Certain types of object in German history museums could either document the experience of Nazism’s primary victims (the persecuted) or of its secondary victims (the relatively protected majority who became victims of wartime violence). A wide gulf of moral responsibility separates these historical experiences, but if you are looking at a suitcase in a museum only the context will tell you which side it belongs to. A Jewish man or woman may have taken it into exile, onto the deportation trains, or, in rare cases of survival, to a new life after 1945. Equally, it could be the suitcase of a non-Jewish evacuee, an ethnic German forced to flee the Red Army, a POW returning home, or even – later on – a German fleeing East Germany. Context is everything.
Toys, too, can tell quite different stories, depending on the owner. This doll belonged to two Jewish children taken into hiding by their mother. The children were discovered, deported, and murdered, aged seven and five. Beyond the pathos of innocent victimhood, the doll challenges our ideas of what it means to have survived. The mother survived, remarried, and had another daughter, to whom she passed on the doll, but she never recovered from the loss of her older children. Though rare, this experience happened both to Nazism’s primary and secondary victims. Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s partly autobiographical novel Lost tells of a (non-Jewish) boy born after 1945 living in the shadow of an older brother who had been ‘lost’ as the family fled the Soviet advance.
German History Museums 