Exhibiting the National Socialist past: An overview of recent German exhibitions

The article attempts to move beyond the scholarly debates surrounding the so-called Wehrmacht Exhibitions by broadening the focus to include a wide spectrum of public exhibitions about the National Socialist era in Germany, mounted mostly between 1995 and the present. Three straightforward questions — `What is exhibited?', `Who exhibits it?' and `Where is it exhibited?' — throw up some complex answers: a shift from history to memory becomes evident; the line between protest exhibitions and establishment exhibitions becomes blurred as public memory work becomes increasingly institutionalized; and exhibitions use a combination of symbolic and indexical place (as defined by Aleida Assmann) to make statements about the relationship of contemporary communities to the National Socialist past.