Writing With Things

The spatial concept and architecture of the exhibition „Youth without a homeland. Kindertransports from Vienna”

The exhibition tells the story of children who had to flee from Nazi persecution, homeless and alone, always in danger. Not all of them managed to flee, not all of them readily found a new home. The exhibition architecture aims to give a locus to this homelessness, to communicate it, and to connect the fates and stories of individual children.

Visitors entering the first room are confronted by an overpowering wall devoted to the flood of forms involved in the processing of the Kindertransports, writing as form-filling. Beyond it is a room devoted to the routes taken—or not taken—by the children, together with the things that accompanied them on their journey or that they had to leave behind.

Opposite the wall of writing is the entrance to the second room. This shows the many books written by the Kindertransport children and their descendants about their flight and fate. Beyond the books is the eyewitness room: the place of telling stories through things that the children took with them on their flight and kept, collected during their journey, or which marked their later lives. These things belonging to the individual children are each given their own letter case, which does not contain lead or wooden letters, but rather a personal collection of objects that stand for an “object typeset” of homelessness and lost childhood. The individual fates are connected from one letter case to the next, like the children in flight: all of them on their own and yet together in a boat or train. Writing—be it with letters or objects—is a leitmotif throughout the exhibition.