Hitler and the Germans: National Community and Crime

Irit Dekel is a graduate from the New School currently on a postdoctoral fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Visiting the exhibition Hitler and the Germans:  National Community and Crime at the German Historical Museum, I found very little new about Hitler and even less about “the Germans.”

I did find interesting the display and discussion of the national community as connected to perpetration. However, the presentation of crime, or perpetration, lacked individuals and their daily choices and was instead filled with examples of the masses looking for security and stability. The exhibition was celebrated in the local German press as revolutionary simply for showing so much of Hitler, and for connecting his rule to the German people.

It is not a small thing, this act of naming, and the exhibition does that, but then compiles exhibits: posters, photos, Hitler’s aquarelles, busts and books and Nazi advertising in materials that were mostly used for propaganda.

There was a fear expressed in the press around the opening of the exhibition that right wing extremists and Neo- Nazis would come and admire it, now in the open. Those worries were dismissed as the curators assured the prospective visitors that Hitler is not presented spectacularly, and so those loathed groups, which also “probably do not go to museums,” would not come.

Here is the first time where presumption about class, education, racism and origins from the former east could be easily detected but not explicitly discussed.

The mix of thinking about what is presented in the exhibition together with how it will be consumed was at the center of the exhibition’s review in the German press (see, in German, a review in the Spiegel). The curators Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Dr. Simone Erpel, Klaus-Jürgen Sembach  made sure that whenever a photo of Hitler is shown with his gaze directed at the camera, the affect of dimming light and photos of Nazi crimes will flicker in the background, so that the visitor is always reminded of the crimes together with whatever else they might feel or think of 1933-1945.

An interview for the center-left weekly Die Zeit focused on the historical relations between the national community and perpetrators. The November 4th issue of Die Zeit has a cover article about how the fourth generation family members relate to the deeds of their great-grandparents. As opposed to the third generation, who generally refused to admit that their grandparents were perpetrators (see Welzer Opa war kein Nazi), the fourth generation (14-19 years old were interviewed) would admit that their families were involved with the Nazi crimes, but ask time and again, “what does it have to do with me.”

The teachers seem as confused in trying to answer this simple question, a confusion I see well in my current study of educational programs at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. What most educators and teachers worry about is that the pupils show no affect. I can attest: not only are they not moved, they are encouraged to perform a repetition of horrible historical facts as well as reflect emotionally on the exhibit’s materials when asked: “Which photo or room moved you the most?”

Each memorial is supposed to raise different feelings: in the Holocaust memorial one is to feel lost; in the Topography of Terror: angry. What should one feel in the Hitler exhibit?

In looking at people in the exhibition (it was full, we waited in line for about 30 minutes to get in) I saw that it was important to project, or perform, seriousness. The curators seeded in the exhibition a few parts of Chaplin’s “the great dictator” as well as other comedians and cartoonists work on Hitler. However, they were situated in close proximity to very sad documents and photos, so most visitors did not laugh.

The three very visible right wing extremists I encountered observed Hitler’s busts with awe, as well as the beer glasses, Nazi toys and other memorabilia of that time.  They were walking there alone. German parents came with teenage children; tourists speaking many languages came to see the event, too.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung criticized the exhibition for not showing the growing loyalty of the people as they were awarded the new jobs, apartment and capital of Jews as the war progressed. I went to the exhibition with a colleague and a friend, Victoria Bishop-Kendzia, who is writing an ethnography on school classes visiting the Jewish museum in Berlin.  She summed it up: “there is no perpetrators’ narrative.”

Not because the crimes are not named, but because there are little, scattered, opportunities to become empathetic, or to understand how it was for Germans then, without an immediate repudiation.

A few reviews commented on the timely opening of the exhibition around Sarrazin’s  book publication on the German race (and other less fortunate races like “the Muslims”) in late October and when Merkel gave an interview in Potsdam in which she announced “the failure of multiculturalism” and lamented the fact they, the immigrants, do not try hard enough to become Germans.

If such an exhibition, besides its ritualized “newness” quality, could illuminate, or help see differently how certain concepts, which are not the same as the Nazi’s used, can be limiting or hurting, we could say that its goal is well achieved. But I am afraid that its stays on a safer, familiar level of fascination with the exhibits and their piling-on, in a dimly lit, very old-new German Historical Museum.