Chloe Paver writes:
Asked to describe this museum, visitors tend to mention the prisoners’ graffiti in the basement. Evidently, this exerts the fascination of the dungeon. From the point of view of the researcher, the museum is more interesting as an example of the ‘mainstreaming’ of German memory of the Nazi era and for its thoughtful display practices.
As the ‘Object to Look Out For’ indicates, the NS-Dokumentationszentrum owes its existence partly to a lone protester, Sammy Maedge, and partly to more collective forms of citizen activism. This pattern, whereby either a single-minded individual or a Bürgerinitiative (group of concerned citizens) push for the neglected Nazi past to be remembered, has repeated itself hundreds of times across Germany. By contrast, citizen activism is not generally an effective means of bringing museums into being in the UK.
Compared with the documentation centres in Berlin and Munich, which see their role as presenting academic historiography to a broad public, the NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln employs a more conceptual approach, closer in spirit to the documentation centre at the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. Perhaps what links these two museums is that, rather than enjoying the luxury of a purpose-built museum, they have inherited existing buildings. Spaces not originally designed for museum use can be envisaged as a series of surfaces, cubes, and corridors with varying amounts of volume and light. From that starting point, information is conceived of as emerging out of the space, rather than as a set of texts and images awaiting formatting in two dimensions. At the documentation centre in Cologne, small amounts of text are combined with evocative visual and spatial displays.
One small room is lined with perspex sheets inscribed with the names of more than 2,500 clubs registered in Cologne in 1933. This alphabetical directory, with its rigidly repetitive format, has little immediate visual appeal, but it becomes more intriguing the longer one stands in front of it. It represents the process of ‘Gleichschaltung’, by which organizations were brought into line – or fell into line – with National Socialist aims and practices. As a caption explains, the directory captures just the first stage in that process. In 1933, the Nazis mainly banned clubs affiliated with the political Left. In the list on the walls, those clubs’ names have a line drawn through them. Only later did the Nazis ban Catholic organizations and Jewish organizations.
In a way, choosing the date 1933 makes the display disappointing, because a relatively small number of names has been scored out. However, if one reads the list for long enough, it begins to conjure up an unaccustomed picture of Germany in 1933. A kaleidoscopic image of society emerges: the Local Association of Linoleum Traders, the Horse-Breeding Association of Cologne, the Aquarium and Terrarium Club, and the Sugar-Beet Association of Raw Sugar Manufacturers in the Rheinland – these are just four of the 2,500. In all their wonderful diversity, these harmless names stand for an opportunistic, indifferent, or cowardly majority that secures its favoured status at the expense of a vulnerable minority. The crushing of workers’ clubs acquires a certain pathos: what threat, really, was posed by the ‘Loreley Workers Singing Club’ or the ‘Rambling Choir of the Friends of Nature’? What purpose did it serve to ban every accordion club in the city? The visitor is also invited to ponder on the arbitrariness of the divide between the favoured and the harassed: what distinguished the Amiciata Mandolin Club from the Alpine Rose Mandolin and Zither Club, only one of which had to close? Which bureaucrat was charged with working out that the ‘red’ in ‘Red Cross’ was politically blameless but the ‘red’ in ‘Red First Aiders’ was not? Finally, because so many clubs are local, visitors living in Cologne will recognise, again and again, the names of districts and suburbs – Merheim, Bayenthal, Nippes, Longerich – which stress the ubiquity of Nazi cultural control.
From this wider social picture, a later installation zooms in on individual victims. The museum is careful to state that it has obtained the permission of surviving family members to show personal details of local Roma and Sinti (gypsies). Each person is represented by the documentation collected on them by Nazi police and scientists: photographs, handprints, and file cards recording their bodily characteristics. To counter the dehumanizing effect of this perpetrator material, each set of information is printed on an individual column, with the photograph at the top, allowing the visitor to walk among the group. This common curatorial trick serves to re-individualize victims whom the Nazis homogenized. Besides this, the museum relies on the double-faced character of the images. On the one hand, the handprints and photographs were taken without consent and served as an instrument of control. The handprints also bear the pen marks of the scientists who measured features of the palms and fingertips in the erroneous belief that they could prove ethnic difference in this way. Despite all this, the photos and handprints remain irreducibly individual, testimony to the singularity and diversity of those who were persecuted and killed.
A few of the photographs of children are in colour, creating a momentary shock of the past intruding into the present, since nothing in their dress or hair indicates that they are not alive at this moment. Although ‘generations’ is a key research theme for colleagues in my field, I have yet to find an analysis of the generational dividing line between those who, having grown up with black and white photographs, see the subjects mentally in colour and those who, having grown up with colour images, see black and white photographs as photographs of black and white people. The fortuitous timing of the shift from black-and-white to colour film technology (which could have come ten years earlier or ten years later with quite different effects) must have done more than many other things to create an unbridgeable imaginative gap between younger generations and the Nazi era. This makes occasional colour images all the more potent.
German History Museums 