‘INSTITUTIONALIZED STORIES’: CHILDHOOD AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN MUSEUM DISPLAYS

Abstract

This article addresses the museum as institution and its contribution to post-Wende cultural memories of growing up in the Third Reich. Drawing on museum theory and practice, it examines different representational strategies as a way of theorizing about the limits and possibilities of depicting childhood under Nazism in the cultural sphere. Through a close reading of contemporary museum displays (in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and Hagen), it explores ‘institutionalized stories’ (Brian W. Ferguson) on offer about this childhood experience; the extent to which these have been controlled and challenged by museums; and the museum’s power and potential as an institution to shape part of that historical narrative of childhood. Finally, the article analyzes the deployment of the museum as metaphor in autobiographical works by Martin Walser and Joachim Fest, both of whom grew up under Nazism, and considers whether it is possible to speak of an ‘institutionalized’ memory of childhood in the Third Reich.

Keywords:

• Museums
• childhood
• National Socialism
• Martin Walser
• Joachim Fest
• cultural memory
• material culture

Notes

This article is based on material submitted as part of my doctoral thesis, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to Karen Leeder and Chloe Paver for their guidance and to museum staff at the institutions discussed below for their assistance.¹ Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ‘Vorwort’, in Meine Schulzeit im Dritten Reich: Erinnerungen deutscher Schriftsteller, ed. by Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1982), p. 9. The writers included in the anthology were born between 1919 and 1929.

2 For example Harald Welzer’s notion of ‘gefühlte Geschichte’: a term he uses to describe the kind of historical representation which focuses on experience, rather than ‘factual knowledge’, in ‘Ein Zeit-Gespräch mit dem Sozialpsychologen Harald Welzer über das private Erinnern’, Die Zeit, 25 March 2004, pp. 43–46 (p. 43).

3 Helmut Schmitz, ‘Soundscapes of the Third Reich: Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde’, in German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past: Representations of National Socialism in Contemporary Germanic Literature, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 119–41 (p. 121).

4 Michael Heinlein, Die Erfindung der Erinnerung: Deutsche Kriegskindheiten im Gedächtnis der Gegenwart (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2010), p. 9.

5 For example Guido Knopp’s Hitlers Kinder (ZDF, 2001). See also the major debates sparked by such accounts, for example the reception of Martin Walser’s Friedenspreisrede in 1998; the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI and the subsequent media discussion about his ‘Nazi past’; and Günter Grass’s revelation in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006) that he had been in the SS. Although Grass was a seventeen-year-old at the time, the controversy provoked a discussion of his generation and of those who spent their formative years under Nazism, both as children and as adolescents.

6 Bruce W. Ferguson uses this term in his chapter ‘Exhibitions Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense’, in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (Oxford: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175–91 (p. 175). Although Ferguson is concerned with art exhibitions, his theoretical discussion of the institutional nature of displays informs the current study.

7 Chloe Paver has compiled an excellent database of exhibitions about National Socialism since the 1990s: <http://people.exeter.ac.uk/cpaver/exhibitions_ausstellungen.html> [accessed 30 March 2013].

8 For example the Anne Frank Zentrum, Berlin.

9 See Chloe E. M. Paver, ‘Exhibiting the National Socialist Past: An Overview of Recent German Exhibitions’, Journal of European Studies, 39 (2009), 225–49 (p. 226). Paver also points out that caution is necessary when attempting to draw conclusions about how museums shape cultural memory.

10 Sharon MacDonald, ‘Theorizing Museums: An Introduction’, in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. by Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 1–21 (p. 14).

11 Sharon Roberts, ‘Minor Concerns: Representations of Children and Childhood in British Museums’, Museum and Society, 4 (2006), 152–65 (p. 152). See also Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2008), pp. 113–39.

12 See Susan A. Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum’, History and Theory, 36 (1997), 44–63 (p. 45).

13 Susan A. Crane, ‘Introduction’, in Museums and Memory, ed. by Susan A. Crane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17 (p. 3).

14 Ibid.

15 See Quintilian: The Orator’s Education, ed. by Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), v, pp. 58–85.

16 Rosmarie Beier-de Haan, ‘Re-staging Histories and Identities’, in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. by Sharon MacDonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 186–98 (p. 187).

17 Ibid., p. 187.

18 See Sigrid Godau, ‘Inszenierung oder Rekonstruktion? Zur Darstellung von Geschichte im Museum’, in Geschichte — Bild — Museum: Zur Darstellung von Geschichte im Museum, ed. by Michael Fehr and Stefan Grohé (Cologne: Wienand, 1989), pp. 199–212.

19 Beier-de Haan, ‘Re-staging Histories and Identities’, p. 187.

20 Ibid.

21 Udo Gößwald, ‘Das Museum als soziales Gedächtnis’, in Erinnerungsstücke: Das Museum als soziales Gedächtnis, ed. by Udo Gößwald (Berlin: Hentrich, 1991), pp. 6–13 (p. 8).

22 Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History’, p. 51.

23 See Susan Crane’s discussion of the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian Institution’s 1994 exhibition of the Enola Gay aircraft used by the United States Army Air Forces in the attack on Hiroshima in August 1945, in Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History’, pp. 44–63.

24 Ibid., p. 46.

25 See John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009).

26 See Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 2–28.

27 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: Studies in Transmission, Reception, and Influence (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 169–88 (p. 172).

28 Richard N. Coe, When the Grass was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 263. Coe is quoting Michel Leiris, Biffures, vol. 1 of La Règle du jeu (Paris: Gallimard, 1948; repr. 1975), p. 11.

29 See Jenks, Childhood, pp. 2–3; and Jenny Hockey and Allison James, Growing Up and Growing Old: Ageing and Dependency in the Life Course (London: SAGE, 1993), p. 60.

30 David Fleming, ‘Social History in Wonderland: A Review of the SHCG Annual Study Weekend of 1988’, Social History in Museums, 16 (1988), 31–33 (p. 31). Cited in Sharon Roberts, ‘Minor Concerns: Representations of Children and Childhood in British Museums’, Museum and Society, 4 (2006), 152–65 (p. 157).

31 Sharon Brookshaw, ‘The Material Culture of Children and Childhood: Understanding Childhood Objects in the Museum Context’, Journal of Material Culture, 14 (2009), 365–83 (p. 381).

32 Joanna Sofaer Derevenski, ‘Material Culture Shock: Confronting Expectations in the Material Culture of Children’, in Children and Material Culture, ed. by Joanna Sofaer Derevenski (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 3–17 (p. 11). She is drawing on work by Marx Wartofsky here: ‘The Child’s Construction of the World and the World’s Construction of the Child: From Historical Epistemology to Historical Psychology’, in The Child and Other Cultural Inventions, ed. by Frank S. Kessel and Alexander W. Siegel (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 188–215.

33 On the role and design of the DHM, see Beier-de Haan, ‘Re-staging Histories and Identities’, pp. 189–90.

34 It is not clear whether this came with the doll’s house as sold, whether it was an accessory for doll’s houses available in shops, or whether it was home-made. I discuss the doll’s house as a gendered toy in ‘Dolls and Play: Material Culture and Memories of Girlhoods in Germany, 1933–1945’, in Deconstructing Dolls: The Many Meanings of Girls’ Toys and Play, ed. by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Jennifer Whitney [Peter Lang, forthcoming 2014].

35 Paver, ‘You Shall Know Them’, p. 172. On Nazi-coded objects in the exhibition space, see ibid, pp. 171–75.

36 Angela Winkler, Das romantische Kind: Ein poetischer Typus von Goethe bis Thomas Mann (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2000), p. 31.

37 The title of ‘Wir fahren gegen Engeland’ was based on a poem by Hermann Löns made popular under Nazism in a musical setting by Herms Niel. See Kerstin Merkel, ‘Gesellschaftsspiele’, in Kerstin Merkel and Constance Dittrich, Spiel mit dem Reich: Nationalsozialistisches Gedankengut in Spielzeug und Kinderbüchern (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011), pp. 193–98 (p. 198).

38 Stargardt, Witnesses of War, pp. 174–75. See also Patricia Heberer, Children During the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: AltaMira in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011), pp. 291–302.

39 See for example Hilke Lorenz’s Kriegskinder: Schicksal einer Generation (Munich: List, 2003) and Sabine Bode’s Die vergessene Generation: Die Kriegskinder brechen ihr Schweigen (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2005).

40 See for example Heberer, Children During the Holocaust, pp. 293–95.

41 The drawings were produced by children in the Theresienstadt ghetto. For an analysis of such pictures, see for example Stargardt, Witnesses of War, pp. 207–13; and I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942–1944, ed. by Hana Volavková (New York: Schocken Books in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994).

42 Brookshaw, ‘The Material Culture of Children’, p. 381.

43 Primarily in popular film and fiction. See Beate Müller, ‘Agency, Ethics and Responsibility in Holocaust Fiction: Child Figures as Catalysts in Bruno Apitz’s Nackt unter Wölfen (1958) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s Nacht (1964)’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 36 (2011), 85–114.

44 See Roberts, ‘Minor Concerns’, p. 161; Brian W. Shepherd, ‘Making Children’s Histories’, in Making Histories in Museums (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), pp. 258–71 (p. 269); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Education, Communication and Interpretation: Towards a Critical Pedagogy in Museums’, in The Educational Role of the Museum, ed. by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (Leicester: Routledge, 1994), pp. 3–28; and Margaret Lindauer, ‘The Critical Museum Visitor’, in New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction, ed. by Janet Marstine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 203–23.

45 Roberts, ‘Minor Concerns’, p. 161.

46 Shepherd, ‘Making Children’s Histories’, p. 269.

47 <http://www.hamburgerschulmuseum.de/framedef.htm> [accessed 20 March 2013].

48 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums’, in The New Museology, ed. by Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), pp. 22–41 (p. 26).

49 <http://www.hamburgerschulmuseum.de/2010-11-01_SchulmuseumV1.pdf> [accessed 7 August 2013].

50 Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth, ‘Introduction’, in Das historische Museum, ed. by Gottfried Korff (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus-Verlag, 1991), pp. 9–41 (p. 17).

51 Helmut Schmitz, ‘Introduction: The Return of Wartime Suffering in Contemporary German Memory Culture, Literature and Film’, in A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 1–31 (p. 5).

52 Harald Welzer, ‘Im Gedächtniswohnzimmer: Warum sind Bücher über die eigene Familiengeschichte so erfolgreich? Ein Zeit-Gespräch mit dem Sozialpsychologen Harald Welzer über das private Erinnern’, Die Zeit, 25 March 2004, pp. 43–46 (p. 43).

53 Norbert Frei, ‘Gefühlte Geschichte’, Die Zeit, 21 October 2004, p. 3.

54 The centre’s activities were mainly restricted to academic research until it was founded for a second time in 1987:http://www.museenkoeln.de/ns-dokumentationszentrum/default.aspx?s = 335 [accessed 20 July 2013].

55 An audio commentary is available. This tells the visitor that non-Nazi youth groups were increasingly marginalized and then banned after 1933.

56 On the role of eyewitness testimony in the museum, see Gaynor Kavanagh, ‘Making Histories, Making Memories’, in Making Histories in Museums, pp. 1–15; and Selma Thomas, ‘Private Memory in a Public Space: Oral History and Museums’, in Oral History and Public Memories, ed. by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. 87–103.

57 Jens Stubbe, ‘Zeitreise in eine andere Jugend’, Westfalenpost, 3 June 2009, <http://www.derwesten.de/wp/staedte/hagen/zeitreise-in-eine-andere-jugend-id355780.html> [accessed 7 August 2013].

58 Unpublished interview with Dr Ralf Blank, Historisches Centrum, Hagen, 23 July 2009.

59 <http://www.hagen-58.de/veranstaltungen/kultur/4771/jugend-im-nationalsozialismus.html> [accessed 20 March 2012].

60 Adolf Hitler, Rede in Reichenberg, 4 December 1938, cited in Carl Wolfgang Müller, Wie Helfen zum Beruf wurde: eine Methodengeschichte der Sozialen Arbeit (Weinheim/Munich: Juventa Verlag, 2006), p. 109.

61 See Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion, and History’, pp. 44–63.

62 Harald Welzer, ‘The Collateral Damage of Enlightenment: How Grandchildren Understand the History of National Socialist Crimes and Their Grandfathers’ Past’, in Victims and Perpetrators, 1933–1945: (Re)presenting the Past in Post-unification Culture ed. by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), pp. 285–96 (p. 290).

63 Walser also raised this issue in his (in)famous Friedenspreis speech. See ‘Martin Walser, Die Banalität des Guten: Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede aus Anlass der Verleihung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels’, FAZ, 12 October 1998. The secondary literature on Walser is extensive. On his approach to the politics of memory, see in particular Stuart Taberner, ‘A Manifesto for Germany’s “New Right”? ? Martin Walser, The Past, Transcendence, Aesthetics, and Ein Springender Brunnen’, German Life and Letters, 53.1 (2000), 126–41; and Christoph Parry, ‘Die Rechtfertigung der Erinnerung vor der Last der Geschichte’, in Grenzen der Fiktionalität und der Erinnerung, ed. by Christoph Parry and Edgar Platen (Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 2007), pp. 98–111.

64 Martin Walser, Ein springender Brunnen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 9.

65 Helmut Schmitz identifies this in his analysis of Ein springender Brunnen, in Helmut Schmitz, On Their Own Terms: The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990 German Fiction (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2004), pp. 186–87.

66 Andrew Prescott, ‘The Textuality of the Archive’, in Louise Craven, What are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader, ed. by Louise Craven (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 31–53 (pp. 32–33).

67 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 139.

68 Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 165.

69 Ibid.

70 Willi Winkler, ‘Die Sprache verwaltet das Nichts: Ein Gespräch mit Martin Walser über Poesie, Politik und die Frage, wieviel Macht der Literaturbetrieb wirklich hat’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 September 1998, p. 15.

71 Gertrud Bauer Pickar, ‘In Defense of the Past: The Life and Passion of Alfred Dorn in Die Verteidigung der Kindheit’, in New Critical Perspectives on Martin Walser, ed. by Frank Pilipp (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), pp. 134–56, (p. 135).

72 Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 138.

73 Martin Walser, Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991).

74 Joachim Fest, Ich nicht: Erinnerungen an eine Kindheit und Jugend (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2008), p. 366.

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Alexandra Lloyd

Alexandra Lloyd is Lecturer in German at Magdalen College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her doctoral thesis concerned depictions of childhood and adolescence under Nazism within post-1990 German culture. Recent publications include ‘Writing Childhood in Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: Eine Jugend’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 49 (2013), 175–83.