“NEVER AGAIN.”
HOW CAN THE MEMORY OF NAZI CRIMES BE PRESERVED?
Based on: Bundeskunsthalle
What will become of the memory of the crimes of National Socialism once the last witnesses are gone? How can authentic sites and the material evidence of these crimes be protected in a world increasingly dominated by digital media? And how can attempts to relativize history be countered? These questions are the starting point for the exhibition NIE WIEDER! Gegen das Vergessen der NS-Verbrechen (NEVER AGAIN! Against Forgetting Nazi Crimes), on view at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn until May 2, 2027.
The exhibition’s curators start from the premise that European remembrance culture is at a moment of fundamental change. In the coming years, very few Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution will still be able to speak about their experiences in person. Surviving testimonies, documents and objects, and the sites where the crimes were committed, are therefore becoming ever more important, as are the ways in which they are interpreted and passed on to future generations.
The exhibition is divided into five sections: Knowledge, Sites of Crime, Memorials, Memory and Future. Each explores a different aspect of the responsibility to preserve memory. The first is concerned with research and the communication of facts. The curators point out that despite many decades of research, there are still untapped sources and archives, and that knowledge of the crimes committed by Germans, especially in Eastern Europe, remains incomplete. They also stress that knowledge of history alone does not guarantee democratic attitudes, but that a democracy that allows its own history of violence to be relativized, or the institutions that research it to be attacked, undermines its own foundations.
The question of authentic sites features prominently. Former camps, sites of mass murder and other historic places are not only places of remembrance and mourning but also material evidence of what happened. Preserving, documenting and further researching them is becoming increasingly important in a world in which the authenticity of images and testimonies is at times called into question.
The Bundeskunsthalle also shows that memory is not confined to documents and museum display cases. It is shaped by monuments, family recollections and stories passed down from generation to generation, and also by art. Works by artists such as Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, Harun Farocki, Käthe Kollwitz, Zoran Mušič, Józef Szajna, Luc Tuymans and Natalia Romik therefore form an important part of the exhibition. They deal both with the crimes themselves and with their afterlife in social memory.
The final section of the exhibition, devoted to the future of memory, is particularly significant. One of the projects on display is an interactive digital testimony by Holocaust survivor Eva Umlauf, which lets visitors put questions to her and receive answers she recorded in advance. New technologies can help preserve individual stories, but they also raise questions of authenticity, context and the limits of replacing direct encounters with digital ones.
Yet the exhibition is not only about ways of remembering. The mechanisms that “produce forgetting”—denial, relativization and the political instrumentalization of history—are another important theme. At a time of growing distrust of sources, when images are easily manipulated, material evidence and reliably documented testimony become all the more important.
NIE WIEDER! is a joint project of the Bundeskunsthalle and the Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora (Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation). Contributors to the exhibition include historian Jens-Christian Wagner, memory scholar Aleida Assmann, Meron Mendel, Susanne Siegert and Auschwitz Survivor Eva Umlauf, who shares patronage of the exhibition with the German Minister of State for Culture and the Media, Wolfram Weimer.
The “Never Again” of the title is presented here not as a self-evident declaration but as a commitment. Memory does not sustain itself. It requires knowledge, the protection of sites and sources, the work of institutions, new forms of education, and a willingness to stand up to those who try to distort history or remove it from public consciousness.
36