April 9th, 2025 – March 1st, 2026 | Levels 1 and 2

The Third Generation
The Holocaust in Family Memory

An exhibition of the Jewish Museum Vienna in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Munich

The Exhibition
Eighty years after the Holocaust, the exhibition “The Third Generation” examines transgenerational traumata and the emotional legacy of the survivors. This ties in with the increasingly urgent question: how are we to remember, now that there are virtually no contemporary witnesses, who directly experienced the Holocaust, to be asked? They have passed on their stories, as well as their traumata, to their children and grandchildren.

While the second generation grew up with the immediate impact of their parents’ physical and psychological injuries, the third generation’s view of family histories, in which memories and silence, family myths and family secrets, overwhelming or missing family legacies are ever-present, is from a greater distance time-wise.

The exhibition explores various strategies for dealing with and examining the legacy of the Holocaust. It takes a closer look at the struggle for social recognition of Sinti and Roma Holocaust victims. Using artistic works in particular, it tells of archiving and no longer wanting to remain silent, of appropriation and demarcation, of consciously remembering and wanting to forget, of the omnipresence of the Holocaust and the large gaps in family histories, as well as the attempts to fill them.

First created for the Jewish Museum Vienna, the exhibition has now been adapted and expanded for its second venue at the Jewish Museum Munich. Greater prominence has been given to the local perspective, with Munich-based artists showing how the Holocaust continues to have an impact on their lives today. The topic of provenance and restitution, as well as the incomplete histories of some objects in our collection and how family legacies are handled, is highlighted by means of a number of different works in the Munich show.

Curators: Sabine Apostolo, Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz (Vienna) | Ulrike Heikaus, Yuval Schneider (Munich)
Exhibition Design: koerdtutech

#ThirdGeneration

Artists
Noa Arad-Yairi | Hannah Bischof | Lola Carr | Helena Czernek / Aleksander Prugar | Esther Dischereit / Raymond Alan Kaczynski | Zsuzsi Flohr | Jason Francisco | Eduard Freudmann | Chana Freundlich | Dan Glaubach | Rafael Goldchain | Hazel Karr | Mirta Kupferminc | Amy Kurzweil | Valérie Leray | Ilana Lewitan | Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger | Rutu Modan | Dvora Morag | Fabian Erik Patzak | Katja Petrowskaja | Jonathan Rotsztain | Esther Safran Foer | Georg Soanca-Pollak / Lydia Bergida | Art Spiegelman | Alfred Ullrich | Marina Vainshtein

Download the exhibition leaflet here.