Whe starts with feelings, presents an alternative story. The exhibition on the subject of hatred in the House of History (HdG) Baden-Württemberg is the second part of a trilogy dedicated to the emotions greed (ended in September), hate and love (which will open in October 2022) – feelings that HdG are considered to be “particularly effective socially”.
Instead of the thoroughly rationalized Homo oeconomicus, she tells in “Hatred” of people (also) as instinctual beings, instead of main and state actions of internal and individual experiences, instead of abstract structures, rather of pain, injuries, anger or happiness. In short: The modern era appears less as a cool and disenchanted epoch, but as a passionately turbulent age.
This approach is currently in vogue in the sciences. It speaks for the HdG to test in the three big shows how the story of emotions can be represented with exhibits in the room. With the resources of the museum, it substantiates the idea that feelings are not something purely internal, but rather socially shaped, and that they arise through the way in which they are lived out and expressed. Understood in this way, actions can be read from the traces of things that mirror the soul.
The wired shoes
The shooting target that Johann Friedrich Hezel donated in 1792 after his election to the council of the imperial city of Schwäbisch Hall is such a mirror. It is painted with destroyed symbols of the French monarchy, with severed heads and the red freedom cap of the revolutionaries, which has pierced a bullet. The hatred of the “hereditary enemy” becomes physically tangible here. The same applies to the shoes wired with detonators of the Islamist “Sauerland Group”, which planned a (foiled) attack on US soldiers in 2007, or to the wooden cross that members of the Antifa 2019 put in front of the house for AfD MP Christina Baum Insults and the threat of “died on December 31, 2019”.
For the curators headed by project manager Rainer Schimpf, hatred is a “reprehensible emotion. Whoever hates, rejects others so radically that they no longer see people in them. ” and greed shone golden). The dark exhibition space is filled with the black lacquered poles of scaffolding, through which a turquoise-green rope winds to form a dense network that blocks the view. Hatred, as it is shown here, is impenetrable, poisonous and gloomy.
The hatred and its relatives
The narrative takes up this basic tone, which gives the perpetrator and victim stories with strong objects their very own presence, closeness and emotional impact. Outstanding ensembles of things have been brought together in order to present the topics in a pointed manner. They are stories of agitation against politicians and anger against Jews, of violence against women and meanness in social networks, but also of hope and affection (a reference to the next show on the subject of love). They are assigned to subject areas that place hatred in a larger context, frame it as revolutionary, nationalist, right-wing and left-wing extremist, Islamist, Jewish, misogynistic or LGBTTIQ * hostile.
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