Germany's new Exile Museum uses art to create empathy, but a focus on privileged migrants will achieve nothing

If the museum hopes to succeed in its aim, it must refrain from having a solely elitist, intellectual focus, and instead attempt to include the experiences of the anonymous masses and lesser known personalities

Madhvi Ramani
Sunday 28 October 2018 11:16 EDT
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As we can see from Germany today, historical acknowledgment and education do make a difference to racist and anti-immigrant views
As we can see from Germany today, historical acknowledgment and education do make a difference to racist and anti-immigrant views (Getty)

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A sketch by the Berlin expressionist artist Kathe Kollwitz, sold for a record price of €450,000 (£400,600) depicts a woman pressing her face against a child’s. The figures are solid, tangible and heavy with emotion. The work is called Abschied, which means “parting” in German, and it’s one of almost 400 works that private collector Bernd Shultz sold off last week in a two-day auction that raised €6.3m (£5.6m).

Schultz bought his first artwork in 1958, and although his collection spans over 500 years of art history and contains artists from Picasso to Warhol, his main interest has always been the human face. But now, he has sold his most beloved pieces to fund a project he believes is more important – a German museum focussed on exile.

It is surprising that a country with a long history of exile – both as a result of the Nazi and communist dictatorships and now as a place of asylum – has no significant public-facing institution or memorial dealing with the subject. In 2009, Nobel Literature Prize winner Herta Muller called for a national museum dedicated to exiled people in an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel. The fact that none existed, she argued, represented a gap in German cultural policy.

Since the government ignored the suggestion, Muller, who fled her native Romania in 1987 after persecution from the Ceausescu regime, along with Schultz and other prominent figures from Berlin’s cultural scene, are establishing a privately-funded museum. It will focus on the roughly 500,000 people who fled the German-speaking world to the UK, USA, various Latin American countries, Shanghai, and other destinations during the Nazi era.

At a time when migration policy is one of the most debated topics in Germany – and the rest of the world – and fuelling the rise a nationalistic, anti-immigrant sentiment, the move is undoubtedly political too. By telling the stories of exiled people from 1933-45, the museum’s patrons hope to raise empathy and draw parallels with exiles today.

Of course, this premise has its challenges. The museum’s concept to focus exclusively on this period bears the risk of highlighting the differences rather than similarities between migrants then and now.

One of the reasons for the reluctance to memorialise these exiles is the fact that they are not typically seen as victims of the Nazi regime. In fact, former Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt, who escaped to Norway during the Third Reich, was later repeatedly accused of being a Vaterlandsverrater,a traitor to his country, by his conservative political opponents.

Most others did not come back, but those who did faced similar accusations. People who successfully managed to escape (some died on their escape) were seen as survivors rather than victims, and they were very often privileged.

Figures such as Albert Einstein, Max Beckmann (whose artwork is also being auctioned in the Schulz collection), Willy Brandt, Hannah Arendt, Billy Wilder and Thomas Mann were well-off, educated, and had a voice. And therein lies a key challenge for the group of cultural elites creating an exile museum that claims to build a bridge to today’s refugees.

If the museum hopes to succeed in its aim, it must refrain from having a solely elitist, intellectual focus, and instead attempt to include the experiences of the anonymous masses and lesser known personalities.

Hertha Nathorff, for example, a doctor who moved from the Charlottenburg district of Berlin to the USA in 1938 wrote in her diaries about the “hard and dirty” menial work she took on and the fact that she was regularly called a “dirty refugee” and “Nazi spy.” Acknowledging such migrant experiences would provide further clarity about German history and identity, and raise empathy for the plight of all exiles.

As we can see from Germany today, historical acknowledgment and education do make a difference to racist and anti-immigrant views. It is no coincidence that support for the anti-immigration party AfD is much stronger in the former east of the country, where no real historical reckoning of the country’s Nazi past took place under the communists, as opposed to in the west where this history is widely understood.

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The museum’s focus on the stories of exiles will provide a space to consider them as individuals, instead of the abstract figures, images of crowds or nameless individuals we are so often confronted with when it comes to the topic of migration.

Stories, like art, have the ability to create empathy, and that's clearly what the intention was here. But in order to create a link between today's refugees and migrants to those who fled Germany last century, we need to do more than rehash stories of the past.

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