HITLER AND THE GERMANS

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An exhibition at the German Historical Museum attempts to explain Hitler's allure. Cornelia Günther goes in search of answers ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The media coverage was enormous well before the exhibition officially opened. Entrance often now involves a long queue. Why does the name "Hitler" still hold this magical fascination? Perhaps it is because he remains so mysterious to post-war generations. Or because so few German institutions have actually taken a long and public look at the man himself.

"Hitler and the Germans. Nation and Crime" at the Deutsches Historisches Museum is only the second exhibition in Germany ever dedicated to Adolf Hitler. It seeks to answer what is perhaps the country's most pressing question: why did the nation follow him? Since my early school days, I had to confront countless documentaries, memorials and exhibitions about the unprecedented atrocities of the Third Reich. I was hoping for enlightenment—why could all this happen, and why in Germany?

Growing up in the East, I believed for a long time that I lived in the morally better part of Germany. At school we were told that former Nazis had all escaped to the West after 1945. Logically only the anti-fascists must have stayed in the German Democratic Republic. Our lessons about Hitler’s rise to power concentrated on his regime’s brutal dictatorship, under which opponents (first and foremost the communists) were imprisoned and murdered. We learned that Germans lived under constant surveillance and in a permanent state of fear. But we did not learn why Hitler also meant hope for so many people, and did so until the bitter end.

As the title of this exhibition implies and as its curators emphasise, Hitler’s rise to power cannot be explained without considering his support among the German people. Sir Ian Kershaw, a British biographer of Hitler and member of the exhibition’s board of historians, has classified this relationship as one that was near religious, like people with a messiah. Hitler offered a way for Germans to regain their pride after the degrading fallout from the Treaty of Versailles and the struggles of the Great Depression. One exhibit features hand-written letters to “My dear Führer” with warmest wishes for his 43rd birthday. Many Germans felt personally invested in the man who promised to grant them the lives and the future they deserved.

The show's 600 exhibits demonstrate the penetration of Nazi propaganda into everyday life, including tiny swastika badges, cuff-links, children’s toys and giant oil canvases glorifying “the fighting people”. But I still can’t grasp why there was so much enthusiasm, and why it lasted so long. The exhibition's many photos and film clips depicting the violence of the regime and the brutality of the war turned me cold. Didn’t people feel the same 70 years ago, or did they avert their eyes?

Karina, a young half-Singaporean woman, told me she was quite impressed. “Having spent time living in Japan, I notice the contrast between the German approach and that of the apparent Japanese inability to acknowledge their responsibility for events of the same period.”

Yesterday also saw the publication of an intriguing new book by four German historians called “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” (The Foreign Office and the Past), about the role German diplomats played in the Holocaust. Commissioned by Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister, the book is a product of years of investigation. One of the book's authors has described the Nazi-era ministry as a "criminal organisation". In Germany, a painful reconciliation with the past is nearly its own industry.

"Hitler und die Deutschen”, Deutsches Historisches Museum (Pei Building) until February 6th 2011

(Cornelia Günther works in The Economist office in Berlin.)

Picture credit: A deck of playing cards showing Hitler and other Nazis, Berlin after 1934, © Sebastian Ahlers; advertising with SA man for the cigarette brand “Trommler” (Drummer), 1933-1945, © Indra Desnica