No Silence, but Whispers: Postwar Exhibitions on Nazi Crimes and the Shoah in Austria, 1945–1949

Abstract

ABSTRACT Until the 1990s, the myth that Austria had been a victim of National Socialism reigned. Recent historiography has turned this discourse diametrically around, highlighting, among other things, the limited willingness of large segments of Austrian society after 1945 to address their guilt and responsibility for Nazi crimes. However, these issues have seldom been explored in depth. The exhibitions of the early postwar era shine light on precisely these tentative attempts. Those initiated by the Allies, aimed to confront the locals with Nazi crimes, were followed by local exhibitions, which were nevertheless unable to find a means of expression transcending a mere documentation of the horrors that had occurred. The Viennese exhibition Niemals vergessen! – a spectacular show from a curatorial perspective – already moved in a twilight zone between serious engagement with the subject and projecting guilt onto Germany. Yet the show’s motto − ‘We are all guilty!’ − demonstrates that such statements were possible in 1946 that would later become suppressed. This phase of direct confrontation with National Socialism ended with a watered-down attempt to stage an anti-racist exhibition at the Natural History Museum in 1949, although further exhibitions were mounted by resistance groups, albeit with different aims in mind. One reason for the failure of these early initiatives may have been the absence of an appropriate language with which to discuss the Holocaust, a form of ‘speechlessness’ in light of the dimensions of this crime. Not until 1965 would the Holocaust be exhibited to the Viennese public, in a traveling exhibition at the Chamber of Labor. The great silence that is presumed to have dominated in the early postwar period turns out to be no less of a myth: Whoever listened closely would at least have heard a whisper.