Visiting the exhibition Hitler and the Germans:  National Community and Crime at the German Historical Museum, I found very little new about Hitler and even less about “the Germans.”

I did find interesting the display and discussion of the national community as connected to perpetration. However, the presentation of crime, or perpetration, lacked individuals and their daily choices and was instead filled with examples of the masses looking for security and stability. The exhibition was celebrated in the local German press as revolutionary simply for showing so much of Hitler, and for connecting his rule to the German people.

It is not a small thing, this act of naming, and the exhibition does that, but then compiles exhibits: posters, photos, Hitler’s aquarelles, busts and books and Nazi advertising in materials that were mostly used for propaganda.

There was a fear expressed in the press around the opening of the exhibition that right wing extremists and Neo- Nazis would come and admire it, now in the open. Those worries were dismissed as the curators assured the prospective visitors that Hitler is not presented spectacularly, and so those loathed groups, which also “probably do not go to museums,” would not come.

Here is the first time where presumption about class, education, racism and origins from the former east could be easily detected but not explicitly discussed.

The mix of thinking about what is presented in the exhibition together with how it will be consumed was at the center of the exhibition’s review in the German press (see, in German, a review in the Spiegel). The curators Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Dr. Simone Erpel, Klaus-Jürgen Sembach  made sure that whenever a photo of Hitler is shown with his gaze directed at the camera, the affect of dimming light and photos of Nazi crimes will flicker in the background, so that the visitor is always reminded of the crimes together with whatever else they might feel or think of 1933-1945.

An interview for the center-left weekly Die Zeit focused on the historical relations between the national community and perpetrators. The November 4th issue of Die Zeit has a cover article about how the fourth generation family members relate to the deeds of their great-grandparents. As opposed to the third generation, who generally refused to admit that their grandparents were perpetrators (see Welzer Opa war kein Nazi), the fourth generation (14-19 years old were interviewed) would admit that their families were involved with the Nazi crimes, but ask time and again, “what does it have to do with me.”

The teachers seem as confused in trying to answer this simple question, a confusion I see well in my current study of educational programs at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. What most educators and teachers worry about is that the pupils show no affect. I can attest: not only are they not moved, they are encouraged to perform a repetition of horrible historical facts as well as reflect emotionally on the exhibit’s materials when asked: “Which photo or room moved you the most?”

Each memorial is supposed to raise different feelings: in the Holocaust memorial one is to feel lost; in the Topography of Terror: angry. What should one feel in the Hitler exhibit?

In looking at people in the exhibition (it was full, we waited in line for about 30 minutes to get in) I saw that it was important to project, or perform, seriousness. The curators seeded in the exhibition a few parts of Chaplin’s “the great dictator” as well as other comedians and cartoonists work on Hitler. However, they were situated in close proximity to very sad documents and photos, so most visitors did not laugh.

The three very visible right wing extremists I encountered observed Hitler’s busts with awe, as well as the beer glasses, Nazi toys and other memorabilia of that time.  They were walking there alone. German parents came with teenage children; tourists speaking many languages came to see the event, too.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung criticized the exhibition for not showing the growing loyalty of the people as they were awarded the new jobs, apartment and capital of Jews as the war progressed. I went to the exhibition with a colleague and a friend, Victoria Bishop-Kendzia, who is writing an ethnography on school classes visiting the Jewish museum in Berlin.  She summed it up: “there is no perpetrators’ narrative.”

Not because the crimes are not named, but because there are little, scattered, opportunities to become empathetic, or to understand how it was for Germans then, without an immediate repudiation.

A few reviews commented on the timely opening of the exhibition around Sarrazin’s  book publication on the German race (and other less fortunate races like “the Muslims”) in late October and when Merkel gave an interview in Potsdam in which she announced “the failure of multiculturalism” and lamented the fact they, the immigrants, do not try hard enough to become Germans.

If such an exhibition, besides its ritualized “newness” quality, could illuminate, or help see differently how certain concepts, which are not the same as the Nazi’s used, can be limiting or hurting, we could say that its goal is well achieved. But I am afraid that its stays on a safer, familiar level of fascination with the exhibits and their piling-on, in a dimly lit, very old-new German Historical Museum.

Sometimes the solution to theoretical problems become apparent not through careful research or close reading of important texts, but in the course of thinking about everyday life, in the course of leading a reflective life.  You have an everyday encounter. You give it thought, and a major intellectual problem is solved.

I had such an experience and revelation at a lunch in Berlin in November of 1994.  I remember the discussion.  I remember the setting, an Italian restaurant in the leafy outskirts of the city.  But I have only a vague recollection of my lunch partner, a female German scholar.

I was in Berlin in 1994 on a leg of a United States Information Agency sponsored lecture tour in Europe.  The main event was in Poland, where I helped inaugurate a short lived American Cultural Center there.  Following my stop in Warsaw, I flew to Berlin to speak in the well established American Cultural Center there about my book The Cynical Society, but also gave a talk at the Free University about my other relatively recent books, Beyond Glasnost and After the Fall.  The first Berlin talk was about my work on American political culture, the second on my work in Central and Eastern Europe.  After the second talk, I had a lunch with my hostess.  We engaged in the normal small talk.  No doubt, we discussed the presentation I gave and the reaction of the audience.  The details escape me except for one exchange.  It went something like this:

Jeff – “I think that it is not at all clear that Hitler’s crimes were qualitatively different than those of Stalin.”

Hostess –  “No!  Hitler was unique.  The intentional project of modern industrial genocide was unprecedented, uniquely evil, something that must not be forgotten.”

We went on and discussed this, I, as an expert on the Soviet bloc and its democratic opposition, she as a German scholar.   The conversation was warm, not at all heated, though the subject matter was tough.  I emphasized the immensity of Stalin’s crimes, of the gulag, of the mass starvation in Ukraine, the brutal treatment of those who dissent and of inconvenient national minorities.  She countered with recollections of the Holocaust.

At some point, I don’t remember when, I realized a paradox.  The meaning of this exchange would be precisely reverse, if I argued the position she presented, and she argued the position that I presented.  The embodiment of the argument determined the meaning of the exchange.

If I, as an American Jewish scholar, argued the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and she, as a German scholar, argued that Nazism was no worse than Soviet Communism, we would have been emphasizing the differences between us, revealing suspiciousness of the other, moving in the direction of nationalism.  As it was, we recognized each other as open people, as colleagues.  The meeting that we had was one of mutual respect and understanding.  The meeting of the imagined encounter would have been antagonistic.  Discussion could continue in the actual encounter, it would end in the hypothetical one.  Learning would accrue in the real one, probably wouldn’t in the imagined one.

As the author of The Cynical Society, I am quite critical of reductive reasoning, reasoning that reduces the meaning of an utterance to the qualities of the speaker, particularly related to positions and motives of wealth and power.   I emphasize that text should not be reduced to context.  On the other hand, as a sociologist, I know that context matters.  At the Berlin lunch, I think I saw how the criticism of sociological reduction and the insight of sociological knowledge can both stand.  Text and context are related in important ways, but context doesn’t determine text.  It culturally informs it.

This has many practical applications.  The cultural context of American racism, thus, informs how blacks and whites can speak to each other effectively.  This is why being race blind is funny when Stephen Colbert asserts it. It is why when whites complain that there is a need to struggle for equal rights for whites; they actually intend the opposite of what their words on the surface apparently say.  Indeed it is why when the Supreme Court rules that the law must be color blind, it is on very dubious grounds.