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Material Experiences, 1933–45

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Exhibiting the Nazi Past

Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

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Abstract

Taking its lead particularly from a wider scholarship on mentalities and experiences under National Socialism, Chapter 3 of ‘Exhibiting the Nazi Past’ considers how history exhibitions use objects to present the experiences of 1933–45 and how, when conventional objects fail them, exhibition-makers objectify language and photographs. The focus is less on the presentation of the Nazi elite (though the chapter shows that there are routine ways of devaluing their material culture) than on what it felt like to experience Nazism either as a member of the non-persecuted majority or as a victim. Special attention is paid to how exhibitions present Jewish participation in Heimat culture and how they display the systems of object value, manufacture and exchange that prevailed in the concentration camps.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat: A German Dream. Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 23.

  2. 2.

    Boa and Palfreyman, p. 7.

  3. 3.

    The work can be viewed in action at http://www.victorkegli.com/de/herschel-gretel [accessed 29 May 2018]; photographs are available in Jüdisches Museum Berlin (ed.), Heimatkunde. 30 Künstler blicken auf Deutschland (Munich: Hirmer, 2011), pp. 88–91.

  4. 4.

    Austrian artist Azra Akšamija’s contribution to ‘Heimatkunde’, ‘Dirndlmoschee’, also used folk culture . While folk costume and Islam are not contradictory in Akšamija’s native Bosnia, the creation of this piece in Austria and its showing in Germany would seem to rely on the idea that Germanic folk traditions are understood to be in opposition to non-Christian cultures and that this opposition is ripe for subversion. Ibid., pp. 14–17.

  5. 5.

    Boa and Palfreyman, pp. 14, 22.

  6. 6.

    The fashion exhibition ‘Glanz und Grauen’ devoted a section to Tracht (though not in connection with Jewish culture) and questioned our era’s stereotyping of Tracht as quintessentially Nazi. One object that summed up the complex relationship of 1930s women to Tracht was a fashionable summer dress in an urban approximation of Tracht style, its fabric decorated all over with a motif of a woman in authentic Tracht. LVR-Industriemuseum (ed.), Glanz und Grauen. Mode im dritten Reich (Bönen/Westfalen: Kettler, 2012), p. 78.

  7. 7.

    Bernhard Purin (ed.), Jüdisches Museum Franken in Schnaittach. Museumsführer (Fürth: Jüdisches Museum Franken—Fürth und Schnaittach, 1996), p. 33.

  8. 8.

    Viewed in September 2017; objects are swapped in and out of this vitrine periodically.

  9. 9.

    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. 280). This southern German greeting is part of Sharone L ifschitz’s installation ‘Speaking Germany’ (discussed also in Sect. 5.7), passages from which are pasted onto the windows of the museum. It is therefore a quotation from an interview with one of her participants, but its position by the door makes it do double service as the museum’s local greeting to its often international visitors.

  10. 10.

    Hanno Loewy and Gerhard Milchram (eds), Hast du meine Alpen gesehen? Eine jüdische Beziehungsgeschichte (Hohenems and Vienna: Bucher, 2009).

  11. 11.

    See my article: Chloe Paver, ‘What’s so Austrian about the Alps? Local, Transnational, and Global Narratives in Austrian Exhibitions about the Alps’, Austrian Studies, 18 (2010), special issue: ‘The Alps’, 179–95.

  12. 12.

    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. 87).

  13. 13.

    Bernhard Purin , director at Schnaittach 1995–2002, now director of the Jüdisches Museum München , recalls his role in the creation of the Schnaittach museum in ‘Building a Jewish Museum in Germany in the Twenty-First Century’, in (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millennium, ed. by Robin Ostow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 139–56. Gruber, Virtually Jewish, pp. 166–68.

  14. 14.

    Gruber, p. 166.

  15. 15.

    Gruber, p. 167. Purin tells the story in Bernhard Purin , Judaica aus der Medina Aschpah. Die Sammlung des Jüdischen Museums Franken in Schnaittach (Fürth: Jüdisches Museum Franken—Fürth und Schnaittach, 2003), pp. 7–9.

  16. 16.

    Walter Tausendpfund and Gerhard Philipp Wolf , Die jüdische Gemeinde von Schnaittach (Nuremberg: Korn und Berg, 1981). For their view of Stammler, see particularly pp. 45–46, where he figures as ‘mutig’ and ‘furchtlos’ (‘brave’ and ‘fearless’) while the Jewish community, who were willing to give him objects ‘vor ihrem Weggang’ (‘before they went away’), do not appreciate his work on their behalf after 1945. The book has little to say about the Holocaust, a word it avoids, speaking instead of ‘das Ende der neuzeitlichen Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland’ and ‘die beispiellose Judenpolitik im “Dritten Reich”’ (‘the end of the modern history of the Jews in Germany’ and ‘the unprecedented Jewish policy in the “Third Reich”’, p. 7).

  17. 17.

    Martyn Housden, Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 147, 160.

  18. 18.

    Tausendpfund and Wolf, p. 47.

  19. 19.

    The building itself is owned by neither museum, but rather by the local council.

  20. 20.

    Sabine Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen. Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und Österreich (Berlin and Vienna: Philo, 2000), p. 81.

  21. 21.

    A temporary exhibition about local trade guilds shown in 2012 (‘Von der Zunft zur Innung—Handwerk im Wandel’ or ‘Trade Guilds Past and Present: Artisan Work through the Centuries’) cited a seventeenth-century complaint against Jewish butchers by the butchers’ guild. Apart from this curious fact, which was not analysed, Jews were not mentioned. It was taken as read that guild members were Christian.

  22. 22.

    Boa and Palfreyman, p. 165.

  23. 23.

    For a recent newspaper article registering surprise that a green politician should believe in Heimat in the age of the AfD, see: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/sz-serie-was-ist-heimat-ein-linker-biobauer-fordert-die-heimatliebe-zurueck-1.3814376 [accessed 29 May 2018].

  24. 24.

    Chloe Paver, ‘You Shall Know Them by Their Objects: Material Culture and Its Impact in Museum Displays About National Socialism’, in Cultural Impact in the German Context: Models of Transmission, Reception and Influence, ed. by Rebecca Braun and Lyn Marven (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 169–87.

  25. 25.

    Hans-Ulrich Thamer and Simone Erpel (eds), Hitler und die Deutschen. Volksgemeinschaft und Verbrechen (Dresden: Sandstein, 2010), pp. 216–17.

  26. 26.

    ‘Volk – Heimat – Dorf. Ideologie und Wirklichkeit im ländlichen Bayern der 1930er und 1940er Jahre’ (‘Nationalism, Local Identity, and the Village: Ideology and Reality in Rural Bavaria in the 1930s and 1940s’, 2017 at a series of farming museums; viewed at the Bauerngerätemuseum Hundszell).

  27. 27.

    Birgit Angerer, et al. (eds), Volk, Heimat, Dorf. Ideologie und Wirklichkeit im ländlichen Bayern der 1930er und 1940er Jahre (Petersberg: Imhof, 2016), p. 20.

  28. 28.

    Angerer, p. 21.

  29. 29.

    Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (ed.), Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), pp. 579–627.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., pp. 598–605.

  31. 31.

    ‘Kahn & Arnold. Aufstieg, Verfolgung und Emigration zweier Augsburger Unternehmerfamilien im 20. Jahrhundert’ (‘Kahn & Arnold: The Rise, Persecution, and Emigration of two Families of Entrepreneurs from Augsburg in the 20th Century’, 2017 at the Staatliches Textil- und Industriemuseum, Augsburg).

  32. 32.

    The exhibition had no catalogue, but the car can be viewed in the advertising video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHpoDPYzi8w [accessed 29 May 2018].

  33. 33.

    Walking over to the car after listening to the audio file, it became clear that this was not, in fact, the disputed Horch (which had, of course, been sold on) but another family car in which a family member escaped to Britain. Yet that substitution made no difference to the mesmerizing effect of the car’s presence during the audio story, an example of how sound and object can work together.

  34. 34.

    Shown, for instance, at ‘Glanz und Grauen’ and at the Dokumentationszentrum Prora .

  35. 35.

    The catalogue shows the image in question, and the museum’s caption, but not the arrangement in the vitrine, in which the photographer’s caption is the object. Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst (ed.), Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. Katalog zur Dauerausstellung (Berlin: Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, 2014), pp. 76–78.

  36. 36.

    Pól Ó Dochartaigh and Christiane Schönfeld (eds), Representing the ‘Good German’ in Literature and Culture After 1945: Altruism and Moral Ambiguity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), pp. 4–7. For Ó Dochartaigh and Schönfeld, so-called ‘good Germans’ (the rare resisters among the majority) challenge the self-image of post-war Germans because they are ‘ordinary people who debunk the myth of paralysis’ (p. 7). The example of Topf & Söhne shows that historical figures do not even need to have been ‘good’ to serve that role, just not cowed.

  37. 37.

    In his essay in the catalogue, Herbert Posch is cautious about what can and cannot be read out of the available evidence in terms of individual motivations , but nevertheless sees this telltale as significant. Herbert Posch, ‘InventArisiert. Raub und Verwertung—“arisierte” Wohnungseinrichtungen im Mobiliendepot’, in InventArisiert. Enteignung von Möbeln aus jüdischem Besitz, ed. by Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl and Herbert Posch (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2000), pp. 10–43.

  38. 38.

    Exhibitions about the role of librarians in handling stolen books during the National Socialist era may sound trivial. However, library books are the object of various shorthand systems of classification and, precisely because such marks are isolated from the white noise of continuous text, they can stand effectively for the willingness of working people to do the job of the regime . See, for instance, Cordula Reuß (ed.), NS-Raubgut in der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig (Leipzig: Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2011), which shows how the stamps of dissolved libraries—of freemasons, trade unions and so on—were dutifully crossed out (pp. 48, 67, 77, 79). Even if the theme of such exhibitions is generally provenance , rather than mentalities, articles in their catalogues suggest that the exhibition-makers are interested in understanding the complicity of employees, and images from the vitrines indicate that these stamps and scribbles are put prominently on show.

  39. 39.

    Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit. Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), pp. 118–28.

  40. 40.

    Dreyblatt’s Ravensbrück work is not especially complex, perhaps because it exposes and critiques the perpetrator perspective in ways that align straightforwardly with the museum’s own work, but it should be understood in the context of his much more interesting work on memory and the archive elsewhere. See, for instance, Astrid Schmetterling, ‘Archival Obsessions: Arnold Dreyblatt ’s Memory Work’, Art Journal, 66.4 (2007), 70–83.

  41. 41.

    Shown, for instance, at ‘“Arisierung” in Leipzig. Verdrängt. Beraubt. Ermordet’ (‘“Aryanization” in Leipzig: Excluded, Robbed, Murdered’, 2007 at the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig) and at ‘Entrechtet. Entwürdigt. Beraubt’.

  42. 42.

    For instance, a chess table at ‘Nationalsozialismus in Freiburg ’. Peter Kalchthaler, Robert Neisen, and Tilmann von Stockhausen (eds), Nationalsozialismus in Freiburg (Petersberg: Imhof, 2016), pp. 150–51, 269.

  43. 43.

    Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl and Herbert Posch, ‘Vorwort’, in InventArisiert, ed. by Barta-Fliedl and Posch, pp. 8–9 (p. 9).

  44. 44.

    Posch, ‘Inventarisiert’.

  45. 45.

    Barta-Fliedl and Posch, p. 23.

  46. 46.

    The exhibition ‘Spurensuche. Provenienzforschung in Bamberg’ (‘Searching for Traces: Provenance Research’, 2017 at the Historisches Museum Bamberg) played with this idea of suggestive absences in a slightly different way. In the ante-room to the exhibition, quotations showing local people desperate to get their hands on ‘Aryanized’ items (and resentful that the authorities were taking the best pieces) were framed in a faux-gilt picture frame . Beside the frame was a mocked-up mantelpiece. A paler paint had been used on the wall to create shadows, as if an ormolu clock, two cameo frames and a larger painting had been removed from the room.

  47. 47.

    Ernst van Alphen, ‘List Mania in Holocaust Commemoration’, in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, ed. by Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 11–27.

  48. 48.

    Monika Sommer, ‘Experiment und Leerstelle. Zur Musealisierung der Zeitgeschichte in den österreichischen Landesmuseen’, in Zeitgeschichte Ausstellen in Österreich. Museen—Gedenkstätten—Ausstellungen, ed. by Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2011), pp. 313–35. The exhibition was: ‘“Kulturhauptstadt des Führers”. Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Linz und Oberösterreich’ (‘“The Führer’s City of Culture”: Art and National Socialism in Linz and Upper Austria’, 2009 at the Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum).

  49. 49.

    Bernhard Lichtenberger, cited by Sommer, p. 334.

  50. 50.

    Sommer, p. 334.

  51. 51.

    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. 107).

  52. 52.

    At the exhibition ‘Hitler und die Deutschen’, Nazi memorabilia was shown in a darkened vitrine ; Sect. 5.1 gives examples of items laid on their side in an attic; at the Stadtmuseum München, uniform badges are turned upside down to reveal their manufacturers’ labels ; at the DB Museum, a bust of the Reichsbahn director under National Socialism has been taken from its plinth in the stairwell and placed on the floor of a vitrine, with an empty plinth behind it. An eagle set conventionally on a plinth heightens the humiliation.

  53. 53.

    At ‘Graben für Germanien. Archäologie unterm Hakenkreuz’ (‘Digging for Germania: Archaeology Under the Swastika’, 2013 at the Focke-Museum ), monochrome images of Hitler and other Nazi officials were pixelated but still identifiable. On a mocked-up Litfasssäule (advertising column) at ‘Linz im Nationalsozialismus. Ideologie und Realität’ (‘Linz under National Socialism: Ideology and Reality’, 2008 at the Wissensturm Linz), posters were overlapped so that Hitler ’s head was obscured while the familiar uniformed pose, with a hand on one hip, remained visible. At the Erinnerungs- und Gedenkstätte Wewelsburg 1933–1945 , a Hitler bust is placed with its back to the side of the vitrine, crowded on all sides by other objects and without spotlighting. At ‘Was ist Deutsch?’ (‘What is German?’, 2006 at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum), a bust of Hitler was placed inside a darkened vitrine; the visitor had to press a switch to illuminate it. At ‘Nationalsozialismus in Freiburg’ (‘National Socialism in Freiburg’, 2016 at the Augustinermuseum , Freiburg) a Hitler bust was placed in a corner between more compelling objects, on a low plinth below eye height. (By contrast, in the catalogue the same bust is given almost a full page and is lit and photographed as an art object would be (Kalchtaler et al., pp. 130–31).)

  54. 54.

    The Gedenkstätte Buchenwald , for instance, shows a swastika flag crudely scrunched up . At ‘Linz im Nationalsozialismus’, the overlapping posters partially obscured swastikas . The exhibition ‘Wie wir in Reih’ und Glied marschieren lernten. Schule im Nationalsozialismus’ (‘How We Learned to March in Rank and File: School Under National Socialism’, 2012 at the Schulmuseum Bergisch Gladbach ) deconstructed Nazi flags in various ways, including replacing the swastika in the roundel with a photograph of schoolchildren parading before the Town Hall. Swastikas were truncated or reconfigured in the display architecture of ‘Glanz und Grauen’ and ‘Who Was a Nazi? Entnazifizierung in Deutschland nach 1945’ (‘Who Was a Nazi? Denazification in Germany after 1945’, 2016 at the AlliiertenMuseum ). For an image of a similar effect see 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 (p. 66).

  55. 55.

    This must be a particularly venerable convention since even Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, insisted on it. ‘Let the busts of ancestors with their ornaments be set up at a height corresponding to the width of the alae’. Vitruvius, On Architecture, Book VI, widely available online.

  56. 56.

    A close-up of the milliner’s glass head is available at the museum’s website, but does not show the installation quite as I saw it. It shows a single image of Hitler unfolded inside the glass, whereas in the exhibition space the head was packed with many pieces of paper and Hitler’s face appeared multiple times. http://mittemuseum.de/deutsch/ausstellung/vergangene-ausstellung/reichsmuetterschule-berlin-wedding-in-ns-system/reichsmuetterschule-berlin-wedding.html [accessed 29 May 2018].

  57. 57.

    A similar display of a bust on its back in packing paper was shown at ‘1945. Niederlage, Befreiung, Neuanfang’ (‘1945: Defeat, Liberation, New Beginnings’), 2015 at the DHM. The display drew attention to the point at which—as a direct consequence of Marshall Pétain’s disgrace—his bust was withdrawn from public space and made redundant in its symbolic function. Deutsches Historisches Museum (ed.), 1945. Niederlage. Befreiung. Neuanfang. Zwölf Länder Europas nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2015), p. 236.

  58. 58.

    Sommer, p. 334.

  59. 59.

    Relevant installations are documented in: Maurice Berger (ed.), Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000 (Baltimore: Centre for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2001), esp. pp. 54, 74, 78–79, 80–81; and Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 65–119 (esp. p. 85 and, for busts and empty plinths, p. 84).

  60. 60.

    Silke Arnold-de Simine, Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 80–81.

  61. 61.

    Arnold-de Simine, p. 81.

  62. 62.

    Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; first publ. 1986), pp. 3–63.

  63. 63.

    Describing the approach of the latest permanent exhibition, the head of the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück speaks only rather generally of more careful contextualization than previously, and greater differentiation between different inmate experiences (Insa Eschebach , ‘Die neue Hauptausstellung der Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück’, in Das Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück. Geschichte und Erinnerung, ed. by Alyn Beßmann and Insa Eschebach (Berlin: Metropol, 2013), pp. 11–17). For the head of the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald , the key feature of its new permanent exhibition is its stress on the local populace’s acceptance of the camp system, an emphasis that is intended to counter democratic backsliding today (Volkhard Knigge , ‘Jedem das Seine’, in Buchenwald. Ausgrenzung und Gewalt. 1937 bis 1945, ed. by Volkhard Knigge (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), pp. 6–8).

  64. 64.

    Esther Shalev-Gerz, MenschenDinge/The Human Aspect of Objects (Weimar: Stiftung Gedenkstätte Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora, 2006), p. 75.

  65. 65.

    Shalev-Gerz, p. 90. For a summary of what we know about how objects functioned in a system of exchange that was exclusive to the camps, see Ulrike Kistner, ‘What Remains: Genocide and Things’, in Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony, ed. by Nicolas Chare and Dominic Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 104–29. While Kistner studies the historical reality rather than museum representations of it, she prefaces her study with photographs of fragments remaining in the soil at Auschwitz.

  66. 66.

    Given more space, the Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen (whose latest main exhibition opened in 2007) would make an equally good case study.

  67. 67.

    Beßmann and Eschebach, pp. 18, 156–65.

  68. 68.

    Beßmann and Eschebach, p. 62.

  69. 69.

    Beßmann and Eschebach, p. 256.

  70. 70.

    Beßmann and Eschebach, p. 57. Unlike in the catalogue, the hat is set on a stand in its vitrine, its shape framing an absent face.

  71. 71.

    Beßmann and Eschebach, p. 69.

  72. 72.

    ‘In ordinary circumstances, people who use or produce the objects that survive them, or who are depicted in photographic images, face indeterminate futures that are made poignant by the certainty we bring to them in retrospect. In the context of genocide, however, intended victims actually anticipate their own untimely deaths in a near future. In the images or objects that emerge from such traumatic circumstances, the act of hope and resistance against that knowledge may well be the punctum’. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission’, Poetics Today, 27 (2006), 353–83 (p. 360; their emphasis).

  73. 73.

    Florian Dierl, Mariana Hausleitner, Martin Hözl, and Andreas Mix (eds), Ordnung und Vernichtung. Die Polizei im NS-Staat (Dresden: Sandstein, 2011), pp. 236–37.

  74. 74.

    Hirsch and Spitzer, p. 162.

  75. 75.

    Chloe Paver, ‘Gender Issues in German Historical Exhibitions About National Socialism’, International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 1.3 (2008), 43–55.

  76. 76.

    Hirsch and Spitzer, p. 162.

  77. 77.

    This is confirmed by the database of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which loaned the object to the exhibition.

  78. 78.

    This is, of course, a question of position, and Ruth Klüger ’s Holocaust experience was a strong prompt to rethink patriarchal norms. At the same time, she makes clear that any expectation that the Holocaust should have brought out the best in people is a fantasy projected retrospectively and a fundamental misunderstanding of what genocidal persecution is and does. Ruth Klüger, weiter leben (Munich: dtv, 1992; repr. 2012), p. 72.

  79. 79.

    Having said that, if readers want a further application for Hirsch’s and Spitzer’s paradigm of testimonial objects, they might consider a pair of shoes on display at the Ehemalige Synagoge Haigerloch . Wanting to be sure that his son would have a good pair of shoes in adulthood, a local cattle trader gave his twelve-year-old boy his own ‘best’ shoes to take on a Kindertransport. The father was murdered before the boy was big enough to fit the shoes, but the son kept them in his UK home and bequeathed them to his daughters, who donated them to the museum . The contrast between the adult male shoes in the glass case and the boy recipient, and between him and the women who inherit the old-fashioned men’s shoes, creates the kind of temporal disjunctions about which Hirsch and Spitzer write. The shoes are not illustrated in the otherwise comprehensive museum catalogue, details of which are given in Chapter 5.

  80. 80.

    Enrico Heitzer, ‘Stoffherz von Leonore Fink. Die Herausforderung der zweifachen Geschichte Sachsenhausens’, in Vom Monument zur Erinnerung. 25 Jahre Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten in 25 Objekten, ed. by Ines Reich (Berlin: Metropol, 2017), pp. 90–98 (p. 92).

  81. 81.

    ‘Werkausstellung Sowjetisches Speziallager Nr. 7 / Nr. 1 in Sachsenhausen. Haftalltag und Erinnerung’ (‘Work-in-Progress Exhibition—Soviet Special Camp No. 7 / No. 1 in Sachsenhausen: The Daily Life of the Inmates and their Memories of this Time’), 2017 at the Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen .

  82. 82.

    More research would be needed to establish whether straw work would have been recognised as Eastern European at the time, but two objects in Sachsenhausen ’s display about contacts between the town and the camp —a painting of a man in folk costume and a toy ‘troika’ (sleigh and three horses)—are clearly non-German. Both were given by forced labourers as presents to civilians who provided food and both were kept within the family until donation to the museum .

  83. 83.

    The Deutsch-Russisches Museum also separates out this element, under the heading ‘Begegnungen’ (‘Encounters’).

  84. 84.

    Toys made by forced labourers and exchanged for bread were also shown at ‘Volk – Heimat – Dorf’ though they are not recorded in the catalogue.

  85. 85.

    The extensive scholarship was listed in Sect. 2.3.

  86. 86.

    LVR-Industriemuseum, pp. 44–45.

  87. 87.

    That all the examples are German is perhaps indicative of the fact that Austria identifies less strongly with the history of the Wehrmacht , though wartime bombing is sometimes an exhibition topic.

  88. 88.

    The key study of this phenomenon is Anne Fuchs , After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

  89. 89.

    Gorch Pieken and Matthias Rogg (eds), Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr. Ausstellung und Architektur (Dresden: Sandstein, 2011), pp. 18–19, 34–35. Produced while the new museum was in development, this volume contains essays about the redesign of the museum and introductions to individual objects. A more conventional catalogue is: Gorch Pieken and Matthias Rogg (eds), Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr. Ausstellungsführer (Dresden: Sandstein, 2011), pp. 21–23, 33–35. Also Gorch Pieken, ‘Contents and Space: New Concept and New Building of the Militärhistorisches Museum of the Bundeswehr’, Museum and Society, 10 (2012), 163–73 (p. 171).

  90. 90.

    Arnold-de Simine, pp. 71–86 (pp. 85–86).

  91. 91.

    Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: OUP, 1985), p. 12.

  92. 92.

    Pieken and Rogg, Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr. Ausstellungsführer, p. 28.

  93. 93.

    Scarry, p. 16.

  94. 94.

    Scarry, p. 114.

  95. 95.

    Ibid.

  96. 96.

    Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, p. 147. In 2012, an exhibition devoted to graphic design under National Socialism showed that Nazi policy towards typography was inconsistent and its control of the graphic industries partial: Thomas Weidner and Henning Rader, Typographie des Terrors. Plakate in München von 1933 bis 1945 (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2012).

  97. 97.

    Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, p. 49.

  98. 98.

    Sandra H. Dudley, ‘Museum Materialities: Objects, Sense, and Feeling’, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. by Sandra H. Dudley (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 9.

  99. 99.

    On this issue , see particularly Klaus Hesse, ‘Die Bilder lesen. Interpretationen fotografischer Quellen zur Deportation der deutschen Juden’, in Vor aller Augen. Fotodokumente des nationalsozialistischen Terrors in der Provinz, ed. by Klaus Hesse and Philipp Springer (Essen: Klartext, 2002), pp. 185–212 (pp. 188, 189).

  100. 100.

    Aleida Assmann, ‘On the (In)compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 187–200 (p. 192).

  101. 101.

    Ibid., pp. 197–98.

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    Chloe Paver

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Paver, C. (2018). Material Experiences, 1933–45. In: Exhibiting the Nazi Past. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77084-0_3

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