“Freedom means more than food” – the banner with the huge lettering blocks access to the dining room, and the school children stand in front of it, a little at a loss. The photo by the Lithuanian photographer Kazys Daugèla commemorates the one-day hunger strike with which the residents of the Displaced Persons camp in Kempten wanted to remind politicians of the Atlantic Charter of 1941. In it, the Americans and the British acknowledged the right of all peoples to self-determination. The demonstrators, whose long protest procession can be seen in another photo, found that this also applies to the Baltic states, which lost the sovereignty they had so laboriously won after the First World War in the Second. As is well known, the protest went unheeded.
Kazys Daugèla photographed these scenes in 1947 while he himself was living in the camp. “My acquaintance with camp life began when my wife, my five-month-old daughter and I opened the door to the room assigned to us,” he writes in his memoirs. What the family saw were lots of bunk beds. “Like herrings in a barrel,” his wife commented on the accommodation. Her roommates were Displaced Persons (DPs), as the Allies called those people who had lost their homes because of the war: abducted forced labourers, concentration camp survivors, former prisoners of war or people who had fled the advancing Red Army. More than 200,000 Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians had made their way to the West in the last months of the war; many of the Baltic refugees – more than 1,300 from Lithuania alone – found shelter in Kempten and lived here between 1945 and 1949.
The city owes the fact that this previously unexplored chapter of Kempten’s city history has now been thoroughly researched to the initiative and research of the Kempten historian and former high school teacher Wolfgang Petz, who not only contacted the relatives of the photographer, who died in 1999, but also located numerous contemporary witnesses who told him about the camp. The results of his meticulous work can not only be read in the highly recommended “temporary refuge” catalog (Likias-Verlag), but thanks to Kazys Daugèla’s photos, they can also be experienced in a special exhibition at the Kempten Museum.
Everyday life in the Kempten camp: children having their morning meal in the large dining hall.
(Photo: Kazys Daugèla)
The Lithuanian photographer’s black-and-white photos tell of everyday life in the camp, which was housed in the north wing of the residence and the adjacent barracks area. Daugèla, a keen observer with an eye for detail, makes it clear without words how tight it was everywhere. Even the attic of the residence was used as living space, three suitcases piled on top of each other made a desk. Food was scarce, the fish caught black were smoked in the open air under constant surveillance. For the people of Kempten, the area was “off limits”, as the signs at the camp entrance made unmistakably clear.
The attic of the residence was also used as living space, in which three suitcases piled on top of each other made a desk.
(Photo: Kazys Daugèla)
Since the Balts managed themselves in their camps, there was little contact with the locals, who the DPs wanted to get rid of as quickly as possible during these times of shortage. In fact, almost all of the refugees left the city again. Daugèla, who was a surveyor by trade and worked as an English teacher in Kempten, also embarked for New York in March 1949. Later he worked in New Hampshire as a civil engineer, specializing as a photographer on construction issues; most of his paintings can be seen today in the Vilnius Architectural Museum.
“living room of the city”
Impressive special exhibitions like these are part of the concept of the Kempten Museum in the Zumsteinhaus, a classical palace from 1802, diagonally opposite the former princely residence and the basilica. The Roman Museum and a natural history museum were housed here for a long time before the city decided in 2015 to renovate the listed building and set up a new city museum. The house, which only opened in 2019, emphasizes participation and sees itself as the “living room of the city”.
The Kempten Museum in the Zumsteinhaus, a classical palace from 1802.
(Photo: Hermann Rupp)
The fact that there is no entrance fee to the museum makes it easier to visit quickly. The permanent exhibition is interwoven with suggestions, exhibits, films and photographs from the population, says Jana Möller-Schindler from the city’s cultural office. The citizens were already intensively involved in the development of his concept. The themes of the special exhibitions are also provided exclusively by the people of Kempten. “We have no shortage of applications, the room is fully booked years in advance,” reports Möller-Schindler.
A visit to the house is also worthwhile independently of the special exhibitions, not only because of the spectacular late medieval and early modern everyday objects that were discovered in 1996/97 in filled cavities in an old town house. The museum is not particularly large, with just 600 square meters of exhibition space. Distributed over two upper floors, eleven rooms illuminate themes that have been driving Kempten for 2000 years: power and powerlessness, faith, urban space, production, new homeland Kempten, traffic, market, living, health, leisure and – apparently very important – the Allgäu Festival Week .
A must in every room is the anchoring of the city’s history in its ancient beginnings through a Roman exhibit, but also the respective contemporary reference, illustrated by the regularly exchanged “today objects”. In the case of the latter, too, the selection is up to the citizens, associations or schools from Kempten, who not only lend an exhibit to the museum, but also explain what the object means to them. Media stations deepen the offer.
Jana Möller-Schindler thinks the effort is worth it. Not only because the Hamburg foundation “Lebendige Stadt” awarded the Kempten Museum among 250 applicants in 2020 as Germany’s best local history museum. But because the people of Kempten actually see the house as “their place”.
temporary refuge. Everyday camp life in Kempten from 1945 to 1949 from the perspective of the Lithuanian photographer Kazys Daugėla, until May 7, Kempten Museum in the ZumsteinhausResidenzplatz 31, 87435 Kempten.