In the last two days of January 1933, all sorts of rumors swept through Berlin's political circles.

It is said that the resigned Chancellor Schleicher wanted to mobilize the Potsdam garrison to arrest President Hindenburg and prevent a government under Hitler's leadership.

Other voices see army chief Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord on the verge of a military coup.

The influential son of the Reich President, Oskar von Hindenburg, urges his father to create facts quickly.

He first sworn in a new Reichswehr Minister in Schleicher's place, then, on the afternoon of January 30, he appointed Hitler Chancellor of the German Republic.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Dealing with counterfactual courses of events is not normally one of the tasks of a history museum.

In the exhibition about fourteen key moments in recent history, which the German Historical Museum in Berlin has been showing since yesterday, she is the center of attention.

The "Roads not Taken" that the exhibition deals with are not just alternative courses of action, such as the possible takeover of power by the Reichswehr in January 1933, but at the same time a means of contrast that sharpens the picture of a given historical situation.

A military putsch against Hindenburg would probably have resulted in the mobilization of the SA by Hitler and that of the workers by the SPD and KPD and thus a civil war; the Weimar Republic would also have come to an end in this case.

Brüning could have prevented the dictatorship

As another exhibition station wants to show, she would have had a realistic chance of surviving if Schleicher's predecessor, Heinrich Brüning, had been able to continue his policy of budget stabilization by tightening money in a milder form until 1935.

But the "Weimar coalition" on which the center politician Brüning relied was crushed between the enemies of the republic from the right and left and his chancellorship with it.

The partition that the DHM Brüning is dedicated to is therefore more of a memento than a retro utopia: here a bust of Hindenburg, there a Nazi election poster above a shelf with "remedies" for Germany's economic recovery and next to it the man in a suit with a stand-up collar who waves his hat as if greeting the workers he has deprived of their industrial jobs.

It is correct that the station dealing with Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor is located almost exactly in the middle of the sequence of rooms in the basement of the Pei building, because from here development lines lead in all directions, to our present after reunification as well as in the past of the failed revolution of 1848. The German-Israeli historian Dan Diner, who conceived the exhibition, deliberately reverses the chronology, he starts with the autumn of 1989 and ends with Friedrich Wilhelm IV's rejection of the German imperial crown. by Prussia in April 1849.

In this way, Diner wants to sharpen our awareness of the question of whether it is sufficient "to depict reality as it happened".

If the answer is no,

then, however, the prevailing view of history is also up for discussion.

The exhibition in the DHM is intended to act as a corrective in that, according to Diner, it focuses on “coincidence, contingency and thus also the responsibility of the people involved”.

In view of this program, it is amazing how little is said about Bismarck, Honecker, Willy Brandt, Adenauer, Stauffenberg, Ebert, Stalin and even Hitler in the fourteen history rooms set up by the curators and museum designers.

What drove them when they acted is lost in the small print under the posters, photographs and media stations that trace the historical trace of what happened.

Personal charisma plays an important role in developments that come to a head at a historical moment, such as the fate of Brandt's Ostpolitik in the failed vote of no confidence in April 1972.

The corresponding installation in the DHM, on the other hand, concentrates on the CDU/CSU campaign and asks what would have happened

if Brandt's challenger Rainer Barzel had won the vote and revised the relaxation process.

One could just as well speculate about how Brandt's chancellorship would have developed if it had become known at the time that at least two of the Union deputies who voted for him had been bribed by the East German state security service.

Contingency awareness is like a virus: it infects everything it touches.