DHM Exhibition Preview 2025
As of: 15 January 2025, additions and alterations are subject to change
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
Although there’s still time to see the exhibitions “What is Enlightenment? Questions for the Eighteenth Century“ (until 6 April 2024) and “Roads not Taken. Or: Things could have turned out differently” (until 11 January 2026) at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, we would like to take this opportunity to offer a sneak peek at our program for the upcoming year.
In May 2025, the exhibition “On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-1948” opens: How did post-war societies process the experience of violence and annihilation caused by the Second World War and the forcible occupation of large parts of Europe by National Socialist Germany? A previously overlooked, but historically influential form of coming to terms with this desolation were the exhibitions that were organised in post-war Europe between 1945 and 1948 by institutions, groups, and many other players in numerous countries. For the first time the Deutsches Historisches Museum plans to examine the history of this pan-European phenomenon on the basis of early exhibitions in London, Paris, Warsaw, Liberec and Bergen-Belsen. The exhibition is being realised in cooperation with the Project Group for the documentation centre “German Occupation of Europe in the Second World War” (ZWBE). An accompanying programme conceived by the DHM and the ZWBE will explore the topic of German occupation and tyranny in Europe in greater depth.
On 26 September 2025, we invite you to our 7th symposium in the Historical Judgement series in the Pei Building: Under the working title "Varieties of Germany", the upcoming symposium will continue our experimentation with different new perspectives on German history in its international contexts and look at German history from different perspectives "from the outside". Together with our panellists, we will examine at aspects of German history that may initially seem rather marginal from an internal perspective, but which have been particularly well received abroad or have been of central importance for discourses there. We are particularly interested in those "crystallisation points" of history that have not yet been seen and classified as such and are therefore surprising.
From November 2025 on, the exhibition “Nature and German History. Faith – Biology – Power” (WT) will display nine-hundred years of German history. The spectrum ranges from Hildegard of Bingen’s concept of “viriditas”, the greening power of creation, in the 12th century to the early anti-nuclear movement in Wyhl and the different concepts of nature in the two Germanys towards the end of the 20th century. Moreover, the co-option of what was considered “natural” was one of the ideological tenets of the Nazi dictatorship, which attempted to bring both “external” and “internal” nature under their power of definition and rule by decreeing innumerable laws. The “Nuremberg Laws” and the “Reich Conservation Act” were both enacted in the same year: 1935. The project focuses on the changing significance and conceptuality of “Nature” and examines it as a political factor in German history. Who defines what is considered nature? Who can influence it? How does the understanding of external and internal nature vary? And what happens to nature when unforeseen events occur that lead to political actions?
You can find a preview of our upcoming exhibitions in 2025 for download (pdf) under the following link: https://www.dhm.de/assets/DHM/Bilder/Pressebilder/2025/Exhibition_preview_2025_DHM.pdf