Jens-Christian Wagner

Exhibiting the History of Violence

On the Musealisation of the German Occupation in the Second World War

Jens-Christian Wagner

Finding the courage to fashion a narrative without degrading objects as original historical sources or prescribing a particular interpretation of history – that is the challenge that all museums face when they present a disputed topic in the politics of memory and are required to provide academically sound historical education and to commemorate the victims. One such topic is the German occupation of Europe in the Second World War. The use of critical source analysis in presentations of photos and autobiographical documents can offer a viable approach.

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany, supported by its allies, established an unprecedented reign of violence in Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Nearly 300 million people in the occupied territories were subject to the murderous Nazi plan to introduce a racist New Order in Europe. Nearly 20 million civilians in the annexed and occupied territories did not survive the war, including the Jews, Sinti, and Roma who were shot to death or gassed, the Slavs in Eastern and SouthEastern Europe who died of hunger or were conscripted into forced labour and deported, and the people in almost all European countries who were executed as resistance fighters or hostages or sent to concentration camps.

In October 2020, more than 75 years after the end of the war, the German Bundestag decided to open a new documentation centre for the victims of the occupation regime. Its mission is to provide a comprehensive account of the crimes. But how can such a history of violence be presented? What can museum objects as historical sources tell us about this history? And can individual suffering and mass murder be depicted in a museum at all?

Which Objects, Which Topics? Life in the territories occupied or controlled by Nazi Germany varied greatly, depending on the form of occupation, the phase of the war, and the region. Consistent with their racial ideology, the German occupation forces in Eastern and SouthEastern Europe treated the population with greater brutality than those in Western and Northern Europe. The life of a factory worker in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, for example, differed fundamentally from that of a farmer in occupied Norway, where a puppet government ruled under German control. In Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, several million people were conscripted into forced labour and deported to Germany. In Greece, on the other hand, which also suffered under a brutal occupation regime, such deportations were largely unknown – with the exception of the Jewish population, especially in Salonika, who were deported to Ausschwitz and murdered there. Finally, in France, men were initially recruited to work in Germany on a more or less voluntary basis. Only when they arrived did they learn that they were not permitted to return.

Every exhibition on the occupation regime must highlight these differences and at the same time take pains not to trivialise the suffering of the majority of people in Western Europe who did not live in constant fear of their lives. It must do so against the backdrop of the Shoah and the systematic starvation of the Slavic population in the East. These dictates apply particularly to the important topic of everyday life under the occupation.

What other topics should be examined? A key experience for all people in the occupied territories was the German invasion itself, often accompanied by military violence, “cleansing” operations, and direct threats to civilian life. Invasion was followed by the establishment of a military or civilian occupation administration whose power was based on the German system of repression and the collaboration of local organisations. Even people who were not victims of raids, arrests, torture, or murder suffered under the occupation because of the hunger and the constant fear of being separated from family members or friends, who were deported to camps in Germany or were conscripted into forced labour. Another important topic, alongside collaboration, is resistance to the German occupation. There was individual and organised resistance in all of the occupied countries, ranging from support for persecuted persons and fugitives to strikes, sabotage, and armed underground resistance. It often culminated in regional

uprisings such as those in Warsaw and Slovakia. In terms of topography and themes, the occupation covers an enormous range, which museums cannot present in encyclopaedic form or address for all regions. Condensation, concentration, and typification are necessary strategies.

What objects can be used to show the experiences of people in the occupied territories? At first glance, this question seems relatively easy to answer: weapons can stand for uprisings, leaflets for resistance, work IDs and ration cards for the regimented life under the German administration, suitcases for deportations, barbed wire for incarceration, a dented bowl for hunger, a striped prisoner’s uniform for life in the concentration camps, and wornout clothes and a hoe for forced labour. But can these objects convey anything about the historicalexperiential dimension of violence? Are they not banal, redundant exhibits that cannot adequately represent the crime? What do they tell us about misery, fear of death, and violence – or about the people who suffered from them? “Museum things”, as Gottfried Korff called objects displayed in museums, are “sign vehicles that mediate between the past and the present”.1 How can the properties we attribute to them – their tactility, aesthetic quality, aura, authenticity, or emotiveness – support the process of appropriating or (more accurately) understanding history? Functioning as “tools of communication between the visible and the invisible”,2 these objects have a fragmentary character whose symbolic content must be (re)contextualised and (re)dimensioned through their selection and arrangement as well as through textual explanations. This means that the representation and communication of history in museums is always a constructive process, in which some meanings are more strongly actualised than others, despite the supposed interpretive openness of the act of viewing.

Documentation or Narrative?

With a certain positivist mindset, curators at the concentration camp memorials of the 1990s believed that by basing their work on a documentary, quasiforensic concept that involved searching for and preserving traces of history, they could offer exhibition visitors the opportunity to form their own views by presenting them with large, multiperspective exhibits that were open to different interpretations. As part of this concept, objects were not meant to illustrate a prescribed interpretation of history, but to provide a multilayered, intentionally ambiguous, and fragmentary glimpse of it. This concept deliberately distanced itself from the constructed, meaningcreating master narrative that had become ideologised as a result of interpretive disputes in the politics of memory.

On the one hand, this documentary principle resulted from the rejection of the ideologically distorted representations of history at the national memorial sites of the German Democratic Republic (the paradigm for this sober new documentary style was the first postunification exhibition on camp history at the Buchenwald memorial site, which opened in 1995). On the other, it arose from the realisation that the material traces of the history of the Nazi crimes were not only historical sign vehicles and objects for display, but evidence that stood for the credibility of what was being narrated. This is especially true of written documents such as the protocol of the Wannsee Conference and the Master Plan for the East, which serve as proof of the crimes that were committed by actors in the ministries and the repressive state apparatus. The forensic function of the objects is of fundamental importance, particularly in view of the highly charged societal treatment of the Nazi crimes, the political instrumentalisation of history, and attempts to cast doubt on and relativise the atrocities.

From the perspective of the politics of memory, the documentary principle remains important, not only in terms of its use in exhibitions, but also with regard to its application to remains of the former camps. From a methodological and didactic perspective, though, it has fuelled doubts for two reasons: one, due to scepticism about a possible positivist conception of sources; and two, because of the didactic implementation problems it causes. It is not helpful to rely solely on relics, objects, or efforts to imbue them with a particular aura. The detailed information objects convey, as valuable as this may be, obstructs the view of the whole and can only be understood and interpreted with a great deal of prior knowledge that the average museum visitor does not have. Many people are overwhelmed by the sheer number of documents and objects if these are not classified or commented on.

Ideally, exhibitions are developed and produced on the basis of materials. However, we should not delude ourselves on one point: particularly in the case of exhibitions about the history of the Nazi crimes, objects are secondary to the narrative, which most often takes the form of an authorial story about the crimes and their victims. At worst, objects are degraded to mere illustrations of the narrative. At the same time, exhibitions on the Nazi crimes perform an important function for historical political education and the democratic identity of German and European society. Through historical education work, they prevent the crimes from being suppressed and trivialised, and they also commemorate the victims.

This means we must acknowledge the intrinsic value of objects as sign vehicles, despite the dominance

of the narrative. This intrinsic value transcends the function of objects as evidence and documentation. Objects are more than just footnotes to a historical narrative. They lend history a visual form. They arouse curiosity and are hopefully also a bit difficult to process because their meaning is ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory.

Curators face the challenge of not smoothing over this ambiguity or contradictoriness, despite using a narrative. They must help visitors to decipher and comprehend objects’ message without placing excessive restrictions on their open symbolic content. They can do so through unobtrusive textual information or by presenting historical facts in other media. The options include room and section texts (as brief as necessary), infographics, and animated media installations.

Photographs, Eyewitness Interviews, and Autobiographical Documents Despite the dominance of the narrative and the importance of using text and media to contextualise exhibits, objects form the core element of an exhibition. When curators at the Buchenwald and MittelbauDora Memorials Foundation developed the international travelling exhibition Forced Labour: The Germans, the Forced Labourers, and the War – whose first stop was the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2010 – they were surprised to find comprehensive photographic documentation of significant events during their extensive archival research in Germany and abroad.3

This exhibition on forced labour devoted one of its main sections to the occupation regime. Because the topic of the exhibition and its main section are closely intertwined, the new documentation centre for the victims of the occupation regime can be expected, conversely, to include a section on forced labour. The presentation of photos based on critical source analysis could form an important thematic, creative, and didactic pillar. In the exhibition on Nazi forced labour, the curators were able to reconstruct entire series of photographs, which facilitated a nearly scenic approach within the framework of case histories. Not only did this approach create visual anchors, but it also made it possible to visually represent historical situations in a quasicinematic way. This type of visuality, presented on the basis of source analysis, is not an end in itself meant to manipulate visitors or attract their attention by striking, superficial means. Its aim is rather to use photographs as a springboard for an intense immersion in history and at the same time to present them as sources that activate cognitive processes and form ensembles with other sources, including threedimensional objects.4

The prerequisite is an approach to the photos based on critical source analysis. It is crucial to research and identify not only the photographers and the subjects, but also the specific historical situation, the perspective adopted, how the photos have survived, and how they were used in different media. Source analysis is essential for all museum objects, but it is especially relevant for photos, given their visual succinctness.

But there is another way in which the use of photos to present the history of violence poses academic, didactic, and ethical challenges – and creates a dilemma that every team has experienced that has ever worked on an exhibition about concentration camp history. On the one hand, curators must unsparingly document the history of violence. Not showing the shocking photos of corpses in camps or execution trenches could at worst amount to trivialising the Nazi crimes. But does the presentation of photos not degrade the victims a second time? And does it not contradict the ban on overwhelming and manipulating viewers (Überwältigungsverbot), which is one of the key principles in the Beutelsbach Consensus on Civic Education?5

This is not an easy dilemma to resolve, but it can be minimised if the photographs are used as historical sources as opposed to blowup illustrations – and especially if they convey stories that are not immediately understandable and must be deciphered by viewers. One example can be found in the permanent exhibition of the MittelbauDora concentration camp memorial, which opened in 2006. It contains a section on the death marches and the Gardelegen massacre in April 1945, when more than 1,000 concentration camp prisoners were forced into a barn that was subsequently set on fire. The visual anchor in this section is not one of the shocking photos of the burned corpses, but a blackandwhite image showing only a striped cap and a dark spot in a field. The cap belonged to a prisoner who escaped from the barn and was shot by the killers. The dark spot on the ground is a pool of blood. The deadly violence in the photo only becomes clear at a second glance; in addition, the photo documents killing in an open field and thus in public. The photos of charred corpses, by contrast, are only shown as they once appeared in the news media – namely, in an issue of the American Life magazine, which on 7 May 1945 was the first organisation to publish them.

Of course, the need for critical source analysis also applies to another type of source and object that is often the focus of exhibitions about contemporary history, especially those at concentration camp memorials: the eyewitness interview.6 On the one hand, such interviews are included to provide experiential access to the topic. On the other, in contrast to histories of political power, they lend a voice to the nameless. However, in

exhibitions on the history of violence, including those centring on concentration camps, such interviews may also be also used because few other sources have survived or because the existing ones are not suited to presenting the topic. Because of the functions assigned to them, though, these interviews are often not identified as complex sources that are historical constructs and producers of meaning themselves (especially if the interviews have taken place long after the events at the heart of the narrative). Instead, they are treated disparagingly as substitute sources, emotional attractions, or a means to authenticate the curatorial narrative.7

Direct experiential access to historical perception can be provided by diaries, letters, and other autobiographical documents. Compared to retrospective interviews, these exhibits can be effective because they often come from people who, in contrast to the eyewitnesses reporting in videos, did not survive the war or the occupation. Embedded in a biographical framework and touching on aspects of structural and social history, they provide information not only about contemporaneous perceptions of the occupation regime, but also about the subjects’ scope of action. In other words, in them, the victims are not transformed into objects, but are presented as subjects with options to act, if limited. This is important not only didactically, but also for the political and ethical commemoration of those who suffered under German occupation. Finally, autobiographical documents provide a sourcebased, multiperspective approach that helps to counter the further emotional charging of a disputed and often instrumentalised topic in the politics of memory.

Examining the Way Nazi Society Functioned Nevertheless, the focus should not be restricted to the victims, despite the need to commemorate them. If an exhibition is to initiate a reflection process that encourages people to learn about history – which should be its main function – it must above all address the question of why these people became victims in the first place. It is thus of fundamental importance for exhibitions on the Nazi crimes to examine the motivation of the (co)perpetrators, profiteers, and spectators. In particular, such exhibitions should question the workings of Nazi society, which took a radically racist form and was based on two corresponding pillars: first, the offer of integration into the promoted Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community; and, second, the exclusion, persecution, an ultimatel murder of all those who stood outside this racially and biologically defined collective.8 An exhibition that adopts multiple perspectives by presenting the victims as acting subjects and questioning the perpetrators and their motivation for participating in National Socialism (including those who collaborated in the occupied territories) will help to prevent our culture of remembrance from growing rigid through empty affirmations, displays of pathos, and rituals. It will ensure that historical reflection is not replaced by mourning without reflection. Furthermore, an exhibition that poses sociohistorical questions about National Socialism and the occupation regime can establish connections to the present beyond false historical analogies. It can activate reflection processes among visitors – especially about their own social, political, and ethical place in contemporary life. 

1 Gottfried Korff, “Zur Eigenart der Museumsdinge”, in

Museumsdinge: deponieren – exponieren (Cologne, 2002), 140–45, here 143.

2 Ibid.

3 See Volkhard Knigge et al.,

“Einleitung“, in Zwangsarbeit:

Die Deutschen, die Zwangsarbeiter und der Krieg, volume accompanying the exhibition, ed. Volkhard Knigge et al. (Weimar, 2010), 6–11, here 9.

4 Ibid.

5 See Deborah Hartmann et al.,

“Zeitgeschichte ausstellen”,

Mittelweg 36, nos.5–6 (2021), 58–70, here 63.

6 For a critique of the term

Zeitzeugen (eyewitness to history), see Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei, eds., Die

Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2012). 7 See Jens-Christian Wagner,

“Zeitzeugen ausgestellt: Die

Nutzung von Interviews in

Museen und KZ-Gedenkstätten”, in Erinnern an Zwangsarbeit: Zeitzeugen-Interviews in der digitalen Welt, ed.

Nicolas Apostolopoulos and

Cord Pagenstecher (Berlin, 2013), 59–67, and the comprehensive discussion in Steffi de

Jong, The Witness as Object:

Video Testimony in Memorial

Museums (New York, 2018).

8 See Jens-Christian Wagner,

“NS-Gesellschaftsverbrechen in der Gedenkstättenarbeit”, in Der Ort der “Volksgemeinschaft” in der deutschen

Gesellschaftsgeschichte, ed.

Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann et al. (Paderborn, 2018), 421–37.