Gdansk in Poland is an extraordinarily beautiful city and I very much enjoyed spending 6 days there recently. However, the population of Poland suffered terribly in the Second World War. The horrifying scale of loss, for the Polish population and globally, is laid out in the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk. It is almost impossible to comprehend the number of people who died in Poland: 17% of the population, including 3 million Jews. If anyone plans to visit Gdansk, I highly recommend visiting the Museum. Although the content is challenging and upsetting, the Museum does an excellent job of setting out the lead up to and global context for WW2, before then describing the impact on different populations. As an artist, it was deeply disturbing to see the way in which art and design was used by fascist regimes to infiltrate every aspect of people's lives and to manipulate their viewpoints.
Unsurprisingly, posters were an important progaganda tool. Here is a poster from the exhibition 'The Eternal Jew' which was held in the German Museum in Munich in 1937, which presented false caricatures of Jews. This poster represents the antisemitic view that Jews were greedy. It is unsettling to me that an artist would use their considerable talents to portray such an image (although perhaps the artist did not have a choice). Another very distressing concept I learned about was the all encompassing sense of Totalitarianism. The exhibition quotes Mussolini, the Fascist leader of Italy: "To the fascist, everything is within the state, and outside the state nothing human or spiritual exists, and there is no greater value than the state". The National Leisure Hours Organisation took charge of Italians' free time - as this postcard portrays.
However, it was the set of Christmas baubles on display, with the swastika in the middle, which was the most shocking piece of design I saw. Christmas is associated with the innocence of childhood, celebration and special times together with family and friends, feeling warm and safe and valued. This Christmas decoration demonstrates how the Nazi system was able to infiltrate every aspect of family life.
If you visit Gdansk, I cannot recommend this Museum enough. Many of the displays focus on the dreadful first hand photos, footage and accounts of what took place, and these are devastating to see and hear. However, these pieces of propaganda are also very impactful. They help you to understand the context of these terrible events and the insidious influence of the regimes which were in place in the lead up to and during the Second World War.