Secondary Experientiality
5.3 The Topography of Terror in Berlin
The Topography of Terror Documentation Centre (Topographie des Terrors, ToT) in Berlin opened its third and current permanent exhibition on May 6, 2010, on the ground of the former headquarters of the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the SS, and the Reich Security Main Office on the former Prinz-Albrecht-Straße and Wilhelmstraße. In contemporary Berlin, it stands as a reminder of the Na-tional Socialist government quarter, while located only a few minutes away from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It is also located between the tourist attractions Checkpoint Charlie and Potsdamer Platz and features the longest existing segment of the outer Berlin Wall along Niederkirchnerstraße (formerly Prinz-Albrecht-Straße). The documentation center receives an estimat-ed 1.3 million visitors per year, of which approximately 70 percent are interna-tional visitors.⁶² The institution was established with a temporary exhibition in a provisional pavilion, as part of (West) Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebration in 1987.⁶³ The Foundation of the Topography of Terror was established in 1992, and in 1997, the second exhibition moved into the moat under the remaining piece of the Berlin Wall. It endured two failed architectural competitions and
The Big Picture Show“Truce”requires the most active visitors, since they are confronted with five identifiable voices from the conflicts/wars in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq, Northern Ire-land, and El Salvador. The five individuals have very diverse experiences of how truce-building processes worked for them personally, which creates an openness and tension to which the vis-itor can actively react.
For visitors in 2018 see the ToT’s website https://www.topographie.de/en/topography-of-terror/, accessed 13 October 2019. For the international visitors in 2017 see Schulz 2018. Since the ToT does not charge an admission fee and many visitors only visit the outdoor exhibition in the moat, these numbers are estimates.
See for its history, Haß 2012 and Till 2005, especially 63–152. See also the catalog of the first exhibition Rürup 2002 (1987) and Seiter 2017.
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has a strong history of activist interventions,⁶⁴ marking it as a site of political contention.⁶⁵After the construction of the building by the second competition’s winner, the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, was stopped in 2004,⁶⁶a third archi-tectural competition was won by architect Ursula Wilms and landscape architect Heinz W. Hallmann. The buildings and grounds were then finally completed in 2010 with a far less emotionalizing and more pragmatic building. Its metallic fa-cade is intentionally understated so that visitors can focus on the contents of the exhibitions and the traces of the landscape.⁶⁷
At first glance, the ToT seems to be out place in the list of permanent exhi-bitions analyzed in this book. It is a documentation center rather than a histor-ical or memorial museum, as discussed above, and its mission seems to avoid strong narratives and immersion at all costs. It almost exclusively uses photo-graphs to visualize war, with minimal audio and video footage. The 800-square meter permanent exhibition displays a soft temporal structure by describing the Nazi’s rise to power in section 1, institution of terror in section 2, the terror in the German Reich in section 3, the terror in the occupied countries during the war in section 4, and the aftermath of the war and the post-war trials in section 5. The exhibition is organized structurally into perpetrator groups, victim groups, and victim countries. Because of its mandate to represent the perpetrators that oper-ated from the center of Berlin,⁶⁸it avoids the possibility of empathy with any his-torical people. There can clearly be no primary experientiality to re-experience, for example through scenes, historical atmospheres, and individual or collective perspectives. However–as will be shown–there are effects of structural
empa- See in particular Haß 2012; see also Young 1993, 81–90. James E. Young emphasizes the im-portance of‘contested memory’here, inviting“visitors into a dialogue between themselves and their past”(1993, 190).
See also Till 2005, 63–105.
See Leoni 2014. Claudio Leoni strongly argues–with reference to psychoanalytic poststruc-turalist theory–in favor of Zumthor’s aesthetics, which he reads as a necessary aesthetic solu-tion to deal with the unrepresentability of the Holocaust:“As a positive negation of the site and its history, Zumthor’s building would have created a gap within our realities, a gap where the real could have been conjectured”(2014, 117). This reading demonstrates the differences between an emotional, non-representative architectural approach and a documentary and educational one (which was ultimately chosen)–even if in the latter the ToT reflects on the unrepresenta-bility of the Holocaust through its photographic montages as well.
For the development and concept of the final building and the landscape architecture, see Stiftung Topographie des Terrors 2011, 10–16.
The executive director of the Foundation Topography of Terror (Stiftung Topographie des Ter-rors), Andreas Nachama, notes that this focus on perpetrators is possible because of the many other documentation and memorial institutions in Germany and abroad that tell the stories of the victims (2010, 7).
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thy that confront the visitor with the collective gazes of this era through photo-graphic montage techniques.⁶⁹
The mission of the ToT is to provide a documentary overview of the perpe-trators and their acts of perpetration (Nachama 2010, 7). It conveys“in a concise presentation with carefully chosen examples, fundamental information on the headquarters of the SS and the Gestapo located on this site between 1933 and 1945 and on the crimes initiated by these institutions, their leaders, and person-nel, which they perpetrated not just in Germany, but above all in many countries of Europe” (Nachama 2010, 7). The exhibition highlights facts to provide evi-dence of these historical crimes and elaborates on historical structures, deep-ened through the use of computer stations and printed document folders con-taining detailed background information. The photographs⁷⁰ displayed on the vertical panels suspended from the ceiling serve an illustrative function, render-ing subjects such as different branches of the German police and security oper-ations, different victim groups on German territory, and crimes committed in dif-ferent occupied countries representable.
However, the ToT employs two primary techniques to create secondary expe-rientiality. First, similarly to the chronological exhibition in the MHM,⁷¹ but ex-clusively based on photographs and official documents, they create mini clusters of material, living scenes of the‘Volk community,’the Secret State Police (Gesta-po), the Security Service (SD), Jews in Reich territory, Forced Laborers and Soviet prisoners of war, and Occupied Poland, among others. These scenes only exist as a secondary experiential museum montage; they poietically produce a visitor ex-perience that only exists within the museum space. The ToT generally separates its pictorial and textual documents (Nachama 2010, 6). The former are float-mounted on panels, whereas textual historical source material is presented through facsimiles on lecterns in front of the panels for easier reading. Inter-spersed with the photographs on the float panels, contemporary quotations by leaders of the regime are printed in black, and contextualizing quotations by re-nowned academic historians are printed in orange. The clusters connect with each other through historical and structural themes throughout the permanent exhibition, as also seen in the MHM. The ToT uses an open style that enables vis-itors to distance themselves from any immediate immersion or empathy with
ei- For the empathy created by the ToT see also Johnston-Weiss 2019, 96–98.
All photographs are enlarged facsimiles printed on the exhibition floats and arranged in clusters of different size. They have extensive descriptive and contextualizing captions as well as a bibliographical reference to the source of the photograph.
As seen above in the analysis of the“Barbarossa”cabinet in chapter 5.1.
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ther the perpetrators or the victims. The visitor can further intensify the exhibi-tion’s networking effect by actively connecting these themes to the ToT’s other exhibitions: the 200-square meter open-air exhibitionBerlin 1933–1945: Between Propaganda and Terror, the fifteen-station tour on the grounds of the ToT,⁷² spe-cial exhibitions, and a spespe-cialist archive. Second, the documentation center cre-ates secondary experientiality through its extreme focus on visualization via photographs, which results in an aesthetic effect that emotionalizes the visitor through repetition and montage (Jaeger 2017b, 175–177).⁷³ The second network-ing strategy depends on the visitor consciously or subconsciously maknetwork-ing con-nections that establish an emotional cluster that surpasses documented facts and structures.
The themes that are networked throughout the museum are both structural and historical. As in the MHM, they allow the visitor to go beyond individual events or people, in order to understand systemic structures and provoke ques-tions about the emergent subject matter. The ToT creates systemic networking ef-fects through the clustering and visualization of themes such as the spectator-ship of crimes, scenes of humiliation and discrimination – antisemitism in particular–scenes of denunciation and deportation, crowd scenes, crime scenes including shootings and mass atrocities, laughter, and portraits of individuals.
The latter themes include group photographs of perpetrators and/or institutions as well as the forced assembly of different victim groups. Furthermore, these themes are historical, with some reaching experientiality within one section in particular, such as the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust, or the events in specific occupied territories such as Poland or the Soviet Union.
To better understand the ToT’s networking techniques, I will first analyze the theme of humiliation and spectatorship, followed by the theme of laughter. Af-terwards, I will examine the clustering of concrete historical spaces by focusing on the particular example of occupied Poland. In the section“The‘Volk Commu-nity,’”the visitor sees two photographs displaying a 19-year-old woman having her head publicly shaved in the market square in Ulm, as a punishment for her relationship with a French prisoner of war (see fig. 18). There is a small image showing the shaving on a podium in the center of the market square, with thou-sands of spectators surrounding the woman, and a larger close-up photograph of
Here, the documentation center also serves as a memorial site that commemorates the vic-tims in the prison cells of the cellar of the Gestapo headquarters, where many political prisoners were tortured and executed. See also Stiftung Topographie des Terrors 2010b.
See Hesse 2002 for the photographs’tension between authenticity and ideological construc-tion. I thank curator researcher Klaus Hesse for his detailed introduction in the curatorial tech-niques and use of imagery in the Topography of Terror in a meeting on July 6, 2012.
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some of the spectators. The second picture depicts eager spectators, mostly smil-ing and happily watchsmil-ing the scene.⁷⁴Whether the audience was staged to pro-duce photographs for propaganda purposes or not, the visitor comes away with an impression of how the Nazis created their community and that the spectators appeared to attending these events voluntarily. Visitors encounter this type of forced public humiliation throughout the exhibition. In a photo in the very first section,“Terror and‘Coordination,’”⁷⁵a Social Democrat and local counci-lor is led through the city of Hofgeismar on an ox in May 1933. A large number of spectators, especially young people, flank the procession. Right next to this, the visitor encounters an image of anti-Jewish terror in Duisburg, in which SS force three Jewish men to carry a black-red-gold flag through the city. Many spectators are present and the exhibition ensures that visitors are able to recognize that Fig. 18 Part of section“The‘Volk Community.’”Interior permanent exhibition. Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror), Berlin (Photo: Author, 2017, courtesy of Topographie des Terrors).
The caption explains that the photo appeared in the newspaper theUlmer Sturm/Ulmer Ta-geblatt,with the caption“Thousands of faces expressed mockery and disgust.”
“Terror und Gleichschaltung”in German.
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these images are representative of everyday life in Nazi Germany, rather than ex-ceptional. The“Forced Laborers”section shows the public shaming of a German woman and Polish man who had a relationship with each other in 1940 and the head shaving of a German woman from Altenburg in 1941; visitors also see a Ge-stapo man shearing the beard of an arrested Jew in Warsaw in 1939 in the Poland section. In this way, visitors become attuned to how violent spectacles were en-grained in the historical reality of Nazi Germany. Aside from these examples of public shaming, spectators are present in images watching the destruction of synagogues, the auctioning off of Jewish property, and mass executions. Here, the visualization of war is performed as an implicit aesthetic montage effect, al-lowing visitors to realize how public and overt both discrimination and daily ter-ror were. They experience a constructed gaze that exemplifies what could be seen through the eyes of the public and the perpetrators.
For example, a montage depicts various phases and angles of the execution of eleven foreign forced laborers by Gestapo officials in Cologne Ehrenfeld in Oc-tober 1944. The five photographs first depict a large crowd watching the scene.
The largest central picture of the cluster captures the moment directly after the execution. In the forefront of the photograph, visitors see the back or side views of the Gestapo officials. Behind the corpses, spectators leave the scene.
Two documents in front of this photomontage allow visitors to dive further into the event’s factual context. One document is the testimony of an eyewitness in an investigation by the Cologne public prosecutor’s office in 1967, the other an interview protocol with a Gestapo member on his participation in the hanging in 1969. The case against him was dropped since it could not be disproved that he believed that the men had been lawfully sentenced at the time, but it is clear that the legality of the hanging was in doubt. The documents also complicate the per-petrator gaze, which visitors replicate by looking at the photographs. On the one hand, this adds the perspective of West Germany’s legal system, and on the other, visitors are directly confronted with both the voice of a possible perpetra-tor and that of a spectaperpetra-tor-bystander. The spectaperpetra-tor says that he cannot comment on what the crowd was thinking, since everybody was too afraid to state their opinion openly. There is also no indication of whether people were forced to watch the execution as deterrence or watched voluntarily out of curiosity.⁷⁶
Visitors can find the full set of sixteen photographs of the execution in Ehrenfeld of the cor-responding computer station“Persecution and Extermination in the German Reich”to the side of section 3. Visitors looking for in-depth material can read a photo story that provides consid-erable evidence of how ordinary Germans witnessed crimes in Germany, allowing the visitors to feel challenged to reflect on their own observer positions. Similarly the computer station pro-vides picture stories of numerous deportations of Jews, particularly the one in Lörrach in Octo-5.3 The Topography of Terror in Berlin 165
The ToT restricts itself to an informational, factual description with the effect that the visitor experiences the reality of spectatorship and of terror in the last days of the regime. Further reflection depends on the visitors’background. Inter-national visitors might assume all Gestapo or policemen shown are automatical-ly guilty and simpautomatical-ly could not be prosecuted. The brutality and public nature of these examples constructs a public gaze. It challenges the visitor to emotionally react to the picture and to self-reflexively take a stand against the humiliations and atrocities on display. One could react similarly to the German public witness-ing of different kinds of discrimination throughout the war and the National So-cialist regime.⁷⁷Whereas the museum avoids any opportunity for the visitor to identify or sympathize with perpetrators, the aesthetic effect of the Ehrenfeld cluster and the repetition of numerous scenes of humiliation and spectatorship throughout the exhibition forces visitors to reflect on how they may have be-haved in a similar situation. Visitors also become bystanders to these events, em-ulating the historical spectators. Michaela Dixon has described the tension be-tween experiencing the gaze and reflecting on its subjectivity as textual or explicit focalization. She argues that perpetrator sites such as the ToT use “ex-plicitfocalisation, […] in the sense that the identity of the perpetrator focaliser is openly acknowledged and clearly marked, which exposes his/her subjectivity and potentially undermines his/her reliability, thereby mitigating the influence of the perpetrator focaliser on the visitor” (Dixon 2017, 246–247). This does not explain why high profile perpetrators did what they did, but visitors can come close to an experiential feeling of the‘Volk community’and the structures and actions emerging from it. Their contexts differ; however, through repetition visitors can understand how intense this climate of humiliating‘otherness’was.
This clearly cannot be attributed to individual perpetrators, but can be experi-enced instead as a systematic structure. This also demonstrates that those read-ings of the ToT that argue that its exhibition exclusively assembles facts and documents and lacks a master narrative structure or clear thesis⁷⁸overlook the secondary experientiality the exhibition produces.
ber 1940, depicting victims, perpetrators, and observers/spectators. See for further context Na-chama and Hesse 2015 (2011).
See Springer 2002 for the complex relationship between propaganda and private photogra-phy under National Socialism.
See for example the otherwise very intelligent reading by Jens Bisky (2010). Bisky argues– correctly–that the ToT at best provides“traces”of the debates in historiography and society about German perpetrators and National Socialism and does not engage with the historiography and remembrance culture of the GDR.
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Another networking motif that is predominant throughout the exhibitions is laughter. Bystanders or perpetrators constantly–partly staged for portrait pur-poses– seem to either enjoy the pain and humiliation of others or seem to love and enjoy life despite the horrors around them. The most iconic photograph in this vein, displayed in almost every Holocaust exhibition opened in the last decade, is a group portrait of laughing SS female auxiliaries and SS men from the Auschwitz concentration camp at the SS retreat Sola-Hütte. It is clustered with three other images of smiling and relaxing SS men in the idyllic mountain retreat, including Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele and Auschwitz comman-dant Rudolf Höß; all taken in late summer 1944. These images all stem from the so-called‘Höcker album’that was given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 (Busch et al. 2016). In the section on the Reich SS Leader and Himmler’s SS State, there is an undated private group photo of a dozen celebrat-ing Waffen-SS members holding beer bottles. Regarding the large number of group photographs in the exhibition, it is important for visitors to understand that, on the one hand, they see staged pictures of smiling Germans working for the Nationalist Socialist system and committing crimes; and on the other hand, they see anonymous victim groups being deported and punished from
Another networking motif that is predominant throughout the exhibitions is laughter. Bystanders or perpetrators constantly–partly staged for portrait pur-poses– seem to either enjoy the pain and humiliation of others or seem to love and enjoy life despite the horrors around them. The most iconic photograph in this vein, displayed in almost every Holocaust exhibition opened in the last decade, is a group portrait of laughing SS female auxiliaries and SS men from the Auschwitz concentration camp at the SS retreat Sola-Hütte. It is clustered with three other images of smiling and relaxing SS men in the idyllic mountain retreat, including Auschwitz camp doctor Josef Mengele and Auschwitz comman-dant Rudolf Höß; all taken in late summer 1944. These images all stem from the so-called‘Höcker album’that was given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 (Busch et al. 2016). In the section on the Reich SS Leader and Himmler’s SS State, there is an undated private group photo of a dozen celebrat-ing Waffen-SS members holding beer bottles. Regarding the large number of group photographs in the exhibition, it is important for visitors to understand that, on the one hand, they see staged pictures of smiling Germans working for the Nationalist Socialist system and committing crimes; and on the other hand, they see anonymous victim groups being deported and punished from