DOCSLIB.ORG

The Medium of the Museum

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Medium of the Museum Chapter 2: The Mediumofthe Museum 2.1 MuseumSpaceand the ‘ Ideal’ Visitor Howdohistory museumsapproachthe past?AleidaAssmann – partiallydrawing on themuseum analysis of Rosmarie Beier-deHaan – differentiates betweenthree typesofhistoricalrepresentationsofmemory: narrating, exhibiting,and staging (2007, 149 – 153).¹ Narrating referstothe narrativesemantics of ahistoricalrepre- sentation that ascribes meaning, importance,and direction to thenarratedevents. Exhibiting refers to theplacement of historicaltexts,images, andobjects in space, whichisfar less sequential andcausalthannarrating andallowsfor effectsofsi- multaneity.Finally,staging thepastisdivided into thecategories of media staging, particularly throughfilmand moving images,and spatialstaging,which Assmann mainly relatestoauthentic heritage spaces that allowfor imaginativere-experienc- ingorperformative simulationsofthe past.However,Assmann’sanalysisisnot specific enough to help us understand theparticularitiesofthe mediumofthe ‘museum’ (or exhibitions in museum space).Inher chart – whichisdivided into basicrepresentationalmodes,media,and format – themuseumasa‘format’ only appearstobeconnectedtothe mode of exhibiting,whereas ‘medial staging’ relatestodocumentary andhistoricalfilm, and ‘spatialstaging’ to memorial sites andreenactmentsofhistory (2007, 154). WhileAssmann’stypology, terms andstructuraldescriptions of ‘staged’ public historyare slantedtoward theproductionsites of narratives,museum exhibitions, or performances,narratologistshavebroadened thesubject-matterofnarratology to culturalrepresentations in general(seee.g.Nünning andNünning 2010). Ans- garNünning hasshown howthe focusonworld-making allows forthe discussion of historiographic narrativeinthe much widercontexts of mediaand discourse theory,ifone,for example, sees “events,stories,and storyworldsasdiscursively created, medially represented, culturallyspecificand historically mutablecon- structs” (Nünning 2010,206). To applythistoanunderstanding of representational formsand storyworldsofhistory museumsand thespecifics of themuseum as me- dium thepotentialvisitormustbetaken into account – at leastasmuchasthe motivation andintentional design of theexhibitioncreators. Thequestionof whethermuseums canbereadlikeatexthas caused considerable debate,partic- ularly amongnarratologists andsemioticiansonthe onehand, andmuseumstud- In German erzählen, ausstellen,and inszenieren. OpenAccess. ©2020 Stephan Jaeger,published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664416-006 2.1 MuseumSpace and the ‘Ideal’ Visitor 41 iesscholarsand museum practitioners on theother.Incomparisontoamore gen- eralreaderresponsetheorythatrelatestotextual media, one must here askwhat specific role thevisitorhas in history museums’ representations, narrations,stag- ing, andsimulations of thepast? What does it mean when thevisitormoves throughspace andspatialarrangements, in comparison to thereaderofabook whomustimagine thespacesbeing narrated? Space in museums can also be described through anarratological approach that has recentlyemerged: ‘narrative geography.’ Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu define spaceasdenoting “certain key characteristics of the environments or settingswithin which characters live and act: location, position arrangement,distance, direction, orientation, and movement” (2016, 7). Regarding this concept,the museum functions as acoreexample for spatial narrativemedia. However,its discussion does not explain the specificity of mu- seum narrativesinspace, beyond the general observation thatmuseums speak to the visitor’sdifferent senses. After the authorsexplain numerous possibilities of how narrative can playarole in spatial museum design, their chapter on “mu- seum narrative” goes on to explore fairlybroad spatial storylines in narrative- based museums, narrative architecture in history museums, and the framing of museum narrativesthrough beginningsand endings. Finally, Ryan et al. arguethat the museum’smain characteristic in terms of narrative geography can be found in its differencefrom landscape narratives: “the possibility to de- sign the exhibit along acirculation path that accords with astoryline and narra- tive progression” (2016,203). However,evenifmemorial sites deal with the phys- ical conditions that they find in pre-existing buildings or landscapes, the complexity of museum representation is clearlyrestricted through numerous dis- cursive and political conditions. The complexity of demands made by the archi- tectural design, the design firm itself, museumstakeholders, marketing pres- sures,lobbyists who want their themes represented, local and national politicians, and the press are such that one wonders how freemuseums actually are to narrate space. Anarratological theory of space derivedmainlyfrom cate- gories that have been developed for the literaryanalysis of fictional texts seems to fall short in explaining narrative and space within the museum. To explain the relationship of museum and space, Daniel Tyradellisidenti- fies exhibitions with “thinkinginspace” (2014, 134–159). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes that “[e]xhibitions are fundamentallytheatrical, for they are how muse- ums perform the knowledge they create” (1998, 3). Similarly, HeikeBuschmann follows Michel de Certeauinreading ‘space’ as the resultofthe interaction be- tween aperson and the structural condition provided in the three-dimensional ‘place’ (2010,162– 163). Thisacknowledgesthat the museum needs the entity of the recipient to actualize or performits space, and furthermore, that it is nec- 42 2The Mediumofthe Museum essary to understand the role of the visitor in space and to illustrate the poietic and performative nature of museum exhibitions, in analyzinghow exhibitions represent the past.Poiesis – aprominent concept in the historiographical theo- ries of Hayden White (1987: 42;see also Jaeger 2011, 33 – 34) and Paul Ricœur (1984–85, I: 52–87) – means that the past onlybecomes reality through the act of representation or narration. This is particularlyevident in the medium of the museum, wherethe museum first creates aspatial arrangement of objects, images, texts,and scenes;and secondly, it requires the (active) perception of vis- itors to completethe process of experientiality and fill the shell of the exhibition. This second element surpasses White’sand Ricœur’suse of the term, wherein they emphasize the poietic potential of historiographic narrative. To understand this aspect of the museum visitor’srole, Mieke Bal’scompar- ison between visitors of the theater and of art exhibitions proves helpful: “In- stead of standingstill in front of an imaginary stage, as in theater,the visitor now walks through aforest of objects. Andinstead of being aspectator of the play, she is now aco-narrator,fulfilling in her own waythe script thatpredeter- mines the parameters within which the story can be told” (2008, 20,see also 1996,2–4). Bal’sapproach emphasizes the dynamics thatamuseum visitor can perform in space, by zoominginand out like afilm camera, from long shot to aclose-up and vice versa (2008, 26).² Similarly, RosmarieBeier-de Haan’sdiscussion of stagingasanintegralpart of ‘new museology’ helps in de- fining the specifics of the museum as medium. Traditionally, museumshavetried to createexhibitions that positioned the visitor as adetached observer(2006, 192).Aspart of ‘new museology,’ [v]iewers arenow drawn intothe ensemble of exhibited objects, no longer able to assume the positionofdetached museum-goers hoveringaboveoroutside the exhibition. The view- ers and their potential perceptions arenow takenintoaccount; they become part of the en- semble and are challengedtoexpress their own perceptions,judgments,and emotions. (Beier-deHaan 2006,192– 193) Suzanne MacLeod also pointsout both how the visitor’sindividual use and ex- perience of space surpasses anyintentional approaches that architects,interior designers,and curators in developing specific effects of space and architecture: In the museum then, arangeofusers – professionals,researchers, families,tourists,organ- ized groups, repeatvisitors and so on – must also be recognized as continuallyremaking the architectureofthe museum through the uses to which it is put.Such uses are, to agreat extent of course, closelycontrolled by the individual and organizational visions of museum See the discussionof‘historical distance’ below. 2.1 MuseumSpaceand the ‘Ideal’ Visitor 43 spacedominant at anyparticular moment.This said, most of us could probablycall to mind amemory of amuseum spacesuddenly transformed through the uses to which it was put, even if it did return to its established character with its requisitespatial practices soon af- terwards. (MacLeod 2005,20) In the museumcontext,design (the planning and buildingofamuseumspace) and reception (bythe visitors who fill the space with their own expectations, de- cisions, and reactions) cannot be completelyisolated from one another.Another concept utilizing space is assemblagetheory.Itsurpasses the agency and inten- tional authorship of the museum planners and of the visitor and looks at as- semblages or clusters that constitutediscursive meanings in which the museum emerges(Macdonald 2013,5–7). Adam Muller highlights the “dynamic interac- tion /intersection of overlapping clusters of objects, spaces,ideologies,memo- ries, feelings, structures,histories,and experiences” (2019). Understood as ‘as- semblages,’ these clusters are
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Photographs of Violence of Wehrmacht Soldiers in the Second World War
    PETRA BOPP (Hamburg) A new sensibility? Photographs of violence of Wehrmacht soldiers in the Second World War I PANČEVO What could be termed a ‘semi–private’ photograph became an iconic image in the context of the so–called first Wehrmacht exhibition, “Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944” (“The war of annihilation: crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944”), which was shown in thirty–three towns and cities in Germany and Austria between 1995 and 1999. The photograph, taken by the propaganda unit photographer Gerhard Gronefeld, shows an execution in the Serbian town of Pančevo in April 1941 [fig. 1]. Executed civilians are lying next to the cemetery wall; in front of them, an officer from the Wehrmacht’s ‘Grossdeutschland’ (Greater Germany) regiment is standing with his gun pointed at a dying victim. Next to him is an officer from the ‘Das Reich’ division of the Waffen–SS, while in the background other soldiers can be seen looking on. The photograph is from a series of fifty images of the hanging and shooting of Serbian civilians by the Wehrmacht in Pančevo. They were taken on 22 April 1941 by Gronefeld, who was a former special correspondent of the OKW1 propaganda magazine “Signal”. He chose not to submit these photographs to “Signal”, instead keeping them at his home in Berlin. It was not until 1963 that he published some of them in a book about the Second World War;2 but they did not elicit any particular response. This changed, however, when the photographs were shown in the exhibition ‘The war of annihilation’.
    [Show full text]
  • Ordinary Men, Less Ordinary Men and Genocidal War in the East, 1941-1945
    Klaus Jochen Arnold. Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion: Kriegführung und Radikalisierung im "Unternehmen Barbarossa". Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004. 579 S. EUR 48.80, paper, ISBN 978-3-428-11302-6. Edward B. Westermann. Hitler's Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 329 Seiten $34.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-7006-1371-7. Reviewed by Thomas Kühne Published on H-German (May, 2006) What made ordinary Germans, ordinary men search into the links between sociology and ideol‐ and ordinary soldiers commit mass murder? This ogy. How were racial and eliminationist ideas and question has been at the center of Holocaust and utopias transformed into deadly action and be‐ Third Reich scholarship since the early 1990s, havior?[1] when pathbreaking books by Christopher Brown‐ Edward Westermann, professor of compara‐ ing and Daniel J. Goldhagen and the sensational tive military theory at the School of Advanced Air exhibition on the war crimes of the Wehrmacht and Space Studies in Montgomery, Alabama, and provoked scholarly as well as public controver‐ Klaus Jochen Arnold, scholar in Münster, Ger‐ sies. Browning was criticized for explaining the many, claim to present new insights into this and mass murder of Jews without considering anti‐ related questions with the published versions of semitism; Goldhagen was charged for exaggerat‐ their Ph.D. dissertations. They do so with varying ing the lethal intention of antisemitism; the degrees of success. Westermann provides a thor‐ Wehrmacht exhibition was blamed for generaliz‐ ough and reliable account of the ideology, organi‐ ing about how many soldiers actually participated zation and racial politics of the Ordnungspolizei in mass murder.
    [Show full text]
  • Rape As a Weapon of War: the Ed Mystification of the German Wehrmacht During the Second World War Alisse Baumgarten Claremont Mckenna College
    Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2013 Rape as a Weapon of War: The eD mystification of the German Wehrmacht During the Second World War Alisse Baumgarten Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Baumgarten, Alisse, "Rape as a Weapon of War: The eD mystification of the German Wehrmacht During the Second World War" (2013). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 586. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/586 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CLAREMONT McKENNA COLLEGE RAPE AS A WEAPON OF WAR: THE DEMYSTIFICATION OF THE GERMAN WEHRMACHT DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR SUBMITTED TO PROFESSOR JONATHAN PETROPOULOS AND DEAN GREGORY HESS BY ALISSE BAUMGARTEN FOR SENIOR THESIS ACADEMIC YEAR 2012-2013 APRIL 29, 2013 2 Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Sex and the Nazis .............................................................................................. 9 The Rules of the Early Reich .......................................................................................... 9 The Ideal Woman .......................................................................................................... 12 The Advent of War ......................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Writing History, Fighting History. Controversies in German Historiography After 1945 Thursday, 4-7Pm – Woodruff 874
    HIST 585-007 (taught in Fall 2006) Writing History, Fighting History. Controversies in German Historiography after 1945 Thursday, 4-7pm – Woodruff 874 Instructor: Prof. Astrid M. Eckert Office: 125 Bowden Hall, Phone: 404-727 1096 Email: [email protected] Office Hours: Wednesday, 11-12am, 4-5pm, and by appointment Course Description: In a recent article, the historian Mary Fulbrook noted that “one of the most striking features of German contemporary history to someone socialized within Anglo-American academia is the extraordinarily close relationship which in Germany is often assumed to exist between historical approaches and positions on the political spectrum.” For better or worse, German historical debates have taken on “dimensions of personal involvement and vituperation that, witnessed by outsiders, might seem not merely out of proportion but indeed entirely out of place in the academic world.” Why has German historiography been so politicized and its debates so acrimonious? This seminar investigates key controversies within the German historical profession since the end of the Second World War. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with central questions in German history while exploring issues and approaches in historical method. Beyond an examination of the specific historiographical questions at stake in these debates and a re-consideration of the texts that ignited the controversies, the seminar will provide students with a broad framework to track and analyze the shifting place of National Socialism and the Holocaust within German historiography. Because many of these debates – particularly the Fischer Controversy, the debate about the German Sonderweg, and the Goldhagen controversy – involved historians from outside Germany, the course will acquaint students with the complex positionality of writing and thinking about German history.
    [Show full text]
  • The Rosenburg Files – the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi Era Bmjv.De/Geschichte
    bmjv.de/geschichte REMEMBRANCE. REFLECTION. RESPONSIBILITY. | VOLUME 1 The Rosenburg Files – The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi Era bmjv.de/geschichte Manfred Görtemaker / Christoph Safferling The Rosenburg Files – The Federal Ministry of Justice and the Nazi Era 2 The Rosenburg Files Preface The Nazi dictatorship committed unthinkable crimes and brought great suffering upon Germany and the world. The collaboration of the judicial system and lawyers with the Nazi regime has meanwhile been well documented in academic studies. Previously, however, it had been an open secret that many lawyers who were guilty of crimes returned to Heiko Maas West German government service after Federal Minister of Justice the foundation of the Federal Republic of and Consumer Protection Germany in 1949. The Independent Academic Commission set up to investigate how the Federal Ministry of Justice dealt with its Nazi past, the “Rosenburg Project”, undertook an intensive study of the continuity in terms of personnel and its consequences. Our Ministry allowed researchers full access to all the files for the first time. I would like to express my great thanks to the two Heads of Commission, Professor Manfred Görtemaker and Professor Christoph Safferling, and to their entire team for their committed work. The results are depressing. Of the 170 lawyers who held senior positions in the Ministry between 1949 and 1973, 90 had been members of the Nazi Party and 34 had been members of the SA. More than 15 percent had even worked in the Nazi Reich Ministry of Justice before 1945. These figures highlight why the prosecution of Nazi crimes was impeded for so long, the suffering of the victims was ignored far too long and many groups of victims – such as homosexuals or Sinti and Roma – suffered renewed discrimination in the Federal Republic of Germany.
    [Show full text]
  • The Past Beneath the Present
    HAGEN/45-130elis 23-11-04 16:10 ™ÂÏ›‰·45 VOLUME 4 (2003-4) HISTOREIN The years of the war are now somewhere far off in the past. But the war itself remains with us, holding us through the power of human memory and through the profound traces that it left behind. It holds us despite the fruitless The Past efforts of those who would like to extinguish that memory and prevent it from being handed down to the next generation. Beneath Mikhail Alekseyev, war veteran, in The Moscow Times, May 9, 1995 All of a sudden it is back. Out of the features the Present and the seminars the past comes sneaking in to make itself at home on the front pages of newspapers amidst current policy. It defeats The Resurgence of World U.N. conferences, penetrates courtrooms, pressures governments. Occasionally it seems War II Public History After to take the present hostage as in German- Greek relations or in the dealings between the Collapse of Communism: North and South. From Athens to Durban a new A Stroll Through the Inter- trend prevails. Old scores are to be settled with reference to war, suppression, Nazi mania, national Press colonialism and slavery. The past has a future. Stefan Ulrich, “The Insurrection of History,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 8-9, 2001 Hagen Fleischer Note on sources: Since this is based almost exclusively on the international press, it is somewhat haphazard in nature: Although sever- al thousand articles have been used, they do not always reflect the most recent development of an issue, especially since they frequently contributed to remedying criticized wrongs.
    [Show full text]
  • Does War Belong in Museums?
    Wolfgang Muchitsch (ed.) Does War Belong in Museums? Volume 4 Editorial Das Museum, eine vor über zweihundert Jahren entstandene Institution, ist gegenwärtig ein weltweit expandierendes Erfolgsmodell. Gleichzeitig hat sich ein differenziertes Wissen vom Museum als Schlüsselphänomen der Moderne entwickelt, das sich aus unterschiedlichen Wissenschaftsdisziplinen und aus den Erfahrungen der Museumspraxis speist. Diesem Wissen ist die Edition gewidmet, die die Museumsakademie Joanneum – als Einrichtung eines der ältesten und größten Museen Europas, des Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz – herausgibt. Die Reihe wird herausgegeben von Peter Pakesch, Wolfgang Muchitsch und Bettina Habsburg-Lothringen. Wolfgang Muchitsch (ed.) Does War Belong in Museums? The Representation of Violence in Exhibitions An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative ini- tiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (BY-NC-ND). which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Natio- nalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti- lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any infor- mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
    [Show full text]
  • Austrian Non-Reception of a Reluctant Goldhagen
    Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History 2000 Austrian Non-Reception Of A Reluctant Goldhagen Pieter M. Judson , '78 Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Pieter M. Judson , '78. (2000). "Austrian Non-Reception Of A Reluctant Goldhagen". The "Goldhagen Effect": History, Memory, Nazism: Facing The German past. 131-149. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/177 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Austrian Non-Reception of a Reluctant Goldhagen Pieter Judson German translations of Hitler’s Willing Executioners appeared in Austria in September of 1996 to a strangely distanced reception. The book did not unleash in Austria the kind of public discussion it called forth in neigh­ boring Germany. The book did not even sell particularly well. Most Aus­ trian reviewers treated it with an exaggerated deference, praising the work for what they called its original focus on the participation of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. Some went so far as to remind their readers that what Goldhagen had written about the Germans could be said of “Austrian citizens of the German Reich” or “citizens of Greater Ger­ many” (Grossdeutschland) as well.' While Austrian reviewers acknowl­ edged that the book’s more controversial conclusions had drawn strong criticism in American and German scholarly circles, they seemed to have missed the more interesting phenomenon altogether, namely, the degree of Goldhagen’s personal popularity in Germany.
    [Show full text]
  • Poland in the Entries of German Metapedia
    Sławomir Ozdyk University of Szczecin POLAND IN THE ENTRIES OF GERMAN METAPEDIA Keywords: German Neo-Nazi movement, Anti-Polish propaganda, historical revisionism Meta- pedia, encyclopaedia online. ABSTRACT: German Neo-Nazi groups have not stopped their Anti-Polish activity yet. Th ey still, in the fi rst place, come with revisionist objectives, not matter how Cold-War-or Polish-Pe- ople’s-Republic-propaganda-like it can sound. Th e activity of the structures would not be possi- ble without ideological backup. And so the Neo-Nazi ‘white collars’ determine the directions of the actions. One of such projects is Metapedia, a Neo-Nazi Wikipedia in which one can fi nd many, shocking for us, information on Poland and the Poles. We cannot ignore it since, despite historic events, the 21st century Neo-Nazism has also many supports in our country. Metapedia’ is an extreme right-wing1 encyclopaedia online, created as a wiki – project in 16 diff erent language sections. Th e fi rst, Swedish lan- guage version was made available on the Internet on October 26, 2006, while the German-language version appeared in May 2007 and at fi rst it covered a few hundred entries. Defi nitely the greatest pool of entries is available in the Hungarian-language version; more than 100,000 entries. Th e project uses the ‘MediaWiki’ soft ware and developing entries is only possible aft er registration. Th e contents are developed by historic revisionism and they downplay the crimes of the Nazi regime2. Even 1 Metapedia als nationales Pendant zu Wikipedia, in: Innenministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen: Verfassungsschutzbericht des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2008.
    [Show full text]
  • Nuremberg's Narratives
    INTRODUCTION NUREMBERG’S NARRATIVES REVISING THE LEGACY OF THE “SUBSEQUENT TRIALS” Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller R Less than a month after the final verdict of the Nuernberg Military Tri- bunals (NMT)1 had been handed down in the so-called High Command Case, the departing chief prosecutor, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, wound up the four-year-long venture in a statement to the International News Service, articulating his expectations as to the legacy of the trial series. To those who thought that the war crimes proceedings, which by that time had come under scrutiny and criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, would fade into oblivion Taylor issued a stern warning: “I ven- ture to predict that as time goes on we will hear more about Nuremberg rather than less, and that in a very real sense the conclusion of the trials marks the beginning, and not the end, of Nuremberg as a force of poli- tics, law, and morals.”2 Although not everything did go as planned and most of the later Nuremberg trials indeed receded into prolonged obscu- rity, Taylor’s prophecy was not wholly mistaken, and the trials would indeed show a remarkable resilience, if more indirect and implicit than had been intended, in shaping politics, law, and historiography (rather than morals). Tracing these—frequently twisted—roads of the NMT’s influence and impact lies at the heart of the present volume. Taylor’s statement attested to the great ambitions entertained by the American prosecutors in preparing the NMT. The so-called Subse- 2 Kim C.
    [Show full text]
  • Stories of Euthanasia in Germany
    ISSUES IN INTEGRATIVE STUDIES No. 18, pp. 7-25 (2000) Stories of Euthanasia in Germany by Scott Denham Davidson College Department of German and Russian Abstract: The lived context of euthanasia under the Nazis is established through four brief nar- ratives. The first two tell of the author’s experience with a German farm family which hid a deaf mute during the war and with a “silent” building which turned out to have housed Joseph Mengele and his staff. The third narrative concerns Mengele’s fascination with a Gypsy boy at Auschwitz and the fourth a film used to accustom German audiences to mercy-killing. A survey of key developments in the history of eugenics theory in Germany and the United States follows, and a thesis is developed that the same racial-purification impulses that drove German science during the 1930s and 1940s were present in American documents and legal procedings. I W E KNOW A GREAT DEAL about the history of the “Nazi doctors,” a group far more amorphous than the title of Robert J. Lifton’s (1986) well- known study would imply. Yet knowledge comes to us from more than archi- val texts and lists of data, especially, it seems, when that knowledge is diffi- cult to understand or painful to confront. Narrative—the telling of stories— helps us structure and make meaning out of knowledge and experience and data and history. I would like to introduce this difficult subject of doctors who became murderers and of science which became the servant of ideol- ogy, with four stories—two personal and two public.
    [Show full text]
  • The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives
    THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum promotes the growth of the field of Holocaust studies, including the dissemination of scholarly output in the field. It also strives to facilitate the training of future generations of scholars specializing in the Holocaust. Under the guidance of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the Center provides a fertile atmosphere for scholarly discourse and debate through research and publication projects, conferences, fellowship and visiting scholar opportunities, and a network of cooperative programs with universities and other institutions in the United States and abroad. In furtherance of this program the Center has established a series of working and occasional papers prepared by scholars in history, political science, philosophy, religion, sociology, literature, psychology, and other disciplines. Selected from Center-sponsored lectures and conferences, THE HOLOCAUST or the result of other activities related to the Center’s mission, these publications are designed to make this research available in a timely IN UKRAINE fashion to other researchers and to the general public. New Sources and Perspectives Conference Presentations 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 ushmm.org The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives Conference Presentations CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM 2013 The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The articles in this collection are not transcripts of the papers as presented, but rather extended or revised versions that incorporate additional information and citations.
    [Show full text]