By Rob Cawston
It is not the type of subject that you expect to raise objections in Germany but... a public dispute has broken out over the location of a new Holocuast exhibition, "11,000 Jewish Children. With the Reichsbann to death."
The CEO of Deutsche Bahn, the country's uber-efficient railway company, has given financial, organizational and technical reasons for not allowing the exhibition to run in stations across the country. He also seems to be a budding art critic, saying "The subject is far too serious for people to engage with it while chewing on a sandwich and rushing to catch a train."
This surely misses the point.
An exhibition commissioned and designed for stations will only make sense when run in stations. As Germany's Transport minister Wolfgang Tiefensee stated this week, "National Socialism was a dictatorship that was played out in everyday life and that was drawn from everyday life ... in those same places, in the train stations."
I'm not saying whack up statues, paintings and monuments in every public space - I wouldn't want to be reminded of the horrors of the gas chamber every time I was in my local post office. But... there seems little point hiding projects away in a closed museum space to be seen only by those with an interest in the subject matter already. (Literaly) bumping into artworks in public spaces cuts across the everyday and forces us to think again and to remember, at least for a moment.
The controversial British historian David Irving once said: "I am not a Holocaust denier. I am bored by the Holocaust and I think most of the world is, too." Are they the same thing? If we are bored by the Holocaust do we risk forgetting it too?
With the current rise in far-right violence in the country the staging of interesting and engaging exhibitions in the public sphere is becoming more - not less - important for Germans and Germany.
Picture: "holocaust memorial Berlin" on Flickr
