Munich Museum Is Another Step in Acknowledging the City’s Nazi Past
|
Version 0 of 1. MUNICH — The Nazis first displayed their overt hunger for power in lock-step parades through Munich’s elegant Königsplatz. Today, against the backdrop of imposing neo-Classical buildings, the striking white form of the city’s new Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism appears oddly misplaced. It is too simple, too clean. That incongruity was the desired effect of the center, which opened its doors to the public on Friday, more than a decade after it was first approved. It is meant to force both residents and tourists in the Bavarian capital to stop and ask themselves: What is that building? And why is it here, in Munich? Winfried Nerdinger, the museum’s director, who has worked since 1988 to see the center realized, said that the structure and its contents were designed to provide sobering answers. “This is a perpetrator site,” Mr. Nerdinger said. “Those who carried out the crimes actually sat here, and the emphasis is on retracing how it could have come to this.” The permanent exhibition follows the rise of the Nazi Party chronologically over three floors. Using a mixture of images, text and an audio guide, the center examines how the Nazi movement grew out of the German Workers’ Party, or D.A.P., founded in a Munich beer hall in 1919; was embraced by middle-class society; and grew into a force that spread throughout Germany and later Europe, leading to World War II and the Holocaust. The exhibition starts on the fourth floor and works its way down, leading visitors through the role that Munich and its society played in creating fertile ground for the far right and the radical anti-Semitism preached by the Nazis. The lower floors are dedicated to an examination of how postwar Munich handled its Nazi history and how anti-Semitism and racial discrimination remain relevant today, through news reports and a study of neo-Nazis in the city. During the opening ceremony on Thursday, several dozen neo-Nazis gathered at the edge of the security perimeter, decrying the center as misleading, unnecessary and a waste of public funds. Mr. Nerdinger said his main goal was education: “to examine what lessons can be taken away from this site, and how are they relevant in the present day?” Although some in the German news media criticized the exhibition as little more than a well-presented, life-size history book, its message seemed to reach and resonate with the visitors who turned up on the May 1 Labor Day holiday for its opening. Martin Mühlschlegel, who was among the first several hundred people to tour the center, said he had initially questioned whether yet another memorial to the Nazi era was necessary. “I first thought, ‘Not another one,’ but after going through it, I found it very informative, very well done, and I think it will be a positive addition to the city,” he said. Germany, more than most countries, has dedicated itself to working through the questions of its past crimes. In Bavaria alone, the memorial sites include the Dachau concentration camp and documentation centers at the Nazis’ rally grounds in Nuremberg and at the Obersalzberg mountain retreat, with its view of the Alps, where Adolf Hitler hosted foreign guests and Munich intellectuals. All are meant to recall the past and warn of its implications for the future. But as the country struggles to cope with an influx of some 200,000 migrants fleeing conflict and poverty last year alone, reminders of Nazi sentiments have emerged. Refugee shelters in Bavarian villages have been defaced with swastikas or set on fire. In Dresden, thousands of Germans have joined weekly demonstrations against Muslims and other immigrants. While those demonstrations, organized by the anti-immigrant movement Pegida, drew support from across the country, nowhere were the counterprotests stronger than in Munich, where several hundred anti-immigrant demonstrators were drowned out by thousands who turned up to send a message of tolerance and diversity. Yet Munich, more than any other place in Germany, has struggled to come to terms with its fall from what Thomas Mann described in 1926 as a society “once healthy and gay” to “a hotbed of reactionary sentiment and the seat of inflexibility and resistance to the will of the times.” After a thwarted communist revolution and a crippling economic depression, the far right found legitimacy among much of the upper middle class, which welcomed Hitler and his newly established party. In 1930, the Nazis purchased an elegant villa just east of the Königsplatz, where they established their headquarters. Known as the Braunes Haus, or Brown House, the building was largely destroyed by bombing and cleared by the American Army after World War II. For decades, the site sat vacant, until the city decided to build the center there at a cost of more than $31 million. Tall, slatted windows on the upper floors provide views of the surrounding buildings, creating a connection between the exhibition housed within the center and the city without. From a vantage point on the third floor, visitors can gaze out at the former Führerbau — today home to the Munich University of Music and Theater — where Hitler signed the treaty decreeing that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland in 1938, while screens show film footage of Nazi parades past the site. Hilton Sullivan, a native New Yorker who has lived in Munich for 31 years, said he had been overwhelmed by the power of the images. Although he was aware that Munich played a special role in the growth of the Nazi Party, he said he had never really given it much thought until visiting the center. “It is incredible how it took place and the whole development, to see how Hitler was able to win people over,” Mr. Sullivan said. “He was magical in a morbid way.” For decades after the United States Army marched into Munich on April 30, 1945 — 70 years to the day before the center’s opening ceremony — proudly brandishing the sign removed from the city limits declaring “Munich, Capital of the Movement,” the city preferred to think of itself as a “global city with heart,” largely ignoring the role it had played in giving birth to the Nazi movement. In the 1980s, that began to change. The municipal authorities conducted a study of the city’s role in Nazi-era history. At the same time, younger Germans were beginning to explore who had suffered under the Nazis. Towns and cities sought to identify Holocaust survivors and invite them back, to give victims a face and a name. In 2001, Munich set out to build the Documentation Center, to confront its past by examining the question of how and why it happened, while reminding visitors that history remains relevant. “The Nazi period will remain a thorn in Germany’s side,” said Andreas Wirsching, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. “We will continually be confronted with the question of how it could be that such a highly civilized country plunged into such an abyss of transgression, into a regime of injustice and murder. That is a lasting question of humanity that can be nightmarishly relevant.” |