The transmission of household objects from the National Socialist era to the present in Germany and Austria: a local conversation within a globalized discourse

Abstract

Increasingly, scholars of Holocaust memory stress its globalization: the ways in which the Holocaust has become a model or reference point for remembered events that belong to quite different historical and cultural contexts. The best of this literature acknowledges the ways in which the local, national, and global are in continual dialogue. This article looks at an instance in which memory remains stubbornly local and national even in contexts in which it is ostensibly internationalized. The article is concerned with history exhibitions about the Nazi era in Germany and Austria and examines one particular set of museum objects: household possessions that have been stored in homes since 1945 and that are typically presented by the museum as having ‘resurfaced’ in the present. These objects are used to concretize abstract processes of remembering and forgetting, communication and silence, in the years from 1945 to the end of the twentieth century. As such, they form part of ongoing debates about how family memory operated during that period in Germany and Austria.