Historians don’t dwell for long on what might have happened if things didn’t happen as they did. But one major exhibition in Germany is exploring precisely that.
What if the Allies hadn’t been able to cross that bridge at Remagen in 1945? Key events in German history appear in a new light as curators explain just how close they came to turning out a different way.
Using various examples of historical turning points, the exhibition, opening Dec. 9 in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, looks at several moments in German history that could have formed a different country had the circumstances been slightly different.
"We show the moments that you reflect on when you look back and wonder: were they decision, actions, coincidences that shaped what happened?” museum president Raphael Gross said in Berlin ahead of the exhibition’s opening.
In the process, visitors to the “Roads not Taken” exhibition by Berlin’s central Museumsinsel (island of museums) get to learn about 14 key points in history, from the March Revolution of 1848 to the fall of the Wall in 1989.
"For us, it is not a matter of telling a different story or presenting a fictional version of history,” German-Israeli historian Dan Diner says.
"Instead, by means of a perspective on courses of history that were then inherently possible, we are able to take a sharper look at what really happened. In short, the perception of potential possibilities allows us to better understand the reality of the past.”
Parts of the exhibition explore history using digital forms of storytelling, allowing visitors to relive protests in Eastern Germany in 1989 from the perspectives of seven different people.
At the exhibition’s “game station,” very different perspectives and options for action emerge when you see the day from the perspective of Egon Krenz, responsible for security issues in the German Democratic Republic's top leadership at the time.
