War and Propaganda

The CI, devel­oped by chezweitz from con­tem­po­rary pro­pa­gan­da mate­ri­als, reflects the strik­ing, sub­ver­sive mes­sages to which peo­ple were exposed between 1914 and 1918, as does the design of the fly­ers and the accom­pa­ny­ing catalog.

Then — as now — all tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties were used to influ­ence pub­lic opin­ion, which is reflect­ed in the var­i­ous media forms with which chezweitz presents the themes of the indi­vid­ual rooms and under­scores them through spe­cif­ic spa­tial mod­els: The bold red tones on which posters are pre­sent­ed in the first exhi­bi­tion room direct­ly con­front vis­i­tors with the immense pow­er of war pro­pa­gan­da; only at sec­ond glance does the dia­logue become appar­ent, with the provoca­tive state­ments enter­ing the visu­al axes. In con­trast, the fol­low­ing rooms reflect the domes­tic ambi­ence of the ​“home front,” which was a pri­ma­ry tar­get of the pro­pa­gan­da. Visu­al­ly and acousti­cal­ly, vis­i­tors come threat­en­ing­ly close to the the­ater of war in the sub­se­quent large-scale film land­scape. Audio nich­es with excerpts from front-line let­ters and diaries com­plete this designed dan­ger space, which is impres­sive­ly struc­tured by ele­ments rem­i­nis­cent of camouflage.

In the con­clud­ing memo­r­i­al room, per­son­al belong­ings and sto­ries of Ham­burg cit­i­zens are tem­porar­i­ly exhib­it­ed in a muse­um. All exhibits came into this col­lec­tion fol­low­ing a pub­lic appeal and have been painstak­ing­ly pre­pared for pre­sen­ta­tion, allow­ing insights into very pri­vate tra­di­tions of World War II rem­nants through inter­views, back­ground sto­ries, and dig­i­tal pro­cess­ing. The CI, devel­oped from con­tem­po­rary pro­pa­gan­da mate­ri­als, reflects the strik­ing, sub­ver­sive mes­sages to which peo­ple were exposed between 1914 and 1918, as does the design of the fly­ers and the accom­pa­ny­ing cat­a­log. Urgent infor­ma­tion requires urgent dis­sem­i­na­tion, so a ​“cre­ative” approach to media and its exhaus­tive use dur­ing wartime is inevitable. There­fore, leaflets explain­ing indi­vid­ual aspects of pro­pa­gan­da with back­ground infor­ma­tion, pre­sent­ing biogra­phies of key pro­tag­o­nists, or rehash­ing wartime recipes, which are avail­able for vis­i­tors to take home at the indi­vid­ual sta­tions or chap­ters of the exhi­bi­tion, were also incor­po­rat­ed into the exhi­bi­tion as a medium.

The exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue was select­ed as one of the ​“Non­fic­tion Books of the Month” by NDR and the Süd­deutsche Zeitung in Sep­tem­ber 2014.