Exhibiting the ‘Red Orchestra’

Abstract

Addressed to the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte [Museum of German History], this quotation is from a letter written by Kuckhoff on 25 June 1963 in response to their permanent exhibition, ‘1933 to 1945’. Such criticism of state-initiated representations of antifascist resistance in museums is a repeated feature of Kuckhoff’s correspondence. This chapter examines Kuckhoff’s role in curating memories of the ‘Red Orchestra’. It begins with an examination of what she found so problematic in two exhibitions at the Museum of German History and in the Haus der Ministerien [House of Ministries] and how she tried to influence them, before moving on to consider her role in creating a touring exhibition on Adam Kuckhoff in 1968. Extensive correspondence about the relative emphases of the exhibitions, the existence of drafts for the accompanying catalogue and responses of visitors to the later exhibition all show the competing modes of representing the group. The chapter thus considers the exhibition as a place of antifascist identity construction. It investigates the specificities of this way of remembering, from the physicality of the space and places of display, to the interaction of objects, labels and images. Due to the evidence available, the following often relies on textual sources, yet, in doing so, it addresses Charles W. Haxthausen’s question about how these spatial stories ‘relate, substantively and rhetorically, to those told exclusively by means of texts and reproductions’.²

Wenig gefällt mir die Darstellung des Widerstandskampfes in der DDR. Mir scheint, dass man nicht ausreichend die vielfältigen Methoden der Arbeit zeigt, sondern undifferenziert — wenn auch mit verschiedenen Namen und Orten — den Kampf der verschiedenen Gruppen darstellt. Die Gruppe, der mein Mann und ich angehörten, ist m.E. völlig unzureichend, ja z.T. falsch dargestellt.¹

I do not like the portrayal of the resistance in the GDR. It seems to me that the diverse methods of the resistance work are not being shown sufficiently; rather the struggle of the different groups is being represented in an undifferentiated way — even though different names and places are mentioned. The group to which my husband and I belonged is, in my opinion, being represented completely inadequately, in parts even incorrectly.