THE GERMAN HOME FRONT DISPLAY             Seeing how well the British ‘Home Front’ re-enactors presented their own living history displays we thought about whether this might be something that we could provide at events to add a ‘civilian’ aspect to the military side of the Luftwaffe Displays. It could also become a useful area for people to have a cup of coffee /or something stronger and a chat - or – as at Detling last year – learn to knit. Although we were inside with the traders this year at Detling we missed being a part of the group!     Yet there were difficulties with sourcing the correct information. Photographs shot inside houses from Germany or Austria were sometimes hard to come by and even those obtained were often either posed for propaganda purposes or from a higher social class.       We thought we would put together a provincial German family home perhaps with a father or brother in the Luftwaffe, a young daughter attending school and the BdM and a mother at home, which according to National Socialism was the ideal of German motherhood and limited her to the home and family.  Ideally this would not be a rigid ‘museum-type’ display but something that would look ‘lived-in’, as if someone had just stepped out of the room for a moment.     We looked at wartime rations, types of foods available, magazines, and researched popular music and radio programmes of the period in order to give a more rounded view for the visitor. We also compiled a hand out, which proved quite popular and explained the intention of our display and gave additional information, photographs and further reading.
Objects for the display, where possible, were sourced directly from Germany. Such as the magazines, wartime money, Winter Relief  badges, Coffee grinder and storage tin, wedding photographs, personal photographs, etc. We were fortunate to find original German books in a local bookshop – so we keep popping in there to add to this collection although we obtained some from Germany as well, particularly the children’s books. Larger items, such as the furniture and soft furnishings were obtained locally after examining photographic evidence bearing in mind that, as is the case even now, many family homes tend to consist of an eclectic assortment of items acquired over many years or indeed inherited from previous generations. Once again we are lucky to know of a clearance place, which takes donations of furniture etc from house clearances – so have managed to source original 30s type furniture at a low cost.    Visitors liked the fact that we had fresh flowers around, seasonal vegetables and bread on the table so we will keep doing that! Children liked the music boxes so I keep one at the front of the display for them to listen to. They were also keen to see the gramophone player work.