As is now the case at many historical sites, the Cologne Documentation Centre has a 360° tour of the EL-DE House, the Memorial and the permanent exhibition. This means that, as well as individual visitors to the site, online visitors have also for some time now been able to access a great deal of information. While the educational programmes on offer could be used in the analogue space for focussing on certain individual aspects, this has up to now been missing in the virtual EL-DE House.
We then developed a web application as a didactic and methodological layer for the 360° tour. In thematic guided tours and example highlights, users (we want to address individual adult visitors as well as students) can explore individual thematic areas and aspects of the history and stories of our institution, as well as elements of exhibition design and staging, in a didactically targeted and methodically guided manner.
Text input fields and the ability to retrieve typed text via email or in the app for presentation, purposes make it particularly useful for teaching.
The digital format also offers space for in-depth study methods and individual approaches, which are not always possible in the physical location. Using the methods of visual history, the workshop What you see is how it was?!? offers a targeted and methodically guided approach to selected objects from the exhibition, including a photograph showing forced labourers in a seemingly cheerful gathering. Users approach the content of the photograph associatively and descriptively, initially in an unbiased way. Information about the background to the photograph, the context and the photographer, as well as the people depicted, is gradually introduced so that questions can be asked about the intention and effect of the photograph, and users can reflect on these against the background of their original description and interpretation.
The web application can also be used to prepare visits. In the format Four Life Stories – Two Places in cooperation with the Brauweiler Memorial, the life stories of persecuted people can be highlighted prior to a visit, so that visitors already know something about the former Gestapo prison in Brauweiler and the EL-DE House as places of Nazi terror. The biographies each persom represent a group of persecuted people, describing the Cologne resistance group National Committee for a Free Germany, the fate of a Cologne Jew, the persecution of nonconformist young people, and – using the biography of Teofila Turska – the fate of a forced labourer. On the basis of these biographies, students can then ask targeted and interest-oriented questions at the Centre and agree on areas of interest with the guides.
Contact
Dr. Dirk Lukaßen, educational consultant at the Cologne Documentation Centre
Email: dirk.lukassen@stadt-koeln.de
Website: www.nsdok.de
