Most museums at urban sites of perpetration are there because somebody protested that the past was being covered up. Sometimes one person was willing to put their head above the parapet.
Although various groups of citizen activists had a hand in the founding of the NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln, Sammy Maedge was a pioneer. In 1979, he stood in Cologne city centre with this scruffy placard, made from a cardboard box he had opened out. In felt-tipped writing and xeroxed images he informed passers-by about the former Gestapo headquarters in the so-called ‘LD House’, or the ‘torture chambers that nobody wants to talk about’, as he put it.
There is something odd about seeing a re-used, hand-written and degraded piece of cardboard behind the protective perspex of a museum display. Germany’s 70-year-old democracy has begun to historicize and celebrate the protest cultures that have nudged it towards a more honest approach to the past.
The cardboard placard fits well with the shabby décor of the documentation centre, where the walls and ceilings have been left in a raw state. This is not ‘authentic’ since the Gestapo headquarters would not have looked like this. They would have been as spruce as any offices in the 1930s. But it represents a kind of transparency: nothing is being hidden behind the veneer of respectability that a traditional museum affords. Whether the cardboard placard would blend in quite so well in the sparse-but-pristine documentation centre in Munich is a moot point.
German History Museums 