Historical exhibitions are in vogue. Lavishly done and well visited, they are formative of the construction of historical reality. Yet just this way of shaping and conveying an image of the past is problematic.

The images in films or books, photographs or pictures that are used in historical exhibitions cannot reconstruct a past event (Hayden White). Historians and curators must nevertheless rely upon such material. If they assume that they can, with help of these media, actually represent the 'process-character of the real', that is, the course of events, they have succumbed to an error. For the representation of the historical is the result of a 'fiction making activity' (Eva Hohenberger drawing on William Howard Guynn), a subsequent appropriation of history that at most shows a part of the truth.

History Exhibitions

In exhibitions images (which will be the topic of the following text), texts and space are combined into a unity. Yet each of these three levels – image, text and space – presents a problem.

The image

Images often serve in historical exhibitions to illustrate events, themes, etc., without the curators having clarified the question about their documentary content or considered that images are themselves part of a historical construction. Time and again it is 'forgotten […] that images by no means merely illustrate, but that they are part of the construction of that reality which they seemingly illustrate. All the more insistently therefore should it be noted that […] images shape feeling, reason, action and memory' (The art historian Horst Bredekamp in his inaugurating speech for the exhibition Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen (i.e., Myths of the Nations. 1945 – Arena of Memories on 1 October 2004).

How much images do this is demonstrated by a particularly significant example from contemporary history. In 1945 Stanisław Mucha photographed the gateway of the death-camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This photograph has been used for decades all over the world in books, films and exhibitions; it has become an 'icon of extermination' (Cornelia Brink). Yet on closer examination it becomes clear that this photograph precisely does not show what its viewer believes he sees. It was taken after the liberation of the camp in 1945; in it neither suffering people nor trains nor guards in the towers are to be seen. Mucha also did not photograph the camp itself, but only its entrance with the gateway. Nonetheless, his image has shaped 'feelings, reason, actions and memory' (Gottfried Boehm). It hangs, as it were, 'on the thread of an invisible text'. The effect of the photograph lies probably above all in this, that the chain of association evoked in the viewer – Auschwitz/extermination/emptiness/cold/loneliness – appeals directly to his emotions and empathy. Presumably it is this immense presence of the photograph that has led curators to use it time and again, without taking account of its effect, its history of reception and its meaning.

The assumption that images are documents of the past makes their use in exhibitions seem a simple matter. Curators see in them the ideal partner to represent, say, a battle or an execution. But as historical constructions they ought to be considered as critically as are texts.

Images and the text

Historical exhibitions often follow a chronological or thematic basic pattern. Next to a text that describes an event and its consequences an image is set that is supposed to illustrate this text. Yet the image can illustrate neither the event nor its consequences. Mucha's photograph, for example, does not show the extermination of the Jews, even though its accompanying text in almost all exhibitions describes the history of the extermination camp Auschwitz Birkenau in detail.

The inability of an image to be a perfect illustration is bound up with the fact that it comes from another time – images, in contrast to their texts, belong to the past. Strictly speaking, the texts describe a perspective of the present on the past, whereas images describe the perspective of the past, without reference to our present. The curator produces the latter. With regard to exhibitions, this can mean in the worst case that a contemporary text uses a historical construction of the past without questioning the perspective of the construction. (Horst Bredekamp)

The space

The visitor to an exhibition moves in a space in which he can see simultaneously images, display cabinets, texts long and short, and so on. The question about perception in space and time is thus the third element of an exhibition. The solution of the problem of setting movement and perception in space into a meaningful visual logic depends decisively on what conceptual role is played by the images. If the images merely illustrate the texts, there can be no visual logic in the space, even though the images are the constitutive condition for exhibitions and dominate the viewer's perception. If exhibitions were taken seriously as exhibitions, the level of images would strictly speaking have to be so organised that the succession and juxtaposition of images would yield a pictorial narrative related to the theme of the exhibition. In the exhibition Mythen der Nationen. 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen (i.e., Myths of the Nations. 1945 – Arena of Memories), shown in the German Historical Museum in Berlin 2004, the attempt was made not to use images as a means of illustration, but rather to make images the starting-point of all reflections on the concept of the exhibition.

Literature Boehm, Gottfried: Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder. In: Christa Maar/Hubert Burda (Hg.), Iconic Turn. Die neue Macht der Bilder, Köln, Dumont 2004, ISBN 3-8321-7873-2 Bredekamp, Horst: Bildakte als Zeugnis und Urteil. In: Flacke, Monika (Hg.): Mythen der Nationen. 1949 – Arena der Erinnerungen, Mainz, Philipp von Zabern 2004, S. 45 – 51, ISBN: 3-8053-3298-X Brink, Cornelia: Ikonen der Vernichtung. Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945, Berlin 1998 Hohenberger, Eva: Dokumentarfilmtheorie. In: Hohenberger, Eva (Hg.): Bilder des Wirklichen. Texte zur Theorie des Dokumentarfilms, Berlin, Verlag Vorwerk 8 1998, Guynn, William Howard: A Cinema of Nonfiction, Rutherford N.J. 1990 White, Hayden: Das Ereignis der Moderne. In: Hohenberger, Eva; Keilbach, Judith (Hg.): Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. Dokumentarfilm, Fernsehen und Geschichte, Berlin, Verlag Vorwerk 82003, ISBN 3-930916-63-0 White, Hayden: Auch Klio dichtet oder die Fiktion des Faktischen, Stuttgart 1986