From now on, you can visit the digital travelling exhibition ‘Gedenken und Erinnern’ in the entrance area of the Earth Sciences Library.

The two-part exhibition deals with the stories of people who were victims of expropriation and forced sale during the German National Socialist era. Since 2013, the FU University Library, as part of the Provenance Research Centre, has also contributed to the tracing and restitution of cultural assets seized as a result of Nazi persecution. In the form of short biographies, the exhibition reports on the former origin of the looted property found in our libraries and how it was ultimately returned.

The second part of the exhibition is complemented by the light installation ‘Fragmented Fates’. The fragments and traces of provenance shown here are representative of the fates of their former owners, which were ‘fragmented’ by the Nazi dictatorship. They are fragments of ownership notes that eventually come together to form complete pictures and then disintegrate back into their individual parts. This alternation of destruction and reconstruction symbolises the many once intact lives that were later brutally destroyed during the Nazi era. The matching interplay of light and shadow is also intended to metaphorically illustrate how close hope and tragedy were to each other at the time.

Overall, the exhibition not only reflects the fates of past lives, but is also analogous to an important part of the work within provenance research. Putting fragments together like a jigsaw puzzle and the resulting reconstruction of an entire life is not only similar to detective work. It is the reappraisal of memory for those who had no opportunity to create their own memories.