This museum was a fairly new one, only opened in 2011. The building which housed it was plain in the extreme – a white concrete box, inside and out, neat, functional, but being very careful to avoid any hint of grandeur or even invitation. After spending the afternoon there I could understand why – the history of national socialism (Nazism) is a terrible one, and to an extent Germany is still making its peace with what it produced. I was glad they had the museum there though – it’s been 20 years since I studied this era of history at school, and some of the details were a little foggy. And, as the rise and fall of Nazism effectively occurred in Munich, it had a force which such a museum, anywhere else in the world, simply could not have had without having come in off the streets and out of many of the buildings featured in the history.
The tour guide on my “Third Reich” tour had mentioned that Munich was almost completely destroyed during the second World War – even so I was taken aback by video footage in the museum of the damage the city suffered, mainly from American bombers. Thomas Mann, a Nobel laureate, wrote of the bombing and the damage in 1942, “They bombed Munich with 200 planes and the heaviest calibre bombs. The explosions could be heard as far away as Switzerland, the earth shaken for many miles around. In historical terms the foolish place has deserved this.”
I could write a great deal more about all that I saw and read here – but the reading would not be pleasant, so I won’t. In fact, I felt such repulsion for everything that the Third Reich produced, and for the city which not only spawned but seemed to nurture it, that even an hour’s walking through sunny city streets, and cheerful buskers, couldn’t dispel it, and I ended up coming back to camp to write a little to get some of the poison out of my system.
Feldherrnhalle, Odeonplatz, Munich - once upon a time the stage was manned by the SS and people who failed to give the Nazi salute on entering the platz were recorded and often later arrested. On this particular morning staff were cleaning up after an evening of classical music held the night before.
Karolinenplatz. I'm standing in the middle of a big roundabout - at the left is an obelisk, a reminder of the Napoleonic wars, and made out of melted down canons and canon balls from those wars. At the right of this pic is a house which once belonged to the Bruckmann family, one of Hitler's upper class patrons - it was here that Hitler, who came from a lower-class family, was taught the manners he needed to interact with others from the upper class, including how to eat things like lobster tail, which only the rich had access to.
Steps of what was once the Fuhrer House - Hitler's Munich office was directly above where I stood to take this photo, and there is some famous footage of Chamberlain walking up these steps to discuss what would eventually become the Munich Agreement, the first step in what would prove to be the fatal appeasement of Hitler. Nowadays it's a music school - I could hear a pianist and an opera singer rehearsing together while I took this photo.
It was very interesting to read about these things from the German perspective, however – most of what I read reflected what I remembered from school, so obviously there does not seem to be any dispute about the facts of the rise and fall of Nazism. What intrigued me though was the German response since then – there seems to have been a strong tendency to try and forget it all ever happened. While for many the second World War is ancient history, and they want it to stay that way, it is only in the last few years that efforts have been made not to forget ... But these efforts tend to meet with disagreement – for example, it took considerable debate to install a plaque in the Konigsplatz to record the purpose to which that place had been put (the burning of the books, among other things). To an extent I can understand this – everything that occurred leading up to and during that war at the hands of Hitler and his psychopaths and thugs was so horrific that it is difficult to know what to do with it, how to process it. I just read about it for a couple of hours and thought an appropriate initial response would be the gnashing of teeth and the tearing of hair, so for a people whose parents and grandparents did all that horror, or let it happen ... I don’t know how they live with it. Maybe forgetting is the only way they can.
Another one of the Konigsplatz buildings - during the time of the Third Reich, the grass and road were all paved over with granite slabs and many huge rallies were held here. Apparently there is a plaque somewhere around one of these buildings, recording their history - but it was a battle to have it instated and it didn't seem to be very prominent as I went looking for it and couldn't find it.
Death March of Dachau Prisoners, April 1945 - a sculpture by Hubertus von Pilgrim in the Museum of National Socialism. As the generations pass, there seems to be more of a tendency towards remembering the horrors of the past as opposed to the forgetting that characterised the generations who committed them.
It seemed ironic, and yet fitting, that listening to the music of some Roma people - who were among the first targeted by the Nazis for persecution during the 1930s - helped to lift my spirits after visiting the Museum of National Socialism.