WEBVTT

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My name is Dr. James Bulgin.

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I'm Head of Public History at Imperial
War Museums in Britain,

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but I was Head of Content for the new Holocaust
Galleries at Imperial War Museums.

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And today I'm at the
German Historical Museum

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at this new exhibition
"On Displaying Violence".

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So "The Horror Camps" is an exhibition
that opened in London

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very shortly after the end of the war,

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and it uses large images of liberation,

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predominantly of Belsen, as its
core mode of display.

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And of course, the idea behind doing that

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is to somehow bring you into
the same world.

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So, contemporarily, there's a
range of perspectives

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about how imagery of this nature
should be used,

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or, in fact, whether it should
be used at all.

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There're some people who would say,

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"You should use the imagery unconditionally
without filter,

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because it exists, it's an established
part of the historical record,

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and to suppress it is a meaningless
gesture."

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There's some people who would say, "You
should never use the imagery,

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under any circumstances, it
can never be used.

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It's such a kind of dereliction
of responsibility

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to our ethical obligation to the
people in the imagery,

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and it should be perpetually
unused by the museums."

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And then there's a whole range of positions
in between those two things.

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So this opening space of the exhibition
is called "The Horror Camps",

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and that title is derived from
the history itself.

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That was the expression that was used
in British media at the time

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to describe Belsen.

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But what's really interesting is here,
and as was the case at the time,

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it's not just "The Horror Camp", which
is how Belsen was described,

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but "The Horror Camps".

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And what that suggests is this
universalisation

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of the camp environment.

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So the specificity of place is
lost almost immediately.

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What we also see is the process
by which the identity

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of those who are liberated is
defined really early on,

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or, in fact, undefined, as
it's described here,

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an invisibility occurs.

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Because, of course, a really large
number of the people

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who were liberated at Belsen were Jewish.

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It's gratifying to see here these people
re-introduced into the frame,

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a kind of a correction in that
act of elision.

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And, interpretively, it's
interesting to me

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that they're positioned at this height.

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So we effectively meet them at eye level.

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And some of their humanity or some of
our responses to their humanity

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are derived from the fact that
we encounter them,

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in an almost unexpected way, directly
by looking them in the eyes.

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So a lot of people, when they think about
the history of the Second World War

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and the history of the Holocaust,

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their memory takes them to the end of the
war and then it sort of stops.

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Whereas the reality is, of course,
that after the war,

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there were tens of thousands of survivors
with nowhere to go.

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And so they ended up living
in these places.

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And these places became really
important sites of

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self-assertion, self-identity,
trying to define and carve out

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different anticipations of the future etc.

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The exhibition at the Belsen DP Camp
is really kind of distinct

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because it's something which doesn't
just exemplify the experiences

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of the people that it deals with, but is
a product of their own effort.

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So they fabricated it themselves.

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They're not speaking objectively about
something at arm's length.

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They're talking about themselves,
what they've experienced,

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what they are experiencing in the immediate
contemporaneous presence.

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And it's interesting as well
to be in an exhibition,

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seeing how an exhibition in
the post-war period

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became a means of defining
this community,

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not just what happened to them
or where they were,

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but how they looked towards
the future as well.