoking them where
relevant.
Other necessary, but not naïve, simplifications in my study are my
reference throughout to ‘museums’, ‘museum objects’ and ‘exhibi-
tion-makers’. Strictly speaking, ‘museum’ applies to institutions that col-
lect, conserve, research and display three-dimensional objects. Memorial
sites often fulfil these functions alongside their other roles, whereas
documentation centres rarely start out with a mission to collect, even
if local people bring along donations regardless.34 While recognizing
33 For similar statements see Julius H. Schoeps, ‘Memories: Enlightenment and

Commemoration’, in Jewish Museum Vienna, ed. by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Hannes

Sulzenbacher (Vienna: Jüdisches Museum Wien, 1996), pp. 7–9 (pp. 8–9); Richard I.
Cohen, ‘The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life: An Overview’, in Visualizing and Exhibiting
Jewish Space and History: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. by Richard I. Cohen (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 3–24 (p. 17).
34 Sharon Macdonald recalls a discussion with a curator at the Dokumentationszentrum

Reichsparteitagsgelände who claimed that while they could not prevent the public from
bringing them Nazi ‘kitsch’ they had no intention of showing it. As Sects. 3.3 and 5.1
show, the documentation centre has since integrated such items into their exhibitions—in
their capacity as historical kitsch. Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the
Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 124.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

these distinctions, I use ‘museum’ as a shorthand because my focus is

on objects, the mainstay of museums. ‘Museum objects’ can then serve
as a pragmatic shorthand for all objects relevant to the topic of National
Socialist materiality, even if sometimes that includes objects that are not
part of a museum collection.
Exhibition-making involves a division of labour not unlike film-mak-
ing.35 An exhibition may involve conservators, curators, histori-
ans, designers, PR and marketing professionals and translators. In its
‘Impressum’, the new (2016) permanent exhibition at the Gedenkstätte
Buchenwald names some 130 individuals or firms who were involved
in the exhibition’s production and another twenty or so advisers. This
means that any simple notion of intentionality, whereby ‘exhibition-mak-
ers’ purposefully create and intend all their effects, is a fiction. It is an
occasionally useful fiction in a book that covers a lot of ground in a lim-
ited space, but in general where I use ‘exhibition-makers’ I take as read
that the behind-the-scenes processes are more complex than the visitor
can read from the finished product. To offset the intentional fallacy to a
degree, I have chosen not to name individual curators and museum his-
torians (except when quoting from their writings), since their exact role
may be impossible to reconstruct. More detailed individual studies would
be needed to give full credit to some of the very creative individuals in
the industry.

1.4  Research Context
Chapter 2 builds a platform for my argument out of selected theo-
ries and concepts; here I briefly appraise the broader research field. In
their introduction to a 2002 volume of essays, Alon Confino and Peter
Fritzsche argue that:

The most common approach to the study of the work of memory in

Germany has been to explore how the German past was represented in

35 For the classic division of labour in the exhibition-making process, see Faye Sayer,

Public History: A Practical Guide (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 57–58.
In small museums or amateur organisations, one or two people may fulfil these roles
between them.
16 C. PAVER

distinct cultural artefacts such as museums, monuments, former concentra-

tion camps, films, novels, poems, and memoirs.36

Their own collection of essays seeks, they say, ‘to take memory out of
the museum and beyond the monument’ in order to study ‘what peo-
ple actually “do” with their memories’.37 While I share their feeling
that scholarship on the memory of National Socialism is sometimes in
danger of repeating itself—‘as yet another (mostly Holocaust) memory
is subjected to an analysis of its construction, representation, and con-
testation’—I challenge their assertion that the study of museums in
German memory culture had exhausted its usefulness by 2002.38 This is
not simply because the majority of exhibitions analysed in this study have
taken place since 2002, often in institutions that had yet to be founded
in 2002. That might, after all, be read as confirmation of Confino’s and
Fritzsche’s view that scholars are merely waiting for the next representa-
tion of the past to emerge so that they can perform the same tired old
operations on it. Rather, I would argue that both museums and scholars
are still developing models for understanding what role material culture
has played in the German and Austrian experience of history and what
role it plays in private and public engagement with the Nazi past.
Whereas scholarship on post-Wende museums of the communist GDR
is dominated by discussions of their use of material culture, research on
history exhibitions about the Third Reich and Holocaust is not centrally
concerned with objects, their survival, collection or display. Objects have
most readily been studied in the context of Jewish museums, which are
defined by the absence of a broad object base and by responses to that
absence. Matti Bunzl, for instance, begins his article on the Jüdisches
Museum Wien with a brief analysis of its two famous ‘anti-exhibits’: its
visible storeroom or ‘Schaudepot’ and its holograms. These, he notes,
occupy two poles of materiality: an ‘acutely unsettling’ ‘massed pres-
ence’ of objects on the one hand and a virtual representation that ‘resists

36 Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, ‘Introduction: Noises of the Past’, in The Work of

Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. by Alon Confino
and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 1–21
(p. 3).
37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

object-bound museology’ on the other.39 Sabine Offe’s work questions

the motivation and meanings behind non-Jewish engagement with
Jewish objects in the 1990s, while Bernhard Purin has reflected on how
museums have responded to the market in Jewish antiques.40
By contrast, research on memorial sites is dominated by museum ped-
agogy and visitor research, with exhibited objects generally only a back-
ground concern.41 This body of work does, however, demonstrate some
of the advantages of treating exhibitions as public history. While much
of the scholarly work on museums and exhibitions dealing with National
Socialism comes from within memory studies, few if any of those who
make exhibitions would call themselves ‘memory workers’; they would
call themselves historians or museum educators. Introducing a collection
of essays on how the National Socialist era has been investigated outside
university settings (including in museums), Frank Bösch and Constantin
Goschler advocate the use of the English-language term ‘public his-
tory’ to categorize and conceptualize this work. First, however, they
insist on freeing the term from two unfair judgements often expressed
through it: that those working outside of academia are ‘just’ contribut-
ing to memory culture, not historiography; and that theirs is ‘popular’
history, hanging on to the coat tails of academic historiography but una-
ble to make original discoveries.42 For Bösch and Goschler, public his-
tory should be taken seriously on its own terms, both for its potential
to catalyse academic historiography and for its power to shape views of
the past. In my own argument, I am sometimes interested in instances in

39 Matti Bunzl, ‘Of Holograms and Storage Areas: Modernity and Postmodernity at

Vienna’s Jewish Museum’, Cultural Anthropology, 18 (2003), 435–68 (pp. 436, 439).
40 Sabine Offe, ‘Sites of Remembrance? Jewish Museums in Contemporary Germany’,

Jewish Social Studies, 3 (1997), 77–89 and Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen.

Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und Österreich (Berlin and Vienna: Philo, 2000). Bernhard
Purin, ‘Dinge ohne Erinnerung. Anmerkungen zum schwierigen Umgang mit jüdischen
Kult- und Ritualobjekten zwischen Markt und Museum’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für
Volkskunde, 47 (1993), 147–66. See also Gruber.
41 Most recently, and with a good overview of previous work, Cornelia
Geißler, Individuum und Masse. Zur Vermittlung des Holocaust in deutschen
Gedenkstättenausstellungen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015).
42 Frank Bösch and Constantin Goschler, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche

Public History’, in Public History. Öffentliche Darstellungen des Nationalsozialismus jenseits

der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. by Frank Bösch and Constantin Goschler (Frankfurt am Main
and New York: Campus, 2009), pp. 7–23.
18 C. PAVER

which exhibition-makers simplify academic historiography for a broader

audience, but I treat this phenomenon more neutrally than Bösch’s and
Goschler’s imagined critics. For my purposes, looking at exhibitions as
public history has the advantage of freeing them from the expectation of
innovation, originality and creativity that often comes with approaches in
the arts. This is not to say that the exhibitions in this study are not often
creative, but few would meet the standards of originality applied to nov-
els or films. As a form of mass communication, public history has good
reason to be middlebrow: its yardstick is professionalism, not avant-garde
aesthetics or intellectual provocation. Accordingly, art exhibitions are
largely excluded from this study, though I cite some exhibitions where
artists have been invited to work with museum objects and some art
exhibition catalogues containing essays on objects.
In line with the ‘transnational turn’ in Holocaust studies, there
is a rich vein of transnational comparative studies of post-Holocaust
or post-trauma museums.43 Some of these take an interest in ‘what
remains’ in a material sense. In particular, Paul Williams’s work exam-
ines the fragments that remain of past atrocities. Though not centrally
concerned with Germany, Williams has set up an expectation that post-
trauma museums struggle to populate their collections because victim
groups are ‘object-poor’, something this study challenges.44 In prac-
tice, Williams goes on to list a whole series of object categories that are
typical for camp museums, so that his claim should not be taken out of
its more differentiated context. In her wide-ranging study of the use of
multiple media to create effects of empathy in the museum, Arnold-de

43 Most recently: Hannah Holtschneider, The Holocaust and Representations of Jews:

History and Identity in the Museum (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), a
comparative study of the Imperial War Museum and the Jüdisches Museum Berlin;
Angelika Schoder, Die Vermittlung des Unbegreiflichen. Darstellungen des Holocaust im
Museum (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2014), a comparative study of the
Imperial War Museum and the Deutsches Historisches Museum; Arnold-de Simine; and
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges
of Representation (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press,
2014), which compares the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, USHMM, and Yad Vashem.
44 ‘Compared to conventional history museums […] there is a basic difficulty with the

object base of memorial museums: orchestrated violence aims to destroy, and typically does
so efficiently. The injured, dispossessed, and expelled are left object-poor’. Paul Williams,
Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford and New York:
Berg, 2007), p. 25.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

Simine cites Williams’ ‘object-poor’ claim and suggests that ‘memory

museums’ are ‘not so much driven by objects but by narratives and per-
formances’.45 She, too, however, analyses a number of museums with
extensive object displays. This notion of ‘sparseness’ is explored further
in Sect. 2.2.
These transnational studies tend to focus on a limited number of
high-profile museums, such as the Imperial War Museum, the USHMM
and the Jüdisches Museum Berlin. While the latter lends itself exception-
ally well to international comparison, where it can be used to represent
Germany’s national self-understanding, it is hardly typical of broader
trends in museum work in Germany. Or, rather, the ways in which it is
typical of German history museums—for instance its relatively conven-
tional use of objects—are not generally what interests the authors of
international comparative studies.
Proceeding from a different corpus of museums, the present study
argues that material culture remains at the heart of exhibition practice in
German history museums, even those that represent victims in their most
‘object-poor’ state, and indeed that some of the most interesting think-
ing is happening in relation to objects. As such, this book aligns itself
more closely with Sharon Macdonald’s work on museums and memo-
rials which defends nation-based studies as the necessary foundation for
(and nuancing corrective to) transnational work.46 Her 2009 monograph
Difficult Heritage works with Daniel Levy’s and Natan Sznaider’s con-
cept of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘deterritorialized’ memory,47 while insisting
that memory must of necessity be expressed in local settings. This jus-
tifies her own study, based on fieldwork in Nuremberg. ‘Because of the
inevitability of local specification – or territorialisation – and its working
out in practice’, Macdonald argues, ‘we need local studies’.48 Yet, with
Levy and Sznaider in mind, she remains alert to the connection between
local manifestations and wider frames of reference, because ‘local actions
are frequently negotiated through comparisons with other places,

45 Arnold-de Simine, pp. 2, 10.

46 Thisparagraph summarizes arguments that are explored in more detail in Chloe Paver,
‘The Transmission of Household Objects from the National Socialist Era to the Present
in Germany and Austria: A Local Conversation within a Globalized Discourse’, Fudan
Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 9 (2016), 229–52.
47 Macdonald, Difficult Heritage, p. 131.

48 Macdonald, p. 187.
20 C. PAVER

through concepts and ideas produced elsewhere’.49 In a later work,

Memorylands, Macdonald reverses the polarity, basing her generalizations
about Europe on local field studies.50
To focus on Germany and Austria, as this study does, is therefore a
conscious choice. While acknowledging that memorial sites and Jewish
museums face outwards to the diaspora of victims of descendants, this
study takes a particular interest in the inward-looking discourses that
exhibitions about National Socialism in Germany and Austria respond
to and produce: the discussions among Germans or among Austrians
about their own past and about their family heritage. I have proposed
elsewhere that a single sentence in the redesigned Militärhistorisches
Museum der Bundeswehr which addresses a young person with the
words ‘Das alles hat es auch in Deiner Stadt gegeben’ [‘All this hap-
pened in your home town, too’] typifies much museum discourse in
Germany and Austria today.51 For while some larger museums at tour-
ist destinations supply an English translation of their main texts, most
history exhibitions with a local or regional focus are mono-lingual, tar-
geted at German or Austrian citizens and telling them ‘This happened
in your home town’. Aleida Assmann has termed this ‘[die] deutsche
Selbstbezüglichkeit [der Erinnerungskultur]’ [‘the German self-ref-
erentiality of memory culture’] and in her own work deliberately steps
beyond it into transnational and global contexts.52 Coming as it does
from outside Germany, the present study does not need to ‘intervene’
in German memory culture to shape its future (Assmann terms her study
an ‘intervention’), nor to worry about German parochialism, allowing
it to analyse precisely that ‘Selbstbezüglichkeit’ that persists in German
and Austrian exhibition-making today. Even as this study acknowledges
the increasing globalization of memory forms and practices, it cautions

49 Macdonald, p. 4. See also p. 187.

50 Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe (Abingdon and
New York: Routledge, 2013). For a broader discussion see Jennifer M. Kapczynski and
Erin McGlothlin, ‘Introduction’, in Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies,
ed. by Erin McGlothlin and Jennifer M. Kapczynski (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2016), pp. 1–16. They argue that scholars within German Studies have missed opportu-
nities to engage with transnational research while, in turn, international Holocaust Studies
has unfairly neglected the nation-based expertise of German Studies.
51 Paver, ‘The Transmission of Household Objects’, p. 236.

52 Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention

(Munich: Beck, 2013), p. 14.

 1 INTRODUCTION 21

against moving too quickly and smoothly to transnational research while

the role of the local and familial in German and Austrian history exhibi-
tions has yet to be fully understood.

1.5  Structure of the Analysis

As is evident from its chapter titles, the study takes a broadly chrono-
logical approach to objects from the years 1933 onwards. This heuris-
tic device balances two considerations against each other. On the one
hand, all exhibition displays are the product of memory work in the
present, so that one could, in theory, lump everything together under
the heading ‘material memory in the early 21st century’. At the same
time, exhibition-makers on this topic structure their exhibition narratives
chronologically. Given the importance of cause and effect and before and
after for the historiography of the Nazi era, the exhibition space is rarely
organized thematically. A chronological structure acknowledges exhibi-
tion-makers’ awareness of time and allows me to unpick its construction.
Typically, each history exhibition in this study contains a wealth of
objects, arranged in complex configurations. The choice to discuss a
small selection of objects from across a range of unrelated exhibitions
is therefore open to challenge. In the chapters that follow, my aim is,
on the one hand, to identify categories of object that are typical for this
exhibition topic (all the while questioning why exhibition-makers have
chosen to make them so) and, on the other hand, to consider how cer-
tain types of museum object relate to broader public and academic dis-
courses about German and Austrian memory of National Socialism:
discussions about what majority Germans knew of Nazi crimes, for
instance, or about the right of majority Germans to remember their own
suffering. The study will show that some categories that are central to
academic German memory studies—generation, trauma, and postmem-
ory—feature only marginally in object display. The sophisticated results
of scholarly study of mentalities in the 1930s and 1940s prove difficult to
replicate in object form, and exhibition-makers have to find ways around
this problem. Finally, the disapproval of post-war failings in memory
which is a regular feature of public discourse (not least in speeches given
by local politicians at the opening ceremonies for exhibitions) is often
taken as read by exhibition-makers and assumed not to need direct artic-
ulation when relevant objects are presented.
22 C. PAVER

Dividing the chronological chapters into sub-chapters allows me to

move between objects relating to the German and Austrian majority cul-
ture and objects relating to the primary victims of National Socialism.
While it would be possible to write a study of just one of the two cate-
gories, that would run counter to exhibition practice as I have observed
it. Any good-quality exhibition about the majority culture devotes space
to the victims of majority actions, often showing personal items that have
been acquired by reaching out to survivors or descendants. Equally, exhi-
bitions at memorial sites all include information on the life and culture of
the SS guards and may even show personal items where these have some-
thing to say about mentality or culpability. Increasingly, memorial sites
also address the actions of the non-persecuted majority under headings
such as ‘Die Volksgemeinschaft’ (the Nazi ‘national community’) or ‘Das
Lager und die Stadt’ (‘The Camp and the Town’).
There is some crossover between the objects representing the two
groups. One cannot tell just by looking at a battered suitcase whether
it belonged to a Jewish emigrant or to an ethnic German fleeing the
Soviet advance. Nor can one tell from looking at a brooch shaped like
a fox terrier whether it belongs in an exhibition about German fashion
in the 1930s or in an exhibition about concentration camp prisoners, as
evidence that they made objects to maintain their will to survive.53 This
material crossover is, however, limited, and the categorical difference
between being privileged by the Nazis and persecuted by them means
that the life cycles of objects and their potential significations in the
museum are quite different and need to be thought through separately.
The challenge is to do that without unconsciously constructing a single
victim experience or a single majority experience.
Chapter 2 builds a framework for the main analysis out of key con-
cepts in museum studies and historiography: objects as fragments and
signs; objects as conduits for emotions and mentalities; and the object
life cycle. Chapter 3, ‘Material Experiences, 1933–45’, begins by reach-
ing back beyond 1933/1938, assessing curators’ use of objects to
demonstrate the Jewish participation in Heimat culture. As the chapter
shows, these exhibition-makers may not appear, strictly speaking, to be
‘exhibiting the Nazi past’ but they are, as is fundamentally the case in

53 Almost identical fox terriers have appeared in ‘Glanz und Grauen’ (an exhibition dis-

cussed in later chapters) and in the permanent exhibition at the Gedenkstätte und Museum
Sachsenhausen.
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

Jewish museums, exhibiting the pre-Nazi past in direct response to the

Nazi past. There follows a consideration of more typically ‘Nazi’ objects,
both those with an obvious propaganda purpose—now framed critically
in the museum—and those that represent more subtly the mentalities of
the German and Austrian majority. Finally, Chapter 3 considers objects
from the nadir of the era: objects from the concentration camps and
objects relating to the sufferings of the non-persecuted majority during
wartime. The objects discussed in Chapter 4, ‘Material Collapse, 1945’,
all bear clear marks of a time of transition: for the non-persecuted major-
ity a time to shed the trappings of the old regime (a process now clearly
criticized in the museum) and for Jewish victims a time to return to life
with whatever material was available.
Chapter 5, ‘Material After-Lives Between the Attic and the Museum’,
is the longest part of the study, reflecting the fact that much of the most
interesting thinking about objects is happening in relation to their fates
after 1945. Many of the objects discussed here were produced between
1933 and 1945 but kept long afterwards. Whether they were hidden
away or cherished and kept on show can tell the museum visitor much
about how the different social groups (persecuted and non-persecuted)
lived with the Nazi past. Other objects were produced or damaged in the
long process of ‘coming to terms’, of arriving at a more honest under-
standing of the majority’s role in National Socialism.
Finally, Chapter 5 shows how objects continue to be reshaped once
they cross the threshold to the museum. These processes chime with
what exhibition-makers at the Gedenkstätte Mauthausen said in their
text ‘Objekte erzählen Geschichte’ in their 2003 permanent exhibi-
tion: ‘Diese Spuren der Vergangenheit sind aber auch Teil der heutigen
Realität. Sie werden laufend geformt, verändert, historische Objekte
werden restauriert, in Sammlungen neu geordnet und auch persönliche
Erinnerungen ändern sich im Laufe der Zeit’ (‘These traces of the past
are also part of today’s reality. They continue to be shaped and changed;
historical objects are restored or assigned to different categories within
the museum collection; and even personal memories change over the
course of time’). When I visited that exhibition in 2006, the text seemed
too challenging in its abstraction for an average visitor. Now it seems to
reflect quite plainly German and Austrian exhibition-makers’ understand-
ing of the mutability of objects from the years 1933–45.
 CHAPTER 2

Between the Material and the Immaterial

2.1  Broken Glass
This chapter establishes a conceptual framework for the critical
analysis of exhibition practice that follows it. Since the overarching
argument of this book concerns the relationship between the abstract
and the material, my discussion of concepts proceeds from a concrete
example. The broken shards of a crystal vase, displayed in 2012 at the
Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, serve to tease out ini-
tial thoughts about the relationship between physical reality and intangi-
ble realities, as embodied in objects that date from the National Socialist
era and its after-years. Subsequent sections of the chapter systematize
these preliminary thoughts using three frames of reference that have
already been modelled—more or less fully—in scholarship: the museum
object as signifier; the object as conduit for experiences, emotions and
mentalities; and the life cycle of the object.
In order to make these conceptual tools serviceable for a study of
history exhibitions about the years 1933–45 in Germany and Austria,
the chapter will need to distinguish between those characteristics that
are shared by all museum objects—their passage through successive life
phases, for instance—and those that are specific to objects connected
to National Socialism and its legacies. In narrowing the focus from the
general to the particular, it will help to keep two opposing aspects of
National Socialism in view. First, the National Socialist regime and its
agents produced, instrumentalized, stole, transported, sold, recycled and

© The Author(s) 2018 25

C. Paver, Exhibiting the Nazi Past, The Holocaust and its Contexts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77084-0_2
26 C. PAVER

destroyed vast numbers of objects between 1933 and 1945, while ordi-
nary people acquired, lost, exchanged, transported, salvaged or recycled
objects in response. These processes continued after 1945, when millions
of objects were partially or wholly destroyed, hidden, neglected, found
and restored. Second, 1933–45 was a period in which the key events
and outcomes were not material products such as inventions or construc-
tions but, rather, many millions of human actions and engagements—
injustices, displacements, injuries, murders and bereavements—which in
turn left a post-war legacy of survivals, new beginnings and psychological
scarring.
First, then, the glass shards. The ‘Aryanization’ process, by which
the Nazi state gradually deprived Jews of property, possessions and the
right to work in the 1930s, has been a recurrent theme in exhibitions
since the late 1990s, reflecting an interest in how the non-persecuted
German majority witnessed, participated in and in some cases prof-
ited from persecution of their Jewish fellow citizens. The exhibition
‘Entrechtet. Entwürdigt. Beraubt. “Arisierung” in Nürnberg und Fürth’
(‘Disenfranchised, Humiliated, Robbed: “Aryanization” in Nuremberg
and Fürth’) was therefore typical of many local reckonings with this
shameful aspect of civic history.
In a section of the exhibition devoted to the radicalization of
anti-Jewish policies in the context of the Pogrom of November 1938,
a small glass case was flanked by full-height photographs, one show-
ing the public burning of synagogue furniture, the other the burnt-out
shell of a synagogue. The label for the glass box, which contained nine
or ten pieces of broken glass, read: ‘Während der Pogromnacht in der
Wohnung der Familie Jakob zerstörte Kristallvase. Leihgabe Eva Rössner’
(‘Crystal vase, destroyed in the home of the Jakob family on the night of
the pogrom. Loaned by Eva Rössner’). The intact base of the vase was set
flat on the floor of the case, making it possible to reconstruct its shape in
one’s imagination. No attempt was made to show the museum’s order-
ing hand, in the way that a set of archaeological fragments might show
signs of classification, visual alignment or reconstruction. Instead, the
shards were arranged in a studiedly random way, facing in different direc-
tions, with either the internal or external surface upwards, evoking the
pattern in which they might have fallen at the moment of breakage.
The lack of explicit direction in the caption allowed for various mean-
ings and connections to emerge which, between them, range across the
analytical models introduced in this chapter. First, the broken vase stands
 2 BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL 27

in various ways for wider meanings and contexts, corresponding to the

linguistic figures of synecdoche, metaphor and metonymy. Like all
museum objects the glass is a fragment of a bigger historical process and
therefore a synecdochic figure. The Jakob family was just one of many
who experienced violent harassment; the object was one of tens of thou-
sands smashed up over two days of violence; the violence was more than
just physical and was part of wider government policy. The vase need not
itself have been fragmented for it to play the conventional museum role
of the part that relates to a whole, but the violence that broke the object
serves as a metaphor for the violence subsequently inflicted on human
bodies and the vase’s fragmented state for family lives torn apart by Nazi
persecution. Finally, if we understand metonymy as a relation of conti-
guity, including the contiguity of cause and effect, then the shards of the
vase evoke what broke them: the angry heft of racial hatred. In museum
exhibitions about the November Pogrom, Nazi hatred is evoked largely
through photographs of the aftermath of looting and destruction; a nar-
row selection of mostly exterior motifs shows bodies passively observing.
In its smashed state, the vase brings us much closer to the muscle power
of violence.1
In a literary text, such figurative readings might be considered cli-
chéd or simplistic, but museums, as purveyors of public history, tend to
draw on a stock of available figures rather than creating original ones.
Allowing for this relative crudeness of effect, the last-mentioned, meto-
nymic figure is perhaps the most powerful effect of the shards, for they
return us to the moment at which Nazi men broke into an apartment
and vented their racist aggression by smashing up whatever their hands
and sticks could reach. As such, the shards also fit the second model
outlined in this chapter: objects conceptualized as conduits for (rather

1 The Geschichtswerkstatt des Vereins Rückblende Gegen das Vergessen in Volkmarsen,

Hessen, a small amateur museum of Jewish life and culture, has the only reconstruction I
have seen of a wrecked Jewish apartment. Though professional museums generally avoid
reconstructions, this one, based on an account given by the victim, is surprisingly effective.
Where repetitive photographic motifs generally keep us at a distance from the vandalism,
here, crockery has been smashed, drawers emptied and chairs turned over. A 2002 exhi-
bition at the Jüdisches Museum Wien, ‘Eine Nacht und ein Tag. Eine Ausstellung zum
9/10. November 1938 in Wien’ (‘One Night and One Day: An Exhibition about the 9th
and 10th November 1933 in Vienna’) deliberately did without photographs of the Pogrom
because they had become so over-used (conversation with Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek,
2006).
28 C. PAVER

than simply ‘witnesses’ to or ‘documents’ of) experience, emotions and

mentalities. In this case, the Jakobs’ experienced the acquisition and
display of the vase (however that might have come about) as pleasura-
ble; they experienced the threat of state power through the vandalism of
their possessions, with its implicit threat to their bodies; they mourned
the lost object by keeping its fragments. The mentality of the perpetra-
tors, on the other hand, conditioned by prevailing political conditions,
expressed itself in a loss of inhibition, allowing antipathy to be unleashed
physically on fellow citizens’ belongings.
The shards of glass also draw attention to the life cycle of the object,
the third scholarly model that will be outlined and appraised in this
chapter. In general, the breaking of an object leads to its disposal, dis-
qualifying it from acquisition by a museum. Exhibitions about National
Socialism, however, contain many damaged and broken objects and
much that would, in all other contexts, be classed as rubbish. While there
is no single unifying factor in such displays of rubbish, the phenomenon
is obviously connected to the violence and destruction of the period. In
this case, the end of the vase’s useful life is particularly acutely expressed:
whereas a broken household implement might continue to function par-
tially, or be re-functioned, a decorative glass object ceases once and for
all to fulfil the function for which it was manufactured the moment it
is no longer whole. By drawing attention to the moment at which the
swing of an SA man’s arm re-categorizes the object as rubbish, the dis-
play focuses on the meaning of this radical devaluation. The smashing
of the vase neither interfered in the functioning of the household nor
impoverished the family, but this very pointlessness expressed the state’s
arbitrary power. The vase had at least two more life phases left after its
useful life ended (and a third if one counts its museum display). Its pres-
ervation as precious rubbish after the attack speaks of the psychological
scars left on the family, possibly also of lingering hopes for a return to
normality. Its preservation down to the third generation speaks of the
intergenerational transmission of Holocaust effects.2
Even if rarely made explicit in the individual captions assigned to
objects, meanings such as those elaborated above are readily available to

2 Internet research indicates that Eva Rössner is the Jakobs’ granddaughter:

http://blankgenealogy.com/holocaust/Histories%20and%20stories/Dannenberg/
Dannenberg,%20Einstein%20and%20Jacob%20Family%20during%20the%20Nazi%20
Period.pdf [accessed 29 May 2018].
 2 BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL 29

visitors because museums make clear, in their broader narratives and in

their paratexts, that it is people, and not objects, that matter in narratives
of National Socialist persecution and murder. No museum invites its vis-
itor to think that it is a shame—from the point of view of the material
world—that a vase was broken. Culturally aware visitors may occasionally
grieve for an irretrievably lost artwork, but the vast majority of broken,
stolen or misappropriated objects are shown to demonstrate what the
Nazis and those who supported them did to people, what kind of people
Nazi supporters were and what suffering the victims endured.
At the same time, because the Nazis harassed and persecuted its vic-
tims through objects (through their public display, their vandalism,
their theft, and—in the camps—their imposition, prohibition or use
as weapons), and because German history museums see it as their pri-
mary aim to give voice to the victims’ suffering, the significance of an
object loops from object to person and back to object. Having acted as
a signifier, object, agent or currency within the Nazi system, the object
is more than a passive historical witness: its physicality was invested
with emotion, caused pain or enabled survival. This is one strand of
Axel Drecoll’s defence of the use of objects, rather than ‘documen-
tation’, in German history museums. Things, he says, are not just
exhibits, but can teach visitors about ‘die Gegenstandsbeziehungen
gewöhnlicher Leute’ (‘ordinary people’s relationships to objects’)
and about ‘die Materialisierung von Politik’ (‘the way in which poli-
tics takes material form’). He reminds us that: ‘Gerade Dinge im Sinne
von Produkten sind und waren im NS-Regime auch und vor allem Teile
symbolisch vermittelter Bedeutungssysteme, die kollektiven Sinn und
soziale Integration stifteten’ (‘Under the Nazi regime, things, particu-
larly in the sense of products, were also – in fact, primarily – compo-
nents in mediated systems of meaning that created a sense of collective
identity and social integration’).3 Drecoll is making an argument specif-
ically about how to present the majority culture (what the Nazis called
the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’) in museums but what he says applies equally
to other categories of object, including those belonging to the victims,

3 Axel Drecoll, ‘NS-Volksgemeinschaft ausstellen. Zur Reinszenierung einer

Schreckensvision mit Verheißungskraft’, in Die NS-Volksgemeinschaft. Zeitgenössische
Verheißung, analytisches Konzept und ein Schlüssel zum historischen Lernen?, ed. by Uwe
Danker and Astrid Schwabe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 105–22
(p. 121).
30 C. PAVER

which are also not simply exhibits from the past but acted and were acted
on, signified and were given meaning, in ways that can help us under-
stand the victim experience. Sometimes, then, the thing is the thing,
so to speak, but only ever because the thing was the agent or object of
human thoughts and feelings.4 It is this interplay between the human
and the material that this chapter seeks to systematize more clearly and
that the study as a whole explores.5
The chapter draws together ideas from across several disciplines—
history and sociology; cultural memory and museum studies; and art
history and material culture studies. It also draws together conventional
academic research and semi-academic writing produced in the context of
exhibitions for publication in exhibition catalogues. It is because these
connections (and their implications for exhibition practice) are still
emerging that this book is able to make a significant contribution to the
field.

2.2  Objects as Signifiers and Fragments

Puzzling over a bunch of keys that were donated to the Jüdisches Museum
Hohenems in 2007 and that were alleged to have belonged to ‘Aryanized’
properties, Anika Reichwald asked, in a curator’s note displayed alongside
them, what they, and the act of keeping them, might ‘stand for’:

4 Atina Grossmann, whose work is discussed in Sect. 2.3, performs this kind of loop when

she first argues that the victims’ material losses in the ‘Aryanization’ process were funda-
mentally immaterial (‘These are the immaterial losses, the identities forever disrupted that
could never be put back together again’) but then returns to the material: ‘Interestingly,
however, these profound, intangible losses are often linked to the re-imagining, and then
listing, of particular objects’. Atina Grossmann, ‘Family Files: Emotions and Stories of
(Non-)Restitution’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 34.1 (2012), 59–78
(pp. 73–74).
5 The opposition between ‘human’ and ‘material’ is heuristic and not intended to deny

the materiality of the human body. Beyond the human remains from the Holocaust, whose
museum presentation has been well researched, a pertinent example of the human body
experienced materially can be found in the catalogue of ‘Ein gewisses jüdisches Etwas’
(‘A Certain Jewish Something’, 2009 at the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt). Although the
‘Etwas’ that Eva Szepesi brought forward was a framed photograph of herself as a child,
the accompanying text makes clear that the key ‘Etwas’ are her plaits, the loss of which at
Auschwitz she still deeply mourns. Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main (ed.), Geschenkte
Geschichten. Zum 20-Jahres-Jubiläum des jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt
am Main: Societätsverlag, 2009), pp. 224–25.
 2 BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL 31

Steht die Aufbewahrung dieser Schlüssel für eine “Bewahrung” der

Macht, die die Nazis über ihre Opfer hatten – ein Gefühl von Superiorität
und Bedeutungsgewinn? Stehen diese Schlüssel und Schlösser für ein
Unrechtsbewusstsein – ein Gedanken an die entrechteten, vertriebenen
und ermordeten Juden?

(Does storing these keys stand for a “conserving” of the power that the
Nazis had over their victims – a feeling of superiority and of an increase in
consequence? Do the keys and locks stand for a consciousness that a wrong
has been committed – recalling the Jews who were deprived of their rights,
driven out, and murdered?)6

The previous owner, Reichwald implies, loaded the keys with mean-
ing by acquiring them, thinking about them and keeping them safe,
and they can carry a trace of that meaning, however faint and imper-
fectly encoded, to the museum visitor. Evidently, the understanding
that objects in museums are ‘Semiophoren’ or ‘Zeichenträger’ (‘trans-
porters of signs’),7 standing for more than themselves, holds true for
the topic of National Socialism as much as for any museum topic. This
still leaves us with the question of what kinds of signification are pos-
sible. Likewise, if we accept that all museum collections are character-
ized by ‘Fragmentarik’ (‘fragmentariness’),8 because it is only possible to
preserve a small part of the material residue of the past, it is still useful
to define further what form that fragmentariness takes for the topic of
National Socialism.
When, in 1990, Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth spoke of the impor-
tance of a ‘visuelle Rhetorik’ in the museum,9 they were doubtless speak-
ing figuratively, yet terms from ancient rhetoric—synecdoche, metonymy,
metaphor—can help to pin down the logic by which museum objects
are made to stand for aspects of the past, in particular, as in the case of

6 Hanno Loewy and Anika Reichwald (eds), Übrig. Ein Blick in die Bestände – zum 25.

Geburtstag des Jüdischen Museums Hohenems (Hohenems, Vienna, and Vaduz: Bucher,
2016), p. 60.
7 Krzysztof Pomian, Der Ursprung des Museums. Vom Sammeln, trans. by Gustav Roßler

(Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988).

8 Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth, ‘Einleitung’, in Das historische Museum. Labor,

Schaubühne, Identitätsfabrik ed. by Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth (Frankfurt am Main
and New York: Campus Verlag, 1990), pp. 9–37 (pp. 18, 21).
9 Korff and Roth, p. 23.
32 C. PAVER

Reichwald’s keys, for abstract and ephemeral actions, mentalities and

emotions. These are, as will become clearer in Sect. 2.3, central to the
historical study of National Socialism and its aftermath but are not them-
selves amenable to collection and display.
In rhetoric, synecdoche involves substituting the part for the whole
or the species for the genus.10 In museums, which must miniaturize
the past world, this substitution is more common than its inverse: the
whole standing for the part, or the genus for the species. In metonymy,
an object or abstraction is replaced by a contiguous object or abstrac-
tion. The contiguity need not be spatial—it may be temporal, causal or
logical—but the assumption is that there is ‘eine reale Beziehung’ (‘a
real relationship’) between the two terms.11 This separates metonymy
from metaphor. Synecdoche, then, assumes a partial identity between
the terms of the substitution; metonymy assumes that the terms are
non-identical but contiguous; and metaphor assumes the terms are
non-identical and not contiguous, but similar. While some substitu-
tions common in ancient rhetoric (Gods standing for their domain, for
instance) have little relevance to museums, others are perfectly applica-
ble: a container stands for its contents, a tool for its user, a product for
its producer, a singular for a plural, and so on.
In the museum context, the ‘real relationship’ assured by synec-
dochic and metonymic figures of substitution is now always in the past:
the object was part of something; it was contiguous to something.
Nonetheless, this real relationship is particularly valued by the exhibi-
tion-makers in this study, whose priority is to document the National
Socialist past factually. Metaphor might seem a less obviously useful
figure for this topic, but the succeeding chapters will show that exhibi-
tion-makers use damaged objects to stand for the damage done to peo-
ple and use hidden or destroyed objects to stand for post-war attitudes of
denial and repression.12

10 Definitions are drawn from: Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik

(Munich: Hueber, 1960), pp. 292–98; Gert Ueding and Bernd Steinbrink, Grundriss der
Rhetorik. Geschichte, Technik, Methode (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986).
11 Ueding and Steinbrink, p. 272, and Lausberg, p. 292.

12 The permanent exhibition of the Nordico Stadtmuseum Linz, opened in 1999 (and

viewed in 2006, since when it appears to have been remodelled), presented a compressed
narrative of the city’s history, with a single vitrine to represent the National Socialist era.
A caption identified its two objects: ‘Wiege zur Feier der Namensgebung (statt Taufe) mit
Blindgänger einer 200 Kilo-Bombe’ (‘Cradle made to mark a child’s naming ceremony (in
 2 BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL 33

Given that every museum object is in some way synecdochic (a

small part of a larger past that cannot be archived in its totality) and in
some way metonymic (having been contiguous with multiple aspects of
the past), using these terms is pointless unless we pose supplementary
questions. Beyond asking ‘Part of what?’ and ‘Contiguous with what?’
we must ask, for instance: ‘What kinds of contiguity make objects from
this era worthy of collection and display?’, ‘Which time does a museum
make an object contiguous with?’, ‘What entities are even recognised
as “wholes” that can be represented by their parts?’ and ‘Does the
museum, in its display practice, unconsciously adopt part/whole struc-
tures assumed by the former regime, or does it expose them as artificial?’.
I take these in turn.
Beginning with the kinds of contiguity that are considered important
for this historic era, we can draw on Mieke Bal, who applies the terms
‘synecdoche’ and ‘metonymy’ to the activity of amateur collectors. They
choose additions to their collections on the basis of whether they are
an exemplar of their class or a link in a chain. She reads this collecting
behaviour through Freud’s theories of fetishism, because in the imagi-
nation of the infantile fetishist body parts stand for the whole body and
objects that are close to the body for the body.13 Bal is concerned with
collecting practices outside of the museum but it is obvious that history
museums, which—with rare exceptions—cannot preserve bodies, are reli-
ant on body substitutes, including objects that were close to the body.
While such objects have traditionally played a role in museums’ celebra-
tion of great men and women, they have taken on a different role in the
case of the Nazi regime, which, on the basis of ideological discourses of
the body, carried out unprecedented levels of bodily destruction, includ-
ing the obliteration of bodily traces. In addition, camp inmates were

place of a christening), with an unexploded 200 kilo bomb’). The exhibition-makers had
placed the bomb inside the traditional craftwork cradle, which bore the words ‘Für Volk
und Vaterland’ in hand-painted Gothic script. In this combination, the two objects stood
for the opposition between life and death. One could read their combination as represent-
ing an ideology that wanted to shape the individual from cradle to grave or as a causal
statement of ‘this is what you get’: offer up your children to a corrupt regime and it will
sacrifice them in war. Such obviously metaphorical arrangements are very rare.
13 Mieke Bal, ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in A Mieke

Bal Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; first publ. 1994), pp. 269–88
(pp. 278, 282).
34 C. PAVER

deliberately reduced to the ownership of objects kept close to the body

or used on the body, as the bare minimum required for the survival of
the usable human being. Together, these contexts make the metonymic
contiguity of object and body (but also the metaphorical substitution of
damaged material for damaged bodies) key to this topic.
The importance of mentalities for historians of National Socialism,
which will be discussed in Sect. 2.3, means that metonymic relations
of cause and effect play a key role for this topic even if, as the opening
example of the keys cautions, actual motivations are often only loosely
inscribed in, and readable from, objects.14 Metonymic figurations in the
museum should remain open to challenge because museums are not nec-
essarily even-handed in their representations of time and causality. As
Sect. 2.4 acknowledges, a single object has a long lifespan, and muse-
ums may (often must) artificially connect an object with one part of its
biography to the exclusion of others. More broadly, museums have a ten-
dency to simplify time, to separate out eras and periods for their clearer
contemplation. Objects may therefore be chosen to help museums con-
struct and control time, but can confound this aim by showing the mess-
iness of time and the simultaneity of the old and the new in real settings.
We will see in subsequent chapters that while museums are generally very
precise about one particular cause-and-effect sequence (Germany per-
secuted and attacked others before its majority began to suffer in war)
and almost compulsively precise about the time span during which
Germany and Austria failed to adequately acknowledge responsibility for
the Nazi past, there is sometimes a deliberate blurring of the distinction
between the period in which people were damaged and the period in
which objects relating to them were damaged. In such cases, metaphoric
readings based on contemporary, retrospective perceptions of National
Socialism may take over from the factual realities of the object’s use
phase. Similarly, we will see examples in Chapter Five of metaphors of
‘burial’ and ‘hiding in plain sight’ being used to stand for social processes
not necessarily causally connected to the actual burial or hiding of the
object on display.

14 For Simon Knell, ‘objects remain weak repositories of information about processes,

actions, and relationships’ and require labels to supply context. Simon J. Knell, ‘Museums,
Reality, and the Material World’, in Museums in the Material World, ed. by Simon J. Knell
(London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–28 (p. 26).
 2 BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND THE IMMATERIAL 35

Turning to the question of whether museums accept or challenge

the part/whole relations that existed in the historical era on display,
uniforms are an example of a class of object that is routinely shown
whole. This is not unreasonable given that this was how most citizens
encountered them, but recreates the visual effect intended by the Nazis.
Occasional alternative approaches defamiliarize this practice: the display
of uniform badges with their manufacturers’ labels still attached switches
attention to the uniform as a composite industrial product from which
manufacturers profited, while the display of samples of ‘brown’ cloth
(actually in remarkably varied shades) exposes the ‘Braunhemd’ (‘brown-
shirt’) as a manufactured idea of unity.15 Conversely, yellow stars are
over-familiar to us as ‘whole’ objects, which is how the Nazis intended
them to be seen (one on each body), but museums increasingly show
them still attached to each other on sheets of yellow stars, switching
focus to the organization that went into producing and distributing
these objects of persecution.16
Another reason why the synecdochic relations evoked in the exhibi-
tion space should be open to challenge is that they make assumptions of
typicality that are inevitably a professional judgement. Based on exten-
sive fieldwork undertaken in German Stadtmuseen, Susanne Hagemann
criticizes the use of ‘ein auffallend begrenzter Objektkanon’ (‘a dis-
tinctly limited canon of objects’) to represent National Socialism, includ-
ing badges, toys, weaponry and uniforms, air raid paraphernalia and
‘der obligatorische Volksempfänger’ (‘the obligatory Nazi-produced
radio’).17 It is possible to recognize all the items on Hagemann’s list

15 The badges at the Stadtmuseum München and at ‘Glanz und Grauen. Mode im

“Dritten Reich”’ (‘Glamour and Horror: Fashion in the Third Reich’, 2012 at the LVR-
Industriemuseum)’; the cloth also at ‘Glanz und Grauen’. The harmonizing of ‘brown’
in propaganda but not in material reality is discussed by Kerstin Kraft, ‘Mythisierungen in
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart’, in LVR-Industriemuseum (ed.), Glanz und Grauen. Mode
im dritten Reich (Bönen/Westfalen: Kettler, 2012), pp. 79–85 (pp. 84–85).
16 Notably at the 2001–2017 permanent exhibition of the Jüdisches Museum Berlin

and at ‘Nationalsozialismus in Freiburg’ (‘National Socialism in Freiburg’, 2016 at the

Augustinermuseum Freiburg).
17 Susanne Hagemann, ‘“Leere Gesten”? Darstellungsmuster in Ausstellungen zur

NS-Zeit’, in Entnazifizierte Zone? Zum Umgang mit der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus in ost-
deutschen Stadt- und Regionalmuseen, ed. by Museumsverband des Landes Brandenburg
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 77–92 (pp. 79, 82).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Toute cette funeste affaire, qui a eu de si longues suites, et dont il n’y a
guère d’hommes plus instruits que moi, dut son origine au plaisir innocent
que prenaient plusieurs personnes de mérite de s’assembler dans un café.
On n’y respectait pas assez la première loi de la société, de se ménager les
uns les autres. On se critiquait durement, et de simples impolitesses
donnèrent lieu à des haines durables et à des crimes. C’est au lecteur à juger
si dans cette affaire il y a eu trois criminels ou un seul. [208] On a dit qu’il se
pourrait à toute force que Saurin eût été l’auteur des derniers couplets
attribués à Rousseau. Il se pourrait que Rousseau ayant été reconnu
coupable des cinq premiers, qui étaient de la même atrocité, Saurin eût fait
les derniers pour le perdre, quoiqu’il n’y eût aucune rivalité entre ces deux
hommes, quoique Saurin fût alors plongé dans les calculs de l’algèbre,
quoique lui-même fût cruellement outragé dans ces derniers couplets,
quoique tous les offensés les imputassent unanimement à Rousseau, enfin
quoiqu’un jugement solennel ait déclaré Saurin innocent. Mais, si la chose
est physiquement dans l’ordre des possibles, elle n’est nullement
vraisemblable. Rousseau l’en accusa toute sa vie: il le chargea de ce crime
par son testament; mais le professeur Rollin, auquel Rousseau montra ce
testament quand il vint clandestinement à Paris, l’obligea de rayer cette
accusation. Rousseau se contenta de protester de son innocence à l’article
de la mort; mais il n’osa jamais accuser La Motte, ni pendant le cours du
procès, ni durant le reste de sa vie, ni à ses derniers moments. Il se contenta
de faire toujours des vers contre lui. (Voyez l’article Joseph Saurin[209].)
Lancelot (Claude), né à Paris, en 1616. Il eut part à des ouvrages très
utiles, que firent les solitaires de Port-Royal pour l’éducation de la jeunesse.
Mort en 1695.
Laplacette (Jean de), de Béarn, né en 1639, ministre protestant à
Copenhague et en Hollande; estimé pour ses divers ouvrages. Mort à
Utrecht, en 1718.
La Porte[210] (Pierre de), premier valet de chambre de la reine-mère, et
quelque temps de Louis XIV; mis en prison par le cardinal de Richelieu, et
menacé de la mort pour le forcer à trahir les secrets de sa maîtresse, qu’il ne
trahit point. Dans la foule des mémoires qui développent l’histoire de cet
âge, ceux de La Porte ne sont pas à mépriser; ils sont d’un honnête homme,
ennemi de l’intrigue et de la flatterie, sévère jusqu’au pédantisme. Il avoue
qu’il avertissait la reine que sa familiarité avec le cardinal Mazarin
diminuait le respect des grands et des peuples pour elle. Il y a dans ses
Mémoires une anecdote sur l’enfance de Louis XIV, qui rendrait la mémoire
du cardinal Mazarin exécrable, s’il avait été coupable du crime honteux que
La Porte semble lui imputer. Il paraît que La Porte fut trop scrupuleux et
trop mauvais physicien; il ne savait pas qu’il y a des tempéraments fort
avancés. Il devait surtout se taire; il se perdit pour avoir parlé, et pour avoir
attribué à la débauche un accident fort naturel. Mort à Paris, vers la fin de
1680.
La Quintinie (Jean de), né près de Poitiers, en 1626[211]. Il a créé l’art
de la culture des arbres, et celui de les transplanter. Ses préceptes ont été
suivis de toute l’Europe, et ses talents récompensés magnifiquement par
Louis XIV. Mort vers 1700.
Rochefoucauld (François, duc de La), né en 1613. Ses Mémoires sont
lus, et on sait par cœur ses Pensées. Mort en 1680.
Larrey (Isaac de), né en Normandie, en 1638. Son Histoire d’Angleterre
fut estimée avant celle de Rapin de Thoiras, et son Histoire de Louis XIV ne
le fut jamais. Mort à Berlin, en 1719.
La Rue (Charles de), né en 1643, jésuite, poëte latin, poëte français, et
prédicateur, l’un de ceux qui travaillèrent à ces livres nommés Dauphins,
pour l’éducation de Monseigneur. Virgile lui tomba en partage. Il a fait
plusieurs tragédies et comédies; sa tragédie de Sylla fut présentée aux
comédiens, et refusée. Il a fait encore celle de Lysimachus. On croit qu’il a
beaucoup travaillé à l’Andrienne. Il était très lié avec le comédien Baron,
dont il apprit à déclamer. Il y avait deux sermons de lui qui étaient fort en
vogue; l’un était le Pécheur mourant, et l’autre le Pécheur mort; on les
affichait quand il devait les prononcer. Mort en 1725.
Launay (François de), né à Angers, en 1612, jurisconsulte et homme de
lettres. Il fut le premier qui enseigna le droit français à Paris. Mort en 1693.
Launoy (Jean de), né en Normandie en 1603, docteur en théologie,
savant laborieux, et critique intrépide. Il détrompa de plusieurs erreurs, et
surtout de l’existence de plusieurs saints. On sait qu’un curé de Saint-
Eustache disait: «Je lui fais toujours de profondes révérences, de peur qu’il
ne m’ôte mon saint Eustache.» Mort en 1678.
Laurière (Eusèbe-Jacob de), né à Paris, en 1659, avocat. Personne n’a
plus approfondi la jurisprudence et l’origine des lois. C’est lui qui dressa le
plan du Recueil des ordonnances, ouvrage immense qui signale le règne de
Louis XIV. C’est un monument de l’inconstance des choses humaines. Un
recueil d’ordonnances n’est que l’histoire des variations. Mort en 1728.
Lebœuf (L’abbé), né en 1687, l’un des plus savants hommes dans les
détails de l’histoire de France. Il aurait été employé par un Colbert, mais il
vint trop tard. Mort en 1760.
Lebossu (Réné), né à Paris, en 1631, chanoine régulier de Sainte-
Geneviève. Il voulut concilier Aristote avec Descartes; il ne savait pas qu’il
fallait les abandonner l’un et l’autre. Son Traité sur le poëme épique a
beaucoup de réputation, mais il ne fera jamais de poëtes. Mort en 1680.
Lebrun (Pierre), né à Aix, en 1661, de l’Oratoire. Son livre critique des
Pratiques superstitieuses a été recherché; mais c’est un médecin qui ne
parle que de très peu de maladies, et qui est lui-même malade. Mort en
1729.
Le Clerc (Jean), né à Genève, en 1657, mais originaire de Beauvais. Il
n’était pas le seul savant de sa famille, mais il était le plus savant. Sa
Bibliothèque universelle, dans laquelle il imita la République des lettres de
Bayle, est son meilleur ouvrage. Son plus grand mérite est d’avoir alors
approché de Bayle, qu’il a combattu souvent. Il a beaucoup plus écrit que ce
grand homme; mais il n’a pas connu comme lui l’art de plaire et d’instruire
qui est si au-dessus de la science. Mort à Amsterdam, en 1736.
Lecointe (Charles), né à Troyes, en 1611; de l’Oratoire. Ses Annales
ecclésiastiques, imprimées au Louvre par ordre du roi, sont un monument
utile. Mort en 1681.
Lefèvre (Tannegui), né à Caen, en 1615, calviniste, professeur à
Saumur, méprisant ceux de sa secte, et demeurant parmi eux; plus
philosophe que huguenot, écrivant aussi bien en latin qu’on puisse écrire
dans une langue morte, fesant des vers grecs qui doivent avoir eu peu de
lecteurs. La plus grande obligation que lui aient les lettres est d’avoir
produit madame Dacier. Mort en 1672.
Lefèvre (Anne). Voyez madame Dacier.
Legendre (Louis), né à Rouen, en 1659, a fait une Histoire de France.
Pour bien faire cette histoire, il faudrait la plume et la liberté du président
de Thou; et il serait encore très difficile de rendre les premiers siècles
intéressants. Mort en 1733.
Legrand (Joachim), né en Normandie, en 1653, élève du P. Lecointe. Il
a été l’un des hommes les plus profonds dans l’histoire. Mort en 1733.
 Le Laboureur (Jean), né à Montmorenci, en 1623, gentilhomme servant
de Louis XIV, et ensuite son aumônier. Sa relation du voyage de Pologne,
qu’il fit avec madame la maréchale de Guébriant, la seule femme qui ait
jamais eu le titre et fait les fonctions d’ambassadrice plénipotentiaire, est
assez curieuse. Les commentaires historiques dont il a enrichi les Mémoires
de Castelnau ont répandu beaucoup de jour sur l’histoire de France. Le
mauvais poëme de Charlemagne n’est pas de lui, mais de son frère. Mort en
1675.
Le Long (Jacques), né à Paris, en 1665; de l’Oratoire. Sa Bibliothèque
historique de la France[212] est d’une grande recherche et d’une grande
utilité, à quelques fautes près. Mort en 1721.
Lémery (Nicolas), né à Rouen, en 1645, fut le premier chimiste
raisonnable, et le premier qui ait donné une Pharmacopée universelle. Mort
en 1715.
Le Moine (Pierre), jésuite, né en 1602. Sa Dévotion aisée le rendit
ridicule; mais il eût pu se faire un grand nom par sa Louisiade[213]. Il avait
une prodigieuse imagination. Pourquoi donc ne réussit-il pas? C’est qu’il
n’avait ni goût, ni connaissance du génie de sa langue, ni des amis sévères.
Mort en 1671.
Lenain de Tillemont (Louis-Sébastien), fils de Jean Lenain, maître des
requêtes, né à Paris, en 1637, élève de Nicole, et l’un des plus savants
écrivains de Port-Royal. Son Histoire des empereurs, et ses seize volumes
de l’Histoire ecclésiastique, sont écrits avec autant de vérité que peuvent
l’être des compilations d’anciens historiens; car l’histoire, avant l’invention
de l’imprimerie, étant peu contredite, était peu exacte. Mort en 1698.
Lenfant (Jacques), né en Beauce, en 1661, pasteur calviniste à Berlin. Il
contribua plus que personne à répandre les graces et la force de la langue
française aux extrémités de l’Allemagne. Son Histoire du concile de
Constance, bien faite et bien écrite, sera, jusqu’à la dernière postérité, un
témoignage du bien et du mal qui peuvent résulter de ces grandes
assemblées, et que du sein des passions, de l’intérêt, et de la cruauté même,
il peut encore sortir de bonnes lois. Mort en 1728.
Le Quien (Michel), né en 1661, dominicain; homme très savant. Il a
beaucoup travaillé sur les Églises d’Orient et sur celle d’Angleterre. Il a
surtout écrit contre Le Courayer sur la validité des évêques anglicans: mais
les Anglais ne font pas plus de cas de ces disputes, que les Turcs n’en font
des dissertations sur l’Église grecque. Mort en 1733.
Le Sage, né à Vannes[214], en Basse-Bretagne, en 1667. Son roman de
Gil Blas est demeuré, parcequ’il y a du naturel; il est entièrement pris[215]
du roman espagnol intitulé: La Vida del escudero don Marcos de Obrego.
Mort en 1747.
Le Tourneux (Nicolas), né en 1640. Son Année chrétienne est dans
beaucoup de mains, quoique mise à Rome à l’index des livres prohibés, ou
plutôt parcequ’elle y est mise. Mort en 1686.
Levassor (Michel), de l’Oratoire, réfugié en Angleterre. Son Histoire de
Louis XIII[216], diffuse, pesante, et satirique, a été recherchée pour
beaucoup de faits singuliers qui s’y trouvent; mais c’est un déclamateur
odieux, qui, dans l’Histoire de Louis XIII, ne cherche qu’à décrier Louis
XIV, qui attaque les morts et les vivants; il ne se trompe que sur peu de
faits, et passe pour s’être trompé dans tous ses jugements. Mort en 1718.
L’Hospital (François, marquis de), né en 1661, le premier qui ait écrit
en France sur le calcul inventé par Newton, qu’il appela les infiniment
petits; c’était alors un prodige. Mort en 1704.
Longepierre (Hilaire-Bernard de Requeleyne, baron de), né en
Bourgogne en 1658. Il possédait toutes les beautés de la langue grecque,
mérite très rare en ce temps-là; on a de lui des traductions en vers
d’Anacréon, Sapho, Bion, et Moschus. Sa tragédie de Médée, quoique
inégale et trop remplie de déclamations, est fort supérieure à celle de Pierre
Corneille: mais la Médée de Corneille n’était pas de son bon temps.
Longepierre fit beaucoup d’autres tragédies d’après les poëtes grecs, et il
les imita en ne mêlant point l’amour à ces sujets sévères et terribles; mais
aussi il les imita dans la prolixité des lieux communs, et dans le vide
d’action et d’intrigue, et ne les égala point, dans la beauté de l’élocution,
qui fait le grand mérite des poëtes. Il n’a donné au théâtre que Médée et
Électre[217]. Mort en 1721.
Longuerue (Louis Dufour de), né à Charleville en 1652. Abbé du Jard.
Il savait, outre les langues savantes, toutes celles de l’Europe. Apprendre
plusieurs langues médiocrement, c’est le fruit du travail de quelques années;
parler purement et éloquemment la sienne, le travail de toute la vie. Il savait
l’histoire universelle; et on prétend qu’il composa de mémoire la
description historique et géographique de la France ancienne et moderne.
Mort vers l’an 1733.
Longueval (Jacques), né en 1680, jésuite. Il a fait huit volumes de
l’Histoire de l’Église gallicane, continuée par le P. Fontenay[218]. Mort en
1735.
Mabillon (Jean), né en Champagne en 1632, bénédictin. C’est lui qui,
étant chargé de montrer le trésor de Saint-Denys, demanda à quitter cet
emploi, parcequ’il n’aimait pas à mêler la fable avec la vérité. Il a fait de
profondes recherches. Colbert l’employa à rechercher les anciens titres.
Maignan (Emmanuel), né à Toulouse en 1601, minime. L’un de ceux
qui ont appris les mathématiques sans maître. Professeur de mathématiques
à Rome, où il y a toujours eu depuis un professeur minime français. Mort à
Toulouse, en 1676.
Maillet (Benoît de), consul au Grand-Caire. On a de lui des lettres
instructives sur l’Égypte, et des ouvrages manuscrits d’une philosophie
hardie. L’ouvrage intitulé Telliamed est de lui, ou du moins a été fait d’après
ses idées. On y trouve l’opinion que la terre a été toute couverte d’eau,
opinion adoptée par M. de Buffon, qui l’a fortifiée de preuves nouvelles;
mais ce n’est et ce ne sera long-temps qu’une opinion. Il est même certain
qu’il existe de grands espaces où l’on ne trouve aucun vestige du séjour des
eaux; d’autres où l’on n’aperçoit que des dépôts laissés par les eaux
terrestres. Mort en 1738.
Maimbourg (Louis), jésuite, né en 1610. Il y a encore quelques unes de
ses histoires qu’on ne lit pas sans plaisir. Il eut d’abord trop de vogue, et on
l’a trop négligé ensuite. Ce qui est singulier, c’est qu’il fut obligé de quitter
les jésuites, pour avoir écrit en faveur du clergé de France. Mort à Saint-
Victor, en 1686.
Maintenon[219] (Françoise d’Aubigné Scarron, marquise de). Elle est
auteur, comme madame de Sévigné, parcequ’on a imprimé ses Lettres[220]
après sa mort. Les unes et les autres sont écrites avec beaucoup d’esprit,
mais avec un esprit différent. Le cœur et l’imagination ont dicté celles de
madame de Sévigné; elles ont plus de gaîté, plus de liberté: celles de
madame de Maintenon sont plus contraintes; il semble qu’elle ait toujours
prévu qu’elles seraient un jour publiques. Madame de Sévigné, en écrivant
à sa fille, n’écrivait que pour sa fille. On trouve quelques anecdotes dans les
unes et dans les autres. On voit par celles de madame de Maintenon, qu’elle
avait épousé Louis XIV, qu’elle influait dans les affaires d’état, mais qu’elle
ne les gouvernait pas; qu’elle ne pressa point la révocation de l’Édit de
Nantes et ses suites, mais qu’elle ne s’y opposa point; qu’elle prit le parti
des molinistes, parceque Louis XIV l’avait pris, et qu’ensuite elle s’attacha
à ce parti; que Louis XIV, sur la fin de sa vie, portait des reliques; et
beaucoup d’autres particularités. Mais les connaissances qu’on peut puiser
dans ce recueil sont trop achetées par la quantité de lettres inutiles qu’il
renferme; défaut commun à tous ces recueils. Si l’on n’imprimait que
l’utile, il y aurait cent fois moins de livres. Morte à Saint-Cyr, en 1719.
[221]Un nommé La Beaumelle, qui a été précepteur à Genève, a fait
imprimer des Mémoires de Maintenon remplis de faussetés[222].
Malebranche (Nicolas), né à Paris en 1638, de l’Oratoire, l’un des plus
profonds méditatifs qui aient jamais écrit. Animé de cette imagination forte
qui fait plus de disciples que la vérité, il en eut: de son temps il y avait des
malebranchistes. Il a montré admirablement les erreurs des sens et de
l’imagination; et quand il a voulu sonder la nature de l’ame, il s’est perdu
dans cet abîme comme les autres. Il est, ainsi que Descartes, un grand
homme, avec lequel on apprend bien peu de chose; et il n’était pas un grand
géomètre comme Descartes. Mort en 1715.
Malezieu (Nicolas), né à Paris en 1650. Les Éléments de géométrie du
duc de Bourgogne sont les leçons qu’il donna à ce prince. Il se fit une
réputation par sa profonde littérature. Madame la duchesse du Maine fit sa
fortune. Mort en 1727.
Malleville (Claude de), l’un des premiers académiciens. Le seul sonnet
de la Belle matineuse en fit un homme célèbre. On ne parlerait pas
aujourd’hui d’un tel ouvrage; mais le bon en tout genre était alors aussi rare
qu’il est devenu commun depuis. Mort en 1647.
Marca (Pierre de), né en 1594. Étant veuf et ayant plusieurs enfants, il
entra dans l’Église, et fut nommé à l’archevêché de Paris. Son livre de la
Concorde de l’empire et du sacerdoce est estimé. Mort en 1662.
Marolles (Michel de), né en Touraine en 1600, fils du célèbre Claude
de Marolles, capitaine des cent suisses, connu par son combat singulier, à la
tête de l’armée de Henri IV, contre Marivault[223]. Michel, abbé de
Villeloin, composa soixante-neuf ouvrages[224], dont plusieurs étaient des
traductions très utiles dans leur temps. Mort en 1681.
 Marsollier (Jacques), né à Paris en 1647, chanoine régulier de Sainte-
Geneviève, connu par plusieurs histoires bien écrites. Mort en 1724.
Martignac (Étienne Algai de), né en 1628, le premier qui donna une
traduction supportable en prose de Virgile, d’Horace, etc. Je doute qu’on les
traduise jamais heureusement en vers. Ce ne serait pas assez d’avoir leur
génie: la différence des langues est un obstacle presque invincible. Mort en
1698.
Mascaron (Jules), de Marseille, né en 1634, évêque de Tulles, et puis
d’Agen. Ses Oraisons funèbres balancèrent d’abord celles de Bossuet; mais
aujourd’hui elles ne servent qu’à faire voir combien Bossuet était un grand
homme. Mort en 1703.
Massillon (Jean-Baptiste), né à Hières, en Provence, en 1633, de
l’Oratoire, évêque de Clermont. Le prédicateur qui a le mieux connu le
monde; plus fleuri que Bourdaloue, plus agréable, et dont l’éloquence sent
l’homme de cour, l’académicien, et l’homme d’esprit; de plus, philosophe
modéré et tolérant. Mort en 1742.
Maucroix (François de), né à Noyon en 1619, historien, poëte, et
littérateur. On a retenu quelques uns de ses vers, tels que ceux-ci, qu’il fit à
l’âge de plus de quatre-vingts ans:

Chaque jour est un bien que du ciel je reçoi;

Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne.
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.

Mort en 1708.
Maynard (François), président d’Aurillac, né à Toulouse vers 1582. On
peut le compter parmi ceux qui ont annoncé le siècle de Louis XIV. Il reste
de lui un assez grand nombre de vers heureux purement écrits. C’est un des
auteurs qui s’est plaint le plus de la mauvaise fortune attachée aux talents. Il
ignorait que le succès d’un bon ouvrage est la seule récompense digne d’un
artiste; que, si les princes et les ministres veulent se faire honneur en
récompensant cette espèce de mérite, il y a plus d’honneur encore
d’attendre ces faveurs sans les demander; et que, si un bon écrivain
ambitionne la fortune, il doit la faire soi-même.
Rien n’est plus connu que son beau sonnet[225] pour le cardinal de
Richelieu; et cette réponse dure du ministre, ce mot cruel, rien. Le président
Maynard, retiré enfin à Aurillac, fit ces vers[226], qui méritent autant d’être
connus que son sonnet:

Par votre humeur le monde est gouverné;

Vos volontés font le calme et l’orage;
Vous vous riez de me voir confiné
Loin de la cour dans mon petit ménage:
Mais n’est-ce rien que d’être tout à soi,
De n’avoir point le fardeau d’un emploi,
D’avoir dompté la crainte et l’espérance?
Ah! si le ciel, qui me traite si bien,
Avait pitié de vous et de la France,
Votre bonheur serait égal au mien.

Depuis la mort du cardinal, il dit dans d’autres vers que le tyran est mort,
et qu’il n’en est pas plus heureux. Si le cardinal lui avait fait du bien, ce
ministre eût été un dieu pour lui: il n’est un tyran que parcequ’il ne lui
donna rien. C’est trop ressembler à ces mendiants qui appellent les passants
monseigneur, et qui les maudissent s’ils n’en reçoivent point d’aumône. Les
vers de Maynard étaient fort beaux. Il eût été plus beau de passer sa vie sans
demander et sans murmurer. L’épitaphe qu’il fit pour lui-même est dans la
bouche de tout le monde:

Las d’espérer et de me plaindre

Des muses, des grands, et du sort,
C’est ici que j’attends la mort,
Sans la desirer ni la craindre.

Les deux derniers vers sont la traduction de cet ancien vers latin:

«Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes.»

Mart., lib. X, ep. 47.

La plupart des beaux vers de morale sont des traductions. Il est bien
commun de ne pas desirer la mort; il est bien rare de ne pas la craindre, et il
eût été grand de ne pas seulement songer s’il y a des grands au monde. Mort
en 1646.
Ménage (Gilles), d’Angers, né en 1613. Il a prouvé qu’il est plus aisé de
faire des vers en italien qu’en français. Ses vers italiens sont estimés, même
en Italie; et notre langue doit beaucoup à ses recherches. Il était savant en
plus d’un genre. Sa Requête des dictionnaires l’empêcha d’entrer à
l’académie. Il adressa au cardinal Mazarin, sur son retour en France, une
pièce latine, où l’on trouve ce vers:

«Et puto tam viles despicis ipse togas[227].»

Le parlement, qui, après avoir mis à prix la tête du cardinal, l’avait

complimenté, se crut désigné par ce vers, et voulait sévir contre l’auteur;
mais Ménage prouva au parlement que toga signifiait un habit de cour. Mort
en 1692. La Monnoye a augmenté et rectifié le Menagiana.
Ménestrier (Claude-François), né en 1631, a beaucoup servi à la
science du blason, des emblèmes, et des devises. Mort en 1705.
Méry (Jean), né en Berri, en 1645, l’un de ceux qui ont le plus illustré la
chirurgie. Il a laissé des observations utiles. Mort en 1722.
Mézerai (François-Eudes de), né à Argentan[228], en Normandie, en
1610. Son Histoire de France est très connue; ses autres écrits le sont
moins. Il perdit ses pensions, pour avoir dit ce qu’il croyait la vérité.
D’ailleurs plus hardi qu’exact, et inégal dans son style. Son nom de famille
était Eudes; il était frère du P. Eudes, fondateur de la congrégation très
répandue et très peu connue des eudistes. Mort en 1683.
Mimeure[229] (Le marquis de), menin de Monseigneur, fils de Louis
XIV. On a de lui quelques morceaux de poésies qui ne sont pas inférieures à
celles de Racan et de Maynard: mais comme ils parurent dans un temps où
le bon était très rare, et le marquis de Mimeure dans un temps où l’art était
perfectionné, ils eurent beaucoup de réputation, et à peine fut-il connu. Son
Ode à Vénus, imitée d’Horace, n’est pas indigne de l’original[230].
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de), né à Paris[231], en 1620, le
meilleur des poëtes comiques de toutes les nations. Cet article a engagé à
relire les poëtes comiques de l’antiquité. Il faut avouer que si l’on compare
l’art et la régularité de notre théâtre avec ces scènes décousues des anciens,
ces intrigues faibles, cet usage grossier de faire annoncer par des acteurs,
dans des monologues froids et sans vraisemblance, ce qu’ils ont fait, et ce
qu’ils veulent faire; il faut avouer, dis-je, que Molière a tiré la comédie du
chaos, ainsi que Corneille en a tiré la tragédie; et que les Français ont été
supérieurs en ce point à tous les peuples de la terre. Molière avait d’ailleurs
une autre sorte de mérite, que ni Corneille, ni Racine, ni Boileau, ni La
Fontaine, n’avaient pas. Il était philosophe, et il l’était dans la théorie et
dans la pratique. C’est à ce philosophe que l’archevêque de Paris, Harlai, si
décrié pour ses mœurs[232], refusa les vains honneurs de la sépulture: il
fallut que le roi engageât ce prélat à souffrir que Molière fût enterré
secrètement dans le cimetière de la petite chapelle de Saint-Joseph, rue
Montmartre. Mort en 1673.
On s’est piqué à l’envi dans quelques dictionnaires nouveaux de décrier
les vers de Molière, en faveur de sa prose, sur la parole de l’archevêque de
Cambrai, Fénélon, qui semble en effet donner la préférence à la prose de ce
grand comique, et qui avait ses raisons pour n’aimer que la prose poétique;
mais Boileau ne pensait pas ainsi. Il faut convenir qu’à quelques
négligences près, négligences que la comédie tolère, Molière est plein de
vers admirables, qui s’impriment facilement dans la mémoire. Le
Misanthrope, les Femmes savantes, le Tartufe, sont écrits comme les satires
de Boileau. L’Amphitryon est un recueil d’épigrammes et de madrigaux,
faits avec un art qu’on n’a point imité depuis. La bonne poésie est à la
bonne prose ce que la danse est à une simple démarche noble, ce que la
musique est au récit ordinaire, ce que les couleurs d’un tableau sont à des
dessins au crayon. De là vient que les Grecs et les Romains n’ont jamais eu
de comédie en prose.
Mongault[233] (L’abbé de). La meilleure traduction qu’on ait faite des
Lettres de Cicéron est de lui. Elle est enrichie de notes judicieuses et utiles.
Il avait été précepteur du fils du duc d’Orléans, régent du royaume, et
mourut, dit-on, de chagrin de n’avoir pu faire auprès de son élève la même
fortune que l’abbé Dubois. Il ignorait apparemment que c’est par le
caractère, et non par l’esprit, que l’on fait fortune.
Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de), président
au parlement de Bordeaux, né en 1689, donna à l’âge de trente-deux ans les
Lettres persanes, ouvrage de plaisanterie, plein de traits qui annoncent un
esprit plus solide que son livre. C’est une imitation du Siamois de Dufresni
et de l’Espion Turc[234]; mais imitation qui fait voir comment ces originaux
devaient être écrits. Ces ouvrages d’ordinaire ne réussissent qu’à la faveur
de l’air étranger; on met avec succès dans la bouche d’un Asiatique la satire
de notre pays, qui serait bien moins accueillie dans la bouche d’un
compatriote: ce qui est commun par soi-même devient alors singulier. Le
génie qui règne dans les Lettres persanes ouvrit au président de
Montesquieu les portes de l’académie française, quoique l’académie fût
maltraitée dans son livre; mais en même temps la liberté avec laquelle il
parle du gouvernement, et des abus de la religion, lui attira une exclusion de
la part du cardinal de Fleury. Il prit un tour très adroit pour mettre le
ministre dans ses intérêts; il fit faire en peu de jours une nouvelle édition de
son livre[235], dans laquelle on retrancha ou on adoucit tout ce qui pouvait
être condamné par un cardinal et par un ministre. M. de Montesquieu porta
lui-même l’ouvrage au cardinal, qui ne lisait guère, et qui en lut une partie.
Cet air de confiance, soutenu par l’empressement de quelques personnes de
crédit, ramena le cardinal, et Montesquieu entra dans l’académie.
Il donna ensuite le traité sur la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains,
matière usée, qu’il rendit neuve par des réflexions très fines et des peintures
très fortes: c’est une histoire politique de l’empire romain. Enfin on vit son
Esprit des lois. On a trouvé dans ce livre beaucoup plus de génie que dans
Grotius et dans Puffendorf. On se fait quelque violence pour lire ces
auteurs; on lit l’Esprit des lois autant pour son plaisir que pour son
instruction. Ce livre est écrit avec autant de liberté que les Lettres persanes;
et cette liberté n’a pas peu servi au succès: elle lui attira des ennemis qui
augmentèrent sa réputation, par la haine qu’ils inspiraient contre eux: ce
sont ces hommes nourris dans les factions obscures des querelles
ecclésiastiques, qui regardent leurs opinions comme sacrées, et ceux qui les
méprisent comme sacriléges. Ils écrivirent violemment contre le président
de Montesquieu; ils engagèrent la Sorbonne à examiner son livre, mais le
mépris dont ils furent couverts arrêta la Sorbonne. Le principal mérite de
l’Esprit des lois[236] est l’amour des lois qui règne dans cet ouvrage; et cet
amour des lois est fondé sur l’amour du genre humain. Ce qu’il y a de plus
singulier, c’est que l’éloge qu’il fait du gouvernement anglais est ce qui a
plu davantage en France. La vive et piquante ironie qu’on y trouve contre
l’inquisition a charmé tout le monde, hors les inquisiteurs. Ses réflexions,
presque toujours profondes, sont appuyées d’exemples tirés de l’histoire de
toutes les nations. Il est vrai qu’on lui a reproché de prendre trop souvent
des exemples dans de petites nations sauvages et presque inconnues, sur les
relations trop suspectes des voyageurs. Il ne cite pas toujours avec
beaucoup d’exactitude; il fait dire, par exemple, à l’auteur du Testament
politique attribué au cardinal de Richelieu, «que s’il se trouve dans le
peuple quelque malheureux honnête homme, il ne faut pas s’en servir.» Le
Testament politique dit seulement, à l’endroit cité, qu’il vaut mieux se servir
des hommes riches et bien élevés, parcequ’ils sont moins corruptibles.
Montesquieu s’est trompé dans d’autres citations, jusqu’à dire que François
Iᵉʳ (qui n’était pas né lorsque Christophe Colomb découvrit l’Amérique)
avait refusé les offres de Christophe Colomb[237]. Le défaut continuel de
méthode dans cet ouvrage, la singulière affectation de ne mettre souvent
que trois ou quatre lignes dans un chapitre, et encore de ne faire de ces
quatre lignes qu’une plaisanterie, ont indisposé beaucoup de lecteurs; on
s’est plaint de trouver trop souvent des saillies où l’on attendait des
raisonnements; on a reproché à l’auteur d’avoir trop donné d’idées
douteuses pour des idées certaines: mais, s’il n’instruit pas toujours son
lecteur, il le fait toujours penser; et c’est là un très grand mérite. Ses
expressions vives et ingénieuses, dans lesquelles on trouve l’imagination de
Montaigne, son compatriote, ont contribué surtout à la grande réputation de
l’Esprit des lois; les mêmes choses dites par un homme savant, et même
plus savant que lui, n’auraient pas été lues. Enfin, il n’y a guère d’ouvrages
où il y ait plus d’esprit, plus d’idées profondes, plus de choses hardies, et où
l’on trouve plus à s’instruire, soit en approuvant ses opinions, soit en les
combattant. On doit le mettre au rang des livres originaux qui ont illustré le
siècle de Louis XIV[238], et qui n’ont aucun modèle dans l’antiquité.
Il est mort en 1755, en philosophe[239], comme il avait vécu.
Montfaucon (Bernard de), né en 1655, bénédictin, l’un des plus savants
antiquaires de l’Europe. Mort en 1741.
Montfaucon de Villars (l’abbé), né en 1635, célèbre par le Comte de
Gabalis. C’est une partie de l’ancienne mythologie des Perses. L’auteur fut
tué, en 1675, d’un coup de pistolet. On dit que les sylphes l’avaient
assassiné pour avoir révélé leurs mystères.
Montpensier (Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans), connue sous le nom de
Mademoiselle, fille de Gaston d’Orléans, née à Paris, en 1627. Ses
Mémoires sont plus d’une femme occupée d’elle, que d’une princesse
témoin de grands événements; mais il s’y trouve des choses très curieuses;
on a aussi quelques petits romans d’elle, qu’on ne lit guère. Les princes,
dans leurs écrits, sont au rang des autres hommes. Si Alexandre et
Sémiramis avaient fait des ouvrages ennuyeux, ils seraient négligés. On
trouve plus aisément des courtisans que des lecteurs. Morte en 1693.
 Montreuil (Matthieu de), né à Paris, en 1621, l’un de ces écrivains
agréables et faciles dont le siècle de Louis XIV a produit un grand nombre,
et qui n’ont pas laissé de réussir dans le genre médiocre. Il y a peu de vrais
génies; mais l’esprit du temps et l’imitation ont fait beaucoup d’auteurs
agréables. Mort à Aix, en 1692[240].
Moréri (Louis), né en Provence, en 1643. On ne s’attendait pas que
l’auteur du Pays d’amour, et le traducteur de Rodriguez, entreprît dans sa
jeunesse le premier dictionnaire de faits qu’on eût encore vu[241]. Ce grand
travail lui coûta la vie. L’ouvrage réformé et très augmenté porte encore son
nom, et n’est plus de lui. C’est une ville nouvelle bâtie sur le plan ancien.
Trop de généalogies suspectes ont fait tort surtout à cet ouvrage si utile.
Mort en 1680. On a fait des suppléments remplis d’erreurs.
Morin (Michel-Jean-Baptiste), né en Beaujolais, en 1583, médecin,
mathématicien, et, par les préjugés du temps, astrologue. Il tira l’horoscope
de Louis XIV. Malgré cette charlatanerie, il était savant. Il proposa
d’employer les observations de la lune à la détermination des longitudes en
mer; mais cette méthode exigeait dans les tables des mouvements de cette
planète ce degré d’exactitude que les travaux réunis des premiers géomètres
de ce siècle ont pu à peine leur donner. Voyez l’article Cassini. Mort en
1656.
Morin (Jean), né à Blois, en 1591, très savant dans les langues
orientales et dans la critique. Mort à l’Oratoire, en 1659.
Morin (Simon), né en Normandie, en 1623. On ne parle ici de lui que
pour déplorer sa fatale folie et celle de Desmarets Saint-Sorlin, son
accusateur[242]. Saint-Sorlin fut un fanatique qui en dénonça un autre.
Morin, qui ne méritait que les Petites-Maisons, fut brûlé vif en 1663, avant
que la philosophie eût fait assez de progrès pour empêcher les savants de
dogmatiser, et les juges d’être si cruels.
Motteville (Françoise Bertaut[243] de), née en 1615, en Normandie.
Cette dame a écrit des Mémoires qui regardent particulièrement la reine
Anne, mère de Louis XIV. On y trouve beaucoup de petits faits, avec un
grand air de sincérité. Morte en 1689.
Naudé (Gabriel), né à Paris, en 1600; médecin, et plus philosophe que
médecin. Attaché d’abord au cardinal Barberin, à Rome, puis au cardinal de
Richelieu, au cardinal Mazarin, et ensuite à la reine Christine, dont il alla
quelque temps grossir la cour savante; retiré enfin à Abbeville, où il mourut
dès qu’il fut libre. De tous ses livres, son Apologie des grands hommes
accusés de magie est presque le seul qui soit demeuré. On ferait un plus
gros livre des grands hommes accusés d’impiété depuis Socrate.

«...... Populus nam solos credit habendos

Esse Deos quos ipse colit.»
Juv., sat. XV, v. 37.

Mort en 1653.
Nemours (Marie de Longueville, duchesse de), née en 1625. On a d’elle
des Mémoires où l’on trouve quelques particularités des temps malheureux
de la fronde. Morte en 1707.
Nevers (Philippe-Julien Mazarin Mancini, duc de). On a de lui des
pièces de poésie d’un goût très singulier. Il ne faut pas s’en rapporter au
sonnet parodié par Racine et Despréaux:

Dans un palais doré, Nevers jaloux et blême

Fait des vers où jamais personne n’entend rien.

Il en fesait qu’on entendait très aisément et avec grand plaisir, comme

ceux-ci contre Rancé, le fameux réformateur de la Trappe, qui avait écrit
contre l’archevêque Fénélon:
Cet abbé qu’on croyait pétri de sainteté,
Vieilli dans la retraite et dans l’humilité,
Orgueilleux de ses croix, bouffi de sa souffrance,
Rompt ses sacrés statuts en rompant le silence;
Et, contre un saint prélat s’animant aujourd’hui,
Du fond de ses déserts déclame contre lui;
Et moins humble de cœur que fier de sa doctrine,
Il ose décider ce que Rome examine.

Son esprit et ses talents se sont perfectionnés dans son petit-fils[244]. Mort
en 1707.
Nicéron (Jean-Pierre), barnabite, né à Paris, en 1685, auteur des
Mémoires sur les hommes illustres dans les lettres. Tous ne sont pas
illustres, mais il parle de chacun convenablement; il n’appelle point un
orfèvre grand homme. Il mérite d’avoir place parmi les savants utiles. Mort
en 1738.
 Nicole (Pierre), né à Chartres, en 1625, un des meilleurs écrivains de
Port-Royal. Ce qu’il a écrit contre les jésuites n’est guère lu aujourd’hui; et
ses Essais de morale, qui sont utiles au genre humain, ne périront pas. Le
chapitre, surtout, des moyens de conserver la paix dans la société, est un
chef-d’œuvre auquel on ne trouve rien d’égal en ce genre dans l’antiquité;
mais cette paix est peut-être aussi difficile à établir que celle de l’abbé de
Saint-Pierre. Mort en 1695.
Nivelle de La Chaussée (Pierre-Claude). Il a fait quelques comédies
dans un genre nouveau et attendrissant, qui ont eu du succès. Il est vrai que
pour faire des comédies il lui manquait le génie comique. Beaucoup de
personnes de goût ne peuvent souffrir des comédies où l’on ne trouve pas
un trait de bonne plaisanterie; mais il y a du mérite à savoir toucher, à bien
traiter la morale, à faire des vers bien tournés et purement écrits: c’est le
mérite de cet auteur. Il était né sous Louis XIV[245]. On lui a reproché que
ce qui approche du tragique dans ses pièces n’est pas toujours assez
intéressant, et que ce qui est du ton de la comédie n’est pas plaisant.
L’alliage de ces deux métaux est difficile à trouver. On croit que La
Chaussée est un des premiers après ceux qui ont eu du génie. Il est mort
vers l’année 1750[246].
Nodot, n’est connu que par ses fragments de Pétrone, qu’il dit avoir
trouvés à Belgrade, en 1688. Les lacunes qu’il a en effet remplies ne me
paraissent pas d’un aussi mauvais latin que ses adversaires le disent. Il y a
des expressions, à la vérité, dont ni Cicéron, ni Virgile, ni Horace, ne se
servent; mais le vrai Pétrone est plein d’expressions pareilles, que de
nouvelles mœurs et de nouveaux usages avaient mises à la mode. Au reste,
je ne fais cet article touchant Nodot que pour faire voir que la satire de
Pétrone n’est point du tout celle que le consul Pétrone envoya, dit-on, à
Néron, avant de se faire ouvrir les veines: «Flagitia principis sub nominibus
exoletorum feminarumque, et novitate cujusque stupri perscripsit, atque
obsignata misit Neroni[247].»
On a prétendu que le professeur Agamemnon est Sénèque; mais le style
de Sénèque est précisément le contraire de celui d’Agamemnon, turgida
oratio; Agamemnon est un plat déclamateur de collége.
On ose dire que Trimalcion est Néron. Comment un jeune empereur, qui
après tout avait de l’esprit et des talents, peut-il être représenté par un vieux
financier ridicule, qui donne à dîner à des parasites plus ridicules encore, et
qui parle avec autant d’ignorance et de sottise que le Bourgeois
gentilhomme de Molière?
Comment la crasseuse et idiote Fortunata, qui est fort au-dessous de
madame Jourdain, pourrait-elle être la femme ou la maîtresse de Néron?
quel rapport des polissons de collége, qui vivent de petits larcins dans des
lieux de débauche obscurs, peuvent-ils avoir avec la cour magnifique et
voluptueuse d’un empereur? Quel homme sensé, en lisant cet ouvrage
licencieux, ne jugera pas qu’il est d’un homme effréné, qui a de l’esprit,
mais dont le goût n’est pas encore formé; qui fait tantôt des vers très
agréables, et tantôt de très mauvais; qui mêle les plus basses plaisanteries
aux plus délicates, et qui est lui-même un exemple de la décadence du goût
dont il se plaint?
La clef qu’on a donnée de Pétrone ressemble à celle des Caractères de
La Bruyère; elle est faite au hasard.
Ozanam (Jacques), Juif d’origine, né près de Dombes, en 1642. Il apprit
la géométrie sans maître, dès l’âge de quinze ans. Il est le premier qui ait
fait un dictionnaire de mathématiques. Ses Récréations mathématiques et
physiques ont toujours un grand débit; mais ce n’est plus l’ouvrage
d’Ozanam, comme les dernières éditions de Moréri ne sont plus son
ouvrage. Mort en 1717.
Pagi (Antoine), Provençal, né en 1624, franciscain. Il a corrigé Baronius,
et a eu pension du clergé pour cet ouvrage. Mort en 1699.
Papin (Isaac), né à Blois en 1657, calviniste. Ayant quitté sa religion, il
écrivit contre elle. Mort en 1709.
Pardies (Ignace-Gaston), jésuite, né à Pau, en 1636, connu par ses
Éléments de géométrie, et par son livre sur l’Ame des bêtes[248]. Prétendre
avec Descartes que les animaux sont de pures machines privées du
sentiment dont ils ont les organes, c’est démentir l’expérience et insulter la
nature. Avancer qu’un esprit pur les anime, c’est dire ce qu’on ne peut
prouver. Reconnaître que les animaux sont doués de sensations et de
mémoire, sans savoir comment cela s’opère, ce serait parler en sage qui sait
que l’ignorance vaut mieux que l’erreur: car quel est l’ouvrage de la nature
dont on connaisse les premiers principes? Mort en 1673.
Parent (Antoine), né à Paris, en 1666, bon mathématicien. Il est encore
un de ceux qui apprirent la géométrie sans maître. Ce qu’il y a de plus
singulier de lui, c’est qu’il vécut long-temps à Paris, libre et heureux, avec
moins de deux cents livres de rente. Mort en 1716.
Pascal (Blaise), fils du premier intendant qu’il y eut à Rouen, né en
1623, génie prématuré. Il voulut se servir de la supériorité de ce génie
comme les rois de leur puissance; il crut tout soumettre et tout abaisser par
la force. Ce qui a le plus révolté certains lecteurs dans ses Pensées[249],
c’est l’air despotique et méprisant dont il débute. Il ne fallait commencer
que par avoir raison. Au reste, la langue et l’éloquence lui doivent
beaucoup. Les ennemis de Pascal et d’Arnauld firent supprimer leurs éloges
dans le livre des Hommes illustres de Perrault. Sur quoi on cita ce passage
de Tacite (Ann. III, 76), «Præfulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso quod
effigies eorum non visebantur.» Mort en 1662.
Patin (Gui), né à Houdan, en 1601, médecin, plus fameux par ses Lettres
médisantes que par sa médecine. Son recueil de Lettres a été lu avec avidité,
parcequ’elles contiennent des nouvelles et des anecdotes que tout le monde
aime, et des satires qu’on aime davantage. Il sert à faire voir combien les
auteurs contemporains qui écrivent précipitamment les nouvelles du jour,
sont des guides infidèles pour l’histoire. Ces nouvelles se trouvent souvent
fausses ou défigurées par la malignité; d’ailleurs, cette multitude de petits
faits n’est guère précieuse qu’aux petits esprits. Mort en 1672.
Patin (Charles), né à Paris, en 1633, fils de Gui Patin. Ses ouvrages sont
lus des savants, et les Lettres de son père le sont des gens oisifs. Charles
Patin, très savant antiquaire, quitta la France, et mourut professeur en
médecine à Padoue, en 1693.
Patru (Olivier), né à Paris en 1604, le premier qui ait introduit la pureté
de la langue dans le barreau. Il reçut dans sa dernière maladie une
gratification de Louis XIV, à qui l’on dit qu’il n’était pas riche. Mort en
1681.
Pavillon (Étienne), né à Paris, en 1632, avocat général au parlement de
Metz, connu par quelques poésies écrites naturellement. Mort en 1705.
Pellisson-Fontanier (Paul), né calviniste à Béziers, en 1624; poëte
médiocre, à la vérité, mais homme très savant et très éloquent; premier
commis et confident du surintendant Fouquet; mis à la Bastille en 1661. Il y
resta quatre ans et demi, pour avoir été fidèle à son maître. Il passa le reste
de sa vie à prodiguer des éloges au roi, qui lui avait ôté sa liberté: c’est une
chose qu’on ne voit que dans les monarchies. Beaucoup plus courtisan que
philosophe, il changea de religion, et fit sa fortune. Maître des comptes,
maître des requêtes, et abbé, il fut chargé d’employer le revenu du tiers des
économats à faire quitter aux huguenots leur religion, qu’il avait quittée.
Son Histoire de l’académie fut très applaudie. On a de lui beaucoup
d’ouvrages, des Prières pendant la messe, un Recueil de pièces galantes, un
Traité sur l’Eucharistie, beaucoup de vers amoureux à Olympe. Cette
Olympe était mademoiselle Desvieux, qu’on prétend avoir épousé le
célèbre Bossuet avant qu’il entrât dans l’Église[250]. Mais ce qui a fait le
plus d’honneur à Pellisson, ce sont ses excellents discours pour M. Fouquet,
et son Histoire de la conquête de la Franche-Comté. Les protestants ont
prétendu qu’il était mort avec indifférence; les catholiques ont soutenu le
contraire, et tous sont convenus qu’il mourut sans sacrements. Mort en
1693.
Perrault (Claude), né à Paris en 1613[251]. Il fut médecin, mais il
n’exerça la médecine que pour ses amis. Il devint, sans aucun maître, habile
dans tous les arts qui ont rapport au dessin, et dans les mécaniques. Bon
physicien, grand architecte, il encouragea les arts sous la protection de
Colbert, et eut de la réputation malgré Boileau. Il a publié plusieurs
Mémoires sur l’anatomie comparée, dans les recueils de l’académie des
sciences, et une magnifique édition de Vitruve. La traduction et les dessins
qui l’embellissent sont également ses ouvrages. Mort en 1688.
Perrault (Charles), né en 1633, frère de Claude. Contrôleur-général des
bâtiments sous Colbert, donna la forme aux académies de peinture, de
sculpture, et d’architecture. Utile aux gens de lettres, qui le recherchèrent
pendant la vie de son protecteur, et qui l’abandonnèrent ensuite. Ou lui a
reproché d’avoir trouvé trop de défauts dans les anciens; mais sa grande
faute est de les avoir critiqués maladroitement, et de s’être fait des ennemis
de ceux même qu’il pouvait opposer aux anciens. Cette dispute a été et sera
long-temps une affaire de parti, comme elle l’était du temps d’Horace. Que
de gens encore en Italie qui, ne pouvant lire Homère qu’avec dégoût, et
lisant tous les jours l’Arioste et le Tasse avec transport, appellent encore
Homère incomparable! Mort en 1703.
N. B. Il est dit dans les Anecdotes littéraires, tome II, page 27,
qu’Addison ayant fait présent de ses ouvrages à Despréaux, celui-ci lui
répondit qu’il n’aurait jamais écrit contre Perrault, s’il eût vu de si
excellentes pièces d’un moderne. Comment peut-on imprimer un tel
mensonge? Boileau ne savait pas un mot d’anglais, aucun Français
n’étudiait alors cette langue. Ce n’est que vers l’an 1730 qu’on commença à
se familiariser avec elle. Et d’ailleurs, quand même Addison, qui s’est
moqué de Boileau, aurait été connu de lui, pourquoi Boileau n’aurait-il pas
écrit contre Perrault, en faveur des anciens dont Addison fait l’éloge dans
tous ses ouvrages? Encore une fois[252], défions-nous de tous ces ana, de
toutes ces petites anecdotes. Un sûr moyen de dire des sottises est de répéter
au hasard ce qu’on a entendu dire.
Perrot d’Ablancourt (Nicolas), d’une ancienne famille du parlement
de Paris, né à Vitri[253] en 1606, traducteur élégant, et dont on appela
chaque traduction la belle infidèle: mort pauvre en 1664.
Petau (Denys), né à Orléans, en 1583, jésuite. Il a réformé la
chronologie. On a de lui soixante et dix ouvrages. Mort en 1652.
Petis de La Croix (François), l’un de ceux dont le grand ministre
Colbert encouragea et récompensa le mérite. Louis XIV l’envoya en
Turquie et en Perse, à l’âge de seize ans, pour apprendre les langues
orientales. Qui croirait qu’il a composé une partie de la vie de Louis XIV en
arabe, et que ce livre est estimé dans l’Orient? On a de lui l’Histoire de
Gengis-Kan[254] et de Tamerlan, tirée des anciens auteurs arabes, et
plusieurs livres utiles; mais sa traduction des Mille et un jours est ce qu’on
lit le plus:

L’homme est de glace aux vérités,

Il est de feu pour les mensonges.
La Fontaine, IX, 6.

Mort en 1713.
Petit (Pierre), né à Paris, en 1617, philosophe et savant. Il n’a écrit
qu’en latin. Mort en 1687.
Pezron (Paul), de l’ordre de Citeaux, né en Bretagne, en 1639, grand
antiquaire, qui a travaillé sur l’origine de la langue des Celtes. Mort en
1706.
Polignac (Melchior de), cardinal, né au Puy, en Vélay, en 1661, aussi
bon poëte latin qu’on peut l’être dans une langue morte; très éloquent dans
la sienne; l’un de ceux qui ont prouvé qu’il est plus aisé de faire des vers