Julia Wycital is in her final semester in the American Studies BA program at the University of Heidelberg. Her interest in history was sparked early, during her school years, since she enjoyed reading and learning about Ancient Greek legends and myths. In 2018/2019 she was an exchange student at the University of New Mexico, where she developed a strong interest in US immigration policy and its history. Her other historical interests include the period of the Second World War. Julia Wycital completed a (partially remote) internship at the GHI in the spring of 2020. Href was lucky to recruit her as an author for our blog series on the impact of COVID 19 on cultural heritage institutions in Germany and beyond.

During the current COVID crisis, people around the world have felt more physically isolated than ever. Yet, digital media have offered an exciting range of experiences to explore history in a virtual environment. For example, the German National Library currently offers seven virtual exhibitions in German and English accessible from anywhere around the world. From the exhibition “5000 years of media history online,” in which you can learn about the importance of Egyptian hieroglyphs as one of the first written systems of humanity, to the exhibition “Arts in Exile,” online visitors have the opportunity to still engage with history as COVID-19 has forced cultural institutions to close their doors this spring temporarily. The German National Library (DNB) has been collecting and archiving over 30 million media items in the German language since 1913.[1] While education and culture are the responsibility of the individual German states, there exists one national library is decentralized in its structure, with two branches, one in Frankfurt am Main and one in Leipzig. This is a result of the postwar German division and reunification.

I took a closer look at two of the seven virtual exhibitions, both of which have been permanent exhibitions at the German National Library before. The exhibition “100^th anniversary of World War 1” is the reopening of the First World War Collection of 1914, which was first set up by the Deutsche Bücherei, one of the antecedent institutions of the DNB and founded 1912 in Leipzig. This exhibition showcases different aspects of everyday life’s hardships during the war, including the blockade of food imports or the propaganda used on young German schoolchildren. Visitors of the online exhibit can switch between eight categories. For example, the “Media World” and “People” during the First World War are offering information in the form of a gallery and an introductory text on the subject. In the category “Collecting the War,” the audience learns that in 1914 many believed that the war would soon end victoriously for Germany. That is why such a numerous and diverse range of documents from this time have been preserved. In this category, the visitor has access to newspapers, posters, photographs or a map titled “The ships sunk by our submarines according to position and number” from 1918 that were circulated during the war. Moreover, the category “Propaganda,” contains, among other propaganda material, digitalized drawings from German satirical journals. Before the start of the war, these journals were an outlet for social and political criticism of German society, but eventually they had to submit to the official war narrative. Overall, the exhibition offers significant insights into life during the First World War.

Compared to the First World War exhibition, the virtual exhibition “Exile. Experience and Testimony” concentrates on the process of emigration during the Nazi regime, including the Second World War. It is usually exhibited permanently at the Frankfurt branch of the German National Library. On the DNB website, the exhibition is structured similarly to the First World War exhibition; three different categories inform visitors about the actual process of escaping, biographies of eight exiles, and countries of refuge. One part of the display of the escaping process highlights the support system the refugees needed to leave their country successfully. The exhibition then shows documents and photographs that were often connected to international aid organizations. They forged passports if the refugee had no valid identity papers or gave information on escape routes. Moreover, using a letter of Sigmund Freud from August 7, 1938, the exhibit shows that renowned individuals also lent their names to organizations such as the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom. In the category “People in Exile” the DNB introduces among others the Austrian lawyer and librarian Clementine Zernik, whose license to practice law was revoked because of her Jewish background when the annexation of Austria in 1938 occurred. Zernik then emigrated to the United States but could not follow her career as a lawyer and instead started working for the group Austrian Action that supported Austrian emigrants. The virtual visitor can take a look at her document of disbarment for a lawyer or at her box with mementos, such as postcards, tickets, etc. from Vienna. This virtual exhibition profoundly communicates the complexity of exile between the years of 1933 and 1945.

The virtual exhibitions of the German National Library are a great way of curating museum content to a large audience during a time when visiting in person is not an option. The two exhibitions that I presented in this blog post are informative resources for learning about the First World War in all its variety, and about the phenomenon of exile during the Nazi era. But one problem of these online exhibits is that they mostly consist of editorial content illustrated with pictures of documents. They cannot replace the firsthand experience of encountering documents or objects in a permanent exhibition and feeling the history behind them. Nevertheless, the online exhibits of the German National Library offer educational spaces to engage with German history and individual biographies and fates

[1] “Portrait of the German National Library.” German National Library. Accessed May 18, 2020. https://www.dnb.de/EN/Ueber-uns/Portraet/portraet_node.html

Almost two years ago, the Library of Congress launched the crowdsourcing platform By the People, which invites volunteers to transcribe, review, and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typescripts from the collections of the Library of Congress. The project runs on the open source software Concordia, developed by the Library of Congress to support crowdsourced transcription projects.

Among the manuscripts made available for transcriptions are documents in German script. In a fascinating recent blog post, David B. Morris, the German Area Specialist, European Division, at the Library of Congress, discusses the art of Unlocking the Secrets of German Handwritten Documents.

The blog post will be particularly interesting for contributors to GHI’s German Heritage in Letters Project, which uses Scripto as the platform to crowdsource transcriptions of German letters, including letters written in Kurrentschrift.

On April 30, 2020, the German government began to lift some of the lockdown restrictions put in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic as the number of new infections per day in the country decreased. Museums, along with public parks and churches, have been allowed to reopen, as long as they follow federal social distancing guidelines.¹ German museums will now be able to draw in visitors once again, but the visiting experience will be very different from what it was before. The opening procedure of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, with social distancing guidelines in place, provides a demonstration of how life will continue in Germany amid the pandemic.

The Stadtgeschichtliches Museum is the municipal museum of the city of Leipzig. It consists of eight exhibition buildings spread out around the city, each containing galleries pertaining to a topic of local history or culture. The museum’s main building at the sixteenth-century Old Town Hall contains a permanent exhibit of the city of Leipzig’s cultural history from the Middle Ages to the present. The nearby Haus Böttchergäßchen, a modern building, features space for rotating exhibitions about further topics of city art and culture. This building also houses an interactive children’s museum aimed at museumgoers ten and under. FORUM 1813, located next to the city’s famous Battle of the Nations monument, is a small museum dedicated to the Napoleonic Wars and the decisive Battle of Leipzig of 1813 that saw the defeat of Napoleon in the German states. The Schillerhaus, located north of the city center, features an exhibit in a farmhouse where poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller spent a summer in 1785. The Museum Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum holds an exhibition about coffee in Germany inside the oldest coffee house in the country, which opened in 1711. The Sportmuseum, next to the Red Bull Arena, covers regional athletic history and contains one of the largest sports-related collections in all of Germany. Finally, the Alte Börse, Leipzig’s seventeenth century customs house near the Old Town Hall, hosts lectures, readings, and other events put on by the museum organization.²

Like other museums in Germany, the Stadtgeschichtliches Musuem closed all of its facilities to the public in March 2020. On May 7, due to the lifting of restrictions, most of the museum’s facilities have reopened. Only the Children’s Museum and the libraries in the Haus Böttchergäßchen remain closed. Because the pandemic has not fully passed, special regulations in line with government recommendations are in place for museum visitors. All exhibition spaces will limit the number of visitors allowed inside at the same time. Visitors must remain six feet (two meters) apart from museum staff and each other, and must wear adequate mouth-nose coverings. The museum is encouraging visitors to use electronic payment for admissions rather than cash, and is engaging in regular disinfecting and cleaning of the facilities. No screening is required to enter, but hand sanitizer is offered for all visitors at entrance areas. All visitors are also asked to respect hygiene measures by regularly washing their hands, coughing into their arm, and keeping their hands away from their faces. 

Because of the almost two-month closure, the Stadtgeschichtliches Musuem postponed all of its upcoming special exhibitions and extended the duration of the exhibitions on display at the time of the closure. During the closure period, it also started a new online exhibit. Titled Hoffnungszeichen, (“Signs of Hope”), the exhibit features images and descriptions of artifacts from the museum’s collection that provided hope for city residents in past years. The first artifact exhibited was a communion chalice from 1632, a year when Leipzig suffered from a plague epidemic amid the Thirty Years’ War. The purpose of the exhibit, according to Musuem Director Dr. Anselm Hartinger, is to show that this generation of Leipzigers “are by no means the first generation to be confronted with general societal challenges, pandemics, wars and upheavals in Leipzig, [who] learned to live with them and ultimately found a strengthened new beginning.”³ The exhibit also allows visitors to submit their own stories, photographs, and comments relating to their experience with the COVID-19 pandemic in Leipzig. On May 7, the museum opened a corresponding physical exhibition in the Haus Böttchergäßchen, featuring the objects the museum showed online and a selection of the digital submissions from visitors. 

By following federal guidelines and encouraging visitors to do the same, the Stadtgeschichtliches Musuem has managed successfully reopen as the pandemic continues. In doing so it provides a model for how museums elsewhere can reopen, though time will tell if these measures will effectively prevent the virus from spreading more in lieu of a full lockdown. The new exhibition demonstrates this museum’s recognition of COVID-19 as an important historical event that will be studied extensively in the future, and an intention to contribute to its documentation within its community. 

1. Nasr, Joseph. “Germany eases lockdown but Merkel warns of new outbreak risk.” Reuters, April 30, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-merkel/germany-eases-lockdown-but-merkel-warns-of-new-outbreak-risk-idUSKBN22C2WO. [↩]
2. “Unsere Häuser.” Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://www.stadtgeschichtliches-museum-leipzig.de/besuch/unsere-haeuser/. [↩]
3. “Stadtgeschichtliches Museum setzt digitale Hoffnungszeichen.” leipzig.de. Stadt Leipzig, March 24, 2020. https://www.leipzig.de/news/news/stadtgeschichtliches-museum-setzt-digitale-hoffnungszeichen/ [↩]

Editorial note: Betty Schaumburg is an intern at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. She is about to graduate with a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Her High School exchange in 2012 in Wisconsin sparked her curiosity in US history. During the course of her undergraduate studies, she also participated in the exchange program of Heidelberg University and spent her junior year at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, she narrowed her historical interest to the post-Civil War era, Reconstruction and the New South, which contributed to the topic of her Bachelor Thesis.

When I registered my Bachelor Thesis in the beginning of March, I had little idea how my research would be impacted by the looming threat of Covid-19. What started out as the exciting final stage of my Undergraduate Studies, turned out to be a rather complicated and uncertain process. Not only have near to all vital public research institutions closed, but even online book stores showed great delays in literature deliveries. As a direct result, many students who are currently in the same position as me, as well as  fellow researchers who are in the midst of their projects, have found themselves stranded and exposed to these unconventional times. This entry aims to describe how in the age of a pandemic I personally have adapted to the unusual circumstances in the duration of my research and utilized digital research in the midst of this Covid-19.

During the course of my academic exchange year at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, my interest in the Lost Cause mentality in the US South has manifested itself so greatly that I knew I would incorporate this topic into my Bachelor thesis. The fact that the Civil War outcome still has such a tremendous influence not only on political discourses around the country, but also on the academic sphere of universities and their students, triggered my interest in the topic of my thesis, which is dealing with North Carolina universities’ response to the rising opposition against Civil War remnants on these campuses. Since my Bachelor thesis primarily focuses on US soil, I narrowed my sources down to the American periphery.

First, I researched newspapers such as the New York Times and The Washington Post for articles discussing rising protests on North Carolina campuses surrounding Confederate monuments to get an idea about the national significance of these debates. What struck me most was the deal the University of Chapel Hill made with the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans concerning UNC’s controversial Silent Sam statue on their campus. According to the New York Times, the university reached a temporary settlement of $2.5 million with the division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to remove the statue from campus, in return for the division to take care of the monument.^[1] Immediately the questions “How influential are Confederate groups on North Carolina campuses? How do campuses address their controversial monuments?” came into mind.  

Consequently, I started searching on UNC’s website for internal sources about their statue and was successful. UNC offers free access to archive.org and their annual Alumni Reviews, which also contain articles about the completion of Silent Sam.^[2] While the reviews about the monument and newspaper articles of the revealing gave me a broad overview about how people at the time perceived the statue, the actual dedication speech by Julian Carr in 1913, exposing racist content,  is available for free on the internet.^[3] As a result, I started to search through selected campuses’ websites for released articles addressing controversial names of campus buildings, statues, and their dedication speeches, which led me to successfully retrieve several documents. Then, on the other hand, I researched statements released by the University administration addressing either the removal of named statues, or plans to regard them as historical artifacts to create a direct comparison of different perspectives throughout the University system. However, while it was difficult for me to find out how exactly the Confederate groups influenced or not influenced those decisions, I at least able to collect a spectrum of the statue’s and building’s timeline and the University’s standpoint on them.

Next, I was able to borrow two important books before the shut down of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro library that contextualize the history of Confederate groups and the manifestation of the Lost Cause into society.  While they enhanced my understanding of the movement behind the Lost Cause in general, they did not suffice to answer my first question. I also still needed about three other sources whose delivery were delayed by a full month due to Covid-19. I knew that due to the delay of the books I had to focus solely on online resources. I needed to dig deeper to analyze campus relationships with Confederate groups. That is why I now shifted my focus to the website newspapers.com, where many newspaper articles published over a span of centuries are available in digital form and continue to find the right resources that bring me closer to the answer to my questions by utilizing the online resources that UNC provides on their website.

Another important finding I made on the UNC website was North Carolina’s General Assembly’s decision to categorize Civil War monuments as “monuments of remembrance” resulting in the statues’ exemption from removal.^[4] This hence created the intentional exclusion of marginalized groups on campus and muffling of the Civil War monument opposition. I plan on researching more about the General Assembly’s rulings and impacts on campus life. 

Even though I had planned to use the sources the Library of Congress and UNC library provide for visitors, I have thus far gathered a detailed overview of critical questions vital to my Bachelor Thesis. Covid-19 prevented me from finding sufficient secondary source material concerning the history of the intermingling between Confederate groups and campuses, but UNC nevertheless provides a great range of digital sources concerning their own controversial history with “Silent Sam”. Overall, Universities in North Carolina do a good job in opening up the debate surrounding the Lost Cause and fill in some of the blanks. The pandemic has shown how easy a delay in research can be, and I was thus able to extend the deadline for my thesis to make use of my ordered books and the libraries once they open up again.

^[1] Michael Levinson, “Toppled but Not Gone: UNC Grapples Anew with the Fate of Silent Sam,” New York Times, February 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/us/unc-silent-sam-statue-settlement.html (Accessed May 5, 2020).

^[2] UNC Alumni Review, “The Soldiers Monument Unveiled”, June 1913,  p. 184, http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/191306/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=184#pg8 (Accessed May 13, 2020).

^[3] Julian S. Carr, “Unveiling of Confederate Monument at University. June 2, 1913” in the Julian Shakespeare Carr Papers #141, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://hgreen.people.ua.edu/transcription-carr-speech.html (Accessed May 13, 2020).

^[4] Adam Lovelady, “Statues and Statutes: Limits on Removing Monuments from Public Property,” August 22nd 2017, https://canons.sog.unc.edu/statues-statutes-limits-removing-monuments-public-property/ (Accessed May 13, 2020).

Figure 1: Angum Check and Tim Osborn, “We Tried to Peacefully Protest. The the University Shut Us Down,” The Nation, September 12, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/we-tried-to-peacefully-protest-then-the-university-shut-us-down/ (Accessed May 15, 2020).

Figure 2: UNC Alumni Review, “The Soldiers Monument Unveiled”, June 1913, p. 184, http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/191306/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=184#pg8 (Accessed May 15, 2020).

Editorial note: Thomas Biggs is an intern at the German Historical Institute Washington DC. He is a graduate of the George Washington University (2019) with a BA in International Affairs and minors in History and German Studies. He studied in Berlin for his junior year spring semester with the IES Abroad Language and Area Studies Program in collaboration with the Humboldt University of Berlin. During this semester he visited the Allied Museum Berlin as part of his coursework. His areas of study included security policy, US and German history, and the development of German democracy between 1815 and the present.

Every museum’s intention is to attract visitors: A museum wants people to experience the stories and objects it has on display, with the hope that they learn something new or understand something greater. Unique exhibitions and significant artifacts are what convince people to visit a specific museum location. The experience of being in the physical location, being able to see images or objects, hear, sounds, and sometimes even smell smells associated with a particular idea or period, is what drives people to visit a museum location. Information today is more accessible than ever, be it in books, on television, or on the internet. Yet people still visit museums, and million-dollar museum projects keep opening, because there is something so unique about the museum experience that cannot be conveyed through any other medium. It is a full immersion in a topic, in a time, and in a place. The COVID-19 crisis has presented a great problem for museums, as stay-at-home orders have made it impossible for them to perform this necessary function of attracting and educating visitors at their specialized locations. To stay in touch with their visitors and present their collections without opening museum buildings, museums have turned to the internet. New technology has allowed for innovative ways to bring a museum to one’s home.

The Allied Museum in Berlin is one such institution facing the issues brought on by COVID-19. The museum presents the history of the three Western Allied powers’ (Great Britain, France, and the United States) military presence in West Berlin and West Germany during the Cold War. It interprets the daily lives and missions of the Allied troops, as well as the impact their presence had on Germany. The museum’s collections hold scores of related artifacts and documents. Its physical location at Clayallee 135, in the former American Sector, is intricately tied to the history it presents. The museum makes use of two former American base buildings, the Outpost Theater and the Nicholson Memorial Library, to house its galleries. In between the two buildings is a plaza displaying the museum’s large artifacts. The most popular of these is the British Handley Page Hastings cargo aircraft, a participant in the Berlin Airlift. On Sundays between April and October, visitors can pay one Euro to climb inside the aircraft, take a look into the cockpit, and view a short film about the airlift. The aircraft is effective at drawing families to the museum on Sundays and is one source of much-appreciated donations for the otherwise state-funded museum.

Since the Allied Museum closed on March 14, visitors cannot experience it in any of these ways. All of the museum’s planned events for the foreseeable future have been cancelled. The museum’s website, alliiertenmuseum.de, has a posted notice about the indefinite closure. Otherwise the website remains largely as it did before march, featuring summaries of the exhibit galleries and an entry about highlighted objects. The “Collections” section offers descriptions of the museum’s collection areas and articles about three “highlighted” artifacts selected on a rotating basis. Historical information and statistics about the Berlin Airlift and denazification are also featured. The museum’s events list has been updated to announce the cancellations.

Fortunately, the Allied Museum is still working to stay in contact with interested patrons, and is making use of new ways to engage the public while they are sheltering in place. The museum has launched a new YouTube channel (titled “Alliiertenmuseum”) featuring German-language video tours. The channel currently has four videos, all posted within the last month. Three of them highlight “favorite objects” on display in the museum galleries, with a visitor guide telling in-depth stories about each. The fourth video features a “behind-the-scenes” look at the museum’s archival facilities, showing how artifacts and documents are catalogued. The museum plans to upload more videos in the coming weeks. The museum’s Facebook page is similarly engaging audiences by posting historical images and photographs of more of the museum’s artifacts, all accompanied by German and English descriptions. The museum will post all further information about museum activities during the pandemic to this page.

May 8, 2020 will mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe (V-E Day), and the Allied Museum had plans to observe the occasion. There was to be an open-air exhibition by the Brandenburg Gate about the end of the war, featuring contributions from the Allied Museum and other Berlin museums that document this period in history. Sadly, this exhibition had to be canceled as well. Allied Museum Director Jürgen Lillteicher states that the majority of the exhibition will now be shown online instead. Dr. Lillteicher hopes that interviews recorded for the exhibition will be made available online as well. Information about this project can be found at kulturprojekte.berlin/projekt/75-jahre-kriegsende/ and on the Facebook page “75 Jahre Kriegsende.”

The museum had additionally planned a film series to be shown at the museum, featuring works of cinema about events between D-Day and V-E Day. Instead, posts about the planned featured films are being added to the Facebook page, so individuals can watch them at home. The museum also intended to host events covering the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by the Allied forces. Posts about this topic are being made for the Facebook page as well, with the most recent one featuring the liberation of Sachsenhausen by the Soviets on April 22, 1945.

The Allied Museum has found ways to engage potential visitors even though no one can visit the museum site itself. Its solutions, utilizing familiar social media platforms, are simple yet effective. People wanting to learn about the postwar period or what the museum itself has to offer can do so by utilizing these platforms, even after the pandemic has passed.