Managing Perpetrator Affect: The Female Guard Exhibition at Ravensbrück

Abstract

Luhmann analyses the affective economies displayed (and displaced) in an exhibition on female guards at the Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial site in Germany. Luhmann tests the declared curatorial aim of the exhibition, which is to interrupt the persistent exculpatory and sensationalising representations of female camp personnel. In order to do this, Luhmann demonstrates, the exhibition focuses in on ‘the ordinariness’ of the women guards. By way of a close reading of two conflicting memories of food in the camp (one by a female survivor, another by a female guard), which arguably together frame the entire exhibition, Luhmann shows how violence, survival, innocence and denial are narrativised as and through gendered constructions.