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| Munich faces up to its brown past
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The city of Munich during the Nazi era
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The exhibit “Places of Remembrance – National Socialism in Munich” opened in March 2006 and runs through 28 May in the Bavarian capital’s gallery of modern art (Pinakothek der Moderne).
The project was initiated by Winfried Nerdinger, director of the Architectural Museum of Munich’s Technical University.
Modern installations remember slave labourers, POWs, and the Dachau concentration camp. These are facts which Nerdinger believes “everyone saw but everybody denied”.
For over 20 years, Nerdinger and concerned citizens have been lobbying Munich’s city council to fund a documentation centre focusing on the city’s association with its Nazi past. Nerdinger stresses that such a centre is particularly important for Munich since the city was the birthplace of the National Socialist movement – the city where Hitler’s long road to power began in 1923 and that eventually sent him to rule in Berlin 10 years later.
Nerdinger told Germany’s prestigious weekly, Die Zeit, that the Bavarian capital has done just about everything to portray itself as a “warm-hearted city… successfully disassociating itself from its brown past”, a reference to the colour of most Nazi uniforms. The fact that the city was able to maintain such a clean image, despite the proximity of the Dachau concentration camp just 30 minutes from the city centre, bewilders Nerdinger.
Although political power would eventually be concentrated in Berlin, Munich remained the “soul” of the Nazi movement, according the Nerdinger. Hitler always returned to Munich and the Bavarian hinterland (Nuremberg and Bayreuth, for example) for his most important rallies and glorification of German culture.
Everywhere in Berlin, large street-side information signs inform passers-by about the historical significance of the area. The German capital has not shied away from confronting its dark past. In Munich, according to Die Zeit, only a handful of commemorative plaques remind anyone of the city’s association with Nazism. None of them give extensive information or have been prominently placed for everyone to see.
Nerdinger’s lobbying has slowly paid off. The current exhibit, “Places of Remembrance – National Socialism in Munich” that opened in 2002 paves the way for the more ambitious Documentation Centre on National Socialism. It is due to open its doors in 2008, during the 850th anniversary celebrations of the city’s founding.
According to Die Zeit, Munich needed an especially long time to come to terms with its National Socialist past because Nazi ideology was particularly deeply rooted in all classes of society there – from the working to the upper classes.
The current exhibit walks visitors through the history of Munich’s road to Nazism – including the 1918 founding of the anti-Semitic Order of the Thule Society; the upper-class salon of Elsa Bruckmann, where, according to Die Zeit, “Hitler learned his good manners”; the Aryanisation of Jewish property; and the destruction of the city’s main synagogue.
Another of the main themes discussed in the show are the histories of Munich’s larger businesses – “most of whom denied any Nazi dealings until as recently as 2000,” Nerdinger told Die Zeit.
The exhibit is at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstareal, Barer Strasse 40.
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