CHGS is proud to maintain collections of art and historical objects that originated with founding director Stephen Feinstein’s work in Holocaust art. These collections include visual artworks, such as the paintings of Fritz Hirschberger, as well as historical objects, including postcards and badges from Nazi Germany.
CHGS has stewardship over these important pieces of history and artistic expression. Our goals are to care for these objects through best museum practices and extend their educational impact through physical and digital exhibition.
We are collaborating with Deborah Boudewyns, UMN Art and Architecture Librarian, and instructor of a UMN course, Workshop in Art, in which students learn the skills of curating and exhibiting, using CHGS collections as the foundation of their work. These students will end the semester with an exhibition featuring CHGS art and objects, to be held in Wilson Library from April 29 – May 12, 2016, with an opening reception on April 29.
In an effort to keep our art collections vital we have migrated the CHGS owned exhibitions to the University of Minnesota Archive.
Our website, which includes resources in the study of Holocaust visual history, is being updated. Our imagery and art research is in the process of being made available online through UMN digital archives, enabling greater functionality, flexibility, and reach. We are working with the University’s physical archives to document CHGS history as we near our 20th anniversary in 2017.
In 1999 Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister and a member of the Green Party with strong pacifist roots, used the phrase “Never Again Auschwitz” to support German military intervention during the Kosovo crisis. In 2005, at the main ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the Red Army for “liberating Europe” (an assertion that obviously did not resonate positively among Poles). In the summer of 2014 Turkish President Recep Erdoğan slammed Israel for betraying the memory of the Holocaust by “acting like Nazis” during the operation against Hamas in Gaza. At the same time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust to warn the world of a nuclear Iran.
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Pertinent to contemporary demands for reparations from Turkey is the relationship between law and property in connection with the Armenian Genocide. This book examines the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide and subsequent attempts to retain seized Armenian wealth. Through the close analysis of laws and treaties, it reveals that decrees issued during the genocide constitute central pillars of the Turkish system of property rights, retaining their legal validity, and although Turkey has acceded through international agreements to return Armenian properties, it continues to refuse to do so. The book demonstrates that genocides do not depend on the abolition of the legal system and elimination of rights, but that, on the contrary, the perpetrators of genocide manipulate the legal system to facilitate their plans.