This book is the first full-length study of the museum object as a memory medium in history
exhibitions about the Nazi era the Second World War and the Holocaust. Over recent decades
German and Austrian exhibition-makers have engaged in significant programmes of object
collection often in collaboration with witnesses and descendants. At the same time
exhibition-makers have come to recognise the degree to which the National Socialist era was
experienced materially through the loss acquisition imposition destruction and
re-purposing of objects. In the decades after 1945 encounters with material culture from the
Nazi past continued both within the family and in the public sphere. In analysing how these
material engagements are explored in the museum the book not only illuminates a key aspect of
German and Austrian cultural memory but contributes to wider debates about relationships
between the human and object worlds.
