Bold new exhibit aims to define German identity

BERLIN, May 30: Long periods of horror and catastrophe, interspersed with moments of light -- that's how Hans Ottomeyer summarises German history.

Ottomeyer, the director of Berlin's German Historical Museum has spent the past six years pulling together the disparate strands that make up that often painful past into an ambitious new permanent exhibit that traces the evolution of the German people from the time of Christ to the present day.

Entitled ''German History in Images and Testimonials from Two Millennia'', the collection is made up of 8,000 historical objects -- from battlefield relics to landmark documents and works of art -- displayed over two floors of the former Prussian armoury building, the Zeughaus, in central Berlin.

The eagerly anticipated exhibit, which opens to the public on June 2, represents a bold attempt by a reunified Germany to define what it is to be German -- a sometimes puzzling question for a people who were united by Bismarck into a single nation-state only 135 years ago.

The collection is also a message to the outside world that German history is more than the two World Wars and 12 gruesome years of Nazi rule that stained the 20th century and remain for many its defining moments.

The German Historical Museum is a government-funded brainchild of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and some see the exhibition as an attempt by the country's political class to put its own stamp on history.

''There is a deliberate political strategy behind the exhibit,'' said Francoise Forster-Hahn, an art historian at the University of California at Riverside who specialises in Germany and museum theory.

VISUALISED MEMORY

Ottomeyer, 60, prefers to see the exhibit as a place of ''visualised memory'', where tourists can get the full picture of Germany's rich history and Germans themselves can fill voids in their understanding of their own culture and heritage.

''We hope this long perspective on German history has an impact,'' he says.

In compiling the collection, he has emphasised ''authentic objects with an aura'' and focused firmly on historic individuals and major political events, presenting Germany in its European context and through its regional diversity.

The exhibit starts nine years after the birth of Christ, with a cavalry mask from the battle of Teutoburg Forest -- a legendary clash in which the Roman commander Publius Quintilius Varus was defeated by Germanic tribesmen led by the Cheruscian leader Arminius. As a result of the battle, Germania never became a part of the Roman empire.

Among the other treasures is the 9th century ''Heliand'', an epic poem and the largest known work in Old Saxon that recounts the life of Jesus in the verse style of a Germanic saga.

The collection traces German history from Charlemagne through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War of the early 17th century. One in five Germans is believed to have been wiped out by the conflict, famine and disease.

A highlight from the early 19th century is a triangular hat that Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Bluecher captured from Napoleon as the defeated French emperor fled the battlefield at Waterloo. Another is the globe that sat in Adolf Hitler's Reichs Chancellery and was famously transformed into a balloon by Charlie Chaplin in his 1939 film ''The Great Dictator''.

On the section of the giant orb where Germany lies, the lacquer has been blasted apart by a bullet -- probably the work of a Soviet army officer. The projectile is still lodged in the globe, which lay hidden for years in a Munich customs office.

Other objects include a model of the mammoth ''Germania'' dome that Nazi architect Albert Speer was commissioned to build for Hitler next to the Brandenburg Gate.

A Trabant P 50/2, the boxy East German-made car, and an anti-Berlin Wall brochure from 1961 allude to the country's four decades of division.

EXHIBIT WITH A MESSAGE

Many of the items came from the collection of the East German government's Museum for German History, which was itself housed in the Zeughaus between 1952 and 1990.

Dedicated to conveying a Marxist-Leninist view of history, its assets were brought under the wing of the German Historical Museum around the time of reunification.

Other items in the exhibit were stumbled upon -- a rare constitutional document from 1849 was found by a child playing in a garden in the eastern city of Potsdam in 1952.

About 1,000 of the exhibit's 8,000 square metres is dedicated to the Nazi period. Half of the collection is made up of objects that date from after World War One.

Ottomeyer has a logical explanation for the space distribution -- he says it mirrors the growth of the German population, which expanded from 2 million to more than 80 million in the 2,000 year period covered by the collection.

Just as the former East German museum provided a particular slant on history, so will the contents, layout and narrative of the new exhibit send a message about how today's Germany wants to be seen.

''Museum exhibits and other displays of objects do not merely reflect history. They are active agents in the shaping of history and the construction of identity,'' said Forster-Hahn.

''This is not merely a passive exhibit which reflects German history over the centuries. It is a tool through which Germany can present itself as a new, reunified nation.''

Reuters