A piece of writing pasted onto the windows of the museum. Does that qualify as an ‘object’?
Yes and no. The museum has a strict no-photography policy but this is something we can photograph. As you approach the outside of the museum you are greeted by quotations and snippets of dialogue on the windows.
These derive from the art project ‘Speaking Germany’, commissioned by the museum before its opening and carried out by artist Sharone Lifschitz. Lifschitz put ads in the paper saying she was a Jewish woman visiting Germany and would like to meet people. The quotations on the windows represent a distillation of the resulting conversations. They encourage us to think of language as an object that can be studied like an exhibit.
The museum has selected comments which relate to the German past or which show attitudes to the encounter with a Jewish person (curiosity but also some unfounded assumptions). In this example we see a man expressing shock that British people could be so insensitive as to use the swastika as a shorthand for ‘German’. In Germany, where the swastika cannot be displayed in public except in educational contexts, the symbol is not connected with contemporary society and it is unlikely to be used in frivolous contexts. Simply the fact that Lifschitz’s interviewee speaks such good English is a reminder of a certain one-sidedness in the relationship between our countries. A German artist expecting to meet German-speakers in the UK would have to search harder.
German History Museums 