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Invoking the Past in Recent German Exhibition Designby Jan Otakar Fischer, from Harvard design Magazine.
Nearly sixty years after the conclusion of the Second World War, it is standard practice in the Gymnasium, the German equivalent of high school, for students to be taught about the rise of Nazism, the horrors it unleashed, and its consequences for postwar Europe. The genocide of European Jews is a central chapter in this instruction. Every year, thousands of teenagers visit former concentration camps like Dachau or Buchenwald, watch films of Hitler's adoring crowds and of cities in flames, participate in intense group discussions about moral responsibility, and come face to face with the historical burdens of their grandfathers. The process is disturbing for most, and unfailingly influences their political outlook. The majority of young Germans accept the necessity of remembrance.The formal transmission of this history to a wider public is the latest and perhaps last stage of what began as private dialogues. What films have dramatized, politicians commemorated, periodicals revisited, and academics debated has not, until recently, found substantial expression in museums, or in their more site-specific cousins, documentation centers. During much of the Cold War, ideological imperatives and a culture of denial prevented a cohere
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May 1, 2004 | Viewed 22,049 time(s)
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