Exhibiting the Nazi Past by Chloe Paver

Author:Chloe Paver
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319770840
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.2 Vandalism, Disposal and Recycling

The experiences of the non-persecuted majority of Germans and Austrians are the more common focus of history exhibitions that address the experience of 1945 (understood as the constructed ‘1945’) and objects are central to the majority experience of transition. At the moment of defeat every obviously Nazi-coded object immediately lost all material and social value for majority Germans and Austrians (while for a time having a residual value to Allied soldiers as booty). Exhibition-makers have become increasingly interested in this moment of mass devaluation and disposal , not for its own sake but because of the broader social meaning of this process.

Objects that were actually destroyed (burned or smashed to small pieces) and objects that were rendered irrecoverable by burial in large landfill pits are not available to museums for display. This narrows the available object base to those objects that were unsuccessfully disposed of and later found buried or hidden, or that were recycled in 1945. These real processes—burial, hiding, adaptation for continued use—happen to map neatly on to metaphors that are used to express moral disapproval of Germany’s and Austria’s half-hearted or non-existent acknowledgement of past wrongs. Thus, when objects from this moment of disposal are displayed, the key—though often unspoken—question is: Did Germans really switch from faith in a dictator to a belief in democracy just by shedding the material signifiers of the old regime? And the unspoken answer is often: ‘No’. Similarly, where recycled objects are shown, the implication is that majority Germans preserved the core values that had led them to support Hitler, but ‘dressed’ them differently so that they might be of use in a new democratic order.

If we unpick the metaphor , the ‘vehicle’ is the superficially altered object, the tertium comparationis is failing or refusing to dispose of something properly and the (unspoken) ‘tenor’ or ‘ground’ is the unreformed German post-war mind . But this is not to say that the material object serves only to point away from itself to implied moral failings, since the two are inseparably linked. Against the background of German and Austrian discourses about the Nazi past the very physicality of material disposal makes it suspect, detached as it is from mental and moral processes : to throw away the thing is not to rethink one’s values. At the same time, real material shortages forced compromises on Germans and Austrians that were simultaneously material and moral. Reusing swastika flags for dresses and aprons of course meant retaining a physical link to the old regime but was a pragmatic response to poverty and shortage. Focussing on recycling as practical need may therefore express a less condemnatory attitude to the German majority in the post-war years.

I begin with objects from which evidence of allegiance to National Socialism has been physically excised , a particularly common display item.20 Often the implication—that it was much easier to switch sides by erasing the signs of Nazism than to reflect on and regret one’s involvement in a murderous regime—is unarticulated, relying on a moral knowledge brought to the museum by the visitor.

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