Pub Date : 2023-07-20DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2225321
D. Véri
ABSTRACT This study explores Holocaust-related exhibitions organized in early postwar Hungary, between 1945 and 1949, from the end of World War II up until the communist takeover. The high number of such exhibitions (26 in total) attests to the existence of a widespread and extensive culture of remembrance, especially in the first three years, when the vast majority of these shows (21) took place. These exhibitions involved art almost exclusively; even the historical exhibitions included artworks and relied heavily on graphic design solutions. The first part of the study provides insight into a pioneering historical exhibition organized in early 1946 in Budapest (‘Those Who Died and Those Who Fought for Our People’s Honor’) and a similar exhibition material prepared later that year, sent to New York to be exhibited at YIVO in 1947 (‘The Jews in Europe, 1939–1946’). In both cases, montage-based design played a key role in conveying messages; moreover, several autonomous artworks were equally integrated into the historical narrative. Both exhibitions were prepared by the Documentation Department, which, in the first case, belonged to the Jewish Agency for Palestine; in the second case, it was already merged into the Hungarian branch of the World Jewish Congress. Importantly, no data has surfaced so far about further historical exhibitions about the Holocaust (or similar topics: war crimes, antifascism, etc.), organized in Hungary in this period. The second part of the paper provides an analysis of the actors involved, highlighting the eminent role played by various organizations, and dedicating special attention to the Jewish and Zionist ones. The final part concerns art exhibitions, differentiating between ‘martyr’ and ‘commemorative’ exhibitions, both organized from the works of victims of the Holocaust – works that with a few exceptions did not themselves relate to the genocide – and exhibitions featuring artworks about the Holocaust created almost exclusively by survivors, mostly narrative graphic series depicting various personal experiences of the victims.
{"title":"Where Art Met History: Holocaust Exhibitions in Early Postwar Hungary","authors":"D. Véri","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2023.2225321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2225321","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study explores Holocaust-related exhibitions organized in early postwar Hungary, between 1945 and 1949, from the end of World War II up until the communist takeover. The high number of such exhibitions (26 in total) attests to the existence of a widespread and extensive culture of remembrance, especially in the first three years, when the vast majority of these shows (21) took place. These exhibitions involved art almost exclusively; even the historical exhibitions included artworks and relied heavily on graphic design solutions. The first part of the study provides insight into a pioneering historical exhibition organized in early 1946 in Budapest (‘Those Who Died and Those Who Fought for Our People’s Honor’) and a similar exhibition material prepared later that year, sent to New York to be exhibited at YIVO in 1947 (‘The Jews in Europe, 1939–1946’). In both cases, montage-based design played a key role in conveying messages; moreover, several autonomous artworks were equally integrated into the historical narrative. Both exhibitions were prepared by the Documentation Department, which, in the first case, belonged to the Jewish Agency for Palestine; in the second case, it was already merged into the Hungarian branch of the World Jewish Congress. Importantly, no data has surfaced so far about further historical exhibitions about the Holocaust (or similar topics: war crimes, antifascism, etc.), organized in Hungary in this period. The second part of the paper provides an analysis of the actors involved, highlighting the eminent role played by various organizations, and dedicating special attention to the Jewish and Zionist ones. The final part concerns art exhibitions, differentiating between ‘martyr’ and ‘commemorative’ exhibitions, both organized from the works of victims of the Holocaust – works that with a few exceptions did not themselves relate to the genocide – and exhibitions featuring artworks about the Holocaust created almost exclusively by survivors, mostly narrative graphic series depicting various personal experiences of the victims.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123544610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-20DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2197736
M. Morris
ABSTRACT This essay presents the work of David Friedman(n) (1893–1980), a renowned Berlin artist whose successful prewar career abruptly ended when Hitler came to power. He was banned from his profession, chased from his home, and his first wife and daughter were murdered. The Nazis looted his work and destroyed his promising career. Friedmann survived the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz to paint again. First shown in Český Dub, Czechoslovakia on January 27, 1946, then in Western Bohemia, Prague, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, this cycle was one of the first exhibitions of Holocaust art in the world. Friedmann's exhibitions at former Sudetenland towns in Western Bohemia were utilized as a ‘denazification’ tool by local education councils. Announcements and posters invited Slav nationals to a celebratory opening and viewing of the exhibition – with compulsory attendance for ethnic-Germans over the age of fifteen years. Every visitor paid admission. Germans failing to appear did not receive their ration cards. Town officials gladly offered the necessary exhibition halls, for it was in their own interest to show to the Germans still living there, scenes from the ghetto and the concentration camps, by the hand of an artist as witness. When asked, David Friedmann explained his paintings to Sudeten Germans unwilling to believe their countrymen had perpetrated such atrocities against the Jews. Friedman translated his haunting memories into more than 100 works and titled his series, ‘Because They Were Jews!’ Personalized descriptions supplement his artwork creating a singularly detailed pictorial and written record of the Holocaust. Friedman continued to fight antisemitism and racial prejudice by educating the public with his Holocaust art exhibitions.
{"title":"‘Because They Were Jews!’ The Postwar Artworks of David Friedmann as Eyewitness Testimonies","authors":"M. Morris","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2023.2197736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2197736","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 This essay presents the work of David Friedman(n) (1893–1980), a renowned Berlin artist whose successful prewar career abruptly ended when Hitler came to power. He was banned from his profession, chased from his home, and his first wife and daughter were murdered. The Nazis looted his work and destroyed his promising career. Friedmann survived the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz to paint again. First shown in Český Dub, Czechoslovakia on January 27, 1946, then in Western Bohemia, Prague, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, this cycle was one of the first exhibitions of Holocaust art in the world. Friedmann's exhibitions at former Sudetenland towns in Western Bohemia were utilized as a ‘denazification’ tool by local education councils. Announcements and posters invited Slav nationals to a celebratory opening and viewing of the exhibition – with compulsory attendance for ethnic-Germans over the age of fifteen years. Every visitor paid admission. Germans failing to appear did not receive their ration cards. Town officials gladly offered the necessary exhibition halls, for it was in their own interest to show to the Germans still living there, scenes from the ghetto and the concentration camps, by the hand of an artist as witness. When asked, David Friedmann explained his paintings to Sudeten Germans unwilling to believe their countrymen had perpetrated such atrocities against the Jews. Friedman translated his haunting memories into more than 100 works and titled his series, ‘Because They Were Jews!’ Personalized descriptions supplement his artwork creating a singularly detailed pictorial and written record of the Holocaust. Friedman continued to fight antisemitism and racial prejudice by educating the public with his Holocaust art exhibitions.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128996441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-13DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2217626
R. Bedarida
ABSTRACT The article discusses how antifascism, the Resistance, and the Holocaust have been exhibited in Italy since the end of Mussolini's regime. It uses the exhibition ‘Post Zang Tumb Tuuum,’ held at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018, as a starting point to evaluate curatorial practices in the immediate postwar period. The author positions ‘Post Zang’ as a culmination of a curatorial tradition of Resistance shows, which have their roots in the mid-1940s. To this end, the author performs a close reading of the 2018 exhibition and its individual objects, casting a spotlight on the historical complexities that curator Germano Celant and his team largely elided in wall texts, the catalogue, or other interpretative materials made available to audiences. Through the interpretative framework of the 2018 Milan exhibition, the article highlights two issues: how fascism absorbed and neutralized political dissent by endorsing a relative artistic freedom; and how the Resistance became, in the immediate postwar period, a dominant narrative, which marginalized the Holocaust and promoted a redemptive interpretation of Italian victimhood, which partly absolved the Italians from both collusion with fascism and the Holocaust. This narrative blurred, absorbed and partly obfuscated testimonies and artistic narrations of the Holocaust, thereby in effect using the Holocaust instrumentally to the creation of anti-Nazi narratives of the Resistance.
{"title":"Whose Barbarianism? Exhibiting Antifascism, the Resistance, and the Holocaust in Postwar Italy and Now","authors":"R. Bedarida","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2023.2217626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2217626","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article discusses how antifascism, the Resistance, and the Holocaust have been exhibited in Italy since the end of Mussolini's regime. It uses the exhibition ‘Post Zang Tumb Tuuum,’ held at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018, as a starting point to evaluate curatorial practices in the immediate postwar period. The author positions ‘Post Zang’ as a culmination of a curatorial tradition of Resistance shows, which have their roots in the mid-1940s. To this end, the author performs a close reading of the 2018 exhibition and its individual objects, casting a spotlight on the historical complexities that curator Germano Celant and his team largely elided in wall texts, the catalogue, or other interpretative materials made available to audiences. Through the interpretative framework of the 2018 Milan exhibition, the article highlights two issues: how fascism absorbed and neutralized political dissent by endorsing a relative artistic freedom; and how the Resistance became, in the immediate postwar period, a dominant narrative, which marginalized the Holocaust and promoted a redemptive interpretation of Italian victimhood, which partly absolved the Italians from both collusion with fascism and the Holocaust. This narrative blurred, absorbed and partly obfuscated testimonies and artistic narrations of the Holocaust, thereby in effect using the Holocaust instrumentally to the creation of anti-Nazi narratives of the Resistance.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133683033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-09DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2209418
Rebecca Frank
ABSTRACT The ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition opened on Memorial Day, May 30, 1945, just over a month after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps where many of the photos were shot. Twenty-five enlarged atrocity photomurals, ranging up to 12 feet high and 19 feet wide, were hung in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch building’s mechanical annex. Over the course of three and a half weeks, 80,413 people visited the exhibition in St. Louis, Missouri. The exhibition then traveled the US in the summer of 1945, including stops in Boston, Detroit, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition used the photomural medium to share the atrocities that Americans read about and saw small photographs of in newspapers in a new way. While photomurals were widespread in the decades leading up to the exhibition, photomurals of atrocity photographs were uncommon. Did the scale of the photomurals affect the experience of viewing atrocity images? What did American politicians think of the exhibition and how it could impact public opinion? How did visitors react to the exhibition throughout the US? Were there similar exhibitions abroad? My article deals with these questions by piecing together sources ranging from newspaper articles to exhibition photographs and a government speaker draft. Starting with the exhibition’s visual landscape and an analysis of the photomurals’ scale, this article then turns to the American government and civilian experience, before closing with an analysis of the London exhibition and publication. By sharing large-scale atrocity photomurals in a collective setting, the ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition evoked new, emotional reactions from visitors.
{"title":"“Lest We Forget”: Bringing Atrocity Home Through Large Photomurals","authors":"Rebecca Frank","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2023.2209418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2209418","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition opened on Memorial Day, May 30, 1945, just over a month after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps where many of the photos were shot. Twenty-five enlarged atrocity photomurals, ranging up to 12 feet high and 19 feet wide, were hung in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch building’s mechanical annex. Over the course of three and a half weeks, 80,413 people visited the exhibition in St. Louis, Missouri. The exhibition then traveled the US in the summer of 1945, including stops in Boston, Detroit, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition used the photomural medium to share the atrocities that Americans read about and saw small photographs of in newspapers in a new way. While photomurals were widespread in the decades leading up to the exhibition, photomurals of atrocity photographs were uncommon. Did the scale of the photomurals affect the experience of viewing atrocity images? What did American politicians think of the exhibition and how it could impact public opinion? How did visitors react to the exhibition throughout the US? Were there similar exhibitions abroad? My article deals with these questions by piecing together sources ranging from newspaper articles to exhibition photographs and a government speaker draft. Starting with the exhibition’s visual landscape and an analysis of the photomurals’ scale, this article then turns to the American government and civilian experience, before closing with an analysis of the London exhibition and publication. By sharing large-scale atrocity photomurals in a collective setting, the ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition evoked new, emotional reactions from visitors.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132556327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2209419
Chelsea Haines
ABSTRACT In 1953, the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz in Israel opened a new permanent Holocaust exhibition. Housed in the kibbutz’s museum, known as the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the exhibition was intended not just to serve the kibbutz population, most of whom were Holocaust survivors, but also to materialize their testimonies for the Israeli public in the then-absence of a national Holocaust museum in Israel. The exhibition at the Ghetto Fighters’ House found a form for early Holocaust memory in a dizzying, non-chronological exhibition that displayed controversial, even taboo, subjects through unflinching and unresolved realism. The young artist couple commissioned to design the exhibition, Hannah and Naftali Bezem, worked intensively for months, combing over photographs, ephemera, and other documents that would make up the bulk of the exhibition that opened on the tenth anniversary ceremony of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Bezems’ belief that, beyond its didactic potential, an exhibition must serve as a model of artistic activism to mobilize its viewers resulted in an unrelenting depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust through displays of photographic documentation, artifacts, artworks, and their own murals. This article argues that the content and design of the 1953 exhibition both served as a call to action to memorialize the Holocaust in Israel in the 1950s, and reflected the post-traumatic state of the kibbutz audience as well as the designers themselves, particularly after Naftali learned that his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz. Through this exhibition, the Ghetto Fighters’ House touched on the limits of Holocaust representation akin to what scholar Michael Rothberg has defined as traumatic realism.
1953年，以色列的隔都战士基布兹开设了一个新的永久性大屠杀展览。这次展览设在基布兹的博物馆里，被称为“隔都战士之家”(Ghetto Fighters’House)。展览的目的不仅是为基布兹的居民服务，他们中的大多数都是大屠杀的幸存者，而且还想把他们的证词呈现给以色列公众，因为当时以色列还没有全国性的大屠杀博物馆。在犹太区战士之家举行的展览，以一种令人眼花缭乱的、没有时间顺序的方式，为早期大屠杀的记忆找到了一种形式，通过坚定而未解决的现实主义，展示了有争议的、甚至是禁忌的主题。受委托设计展览的年轻艺术家夫妇汉娜和纳夫塔利·贝泽姆(Hannah and Naftali Bezem)紧张地工作了几个月，梳理了照片、蜉蝣和其他文件，这些文件将构成展览的大部分内容，该展览在华沙犹太人起义十周年纪念仪式上开幕。贝泽姆夫妇相信，除了其教育潜力之外，展览还必须成为艺术行动主义的典范，以动员观众，通过展示摄影文献、文物、艺术品和他们自己的壁画，无情地描绘大屠杀的恐怖。本文认为，1953年展览的内容和设计既呼吁人们采取行动纪念20世纪50年代发生在以色列的大屠杀，也反映了基布兹观众和设计师自己的创伤后状态，特别是在纳夫塔利得知他的父母在奥斯维辛集中营被谋杀之后。通过这次展览，犹太区战士之家触及了大屠杀再现的极限，类似于学者迈克尔·罗斯伯格(Michael Rothberg)所定义的创伤现实主义。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2217625
Daniel Stern
ABSTRACT Between 1946 and 1949, more than 55,000 Holocaust refugees, 20 percent of them children and youth, were detained by the British in various camps in Cyprus, in order to prevent their entrance to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). Relief organizations and emissaries from Eretz Israel were engaged in providing basic needs, occupation, and education to the detainees. Among other initiatives, art classes were organized for the young and adults alike, and occasional exhibitions were held to display their works. This paper tells the story of these exhibitions from different perspectives – therapeutic, educational, artistic, practical, and political. It exposes the politics behind the exhibits, as well as the competition surrounding them between the different political movements operating in the camps at the time. By analyzing the works of the young students in particular, and based on memories and research, the author shows how art was often used as an ideological tool as well. The youngsters had been directed to express their dreams of a wishful future in Eretz Israel, rather than their traumatic memories and losses in the Holocaust. Sculptures of Zionist leaders, models of kibbutzim, and displays of agricultural tools, among others, were common, while horrors of the war were hardly expressed in these exhibitions. One exhibition, displayed by the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, serves as a case study in this paper. This unique project, called ‘To-No’ (Hebrew initials for ‘Youth Production’) is presented here through its numerous artifacts preserved to this day in archives in Israel, and through later exhibitions of them in Cyprus (2014) and in Israel (2017), accompanied by catalogs and articles of scholarly interpretation. They carry a universal message on the power and influence of artwork and artifacts as a means of resilience and rehabilitation, and as a model of spiritual and cultural resistance.
{"title":"Artists Behind Barbed Wire: Art Exhibitions in the Detention Camps in Cyprus, 1947–1948","authors":"Daniel Stern","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2023.2217625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2217625","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Between 1946 and 1949, more than 55,000 Holocaust refugees, 20 percent of them children and youth, were detained by the British in various camps in Cyprus, in order to prevent their entrance to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). Relief organizations and emissaries from Eretz Israel were engaged in providing basic needs, occupation, and education to the detainees. Among other initiatives, art classes were organized for the young and adults alike, and occasional exhibitions were held to display their works. This paper tells the story of these exhibitions from different perspectives – therapeutic, educational, artistic, practical, and political. It exposes the politics behind the exhibits, as well as the competition surrounding them between the different political movements operating in the camps at the time. By analyzing the works of the young students in particular, and based on memories and research, the author shows how art was often used as an ideological tool as well. The youngsters had been directed to express their dreams of a wishful future in Eretz Israel, rather than their traumatic memories and losses in the Holocaust. Sculptures of Zionist leaders, models of kibbutzim, and displays of agricultural tools, among others, were common, while horrors of the war were hardly expressed in these exhibitions. One exhibition, displayed by the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, serves as a case study in this paper. This unique project, called ‘To-No’ (Hebrew initials for ‘Youth Production’) is presented here through its numerous artifacts preserved to this day in archives in Israel, and through later exhibitions of them in Cyprus (2014) and in Israel (2017), accompanied by catalogs and articles of scholarly interpretation. They carry a universal message on the power and influence of artwork and artifacts as a means of resilience and rehabilitation, and as a model of spiritual and cultural resistance.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126027106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-02DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2212937
Béla Rásky
ABSTRACT Until the 1990s, the myth that Austria had been a victim of National Socialism reigned. Recent historiography has turned this discourse diametrically around, highlighting, among other things, the limited willingness of large segments of Austrian society after 1945 to address their guilt and responsibility for Nazi crimes. However, these issues have seldom been explored in depth. The exhibitions of the early postwar era shine light on precisely these tentative attempts. Those initiated by the Allies, aimed to confront the locals with Nazi crimes, were followed by local exhibitions, which were nevertheless unable to find a means of expression transcending a mere documentation of the horrors that had occurred. The Viennese exhibition Niemals vergessen! – a spectacular show from a curatorial perspective – already moved in a twilight zone between serious engagement with the subject and projecting guilt onto Germany. Yet the show’s motto − ‘We are all guilty!’ − demonstrates that such statements were possible in 1946 that would later become suppressed. This phase of direct confrontation with National Socialism ended with a watered-down attempt to stage an anti-racist exhibition at the Natural History Museum in 1949, although further exhibitions were mounted by resistance groups, albeit with different aims in mind. One reason for the failure of these early initiatives may have been the absence of an appropriate language with which to discuss the Holocaust, a form of ‘speechlessness’ in light of the dimensions of this crime. Not until 1965 would the Holocaust be exhibited to the Viennese public, in a traveling exhibition at the Chamber of Labor. The great silence that is presumed to have dominated in the early postwar period turns out to be no less of a myth: Whoever listened closely would at least have heard a whisper.
{"title":"No Silence, but Whispers: Postwar Exhibitions on Nazi Crimes and the Shoah in Austria, 1945–1949","authors":"Béla Rásky","doi":"10.1080/25785648.2023.2212937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2212937","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Until the 1990s, the myth that Austria had been a victim of National Socialism reigned. Recent historiography has turned this discourse diametrically around, highlighting, among other things, the limited willingness of large segments of Austrian society after 1945 to address their guilt and responsibility for Nazi crimes. However, these issues have seldom been explored in depth. The exhibitions of the early postwar era shine light on precisely these tentative attempts. Those initiated by the Allies, aimed to confront the locals with Nazi crimes, were followed by local exhibitions, which were nevertheless unable to find a means of expression transcending a mere documentation of the horrors that had occurred. The Viennese exhibition Niemals vergessen! – a spectacular show from a curatorial perspective – already moved in a twilight zone between serious engagement with the subject and projecting guilt onto Germany. Yet the show’s motto − ‘We are all guilty!’ − demonstrates that such statements were possible in 1946 that would later become suppressed. This phase of direct confrontation with National Socialism ended with a watered-down attempt to stage an anti-racist exhibition at the Natural History Museum in 1949, although further exhibitions were mounted by resistance groups, albeit with different aims in mind. One reason for the failure of these early initiatives may have been the absence of an appropriate language with which to discuss the Holocaust, a form of ‘speechlessness’ in light of the dimensions of this crime. Not until 1965 would the Holocaust be exhibited to the Viennese public, in a traveling exhibition at the Chamber of Labor. The great silence that is presumed to have dominated in the early postwar period turns out to be no less of a myth: Whoever listened closely would at least have heard a whisper.","PeriodicalId":422357,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Holocaust Research","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122902131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-29DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2210939
Agata Pietrasik
ABSTRACT This article reconstructs and analyses the spaces and visual narratives of two particularly important early exhibitions organized by Holocaust survivors: the one at the Jewish Pavilion in the former Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin (September 1946), and ‘Unzer Veg in der Frayheyt’ (Our Path to Freedom) made in the displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen (July 1947). Located in one of the barracks of the former concentration camp, the Jewish Pavilion in Majdanek was one of the first public commemorative sites expressing Jewish memory of the war in Poland. While presenting a history of the Holocaust, the display also established a space for mourning. ‘Our Path to Freedom’ was created on the occasion of the Second Congress of Liberated Jews in the British Zone. It also presented the Holocaust, while at the same time imagining the future life of survivors in Eretz Israel. Together, these exhibitions demonstrate the heterogeneity of Holocaust memory of that time. They pose questions about different ways of narrating history, pointing to exhibitions as a significant medium, while allowing for a combination of visual and spatial means of representation in order to create a multifaceted narrative about the past.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-26DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2194752
Rachel E. Perry
ABSTRACT George Kadish (Hirsch Zvi Kadushin) is best known as the intrepid, clandestine photographer of the Kovno ghetto. But he was also the curator of one of the first Holocaust exhibitions mounted by a Jewish survivor for Jewish survivors. Even before Israel Kaplan’s November 1945 call to ‘collect and record,’ Kadish was already working as a zamler (collector), salvaging and gathering thousands of photographs from diverse sources in order to assemble an archive of Nazi persecution and Jewish suffering. From this collection, he selected 300 photographs for a traveling exhibition entitled ‘Pictures of the Ghetto’ that was shown in the Landsberg and Feldafing DP camps before being showcased at the first Congress of the She’erit Hapleitah, organized by the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in the American-occupied zone of Germany, on January 27, 1946. Grouping the photos thematically, rather than chronologically or geographically, he collated them onto large, portable black panels captioned with descriptive titles in Yiddish. This article analyzes the discursive framing of Kadish’s exhibition, its semiotics, and its reception as ‘material speech’ addressed to a ‘family of Jewish survivors’ and presenting the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective through ‘bonding images.’ Whereas the antifascist exhibitions of the immediate postwar period marginalized Jewish victimization, Kadish’s showcased Nazi brutality while fostering a community in suffering for the survivors.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-22DOI: 10.1080/25785648.2023.2218151
Rachel E. Perry, Agata Pietrasik
The proliferation of Holocaust museums over the last 40 years has brought popular and critical attention to how exhibitions reflect and construct the cultural memory of traumatic histories. However, most studies of Holocaust exhibitions begin with what Paul Williams described as ‘the global rush to commemorate’ in the late 1980s. This special issue of the Journal of Holocaust Research reveals a longer and broader genealogy of exhibitionary practices, one that took shape immediately after the war. Indeed, already on the day after Liberation, the process of ‘museumification’ was initiated, as impromptu, site-specific exhibitions were organized in the concentration and extermination camps, and impressive blockbusters, like ‘Crimes hitlériens’ (1945), were sponsored by governmental ministries and international organizations across Europe. Organized by the Allies as a medium of mass communication to broadcast Nazi crimes in order to ‘denazify’ public spaces and ward against future fascist tendencies, and connected to the Nuremberg trials, these exhibitions served a variety of functions: to convince and convict, to inform and educate, but also to fashion communal and national identities and legitimize political worldviews. Although scholarship has begun to attend to these antifascist exhibitions, those mounted by the She’erit Hapleita, the ‘surviving remnant’ of Jews in Europe, remain on the margins of academic attention. Jewish survivors not only ‘collected and recorded,’ they also collected and exhibited. Both individuals and collectives used exhibitions as a ‘medium’ of memory to foreground the Jewish experience of victimization as a result of Nazi genocidal ideology and policy. By collecting, representing, and transmitting information through images, texts, objects and technologies, they offered experiential and spatial narratives that forged new relationships between artworks, historical documents, and material artifacts, thus producing knowledge as well as framing individual memories. Some were aligned with the Jewish Historical Commissions; others with international Jewish aid organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) or Zionist groups. Whether organized in makeshift spaces in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps, or
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