Making Women´s History Visible in Europe

A European Learning Partnership (Grundtvig 2)

Heike: A Lioness

Making Women´s History Visible in Europe – below you find some thoughts about the exhibit I liked most:
 

This relief of a lioness struck me at the entrance of the Akropolis-Museum. In the reconstruction (which is not easy to make out on the left hand side of the base) a lion lies opposite her. I don’t know where exactly this relief was originally situated at the Akropolis, nor do I know the meaning of it. It made a deep impression on me, however, because I come from a town in Germany with lots of depictions of lions. Having grown up in Braunschweig, the town of “Henry the lion”, I cannot recall that for once in my life I took a single one of these lions for a female. Thinking of those animals that deeply impressed me when I was a child, I only see male samples of this species before my eyes. Huge manes frame their determined faces –symbolizing the might, the fighting spirit and the strength of the former sovereigns.

It’s told Adolf Hitler had the bones of “Henry the lion” examined in order to find proof of his ideals of race. Nowadays people in Braunschweig like to tell this anecdote, because to the disappointment of the Nazis they found quite the opposite of what they wanted to prove. In my opinion this anecdote isn’t that funny. The bitter truth is, that the crude ideas of national socialism caused tremandous sorrow for millions of people.

In Athens I met testimonies of this German history as well. In World War II German soldiers destroyed whole villages. In the war museum in Athens I stood in front of a show case with cartridge cases which were found on a field. All male inhabitants elder than 12 years of one village had been shot by German soldiers.
It was „Rottweil – Waidmannsheil“ – German hunting-ammunition, which I know from home, for the company still exists and my father, my brother and my husband are hunters.

Thinking of our theme “to put the world together” it’s these pictures that impressed me most: the lioness and the hunting-ammunition.

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