Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

For two years, our curators travelled across all of Europe in search of artworks for our exhibition. And anyone who travels has a story (or two) to tell. Every Friday, we would like to recount one of these stories. In our first story, co-curator Ulrike Schmiegelt tells how her intuition about the whereabouts of a mislaid ring led to a successful loan.

The Jewish graphic artist Leo Glückselig emigrated with his family from Vienna to New York in 1938. Almost sixty years later, he saw a photograph of a work by the French artist Christian Boltanski in a newspaper article about an art exhibition. And was immediately taken aback by what he saw. 

Henry Meyric Huges lives in London. The first contact with him is always with E-mail and it is soon clear that he answers his E-mail more quickly than anyone else on the Desire for Freedom team. And he writes wonderful E-mails at that. The team members who have not had a chance to meet him personally are enthralled about his British courtesy and understatement. We met him for the first time shortly before the exhibition opening. It reinforced our digital impression and that despite his quite impressive biography (understatement): Director of the Hayward Gallery in London, founding member and President of Manifesta, President of the International Art Critics Association AICA, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. And he speaks fluent German. 

Edith Michelsen and Regina Gelbert’s office space is located in structure between both the administrative and exhibition buildings. This architectural ‘in-between’ corresponds well with the work they do. They are the interface between the exhibition objects and the people creating and installing the exhibition. They accompany and document every movement that an object makes during the entire exhibition process, whether while the artwork is underway from Paris to Berlin, stored in the museum’s temporary depot, being unpacked and installed in the exhibition space, or being removed for return to the lender. 

The rooms in the exhibition have names, such as ‘We are the Revolution’, ’99 Cent’, ‘A Hundred Years’, or ‘The Realities of Politics’. A room title that not only mystified some visitors, but also some of our own staff is from the third room, ‘Journey into Wonderland’. The works presented here range from Damien Hirst’s Dead End Jobs to Anselm Kiefer’s Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols), Günther Uecker’s Kriegssarg (War Coffin), and Armando’s Schuldige Landschaft (Guilty Landscape). They focus on how to deal with remembrance, especially after the Second World War.

But what does that have do with a ‘land of wonder’?