New History Show Aims to Restore Germans' Sense of Self

The permanent exhibition is attracting a lot of attention because the past is such a sensitive subject in the country that started two world wars and perpetrated the Holocaust. It's also the first comprehensive show on German history since World War Two.

"The museum wants to remind, to be a place not just of shame but of information and critical self-contemplation. And of the question: 'Who are we'?" Ottomeyer told SPIEGEL.

The horrors of the Nazi period made Germans turn their backs on their country's past, and history teaching was neglected in the decades following the war, said Ottomeyer. Many Germans have only a sketchy knowledge of the centuries preceding the 20th century, he said.

"Until a few months ago I didn't know myself that before 1918 there was no such thing as German citizenship. Before then, people were citizens of Prussia or Bavaria for example," Ottomeyer said.

The exhibition stretches back to 9 AD, the date widely recognised as the birth of the German "nation," when Germanic tribes wiped out three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, thereby stopping the advance of the Roman Empire east of the Rhine.

"Message in a bottle"
There is an iron mask of a Roman legionnaire's helmet dug up from the site of the Teutoburg battle in Kalkriese, northwestern Germany.

Suits of armour, original paintings, priceless manuscripts, uniforms and guns trace Germany's path through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Thirty Years' War, the struggles among the regional dukedoms and kingdoms, the 19th century drive towards national unity, industrialization, and the carnage of the 20th century.

"Its focus on authentic objects makes the exhibition special. It's like a message in a bottle to future generations," said Ottomeyer.

The 12 years of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 make up the biggest single part of the exhibition.

It has the 5 foot 7 inch high globe that stood in Hitler's office and symbolized his plans for world domination. The globe, which contains a bullet fired into it by a Red Army soldier who placed his pistol on Germany, was discovered in a Munich customs office. It was caricatured in the 1939 film "The Great Dictator" where Charlie Chaplin as "Adenoid Hynkel" dances around his office holding the earth in his hands in the shape of a big balloon.

Hitler's desk, hauled out of the burning chancellery by the Red Army, is also on display, along with the engine of a V2 rocket and Nazi iconography.

Also on show is a model of a crematorium in the Birkenau death camp and of the bombastic 180,000-seat "Hall of the People" designed, but never built, by Albert Speer.

Other exhibits include a 1514 painting of Charlemagne from the workshop of Albrecht Dürer, a Turkish tent from the siege of Vienna in 1683 and a steam engine from 1847.

There is the uniform of Frederick the Great, and Napoleon's bicorne hat snatched from his carriage by Prussian Field Marshal Blücher on the battlefield of Waterloo.

Growing interest in Nazi period

In the last few years, German interest in World War II and its aftermath has been growing.

Magazines including SPIEGEL have increased their coverage of the period. New books and television documentaries have focused on the suffering of ordinary Germans in bombing raids and expulsion from eastern territories after 1945.

It's a debate that was taboo for decades given the suffering Germans inflicted on others, and it's being closely watched abroad.

Ottomeyer said the country was still recovering from the historical trauma of the Nazi period. "After being silent for decades, eyewitnesses have started to talk about their experiences. There is a new questioning, and a new dialogue."

But the national memory now tends to focus on World War II. Ottomeyer wants the exhibition to show Germans more than that. "We hope its long-term view will have an effect on the general approach to history," he said.

That, he hopes, will help make Germans more aware of their identity -- a difficult subject because nationalism is tainted by Nazi crimes. But "Germany" emerged from many different regional tribes and kingdoms.

"There are many regional mentalities that only superficially merge into a national character," said Ottomeyer. The German language is the strongest unifying force, he said.

The plan for a national historical exhibition stems from 1987, when then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl founded the German Historical Museum. But the upheaval following the fall of the Berlin Wall led to numerous delays and redesigns.

At what point in history, if any, did the Holocaust become "inevitable"?

The exhibition stretches back to 9 AD, the date widely recognised as the birth of the German "nation," when Germanic tribes wiped out three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, thereby stopping the advance of the Roman Empire east of the Rhine.

However, I don't think, the museum is just and only about the Holocaust: it is what the name says: the German Historical Museum.

Quote:

The exhibition stretches back to 9 AD, the date widely recognised as the birth of the German "nation," when Germanic tribes wiped out three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, thereby stopping the advance of the Roman Empire east of the Rhine.

If you want to look at it from that perspective - it all started from the very beginning.

Therein lies the dilemma: do we want to look at it from that perspective?

"Until a few months ago I didn't know myself that before 1918 there was no such thing as German citizenship. Before then, people were citizens of Prussia or Bavaria for example," Ottomeyer said.

It would be good to include music, foods, scientific achievements, literature, philosophy, etc.

[I can't admit to knowing a large number of German citizens, but of the few that I have met -- it has surprised me how many of those insist that they are Bavarian first and foremost! At the time, I thought it quaint but now I'm wondering if that cultural identification is a wish to distance themselves from 20th century events.]

They have given us the best cars, great beer, brown shirts and Strauss.

Merkel opens exhibition addressing Nazi past

By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Published: 03 June 2006

On an ornate four-foot high steel globe that once stood in Adolf Hitler's Chancellor's office in Berlin, a bullet hole marks the spot where the capital of the Third Reich once stood, and Germany is an expanse of bare metal blasted from the face of the earth.

The damage was inflicted by a Soviet Red Army officer who stormed the Nazi leader's headquarters in the spring of 1945. With a single shot from his pistol fired at point-blank range, he left his own mark of vengeance on the Führer's possession. The bullet can still be heard rattling inside.

The globe is one of more than 8,000 artefacts which make up what is being hailed as the most comprehensive exhibition on German history since the Second World War. The permanent display was opened yesterday by Chancellor Angela Merkel at Berlin's German Historical Museum.

The show has been described as Germany's first major attempt at historical self-assessment. Proposals were first mooted more than 20 years ago by the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, but the idea provoked heated debate, with critics arguing that it would diminish the enormity of crimes perpetrated during the Nazi era. The mammoth exhibition - which attempts to answer the question "What is German?" - is the result of nearly seven years' work by the museum's curators and researchers. A broad sweep through 2,000 years of German history, it is displayed on 7,500 square metres of floor space.

The exhibition begins with a Roman gate, and ends with shattered sections of the Berlin Wall - a potent symbolreunification in 1989-1990. Scores of artefacts document the intervening centuries. Inevitably, the most chilling section covers the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust and the Second World War. A model of the Auschwitz death camp stands alongside a plan of Germania - the Nazi architect Albert Speer's name for a new and bombastic capital of the Third Reich.

Hans Ottomeyer, the museum's director, described the show as "a political drama with many wars but also many attempts to find peace". He said: "It is curious, but war and peace seem to have followed each other in Germany at intervals of almost exactly 50 years."