What Would You Rescue?

Projects in the funding priority “Education in cultural spaces” open up unique, empathic, and creative approaches to the complex history of National Socialist persecution and to the artistic heritage of its victims. 
An example of this is the multimedia touring exhibition “Culture Rescuers.” The project tells the story of people who have rescued cultural objects, family stories or music from oblivion since the National Socialist era. History becomes accessible and inspires young people with an interactive and contemporary approach to National Socialist history.

What would you rescue and how would you define culture? With this question, the KOOPERATIVE BERLIN exhibition attracts visitors directly into its theme at the entrance: postcards with possible answers are pinned up and represent the initial point for a walk around the exhibition.
Four chapters – Courage, Hope, Life and Commemoration – are interconnected like a web: the personal stories of eight culture rescuers from four generations are told. At one time they were hiding diamonds and secretly distributing leaflets, today they are saving music from oblivion, processing memories in short stories and comics, researching family secrets, and laying Stumbling Stone memorials.

This impression is not random: “Culture is like a network that connects us with other people,” explains Ljiljana Heise, the exhibition’s curator. Under National Socialism, our cultural network was severely damaged. As people were persecuted and murdered, culture was also destroyed and robbed. With their courage and commitment, the culture rescuers repaired this network as best they could – and they tell stories of persecution and exclusion, of loss and pain. But these stories are also ones of resistance that testify to courage and the fight for recognition.

Journalist Nora Hespers tells one of these stories: her father, Dirk, had told her that the National Socialists hanged her grandfather, Theo. Her father sang resistance songs and spent his life campaigning for his father’s memorial – with little success. Decades later, Nora Hespers is investigating the fate of her grandfather, reading interrogation files, producing a podcast and writing a book.
At the opening of the exhibition in Leipzig, she sang the resistance song “Mein Vater wird gesucht” [They’re looking for my father]. It was a powerful and emotional moment that shows the impact that rescued cultural assets such as music can still have today.

One more story is told by Eva Weyl, who unwittingly rescued diamonds from the National Socialists. In 1942, at the age of six, she was deported with her parents to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, one of the places where the National Socialists interned German and Dutch Jews. Her mother secretly sewed diamonds into Eva’s coat buttons – no one discovered the diamonds and the family survived. Later on, her mother had a ring made from them, and Eva still wears this ring every day.

Nowadays, Eva Weyl works relentlessly as a historical eyewitness, talks to pupils about her experiences and cautions: “We all live in a luxurious world. Reflect on how others are doing. Try to do something good. Rescue someone.”

The exhibition is particularly aimed at young people, offering a low-threshold approach to the topics of coming to terms with the past and exclusion as well as a supporting program with interviews with historical eyewitnesses: They can experience the stories of the culture rescuers via videos, graphic novels, radio plays, and interactive stations.

And what would the visitors rescue? On their postcards, they mention cultural heritage such as poems and plays, personal memories such as photos and recipes, but also the repositories of modernity: hard disks and servers.

Find out more about the “Culture Rescuers” exhibition.

From September 28th to December 8th, 2024, the exhibition will be on display at the Kampnagel cultural venue in Hamburg.

Author: Sophie Ziegler, EVZ Foundation