Beyond Berlin by Rosenfeld Gavriel David Jaskot Paul B

Author:Rosenfeld, Gavriel David,Jaskot, Paul B.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Memory and the Museum

Munich's Struggle to Create a Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Among all German cities, Munich has arguably had the most difficulty during the postwar period in coming to terms with the legacy of the Third Reich. From the moment World War II ended in 1945, the citizens of the former Nazi “capital of the movement” (Hauptstadt der Bewegung) had to live down the ignominious fact that their city was the birthplace of the political party that had brought death and destruction to Europe on an unprecedented scale. It is no wonder, then, that in attempting to reconstruct their war-devastated city in the years after 1945, the people of Munich largely chose to evade its shameful historical legacy. As I argued in my book Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich, the conservative postwar restoration of the city's damaged historic architecture, the embrace of traditional (rather than modern) architecture for new postwar construction projects, the normalized reuse of Nazi buildings, and the hesitant erection of monuments documenting Nazi crimes all attested to a desire to play down, if not deny, local responsibility for the Third Reich.1

This evasive tendency, to be sure, has not stood unopposed during the postwar period. In the decades since 1945, a countervailing inclination to confront the past has slowly gained support among citizens committed to directing public attention to the city's historic links to National Socialism. Especially since the late 1980s, the impulse to acknowledge the city's Nazi past has steadily gained strength in direct proportion to the enduring local effort to marginalize it. This growing tendency to face the Nazi legacy head-on suggests that Munich has begun to turn away from its prior postwar tradition of evasion.

Yet even as many people in Munich have expressed a growing desire to confront the past, others continue to exhibit serious difficulties in doing so. This difficulty is best illustrated by the long controversy over the creation of a Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism (NS-Dokumentationszentrum). In the middle of 2002, after many years of discussion, Munich municipal officials, together with Bavarian state authorities, announced a historic agreement to create a Documentation Center in the vicinity of one of Munich's most famous squares, the Königsplatz. By January 2003, however, the project had collapsed amid bitter recriminations that led the local media to describe the city as the “laughingstock of Germany's memorial landscape.”2 Further controversies since then have added to the museum project's woes—so much so that it is doubtful whether it will be completed by the end of the decade.

What accounts for the ongoing difficulties in establishing a Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism in Munich? What does the failure to create such an institution reveal about the city's evolving relationship to its Nazi past? What are its implications for the course of urban Vergangenheitsbewältigung within Germany at large? This essay attempts to answer these and other questions by chronicling the saga of the twenty-year struggle in Munich to build a museum for memory.

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