While scholars recognize both museums and films as sites where historical knowledge and cultural memory are created, the convergence between their methods of constructing the past has only recently been acknowledged. The essays in Exhibiting the German Past examine a range of films, museums, and experiences which blend the two, considering how authentic objects and cinematic techniques are increasingly used in similar ways by both visual media and museums. This is the first collection to focus on the museum–film connection in German-language culture and the first to approach the issue using the concept of “musealization,” a process that, because it engages the cultural destruction wrought by modernization, offers new means of constructing historical knowledge and shaping collective memory within and beyond the museum’s walls. Featuring a wide range of valuable case studies, Exhibiting the German Past offers a unique perspective on the developing relationship between museums and visual media.

Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles S. Maier writes that the historians’ controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never got around to holding. The premises of national community, whether formulated in terms of legal culture, inherited collective responsibilities, or patriotic habits of the heart, had already been subjects for vigorous discussion.

This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally. Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest émigré projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German émigré collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the ‘degenerate’ artists themselves. The book explores the show’s potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.

Exhibition catalog for the permanent exhibition on German Jewish History at the Jewish Museum Berlinches.