Gulag: Traces and Testimonies 1929–1956
17 May 2013 to 8 December 2013
An exhibition by the "Memorial" Society, Moscow and the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in cooperation with Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg, on show in the German Historical Museum. Sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
The exhibition presents relics of and testimonies to the Soviet camp system collected by the “Memorial” human rights organization all over the former Soviet Union from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition project seeks answers to the following question: How can the Gulag – a penal camp system already described by its contemporaries as the “quintessence” of Soviet tyranny – be described, how can it be comprehended in all of its dimensions? Voices of people who experienced it first-hand and biographies of former inmates accompany visitors on their exploration of this remote archipelago and create a panorama of the Soviet camp system. Objects from the “Memorial” holdings – for example a makeshift bread pouch, a tattered dress or a metal grave tag – make the everyday lives of the camp inmates tangible.
