The NS Documentation Center not far from Königsplatz has recently expanded its team of helpers by four people: in future you can also be guided through the exhibitions by Hans Busch, Stephan Palta, Hans-Georg Benkmann and Markus Posset, and if one of these four, for example describes a picture, you have to keep your eyes open not only to look at that picture, but also to see its explanations. You can’t overhear what Hans Busch and his colleagues are saying: the four men are deaf, they use sign language to communicate with the visitors who are guiding them through the NS Documentation Center.
For some time now, the Munich and Surroundings Association of the Deaf (GMU) has made it possible for members interested in art and culture to train as museum guides especially for deaf people. The quartet around Hans Busch found this activity exciting in principle, but is more interested in history. And the four slightly older men at the NS Documentation Center were in exactly the right place.
Because that itself offers subject-related training as a museum signer, as the technical term for the sign language is. The designation is derived from the English word “sign”. “We are grateful that the team at the documentation center accepted the challenge and trained us,” sign language interpreter Christian Pflugfelder translated Hans Busch’s gestures and signs into acoustics on Tuesday.
At the annual press conference of the NS Documentation Center, the deaf men symbolized a certain reorientation of the facility, which was inaugurated eight years ago and has been headed by Mirjam Zadoff for five years: the director wants to open her house even more, for the city society, for tourists, for previously neglected groups. For her, there is more to this opening than barrier-free access, which also manifests itself in the removal of an obstacle that should not be underestimated: entering the documentation center. It has been free for some time, thanks to the annual budget of 5.3 million euros made available by the City of Munich.
“Where can we be more inclusive?” Mirjam Zadoff asked on Tuesday. The fact that this formulation is not only meant rhetorically is shown by the previous approach of your team when it comes to cultivating the memory of the time of National Socialism. “We focused on various victim groups that were previously underrepresented,” explains deputy director Anke Hoffsten. For example, from the approach of showing gay and lesbian people in the Nazi era, the exhibition “To be seen – Queer Lives 1900-1950” about the entire queer scene in the first half of the 20th century, which received attention far beyond Munich developed. “Even deaf people have a history of being victims of National Socialism,” suggested Hans Busch with a show of hands.
Max-Mannheimer-Platz, the forecourt of the NS-Document Center, is to be included even more intensively as a meeting place in the future.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
In any case, Zadoff and her employees do not want to cultivate a culture of remembrance in the conventional way: from the omniscient and everything-explaining historian’s point of view, from the perpetrator’s perspective, mediated one-sidedly, from sender to receiver. According to Zadoff, “inclusion also includes participation”, the second focus of the realignment.
Participation, in turn, includes new formats of communication, especially for a younger audience. A computer game has been developed in the documentation center that is based on the experiences of the Dutchman Jan Baziun in the Neuaubing forced labor camp, a “playful approach” as Zadoff finds it. In this way you can obviously get closer to a difficult topic; the game has already been downloaded 30,000 times, she noted.
With the help of dance, theater and film, the aim is to get young people interested in remembering the Nazi era. A project is currently being prepared in which Munich schoolchildren are to create a performance together with their peers from the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. “Nothing is fixed beforehand, the students can bring in their own wishes and approaches,” says project manager Thomas Rink: “The performance is worked out together.”
“We have launched a number of test balloons in recent years”
Opening up also means being open to new ideas, new narrative forms, new approaches via different media, directors Zadoff and Hoffsten said on Tuesday. Since the documentation center is neither a classic memorial nor a classic museum, there are many opportunities to experiment. “We have launched a number of test balloons over the past few years,” says art historian Anke Hoffsten, who has been with the center since it started: “At the beginning we didn’t know how it would develop. And we still don’t know today where it will go in the future becomes.”
No matter how one organizes the work of remembrance – one must always be guided by one question, Mirjam Zadoff believes: “What is the relevance of our topics for the present?” The fact that right-wing extremism and right-wing terrorism are only relics from the past Nazi era is disproved enough by recent events, from the NSU to the OEZ attack and the Hanau murders. “The present,” says historian Zadoff, “keeps catching up with us.”