National Socialism: How exhibitions propagated enemy images
A large number of defamatory exhibitions took place under National Socialism, the aim of which was to slander worldviews, states and populations, including groups and individuals, and to declare them enemies. The zeal that was pursued until the fall of the Nazi regime in order to stir up hatred and resentment in the population against the Jewish minority was enormous. For a long time, exhibitions have been an underestimated medium of historical research in the dissemination of anti-Semitic and racist propaganda under National Socialism.
about the author
Rosemary Burgstaller is a historian and senior research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Her book “The Staging of Hate. Enemy exhibitions under National Socialism” was published by Campus Verlag in 2022 (reading sample).
book launch
The book will be published on January 19, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. as part of a Event organized by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies presented (Bookstore Singer am Rabensteig 3, 1010 Vienna).
In many cases, anti-Semitic and anti-Communist departments and special shows were attached to the popular product fairs and exhibitions. Discrimination and slander were subliminally incorporated into exhibition displays through codes or with the help of details and allusions, for example in the context of craft exhibitions. The focus was on two complexes of the enemy: the Jewish-coded political and ideological opponents of communism and the Soviet regime, and hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism was also the basic constant of almost all other enemy images that were conveyed in these exhibitions, such as the Weimar Republic, liberalism and democracy or the attacks on freethinkers, freemasons and Slavic populations.
Enemy images were conveyed in areas that promoted business as well as in charitable events. For example, through National Socialist infiltrated aid organizations such as “Bruder in Need” and the “International Pro Deo Commission” based in Geneva, anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic enemy image exhibitions of the NS regime were not only in the German Reich, but throughout Europe, for example in Great Britain, in Distributed in Poland and France, with the support of collaborating local institutions.
In 1936 propaganda reached a new dimension
At the Nuremberg Party Congress of 1936, the anti-Soviet agitation of the Nazi regime had reached a new dimension. The second four-year plan achieved here was characterized by economic self-sufficiency and accelerated actual rearmament. The Spanish Civil War began in July of that year. During this phase, the regime carried out extensive alliance propaganda against the Soviet Union at exhibitions and trade fairs. In particular, with the large-scale enemy image exhibitions that began in the fall of 1936, unity was to be demonstrated.
Italy and Hungary were involved with their own special shows in the “Great Anti-Bolshevik Show”, which opened in the library building of the Deutsches Museum in Munich in November 1936. This exhibition was presented in seven major cities of the German Reich until 1938 and, according to the organizers, should have had more than 800,000 visitors. At the same time, numerous other anti-Semitic and war-preparation traveling exhibitions such as “A View of the Soviet Paradise” and “World Plague Bolshevism” were on the road in rural areas. The touring show “World Enemy No. 1: Bolshevism”, built into truck trailers, toured Germany for a year and a half and is said to have been visited by more than 1.4 million onlookers at around 60 locations.
“The Wandering Jew” – also in Vienna
The following year, 1937, the hate exhibition “The Wandering Jew” opened at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. From August 1938 the anti-Semitic hodgepodge was also shown in Vienna, and then in other cities. “The Wandering Jew” has inscribed itself in the historical memory of the federal capital. The striking advertising poster served as a time marker for the year 1938 in the Austrian feature film “Der Bockerer”.
This exhibition was edited particularly luridly. Its structure, its staging impetus and the intensive advertising show how much emphasis was placed on voyeurism and curiosity in order to attract the audience.
The war means the even closer connection between propaganda and violence. Numerous examples have been handed down that prove that enemy image exhibitions were carried out in advance of anti-Semitic measures and deportations. For example, in connection with the traveling exhibition “Le Juif et la France” in the occupied cities of Paris, Bordeaux and Nancy in 1941/42 or with the deportation of the Jewish population of Hungary in 1944.
Crowd pullers in National Socialism
According to the sources that have been handed down, hate exhibitions are among the crowd pullers in National Socialism. Even in the social democratic exile newspaper The socialist struggle It said in 1939 with reference to Austria: “The only cultural events in which mass participation has really been achieved so far are the exhibitions: ‘The Wandering Jew’, the ‘Anti-Comintern Exhibition’ and ‘Degenerate Art'”. Several hundred thousand visitors should not have been uncommon. There were hardly any official protests by democratic governments. And if so, it was preferably a comprehensive demarcation, but never a general criticism of anti-Semitic discrimination.
Outside Germany, on the other hand, counter-exhibitions were carried out by displaced persons or by communist organizations. The actors did not go unnoticed by the National Socialists. Even small exhibitions that did educational work against the crimes of National Socialism tried to fight the Nazi regime at a high political level with what seemed disproportionate aggression.
The Austrian Irene Harand, who published the writing “Sein Kampf. Answer to Hitler” self-published, as a reaction to the exhibition “The Eternal Jew” in Munich in 1937, a stamp campaign with portraits of important Jewish personalities. This campaign is one of the few resistance actions against a National Socialist exhibition of enemy images.