To commemorate the occasion, artists Hannah Goldstein and Claudia Balsters have curated an exhibition highlighting the vital role women played in resisting the Nazis.
An act of commemoration for the women who fought against the Nazis: this is how artists Hannah Goldstein and Claudia Balsters sum up their new exhibition, which highlights the role played by women in the opposition to Hitler’s regime. Some of these writings and works by women on the resistance are scattered on the walls and the floor.
“Women’s stories have always been considered less important than men’s and there’s a lot of reason to speculate about why that is, but one of the reasons is that the winners get to tell the story, right? The winners write the story and so far in our history it’s been mostly white men who write the story and they’ll write about themselves.” explains Hannah Goldstein.
Germany marks the 80th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler this Saturday. One of the women featured in the exhibition, Annedore Leber, was the wife of one of the officers involved in the attempt. She was imprisoned by the Nazis and continued to write about the resistance.
Both artists say some visitors have been surprised to see their last names among the women featured in the exhibition.
“We have shown this work in France and Germany to visitors who may have remembered their own family stories, who have seen our images and been very moved by the stories they imply and perhaps questioned and reflected on their own role in society, too.” adds Claudia Balsters
Recently, several Holocaust memorials have been vandalized in Germany. Among them, a memorial dedicated to LGBT+ victims of Nazism in Berlin. Earlier this month, police investigated anti-Semitic graffiti on a plaque commemorating the deportation of dozens of Jews from the German capital.
In 2017, a leading member of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame”.
The exhibition comes amid a growing influence of the far right. In last month’s European elections, the Alternative fur Deutschland party came in second in Germany. The artists hope their work will be a source of inspiration in the current political climate.
“We have to keep fighting because we are living in a pretty scary situation in Europe right now in many parts of the world and we have to be brave and we have to show that we don’t want to live this way. We want a fair world and we want a just world and I think people who come here can be inspired by these heroic acts.” says Hannah Goldstein.
The exhibition runs until September 8 at the Willy Brandt House, the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party in Berlin.