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Exhibiting the Nazi Past: Museum Objects Between the Material and the Immaterial 1st ed. Edition Chloe Paver full chapter instant download
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THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS CONTEXTS
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.
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
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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
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
vii
viii Contents
6 Conclusion 275
Bibliography 279
Index 295
List of Figures
ix
x List of Figures
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
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).
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
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.
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
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
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’.
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:
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
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
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
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.
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Humming in misery “Non è ——”
He thinks not of the west so brightly ——
Nor listens to the faint and distant ——
But dreams of the false fair to whom is ——
The wo which never, never, will take ——.
Answer
367.
Convert the following into a couplet, perfect in rhyme and rhythm,
without adding or omitting a single letter:
Answer
368.
One and the same word of two syllables, answers each of the
following triplets:
I. MY FIRST springs in the mountains;
MY SECOND springs out of the mountains;
MY WHOLE comes with a spring over the mountains.
Answer
369.
370.
Answer
371.
Answer
372.
My FIRST is a little river in England that gave name to a
celebrated university; my SECOND is always near; my THIRD sounds
like several large bodies of water; and my WHOLE is the name of a
Persian monarch, the neighing of whose horse gave him a kingdom
and a crown.
Answer
373.
Answer
374.
Answer
375.
A DINNER PARTY.
THE GUESTS,
(See Key.)
PARADOXES.
1st. Polus instructed Ctesiphon in the art of pleading. Teacher
and pupil agreed that the tuition-fee should be paid when the latter
should win his first case. Some time having gone by, and the young
man being still without case or client, Polus, in despair of his fee,
brought the matter before the Court, each party pleading his own
cause. Polus spoke first, as follows:
“It is indifferent to me how the Court may decide this case. For, if
the decision be in my favor, I recover my fee by virtue of the
judgment; but, if my opponent wins the case, this being his first, I
obtain my fee according to the contract.”
Ctesiphon, being called on for his defense, said:
“The decision of the Court is indifferent to me. For, if in my favor, I
am thereby released from my debt to Polus. But, if I lose the case,
the fee cannot be demanded, according to our contract.”
2d. A certain king once built a bridge, and decreed that all
persons about to cross it, should be interrogated as to their
destination. If they told the truth they should be permitted to pass
unharmed; but, if they answered falsely, they should be hanged on a
gallows erected at the centre of the bridge. One day a man, about to
cross, was asked the usual question, and replied:
“I am going to be hanged on that gallows!”
Now, if they hanged him, he had told the truth, and ought to have
escaped; but, if they did not hang him, he had “answered falsely,”
and ought to have suffered the penalty of the law.
PART II.
When Hood and his family were living at Ostend for economy’s
sake, and with the same motive Mrs. Hood was doing her own work,
as we phrase it, he wrote to a friend in England: “Jane is becoming
an excellent cook and housemaid, and I intend to raise her wages.
She had nothing a week before, and now I mean to double it.”
CLUBS.
If any man loves comfort and
Has little cash to buy it, he
Should get into a crowded club—
A most select society!
OTHER WORLDS.
Mr. Mortimer Collins indulges in sundry very odd speculations
concerning them.
STILTS.
ETIQUETTE OF EQUITATION.
When a gentleman is to accompany a lady on horseback,
1st. There must be two horses. (Pillions are out of fashion, except
in some parts of Wales, Australia and New Jersey.)
2d. One horse must have a side saddle. The gentleman will not
mount this horse. By bearing this rule in mind he will soon find no
difficulty in recognizing his own steed.
3d. The gentleman will assist the lady to mount and adjust her foot
in the stirrup. There being but one stirrup, he will learn upon which
side to assist the lady after very little practice.
4th. He will then mount himself. As there are two stirrups to his
saddle, he may mount on either side, but by no means on both; at
least, not at the same time. The former is generally considered the
most graceful method of mounting. If he has known Mr. Rarey he may
mount without the aid of stirrups. If not, he may try, but will probably
fail.
5th. The gentleman should always ride on the right side of the lady.
According to some authorities, the right side is the left. According to
others, the other is the right. If the gentleman is left handed, this will of
course make a difference. Should he be ambidexter, it will be
indifferent.
6th. If the gentleman and lady meet persons on the road, these will
probably be strangers, that is if they are not acquaintances. In either
case the gentleman and lady must govern themselves accordingly.
Perhaps the latter is the evidence of highest breeding.
7th. If they be going in different directions, they will not be
expected to ride in company, nor must these request those to turn and
join the others; and vice versa. This is indecorous, and indicates a
lack of savoir faire.
8th. If the gentleman’s horse throw him he must not expect him to
pick him up, nor the lady; but otherwise the lady may. This is important
to be borne in mind by both.
9th. On their return, the gentleman will dismount first and assist the
lady from her horse, but he must not expect the same courtesy in
return.
N. B.—These rules apply equally to every species of equitation, as
pony riding, donkey riding, rocking horse riding, or “riding on a rail.”
There will, of course, be modifications required, according to the form
and style of the animal.