They made themselves comfortable. The good china is neatly sorted in the heavy wooden sideboard. Dolls have taken a seat on the seating area and the table is already set for dinner. Someone gave the cushions on the couch a twist. Everything looks clean, there isn’t a stain on the tablecloth.
Small black and white prints show this interior. Below are color photographs in which sunlight shines through checkered curtains. They were all taken in the former apartments of concentration camp guards from Ravensbrück. A stuffy comfort jumps out at you from the pictures, which contrasts with the place from which they come. The artist Dominique Hurth, who compiled them, supplemented it with curtains into which she – together with textile designer Christina Klessmann – immediately woven the flaw into.
The installation, which dates back to 2020, can be seen in Hurth’s current solo exhibition at the Württembergischer Kunstverein. The artist chose a quote as the title: “Private handbags are not allowed to be carried on field trips”. It is taken from the service regulations catalog of Obersturmbannführer and concentration camp commandant Max Koegel from 1942. It is aimed specifically at female concentration camp personnel; Koegel obviously thought this was necessary.
The exhibition
Dominique Hurth: “Private handbags are not allowed to be carried on field trips.” Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, until March 22nd.
Hurth found further instructions from Koegel’s catalog so remarkable that she copied them out. They prohibit “picking flowers or berries while on duty,” point out that dogs must be kept strictly but not mistreated, and that a pistol and a hat must always be worn while on duty.
The defendants’ patterned umbrellas
In her art, Dominique Hurth conducts a kind of search for clues, the focus of which is the history of Nazi perpetrators and accomplices, primarily in relation to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She starts with objects and materials, and these are almost always textile. There are the uniforms of the concentration camp guards and their origin story. Or the curtains in the concentration camp staff apartments. Or the patterned umbrellas under which the defendants in the third Majdanek trial (1975–1981) hid.
“Preparations for the trials against the Belsen criminals. BU 10359. Signs show the location of all rooms”
Photo:
Dominique Hurth, 2022
3,340 mostly young women worked as guards in Ravensbrück between 1939 and 1945. Around 120,000 women from 30 nations were imprisoned there. In 1940, the SS-owned company Texled (Society for Textile and Leather Recycling) was relocated there, where clothing was primarily produced for the prisoners of concentration camps, uniforms for the SS and the Wehrmacht at the front, and for the female concentration camp guards.
Hurth’s research goes beyond this. One of the oldest works on display, “Unfoldings” (2013), visualizes the “Aryanization” of the Jewish linen company Grünfeld with the folding of a handkerchief. Explosive, especially in Stuttgart, Swabian companies such as Hugo Boss and Mercedes Benz were also involved in Nazi crimeswhich Hurth points out in exhibits.
She never owned a stick or whip
In the middle of the exhibition rooms, the artist has created a small arena for excerpts from the documentation of NaziKriegsverbrecher:innenprozessen, in which former concentration camp guards from Ravensbrück were interrogated. Hurth zooms in on details, has watercolored excerpts from the photographs, and printed statements from the defendants on sheets of paper. One person claims that she never owned a weapon, pistol, stick or whip. That can’t be true, it would contradict Koegel’s instructions.
A 96-minute new video work pulls the strands together, sorts them, summarizes them. However, it remains complex and can hardly be fully grasped in one visit. As well as? Hurth has been researching her topic for years. You can spend a lot of time in the exhibition and also read in a library put together by the artist.