Museum exhibitions that display specific historical periods pose specific challenges for curators and designing team. [1] The leading thread on display, marked by the chronological order of the events, guides the narrative but does not reduce other dilemmas related to the selection of topics, representation, and universal character of the content. The exhibitions focused on war, humanitarian crisis, and atrocities face particular challenges. The ethical and emotional weight of the subject works against audacious solutions regarding the form and the graphic design. Therefore, the exhibitions concerning the topic of violence, persecution and exclusion during the Nazi regime are not expected to be an experimental ground for new approaches in the field of exhibitions and museum practices. Instead, they usually follow the standard pattern of narration and implement changes the technological level, if at all. [2] The remodelling of permanent exhibitions is often a consequence of structural changes and increasing visitors’ numbers. In this article, I argue that the temporary exhibitions, artistic interventions and cross-disciplinary collaborations not only enrich permanent exhibitions, but by actualising their message, they introduce a space for individual interpretation and critical thinking and indirect commitment in the particular cultural production. Basing on my study of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, I explain the interplay between permanent and temporary exhibitions and how inviting arts into history-oriented institution could gain a wider understanding of the narrative.  

In September 2023, the Documentation Centre in Obersalzberg (Documentation Obersalzberg) has opened a new permanent exhibition and significantly expanded the exhibition space. When the Centre was established in 1999, it was expected that approx. 40 thousand visitors per year would visit it to learn about the infamous alpine retreat of Adolf Hitler. [3] The actual visitors’ number exceeded the prognosis more than five times. Roughly, 170 thousand visitors visited the exhibition in Obersalzberg each year. [4] The need for an expanded capacity also led to changes in another Documentation Centre in the same administrative region. The permanent exhibition entitled Fascination and Terror that had been hosted since 2001 in the Nuremberg Documentation Centre at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds was closed in 2020 and it will be reopened in a revamped form in 2025. It promises an updated content with advanced multimedia installed in an expanded exhibition space. 

The far-reaching amendments of permanent exhibitions after twenty years from the first opening are usually requested by the technological developments or intense visitors’ traffic. The curatorial standards and exhibiting techniques have changed and now they offer new contexts and ways to maintain the narrative. While in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the focus was usually on marking places imprinted by National Socialism and preserving them for the educational purposes of future generations, modern approaches ask for an expanding narrative about the NS regime for transnational contexts and a wider spectrum of reflections on the totalitarian system from a global perspective.

The German approach towards the NS past on the local level was fostered by paving legal paths towards mnemonic policies and ushering public debate on ways of remembrance. The Bundestag (German parliament) resolution of 15 May 1997 confirmed the responsibility for the Second World War by Nazi Germany. [6] This official acknowledgement of guilt was preceded by the initiative to build the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. However, the impulse to build documentation centres – among them the ones in Nuremberg or Obersalzberg, and later in Munich and, recently, Freiburg – had been already given by the early initiative of creating the Topography of Terror. It is located on the land of former headquarter of “agencies of violence and perpetration”, namely: Gestapo, SA, SS, Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, in late 1970s. In the past few decades, the public resonance of the open approach towards the NS-past resulted a growing number of initiatives oriented on commemoration and education. 

The overall landscape of memorial sites in Germany comprises various categories, including memorials (Gedenkstätten), sites of memory (Erinnerungsorte), online initiatives, memorial plaques, and the abovementioned documentation centres (Dokumentationszentren/ Dokumentationstätten). The documentation centres represent rather peculiar types of places that combine exhibited narratives about the past and commemorations of the victims of the NS regime. Usually, no mass killings took place in the historical places where documentation centres are now located. Nevertheless, they do have links to National Socialism and therefore convey narratives on structural aspects of totalitarian regimes, such as the crime and invigilation apparatus. The documentation centres provide a supplementary commentary to information presented in memorial sites, i.e. sites where the actual acts of violence took place and are now commemorated. Therefore, they depict the wider historical landscape that help to explain the events from the Nazi past that had happened in these historical places. [6] The critical approach to the Nazi era supports settling the narrative about this period in the context of dictatorship, propaganda, persecution and exclusion. 

The process of establishing memorial site cannot be accomplished impromptu as it includes various stakeholders and interested parties. In some cases, the debates on the form of dealing with the “brown past” lasted several years. Munich, a city particularly involved in the development of the National Socialism, opened its Documentation Center of the History of National Socialism in 2015 as a place with a goal to maintain critical memory of the difficult past. It the following years it gained a prominent place in the narrative about the Nazi structures of power. Like other documentation centres, the location of the centre in Munich is painstakingly meaningful; in this very place, the headquarter of the NSDAP, the so-called Brown House, was located, and the whole district hosted more than 60 buildings that served the Nazi administration. 

The permanent exhibition, entitled Munich and National Socialism, explains the events and circumstances that fostered establishing the Nazi party in Munich after the First World War. Its narrative leads throughout the wartime period up to the modern times, as the last part of the exhibition discusses the aftermaths of the Nazism basing on contemporary examples such as right-wing extremism, antisemitism and political radicalisation. It also explains the process of reconciliation, compensation and remembrance.

The permanent exhibition covers roughly three and a half floors and its planned conventionally in a chronological order. Its content and factual sphere do not pose possibilities for significant changes or reformulations, and the weight of the topic does not allow introducing “experimental” initiatives. Instead, space for commentaries, discussions, and interpretations is provided by temporary exhibitions and supplementary events hosted frequently at the NS Documentation Centre in Munich. Unlike similar institutions in the region, the Munich-Centre uses opportunities offered by temporary exhibitions and artistic interventions to tackle current issues and set them in relation to the permanent exhibition. In autumn 2023, for example, the Munich Documentation Centre hosted the installation of the Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova. Her photo installation Out of Home was created after the Russian invasion on Ukraine in 2022. The artist took pictures of the interiors of public buildings destroyed during the military manoeuvres and combined them with the potted plants that she had taken from the abandoned places. Along with the photo installation, Kadyrova presented another project, namely “Palianytsia” (2022). The title derives from the name of a traditional Ukrainian bread. In the hands of the artist, stones from the Rika riverbed became loaves of bread. Bread in Ukrainian, and widely in Eastern European culture, is a symbol of belonging, solidarity and hospitality. However, in the context of war, it reminds about suffering from hunger, failure to fulfil elementary needs, and the instrumentalisation of food for military purposes. Without doubt, Kadyrova’s artwork evoked memory of the Holodomor – the great famine that took lives of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s.

The installation, which was on display for one month, added a deeper meaning to the permanent exhibition at the NS Documentation Centre in Munich, especially to its parts that concern the Nazi aggression on Poland in 1939, the annihilation and deportation of the persecuted groups, and the air bombing of Munich in 1943. The installation of Zhanna Kadyrova, and other similar temporary exhibitions, leads to new interpretations and offers new, deeper meanings. 

The collaboration with contemporary artists at Munich’s Documentation Centre represents an open and impartial approach to visual media and new forms of narration. Whereas in other countries, for example in the UK, such models of overbridging different perspectives are rather established practices, in the context of Germany’s difficult past, an in-depth knowledge of possible interpretations is necessary. At the same time, the combination of unobvious topics and frames of reference attracts the attention of the wider public and engages visitors in self-reflection. In this way, the documentation centre still fulfils its educational role and nonetheless expands its scope for an active and experiential engagement with the past. Seen from the perspective of curatorial practices, implementing contemporary issues to institutions dealing with historical topics opens space for inclusive and participatory practices that settle the institution “here and now.” Temporary exhibitions, especially those resulting from transnational collaborations, contribute to the entanglement of local, national, and global memories. Finally yet importantly, by combining permanent and temporary, historical and current issues the documentation centres can serve as experimental spaces acknowledging the interplay between past and present and pave the way for new narrative forms.