Butterfly from Berlin's Ashes: The Ambiguity of the Cultural Expression of Emotions - a Commentary

Abstract

111 In the summer of 1946, one of the 26,000 British soldiers involved in the administration of the British zone in Germany created a very special object (DHM 2015: 89). The soldier’s name is unknown. He crept and scrambled through the ruins of the former center of National Socialist Germany, staying close to the bunker where Hitler had committed suicide. He collected pieces of the damaged buildings all around. Afterwards he crumbled them into fine, colored dust. Finally, he took a wooden tablet and decorated it with a peacock butterfly made from this powder of Berlin’s ruins. The blue of the butterfly came from the chips of tiles from a delicatessen store on Potsdamer Platz and the red from brick remnants of a building of Wilhelmstrasse, the street where the “Reichskanzlei,” Hitler’s administrative center, had been located. The tablet was made to look like a harmless souvenir. It bears the inscriptions “In memory of summer 1946” and “Made of the rubbish of the ruins of Berlin.” Today, the object is kept in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London and is currently in Berlin under display in a large exhibition on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Like many pieces of material culture, the British soldier’s butterfly tablet offers insights into the social practices behind the making of the object. In my short commentary, I will argue that this object can provide us with a good opportunity for investigating both the cultural expression and suppression of the undesirable and unbearable.