Hitler und Die Deutschen

Despite courting controversy since its inception, it is only the explicit title: Hitler und Die Deutschen, that heavy-handedly deals with the taboo subject matter exhibited in the Deutsches Historiches Museum’s latest show. The exhibition - the first to focus on the man himself, shown in Berlin’s cultural hub on Museum Island and advertised in a typeface reconcilable to Hollywood cinema – initially seems to offer a spectacle that could easily be viewed as insensitive and inappropriate. As if to induce further criticism, I visited the show on Remembrance Day, but what I was presented with was the antithesis of sensationalism.

Deliberately curated towards the mundane, bog standard museum arrangements serve the analysis of an infamous subject matter, demystifying a mythologised image of Hitler and presenting him instead, as a relatively interchangable blip in the wider cultural zeitgeist that led to the Nazi's catharsis. This demystifying process means few objects exhibited refer to Hitler directly; only three portraits exist in the show, and these are held within montages of Hitler flanked by his supporters. No speech recordings or videos play, and Nazi memorabilia is held within cabinets or mounted traditionally on walls thus dispelling any potential Nazi fetishism by integrating the few objects as undifferentiated parts amongst the many historical documents that fill the show.

Taking the end of World War One as its starting point, the exhibition moves chronologically through a series of artefacts that plot the increasingly hostile climate of Germany's attitudes towards those outside the Aryan race. Great lengths are taken to explain and emphasise the difficult situation of the Weimar Republic that preceded Hitler’s rule, with over a third of the exhibition focusing upon this period. The instability of hyperinflation, widespread unemployment and social fracture, explain the rise of the Nazi party and the emergence of WW2 without the ambiguous, historically constructed persona of the ‘Fuhrer’ encroaching on the viewer. It may seem textbook, but these vital elements are brushed over in other interpretations of the dictator that stand beside this show as points of comparison; ranging from Charlie Chaplin’s satire The Great Dictator to the recent attempt to probe the character of Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall.

Kathe Kollwitz makes the painful post-WW1 situation poignantly clear with mothers cradling their starving children in two poster sized prints. These lend the show works of artistic as well as historical interest that enliven the more mundane, but necessary written documents they intersperse. It is understandable that Germany’s desperate situation provided the ideal climate for Hitler’s ascendency, but the Fuhrer is presented as far from seductive or single-handed. Instead, he is portrayed as a terrible outcome of an already disastrous situation. The veritable distancing of the individual man is not defensive however, but a result of the curator’s confident analysis of the War and Hitler’s powerful role in it. Viewed from an equally removed perspective, such a standpoint is necessary for a new generation of German people for whom more apologising would appear insincere.

Investigated without guilt or apology, it is only in such a spirit that an exhibition could successfully study Hitler an avoid propagating an inconsistent image of him further. It is the inverse spirit that damages in a parallel exhibition of 11 recently discovered Modernist sculptures, deemed ‘degenerative’ by the Nazi’s and lost, currently on show at the Berlin Museum. These works are interesting but they are certainly not the masterpieces the sparse, aggrandising space and lofty accompanying jargon present them as. Discovered in archaeological excavations, the pieces unearth buried memories and unspoken sentiments instead of shedding light on their contribution to the mass of Modernist sculpture of which they are a part.

Marg Moll’s ‘Dancing Sculpture’ is a pale reflection of Picasso’s turn of the twentieth century nudes, and Otto Freundlich’s ‘Kopf’, fractured across the forehead so that the viewer can only imagine the complete form, arouses little interest, except maybe a nostalgic ruin-lust. The bizarreness of the exhibition can only be explained as the actions of a shamed German public unnecessarily attempting to right past wrongs. As such their judgement has become obscured and the works elevated to artistic heights they cannot reach. It would have been more appropriate to display them as historical documents that speak of the Nazi’s Degenerative Art label at large, as a way of confronting a past that clearly still haunts the curators. As Hitler und die Deutschen proves, only when the German people shed their guilt, can they truly and objectively examine the artefacts, myths and taboos that linger on after the War.