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Material After-Lives Between the Attic and the Archive

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Exhibiting the Nazi Past

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

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Abstract

The longest chapter of ‘Exhibiting the Nazi Past’ acknowledges that for most exhibition-makers, what happened after 1945 is as important as what happened in the years 1933–45. Nearly all history exhibitions on this topic devote a final chapter to the after-effects of the Nazi era for victims and for members of the non-persecuted majority. By focussing on the continued storage and circulation of objects dating from 1933–45 in the post-war years, exhibition-makers can criticise Germany’s and Austria’s failure to deal quickly and adequately with the crimes and immorality of the Nazi era. At the same time, they can show how Germany and Austria began to face up to their past through the preservation of material traces. In some cases, they can view even this process of enlightenment critically in retrospect.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Peter Reichel, Harald Schmid, and Peter Steinbach (eds), Der Nationalsozialismus. Die zweite Geschichte: Überwindung, Deutung, Erinnerung (Munich: Beck, 2009).

  2. 2.

    Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last, Deutscher zu sein (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2000; first publ. 1987).

  3. 3.

    Paul Williams sees this as a danger of using what he calls ‘witnessing objects’ (objects that were present when violence took place) in memorial museums, which can reduce a life ‘to its period of greatest suffering’. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), p. 31.

  4. 4.

    I rehearsed some of the issues raised in this section, albeit with a different emphasis, 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.

  5. 5.

    Anke Grodon, ‘Zwischen Einschulung und Einberufung. Eine Ausstellung zum Alltag im “Dritten Reich” im Stadtmuseum Schwedt /Oder ’, in Entnazifizierte Zone? Zum Umgang mit der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus in ostdeutschen Stadt- und Regionalmuseen, ed. by Museumsverband des Landes Brandenburg (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 126–36 (p. 129).

  6. 6.

    Petra Bopp, ‘Wo sind die Augenzeugen, wo ihre Fotos?’, in Eine Ausstellung und ihre Folgen. Zur Rezeption der Ausstellung ‘Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944’, ed. by Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), pp. 198–229 (p. 198). See also p. 226, note 2.

  7. 7.

    Frank Zimmermann, ‘Augustinermuseum bereitet Ausstellung über NS-Zeit in Freiburg vor’, Badische Zeitung, 17 July 2015, http://www.badische-zeitung.de/freiburg/augustinermuseum-bereitet-ausstellung-ueber-ns-zeit-in-freiburg-vor--107824284.html [accessed 29 May 2018].

  8. 8.

    Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films, and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1, 3.

  9. 9.

    Fuchs, p. 4.

  10. 10.

    Fuchs, pp. 60–61.

  11. 11.

    One further example is also a tin vessel: the tin pan at the Mahnmal St. Nikolai mentioned in Sect. 3.5. According to the caption, the owner keeps it in memory of her father who survived the firestorm and re-built a domestic space for his family (including this pan), but died soon afterwards. Her daughter cannot understand why she keeps something so battered. This illustrates a comment on the neighbouring information board: ‘Der Feuerstrum prägte viele Familiengeschichten. Die Erfahrungen der Zeitzeugen beeinflüssen die Erziehung ihrer Kinder und sind wichtiger Bestandteil der kollektiven Familienerinnerung’ (‘The firestorm had a strong impact on many family histories. The experience of witnesses influenced the upbringing of their children and is still an important part of the collective family memory’).

  12. 12.

    As well as Fuchs, see: Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Caroline Schaumann, Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008); and Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani (eds), Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010).

  13. 13.

    I am told that 340 characters are an expected maximum for object captions.

  14. 14.

    The chocolate box may have been saved partly because of the localism that I identified in Chapter 1 as important for German history museums. Made by a well-known Cologne company, Stollwerck, the chocolate box is decorated with a view of Cologne that is not at all ‘chocolate-boxy’, uniting the cathedral, the iron Hohenzollernbrücke and the trade-fair halls, built for the international press fair of 1928. This version of civic pride—a city founded equally on culture and entrepreneurship, the ancient and the modern—is recognisable to Kölner today. The museum juxtaposes that appealing self-image with the knowledge of local support for National Socialism.

  15. 15.

    The call for objects by the Dokumentation Obersalzberg , which opened this book, acknowledged the diversity of real storage spaces when it spoke of ‘Keller und Dachböden, Schubladen und Schränke’ (‘cellars and attics , drawers and cupboards’), though at second mention the copywriter returned to the dyad ‘Keller oder Dachboden’ and this pairing was also used on an accompanying flyer (https://www.obersalzberg.de/neugestaltung/call-for-objects/ [accessed 29 May 2018]). This lexical habit may be more culturally relative than exhibition-makers and their translators acknowledge, given that for UK visitors, for instance, attics and cellars are likely to be figurative spaces only, not real ones.

  16. 16.

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

  17. 17.

    An example from the scholarly literature can show how these metaphors circulate freely: ‘Jahre der Tabuisierung der Vergangenheit haben […] gezeigt, dass ein Übertünchen der Geschichte die falsche Strategie ist und sie unter diesem Putz weiterhin hervorscheint’ (‘Years of placing the past under a taboo have shown […] that painting over the past is the wrong strategy and that the past continues to peep through this covering’). Aleksandra Paradowska, ‘Unbequeme Erinnerungsorte. Ihre Bedeutung, Vermittlung und Bespielung’, in NS-Großanlagen und Tourismus. Chancen und Grenzen der Vermarktung von Orten des Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Historisch-Technisches Museum Peenemünde (Berlin: Links, 2016), pp. 24–37 (pp. 35–36).

  18. 18.

    Ulrike Schmiegelt, ‘Macht Euch um mich keine Sorgen …’, in Foto-Feldpost. Geknipste Kriegserlebnisse 1939–1945, ed. by Peter Jahn and Ulrike Schmiegelt (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 2000), pp. 23–31 (p. 23).

  19. 19.

    Viewed at the Dokumentationszentrum in 2009 under the slightly different title ‘Verführt. Verleitet. Verheizt. Hitlerjugend als Schicksal’ (‘Tempted, Misled, Slaughtered: The Hitler Youth as Fate’).

  20. 20.

    Hugo Molter, ‘Das kurze Leben des Hitlerjungen Paul B.’, nordbayern, 3 April 2011, http://www.nordbayern.de/region/forchheim/das-kurze-leben-des-hitlerjungen-paul-b-1.1123469 [accessed 29 May 2018].

  21. 21.

    For a photograph of the contents of the chest, see: Martina Christmeier and Pascal Metzger, ‘Nationalsozialismus ausstellen. Zum Umgang mit NS-Objekten im Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg’, in Entnazifizierte Zone? Zum Umgang mit der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus in ostdeutschen Stadt- und Regionalmuseen, ed. by Museumsverband des Landes Brandenburg (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 191–208 (p. 197).

  22. 22.

    http://www.museenkoeln.de/nsdok/fundstuecke/ [accessed 29 May 2018].

  23. 23.

    https://museenkoeln.de/ns-dokumentationszentrum/default.aspx?s=494 [accessed 29 May 2018].

  24. 24.

    http://www.museenkoeln.de/nsdok/fundstuecke/ [accessed 29 May 2018].

  25. 25.

    https://www.obersalzberg.de/neugestaltung/call-for-objects/ [accessed 29 May 2018]. Outside of the German context, Suzanne Bardgett speaks of object-hunting for the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London: a railcar is ‘on our wishlist’ and a Pétainist street sign is ‘a particularly good find’ by a buyer. Suzanne Bardgett, ‘The Material Culture of Persecution: Collecting for the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum ’, in Extreme Collecting: Challenging Practices for 21st Century Museums, ed. by Graeme Were and J. C. H. King (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), pp. 19–36 (p. 26, 28).

  26. 26.

    The sensational rediscovery of a silver locomotive once owned by a Jewish family and missing for 75 years was duly celebrated by the Jüdisches Museum Hohenems in an exhibition and a discussion event (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), pp. 19–23; Hanno Loewy in conversation with Hans Thöni: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o3h-Pq1wWc [accessed 29 May 2018]). Though the catalogue entry also alludes to the moral issue of non-Jewish possession after 1945, it is the excitement of discovery that comes across most clearly.

  27. 27.

    Florian Dierl, Mariana Hausleitner, Martin Hözl, and Andreas Mix (eds), Ordnung und Vernichtung. Die Polizei im NS-Staat (Dresden: Sandstein, 2011), p. 97.

  28. 28.

    Dierl et al., pp. 306–7.

  29. 29.

    For an image of the object, see: Peter Kalchthaler, Robert Neisen, and Tilmann von Stockhausen (eds), Nationalsozialismus in Freiburg (Petersberg: Imhof, 2016), p. 123.

  30. 30.

    For another such ‘sleeper’ object at ‘Freiburg im Nationalsozialismus’, in which a painter has overpainted a Nazi salute with a friendly handshake, see Kalchtaler et al., pp. 140–41.

  31. 31.

    Ernst Seidl (ed.), Forschung, Lehre, Unrecht. Die Universität Tübingen im Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Museum der Universität Tübingen, 2015), p. 248.

  32. 32.

    The provenance given on the caption also indicates that the university acquired the painting for its own collection at some point, compounding Wetzel’s social rewards. The exhibition ‘Hast du meine Alpen gesehen?’, discussed in Sect. 3.1, showed a romanticized landscape painting of a concentration camp in the Alps, made by a favourite painter of Hitler. The caption ended ‘1950 erwirbt die Kärntner Landesregierung dieses und andere Bilder Vollbehrs um jeweils 500.- Schilling’ (‘In 1950, the regional government of Carinthia bought this and other pictures by Vollbehr for 500 Schilling each’). It is assumed that the visitor will understand and join in with the museum’s condemnation of post-war public investment in Nazi art.

  33. 33.

    Cornelia Hecht (ed.), Spurensicherung. Jüdisches Leben in Hohenzollern. Eine Ausstellung in der ehemaligen Synagoge Haigerloch (Stuttgart: Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, 2004), pp. 74–75. The caption in the catalogue is rather shorter than the caption in the exhibition space.

  34. 34.

    However, the exhibition ‘Antijüdischer Nippes. Populäre Judenbilder und aktuelle Verschwörungstheorien. Die Sammlung Finkelstein im Kontext’ (‘Anti-Jewish Knickknacks: Popular Images of Jews and Contemporary Conspiracy Theories. The Finkelstein Collection in Context’, 2005 at the Jüdisches Museum Hohenems ), used an antiques-shop mise-en-scène—antique display cabinets and real antiques for sale—to reproduce the milieu in which anti-Semitica now circulates, and to refuse the ‘knickknacks’ the ennobling status of museum objects.

  35. 35.

    Hans-Ulrich Thamer and Simone Erpel (eds), Hitler und die Deutschen. Volksgemeinschaft und Verbrechen (Dresden: Sandstein, 2010), pp. 289–90.

  36. 36.

    Schmiegelt, p. 28.

  37. 37.

    Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs and History: Emotion and Materiality’, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. by Sandra H. Dudley (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 21–38 (p. 23).

  38. 38.

    See Schmiegelt: ‘Ihren urprünglichen Gehalt verlieren private Fotos […] in dem Moment, in dem sie aus dem Kontext familiärer Erinnerungen gelöst werden’ (‘Private photos lose their original substance […] at the precise moment when they are freed from the context of family memory’), p. 24.

  39. 39.

    Marianne Hirsch, ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 3–23 (p. 8).

  40. 40.

    Naomi Tereza Salmon, Asservate—Exhibits. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Yad Vashem (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1995).

  41. 41.

    J.J. Long, ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative, and the Claims of Postmemory’, in Anna Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse Since 1990 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), pp. 147–65. Fuchs appraises Hirsch’s concept, and Long’s critique of it, in Fuchs, Phantoms of War, pp. 48–50. For a more upbeat (if less theoretically grounded) assessment of what imagination can achieve in the absence of memory, see Diana I. Popescu, ‘Introduction: Memory and Imagination in the Post-witness Era’, in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-witness Era, ed. by Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 1–7.

  42. 42.

    The most common category of non-Jewish object to have survived in the home is the craft objects made by forced labourers, discussed in Sect. 3.4. The KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme , Erinnerungs- und Gedenkstätte Wewelsburg 1933–1945 , Deutsch-Russisches Museum and Denkort Bunker Valentin all show examples. Typically, the use made of the object in the post-war years and/or the date on which it was donated to the museum is recorded on the caption to evoke (but not to comment on or analyse) the time span during which people remembered the forced labourers privately but museums had little interest in them. For instance (at Wewelsburg): ‘Sie bewahrte jahrelang ihren Schmuck darin auf. 2008 überreichte sie es dem Kreismuseum’ (‘For years, she kept her jewellery in it. In 2008, she donated it to the district museum’)—end of caption.

  43. 43.

    Shown at ‘Alles hat seine Zeit. Rituale gegen das Vergessen’ (‘Everything has its Time: Rituals against Forgetting’, 2013 at the Jüdisches Museum Berlin ).

  44. 44.

    The catalogue gives full information on the seven vitrines, though a new object has since been substituted for the top hat. Jutta Fleckenstein and Bernhard Purin (eds), Jüdisches Museum München / Jewish Museum Munich (Munich, Berlin, London, and New York: Prestel, 2007).

  45. 45.

    Hanno Loewy, ‘Diasporic Home or Homelessness: The Museum and the Circle of Lost and Found’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 34.1 (2012), 41–58 (pp. 53–55).

  46. 46.

    Hecht, p. 64.

  47. 47.

    Hecht, p. 35.

  48. 48.

    Hecht, pp. 5–6.

  49. 49.

    The bundle of keys that opened Sect. 2.2, shown in 2016 at the Jüdisches Museum Hohenems with a curator’s commentary, revealed a similar combination of local knowledge of ‘Aryanization’ but haziness about the details. The story that the keys had belonged to the son of a former SS man who had collected the keys of ‘Aryanized ’ houses after the deportation of the last Jews was so unlikely it might even be a ‘eine Phantasie, die einer unfasslichen Erinnerung Greifbarket verschafft oder den Marktwert der Objekte als “Antiquitäten” erhöhen soll’ (‘a fantasy which lends tangibility to an ungraspable memory or is intended to raise the market value of the objects as “antiques ”’). Loewy and Reichwald, pp. 58–60.

  50. 50.

    Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff and Niko Wahl, ‘Geraubt, Benutzt, Verbraucht. Weil Dinge kein Gedächtnis haben’, in Recollecting. Raub und Restitution, ed. by Alexandra Reininghaus (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2009), pp. 77–86 (pp. 78, 80).

  51. 51.

    Triendl-Zadoff and Wahl, p. 79.

  52. 52.

    Triendl-Zadoff and Wahl, p. 85.

  53. 53.

    Triendl-Zadoff and Wahl, p. 79.

  54. 54.

    Until some time after 2014, there were two chandeliers on show, and they were placed in glass cases in the main prayer room of the synagogue. I wrote about them in ‘The Transmission of Household Objects’ (pp. 242–43). I am told that that installation was dismantled to make it easier to use the synagogue for events. Now, just one is on show in the vitrines in the Frauenschul; the caption gives briefer but similar information to the old display.

  55. 55.

    For this and all other unpublished information about the exhibition, I am obliged to the lead exhibition-maker, Bettina Leder-Hindemith.

  56. 56.

    For instance, in ‘“Arisierung” in Leipzig. Verdrängt. Beraubt. Ermordet’ (‘“Aryanization” in Leipzig: Forgotten, Robbed, Murdered’, 2007 at the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig ), where two coat hangers for the same department store were able to show the change of ownership during the ‘Aryanization’ process; and at ‘Jüdisches in Bamberg’, a permanent exhibition within the Historisches Museum Bamberg . Clothes hangers embossed with the names of elite Nazi schools are shown at the NS-Dokumentation Vogelsang . The museum does not connect them to the post-war family home, but rather to the role played by uniform in the political education of the young men.

  57. 57.

    Loewy, ‘Diasporic Home and Homelessness’, p. 53.

  58. 58.

    Another object was replaced by the word ‘Psyche’, presumably denoting a statue of the same, but also a nod to Freud .

  59. 59.

    Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl and Herbert Posch (eds), InventArisiert. Enteignung von Möbeln aus jüdischem Besitz (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2000), p. 66.

  60. 60.

    Barta-Fliedl and Posch, p. 123.

  61. 61.

    In the catalogue for the later exhibition, ‘Recollecting’, Barta-Fliedl and Posch report a descendant to whom the Hofmobiliendepot restituted objects from his childhood as saying ‘Der Teppich ist ganz schön abgenützt. Da müssen Tausende Leute darüber gegangen sein’ (‘The carpet is really worn . Thousands of people must have walked across it’). Possibly, this quotation was also in the texts in the vitrines at ‘InventArisiert’, as his case was shown, but I do not have access to those texts. Reininghaus, p. 124.

  62. 62.

    Barta-Fliedl and Posch, p. 95.

  63. 63.

    Wulff E. Brebeck, Frank Huismann, Kirsten John-Stucke, and Jörg Piron, Endzeitkämpfer. Ideologie und Terror der SS (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), p. 350.

  64. 64.

    See, for instance, Carolyn J. Dean, ‘Erasures: Writing History About Holocaust Trauma’, in Science and Emotions After 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2014), pp. 394–413; Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony, ed. by Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–10.

  65. 65.

    Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin and Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (eds), Heimat und Exil. Emigration der deutschen Juden nach 1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2006), p. 239.

  66. 66.

    The dove went on to be displayed, in 2009, together with Domin’s writing desk, at the Kurpfälzisches Museum der Stadt Heidelberg. This ‘artwork of the month’ was interpreted by Domin’s biographer Marion Tauschwitz (http://www.museum-heidelberg.de/pb/site/Museum-Heidelberg/get/documents_E561144707/museum-heidelberg/PB5Documents/pdf/KdM%20November%202009%281%29.pdf [accessed 29 May 2018]).

  67. 67.

    The poem can be viewed at http://www.jmberlin.de/exil/taube.html and in English at http://www.jmberlin.de/exil/en/taube.html [accessed 29 May 2018].

  68. 68.

    ‘Ein ganzes Leben in einer Hutschachtel. Bertha Sander: Eine jüdische Innenarchitektin aus Köln’ (‘A Whole Life in a Hatbox: Bertha Sander, a Jewish Interior Designer from Cologne ’, 2103 at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln ). Paver, ‘The Transmission of Household Objects’, pp. 247–48.

  69. 69.

    Fleckenstein and Purin, p. 68.

  70. 70.

    Fleckenstein and Purin, pp. 68–69.

  71. 71.

    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. 286).

  72. 72.

    Photographs taken for an exhibition about Henryk Mandelbaum, one of very few survivors of the Sonderkommandos, show him with his various object collections and the text: ‘Ich sammle viele Dinge. Warum – ich weiß es nicht. […] Vielleicht – mir ist viel, zu viel verloren gegangen – damals’ (‘I collect lots of things. Why? I don’t know […] Perhaps – I lost a lot, too much – back then’). Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz (ed.), ‘Nur die Sterne waren wie gestern’. Henryk Mandelbaum: Häftling im Sonderkommando von Auschwitz, April 1944 – Januar 1945 (Kassel: Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz, 2006), pp. 84–87.

  73. 73.

    Fischer, Memory Work, pp. 29–68.

  74. 74.

    Esther Alexander-Ihme, ‘Tsi iz a tshemodan oder a valizke a Koffer?’, in Juden 45/90. Von da und dort – Überlebende aus Osteuropa, ed. by Jutta Fleckenstein and Tamar Lewinsky (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2011), pp. 51–52 (p. 52).

  75. 75.

    Savyon Liebrecht, ‘Eine Mesusa’, in Fleckenstein and Lewinsky, pp. 91–92.

  76. 76.

    Rachel Salamander, ‘Closed’, in Fleckenstein and Lewinsky, pp. 101–2 (p. 102).

  77. 77.

    Alexander-Ihme, p. 52.

  78. 78.

    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: OUP, 2012), pp. 80–112 (p. 105).

  79. 79.

    Bernhard Purin (ed.), Dort und jetzt. Zeitgenössische Judaica in Israel (Fürth: Jüdisches Museum Franken—Fürth und Schnaittach, 1997).

  80. 80.

    Purin, Dort und jetzt, p. 18.

  81. 81.

    Michael Köhlmeier, ‘Der Silberlöffel’, in Heimat, Diaspora. Das Jüdische Museum Hohenems, ed. by Hanno Loewy (Hohenems: Bucher, 2008), pp. 252–55.

  82. 82.

    Sabine Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen. Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und Österreich (Berlin and Vienna: Philo, 2000), pp. 250–85.

  83. 83.

    Köhlmeier, p. 253.

  84. 84.

    Ibid.

  85. 85.

    Ibid.

  86. 86.

    Ibid.

  87. 87.

    Köhlmeier, p. 254.

  88. 88.

    Köhlmeier, p. 253.

  89. 89.

    Köhlmeier, p. 254.

  90. 90.

    Ibid.

  91. 91.

    The museum itself titled the exhibition ‘Odd’ in its English-language publicity, though it is unclear in what sense that was meant. The objects are ‘left over’ in the sense of remnants in the town, but also objects that are not needed for the permanent exhibition and so live in the store.

  92. 92.

    Loewy and Reichwald, pp. 33–35.

  93. 93.

    Offe, p. 238.

  94. 94.

    Martina Häfele, ‘Fenster mit Hexagramm’, in Loewy and Reichwald, p. 35. For a related story, in which the psychology of philo-semitism is embodied in a museum object, see Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main (ed.), Geschenkte Geschichten. Zum 20-Jahres-Jubiläum des jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main: Societätsverlag, 2009), pp. 108–9. The torch that Katarina Holländer , one of the originators of the exhibition format, brings to the exhibition as her ‘certain Jewish something’, is a rather flimsy hook on which to hang the story of a former, non-Jewish friend and suitor who claimed that his body had absorbed the soul of a Holocaust victim.

  95. 95.

    It remains to be seen whether this aesthetic will survive the extension of the museum to include a ‘Haus für Erinnerung und Demokratie’ (‘House for Remembrance and Democracy’), announced in July 2017.

  96. 96.

    Loewy and Reichwald, pp. 39–42.

  97. 97.

    As the director explained to me, it mattered little that the packing boxes were not those that are used in the museum store (which were too expensive and came in a more limited range of sizes): the brown boxes formed a bridge between the familiar experience of moving house and the unfamiliar world of museum storage.

  98. 98.

    Martina Christmeier and Alexander Schmidt (eds), Albert Speer in der Bundesrepublik. Vom Umgang mit deutscher Vergangenheit (Petersberg: Imhof, 2017), p. 10.

  99. 99.

    [No author], ‘Dokumentationszentrum sucht Bücher von Albert Speer’, Focus Online, 25 January 2017, http://www.focus.de/regional/bayern/stadt-nuernberg-dokumentationszentrum-sucht-buecher-von-albert-speer_id_6546453.html [accessed 29 May 2018].

  100. 100.

    The catalogue shows images of the exhibition in preparation, with the books represented by placeholders (Christmeier and Schmidt, pp. 2, 8, 16, 36, and 44). One photograph (p. 24) shows the actual books in place.

  101. 101.

    Michael Franz, ‘Bücher sollen auf einem Haufen landen’, website of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, 11 January 2017, http://www.br.de/nachrichten/mittelfranken/inhalt/dokuzentrum-sammelaktion-albert-speer-100.html [accessed 31 October 2017].

  102. 102.

    This old exhibition is documented in its broad outlines at: https://www.buchenwald.de/de/517/ [accessed 29 May 2018].

  103. 103.

    Seidl, pp. 268–69.

  104. 104.

    Christian Bornefeld, ‘Bruchstücke der Mahntafel des Tübinger Gräberfeldes X’, in Seidl, pp. 257–60 (p. 260).

  105. 105.

    Loewy and Reichwald, pp. 16–18.

  106. 106.

    Ibid.

  107. 107.

    Loewy and Reichwald, pp. 52–54.

  108. 108.

    Gorch Pieken, Matthias Rogg, and Ansgar Snethlage (eds), Schlachthof 5. Dresdens Zerstörung in literarischen Zeugnissen (Dresden: Sandstein, 2015), p. 284.

  109. 109.

    Brebeck et al., pp. 424–25.

  110. 110.

    Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg (ed.), ‘Anständig Gehandelt.’ Widerstand und Volksgemeinschaft 1933–1945 (Stuttgart: Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, 2012), p. 188.

  111. 111.

    Thamer and Erpel, p. 292.

  112. 112.

    All at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München , which has a fairly typical art installation in the courtyard in front of the building that combines fragments of images and words.

  113. 113.

    Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings’, in The New Museology, ed. by Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion, 1989), pp. 6–21 (p. 9).

  114. 114.

    ‘Buchenwald. Archäologie gegen das Vergessen’ (‘Buchenwald: Archaeology as a Force Against Forgetting’, 1997 at the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald ).

  115. 115.

    Pia Janssen, ‘Archäologie des Herzens’ (‘Archaeology of the Heart’, 1997 at the Orangerie, Cologne ).

  116. 116.

    Ronald Hirte, Offene Befunde. Ausgrabungen in Buchenwald. Zeitgeschichtliche Archäologie und Erinnerungskultur (Braunschweig: Hinz und Kunst, 1999).

  117. 117.

    Hirte, pp. 54–75.

  118. 118.

    I discuss this installation in Chloe Paver, ‘From Monuments to Installations: Aspects of Memorialization in Historical Exhibitions About the National Socialist Era’, in Memorialization in Germany Since 1945, ed. by Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 253–64 (pp. 255–57).

  119. 119.

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

  120. 120.

    Jacques Rancière, ‘Die Arbeit des Bildes’, trans. by Stephanie Baumann, in Shalev-Gerz, pp. 8–25.

  121. 121.

    Shalev-Gerz, p. 75.

  122. 122.

    A selection of the objects in the ‘Dinge’ modules appears, with the same text, in the catalogue: Volkhard Knigge (ed.), Buchenwald. Ausgrenzung und Gewalt. 1937 bis 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), pp. 74–91.

  123. 123.

    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 (p. 121).

  124. 124.

    Kistner, p. 122.

  125. 125.

    Matti Bunzl , ‘Of Holograms and Storage Areas: Modernity and Postmodernity at Vienna’s Jewish Museum’, Cultural Anthropology, 18 (2003), 435–68 (p. 436).

  126. 126.

    Fritz Backhaus and twenty-five other signatories, open letter to Danielle Spera, 9 February 2011. Available at http://museologien.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/zerstorung-ist-selbst-thema-unserer.html [accessed 29 May 2018].

  127. 127.

    Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, ‘On the Historical Exhibition at the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna’, in Jewish Museum Vienna, ed. by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Hannes Sulzenbacher (Vienna: Jüdisches Museum Wien, 1996), pp. 61–62.

  128. 128.

    http://www.speaking-germany.de/news/ [accessed 29 May 2018].

  129. 129.

    http://www.speaking-germany.de/guestbook/ [accessed 29 May 2018].

  130. 130.

    Fleckenstein and Purin, pp. 70–71.

  131. 131.

    Emily D. Bilski, ‘Wie können Deutsche und Juden miteinander über Deutschland sprechen? Wie können wir uns nicht über Deutschland unterhalten?’, in Fleckenstein and Purin, p. 71.

  132. 132.

    Steffi de Jong, The Witness as Object: Video Testimony in Memorial Museums (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), pp. 15–16.

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    Chloe Paver

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Paver, C. (2018). Material After-Lives Between the Attic and the Archive. In: Exhibiting the Nazi Past. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77084-0_5

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