Chloe Paver writes:
In UK university studies, the air raids on Germany come under the heading ‘Germans as victims’ or ‘German wartime suffering’. Or, as I prefer to think of it (since Jews, for instance, could also be German), the suffering of the non-persecuted majority of Germans during the course of the Second World War. Granted, ‘German wartime suffering’ is snappier.
While relatively privileged under the dictatorship in peace-time, provided that they conformed, the non-persecuted majority (those who were not targeted as Jews, political opponents, etc.) found themselves, after 1939, the victims of war. Their suffering took a range of forms: war trauma at the Front, bereavement, experience of bombing raids, separation from family members, imprisonment under harsh conditions in Soviet POW camps, fleeing homes in Eastern Europe, hunger, rape, or, after 1945, unjust imprisonment in Soviet jails.
Although some of these forms of suffering were experienced by British soldiers and citizens, others were unique to Germany and the overall scale was much greater there. As a result, the social after-effects were considerably more significant.
In the 1990s, the idea established itself in German public discourse that many of these forms of suffering and loss had been taboo during previous decades and that it was finally time to allow Germans to speak openly about how suffering had affected their lives. For about 10 years after that, academics and PhD students were kept busy disproving the notion that any of these things (with the possible exception of rape) had ever been truly taboo, while at the same time analysing the many German novels, films, television programmes, museums and memorials that were produced in the stubbornly persistent belief that ‘at last’ these things could be spoken about.
The Mahnmal St. Nikolai exemplifies this paradox. Hamburg has been publicly mourning those who died in the air raids since 1945 and yet this museum has grown out of the movement towards granting ordinary members of the non-persecuted majority the space in which to say ‘we suffered too’.
What has changed since 1945 is the rhetoric employed to look back at the past. Historian Jörg Arnold has argued that, in 1945, the survivors of the air raids, still freshly bereaved, were not yet ready to hear lectures on cause and effect (your loved ones died and you were traumatised because some years earlier, with your passive or active support, Germany started an aggressive and criminal war). Today, lectures on cause and effect are obligatory. At the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden visitors must read about Germany’s bombing raids on other countries before they can contemplate the destroyed and rebuilt city of Dresden from a viewing platform. The Mahnmal St. Nikolai sets out very clearly the German military strategies (including starting the war in the first place) that preceded the bombing of Hamburg by the Allies.
This kind of framework is used wherever the sufferings of the majority are discussed in professional history museums. Provided that it is acknowledged that Nazism’s primary victims, those targeted for persecution and murder, suffered more and suffered first, and that they suffered without any significant intervention by the German majority, the museum becomes a ‘safe space’ in which the sufferings of the non-persecuted can be explored. In the process, the museum as public institution validates these sufferings.
Of course, any museum rhetoric that is sequential (‘first read this so that you have a framework for understanding what follows’) relies on visitors reading texts in order, which is becoming an increasingly utopian expectation. Guided tours can at least ensure that school groups get the logic straight.
The Mahnmal St. Nikolai has other ways of contextualizing the sufferings of the majority. While the ‘Bombenkrieg’ is associated in the German public imagination exclusively with the sufferings of the non-persecuted majority, the museum makes clear that the persecuted – particularly Jews and forced labourers – where equally exposed in the raids, indeed more so since they had no right to a place in an air-raid shelter. The museum also shows that Allied airmen suffered, experiencing fear of death, bereavement, and guilt.
In my research I am interested in using the relatively new discipline of the ‘history of emotions’ to illuminate the work of German history museums. The history of emotions looks at how the role and value of emotions changes over time in any given society. Not every emotion counts as ‘historical’: historians of emotion can’t go chasing after every fit of jealousy, every bout of bad temper or lovelorn sigh. However, if sufficiently large groups of people experience certain emotions – for instance if similar emotions affect a whole generation or the majority of a city – then emotions can be viewed as historical agents, shaping subsequent events.
Not surprisingly, the Second World War has provided good material for historians of emotions but so far I don’t find much evidence of this in history museums.
It is not that there is nothing to make the visitor feel emotional. On the contrary, German history museums are filled with individual stories and any one of the lives selected by the exhibition-makers is likely to contain moving accounts of fear, pain, and loss. If anything, I’m astonished at how few visitors to German history museums cry, given how much there is to move the visitor to tears. Possibly crying is felt to be inappropriate behaviour.
Nevertheless, in the texts on their exhibition boards museums rarely mention emotions as a historical factor. Possibly this is because the driving force behind German history museums about the Third Reich has been a desire to establish facts (in the face of declining historical knowledge and in defiance of deniers) and to apportion responsibility (in the face of a widespread readiness to gloss over the past).
The Mahnmal St. Nikolai, together with the Deutsch-Russisches Museum and the Donauschwäbisches Zentralmuseum, is among the first to discuss explicitly – if rather tentatively – the emotional aftermath of the Third Reich and its war.
German History Museums 