Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich

By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience.

Munich’s postwar development was the subject of constant controversy, pitting representatives of contending aesthetic and mnemonic positions against one another in the heated battle to shape the city’s urban form. Examining the debates between traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and critical preservationists, Rosenfeld shows that the memory of Nazism in Munich has never been "repressed" but has rather been defined by constant dissension and evolution. On balance, however, he concludes that Munich came to embody in its urban form a conservative view of the past that was inclined to diminish local responsibility for the Third Reich.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2010.
Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520923027

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Assistant Professor of German and European History at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

Book preview

MUNICH AND MEMORY

WEIMAR AND NOW:

GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM

Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors

ï. Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch

2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, by Steven E. Aschheim

3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg

4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity,

by Christoph Asendorf

5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen

6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, by Thomas J. Saunders

7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin

8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean

9. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William E. Scheuerman

10. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, by Martin Jay

11. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum

12. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949, edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau

13. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1933, by Kari Toepfer

14. In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, by Anson Rabinbach

15. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, by Beatrice Hanssen

16. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, by Anthony Heilbut

17. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, by Helmut Lethen, translated by Don Reneau

18. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1943-1948, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Kelly Barry

19. A Dubious Past: Ernst Junger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism, by Elliot Y.

Neaman

20. Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust, by Dan Diner

21. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Kafka’s Fin de Siècle, by Scott Spector

22. Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich, by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

23. The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-194S)

by Klaus Kreimeier, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber

24. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990, by Rudy Koshar

25. We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism, by Marsha Maskimmon

GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD

MUNICH AND

MEMORY

Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Bcrktky Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2000 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenfeld, Gavriel David, 1967-

Munich and memory: architecture, monuments, and the legacy of the Third Reich / Gavriel D. Rosenfeld.

p. cm. — (Weimar and now; 22)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN o-520-21910-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Architecture—Germany—Munich.

2. Architecture—Conservation and restoration — Germany—Munich. 3. Architecture, Modern—20th century—Germany—Munich. 4. Reconstruction

(1939-1951)— Germany—Munich. 5. National socialism and architecture—Germany—Munich.

6. Munich (Germany) —Buildings, structures, etc.

i. Title. II. Scries.

NA 1086.M8 R68 2000

720’.943'36409045 21- dc2i 99-043091

Manufactured in the United States of America

08 07 06 oj 04 03 02 01 00 99

10 9 8 7 6 5 4? 2 i

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Part I RESTORATION OR RENEWAL? 1945-1958

Chapter 1 · DESTRUCTION, RECONSTRUCTION, AND MOURNING

Chapter 2 • ARCHITECTURE, CITY PLANNING, AND THE MEMORY OF NAZISM

Chapter 3 • MEMORY AND URBAN DENAZIFICATION

Chapter 4 • MONUMENTS AND MEMORY

Part II MODERNISM, 1958-1975

Chapter 5 • MODERNISM, POPULIST HISTORIC PRESERVATION, AND THE MEMORY OF NAZISM

Chapter 6 • POPULIST HISTORIC PRESERVATION, REVISIONIST RECONSTRUCTION, AND MOURNING

Chapter 7 • NAZI ARCHITECTURE

Chapter 8 • THE DECLINE OF THE MONUMENT

Part III POSTMODERNISM, 1975-2000

Chapter 9 • THEPOSTMODERNCITY AND THE RECONTESTATION OF MEMORY

Chapter 10 • THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE THIRD REICH

Chapter 11 • THE RETURN OF THE MONUMENT

CONCLUSION

Appendix. MONUMENT INVENTORY

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. Munich Altstadt xii

2. Munich, Outlying Districts xiv

FIGURES

ï. Munich before World War II 16

2. Munich today 17

3. The Peterskirche at war’s end 33

4. The Frauenkirche at war’s end 35

5. The Residenz before the war 37

6. The Altes Residenztheater (Cuvilliéstheater) before the war 38

7. The Alte Pinakothek before the war 42

8. The Alte Pinakothek at war’s end 42

9. The restored Alte Pinakothek 43

10. The Bavarian Armeemuseum at war’s end 47

11. The Neues Residenztheater 66

12. The Bayerische Hypotheken-und Wechsel-Bank 66

13. The Starnberger Bahnhof 66

14. The Verlagshaus Beck 69

15. The Marienplatz 69

16. The old city hall after the war 69

17. The Kaufhof department store 72

18. The Herzog-Max-Burg 73

20. Swastikas on the former Luftgaukommando building 81

21. Denazified Hoheitszeichen on the city Oberfinanzdirektion 82

22. The former Führerbau today 83

23. The Königsplatz before the war 84

24. The Königsplatz during the Third Reich 85

25. One of the two Ehrentempel 86

26. The Führerbau during the Third Reich 87

27. The Haus der Deutschen Kunst during the Third Reich 94

28. The Haus der Kunst today 95

29. The Wittelsbacher Palais during the Third Reich 98

30. The Wittelsbacher Palais at war’s end 98

31. The Brown House before the war 100

32. The former Zentralministerium today 101

33. The Luftgaukommando during the Third Reich 102

34. The Neptunbrunnen 103

35. The Feldherrnhalle today in

36. The Mahnmal der Bewegung during the Third Reich in

37. The Freikorps monument during the Third Reich 113

38. Eagles on the Kongreßsaal of the Deutsches Museum 113

39. The marble Krieger 115

40. The Siegestor before the war 118

41. The Siegestor at war’s end 118

42. The restored south face of the Siegestor 123

43. Monument to civilian war dead at the Schwabinger Schuttberg 134

44. Monument to civilian war dead at the Nordfriedhof 137

45. Monument in Jewish cemetery on the Ungererstrasse 140

46. The Hauptsynagoge before 1938 141

47. The Hertie department store 150

48. The BMW Administration Building 151

49. The 1972 Munich Olympic complex 155

50. The Ignaz-Günther-Haus 168

51. The Kaufhof department store 172

52. The Preysing Palais 179

53. The reconstructed Leuchtenberg Palais 180

54. The Nationaltheater at war’s end 181

55. The Siegestor after restoration of the quadriga 185

56. St. Bonifaz before the war 188

57. St. Bonifaz after the war 188

58. The Odeon concert hall before the war 190

59. The old city hall and reconstructed tower 194

60. The Allerheiligenhofkirche before the war 197

60. The Königsplatz as a parking lot 201

61. The Schuttblume monument 221

62. Monument to the Hauptsynagoge 226

63. The Munich Stadtmuseum 241

64. The Deutsche Beamtenversicherung Headquarters 242

65. The Neue Pinakothek 244

66. The Raffeisen-Bank 248

67. The new Bavarian State Chancellery 253

68. The Landesversorgungsamt 255

69. The pockmarked former NSDAP Administration Building 260

70. The restored Königsplatz 269

71. Ehrentempel foundation 272

72. Monument at the Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus 282

73. Monument to the White Rose at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität 286

74. Stone lion at the Bavarian Catholic Academy 288

75. The Bavarian Armeemuseum, 1990 292

76. Monument to Jews deported from Milbertshofen barracks camp 294

77. Monument to Jews deported from the Israelitisches Krankenhaus 297

78. Monument commemorating Dachau death march 298

79. Stone lion at the Bayerische Landesbank 303 MAP i. MUNICH ALTSTADT

BUILDINGS

Buildings un denoted by numbered squares.

ï Allerheiligenhofkirche

2 Alte Pinakothek

3 Alter Hof

4 Altes Rathaus

5 Altes Residenztheater (Cuvilliés- theater)

6 Amerika Haus (on site of demolished Lotzbeck Palais)

7 Armeemuseum (current Bavarian State Chancellery)

8 Augustinerkirche (secularized)

9 Ausstellungsgebäude (Alter Botanischer Garten)

io Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechsel-Bank

II Bayerische Landesbank (Gemeindebank)

12 Bayerische Landesbausparkasse

13 Brown House (demolished)

14 Bürgerbräukeller (demolished)

15 Bürgersaalkirche

16 Deutscher Kaiser

17 Deutsche Beamtenversicherung Headquarters (Lenbachplatz)

18 Deutsches Museum

19 Deutsches Patentamt

20 Ehrentempel (Königsplatz)

21 Europäisches Patentamt

22 Feldhermhalle

23 Frauenkirche

24 Führerbau (Königsplatz)

25 Gasteig Cultural Center

26 Glyptothek (Königsplatz)

27 Haslauer-Block

28 Haus der Deutschen Ärtzte

29 Haus der Deutschen Kunst

30 Haus des Deutschen Rechts

31 Heilig-Geist-Kirche

32 Herzog-Max-Burg

33 Hettlage Department Store

34 High Voltage Hall

35 Ignaz-Günther-Haus (Jakobsplatz)

36 Institute for Electrical Technology

37 Justizpalast

38 Kaufhof (Karlsplatz)

39 Kaufhof (Marienplatz)

40 Kongreßsaal (Deutsches Museum)

41 Königsplatz

42 Künstlerhaus

43 Landeszentralbank

44 Lerchenfeld Palais

45 Leuchtenberg Palais

46 Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität

47 Ludwigskirche

48 Luftgaukommando (current Bavarian Ministry

of Economics)

49 Marienplatz

50 Marstallplatz

51 Matthäuskirche

52 Max-Josef-Stift

53 Michaelskirche

54 Nationaltheater

55 Neptunbrunnen (Alter Botanischer Garten)

56 Neue Pinakothek

57 Neues Herkulessaal

58 Neues Rathaus

59 Neues Residenztheater

60 Oberfinanzdirektion

61 Oberste Bayerische Baubehörde (OBB)

62 Odeon (partially demolished)

63 Old Age Home (Jakobsplatz)

64 Old Age Home (Lehel)

65 Papal Nunciature (demolished)

66 Park-Cafe (Alter Botanischer Garten)

67 Peterskirche

68 Pinakothek der Moderne (under construction)

69 Preysing Palais (Prannerstrasse)

70 Preysing Palais (Residenzstrasse)

71 Prinz Carl Palais

72 Propyläen

73 Raffeisen-Zentralbank

74 Residenz

75 Ruffini-Haus

76 Siemens Administration Building (Altstadt)

77 St. Anna church

78 St. Anna Damenstift church

79 St. Bonifaz church

80 Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Königsplatz)

81 Staatliche Lotterieverwaltung (on site of demolished Törring Palais)

82 Stadtmuseum

83 Theatinerkirche

84 Theresienstrasse apartments

85 United States Consulate

86 Verwaltungsbau der NSDAP (Königsplatz)

87 War Ministry Building (current Bavarian State Archives)

88 Wittelsbacher Palais (demolished)

89 Wohnungsamt

90 Zentralministerium

(current Bavarian Ministry of Agriculture)

91 Zum Spöckmeier Restaurant

MONUMENTS

Monuments are denoted by numbered circles.

1 Bismarck monument

2 Countermonument at Ehrentempel foundation (Königsplatz)

3 Destroyed Building plaque (Briennerstrasse storefront)

4 Destroyed Building plaque (Hettlage Department Store)

5 Destroyed Building plaque

(Isar-Amper- Werke)

6 Destroyed Building plaque (Marienplatz 3)

7 Destroyed Building plaque (Rischart Bakery)

8 Destroyed Building plaque (Wohnungsamt)

9 Free Press plaque (Süddeutsche

Zeitung, Sendlinger Strasse)

10 Freiheitsaktion Bayern plaque (former Zentralministerium)

11 Fritz Gerlich plaque (Richard- Wagner-Strasse)

12 Fritz Gerlich plaque (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

13 Georg Elser plaque

14 German Resistance monument (Hofgarten)

15 Hauptsynagoge monument

16 Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse synagogue plaque

17 Hitler-Putsch Victims of 1923 monument

18 Jewish Lawyers plaque (Justizpalast)

19 Kriegerdenkmal

20 Lion Feuchtwanger plaque

21 Mahnmal der Bewegung (demolished)

22 Monument to City Employees Killed in Concentration Camps (Neues Rathaus)

23 Monument to Destruction of City (Altes Rathaus)

24 Monument to Liberation of City from Nazism

25 Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus monument

26 POW monument beneath Altes Rathaus

27 Rupert Mayer monument (Bürgersaalkirche)

28 Scholl Sibling monument (Scholl Sibling Dormitory)

29 Sinti and Roma plaque (Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus)

30 Stone Lion Copy (Bayerische Landesbank)

31 Uhlfelder Department Store plaque

32 Weiss Ferdi monument

33 White Rose monuments (Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität)

34 White Rose plaque (Justizpalast)

35 Wittelsbacher Palais plaque

36 Wunden der Erinnerung, Alte Pinakothek

37 Wunden der Erinnerung, Haus der Kunst

38 Wunden der Erinnerung, Ludwigstrasse MAP 2. MUNICH, OUTLYING DISTRICTS

BUILDINGS

Buildings are denoted by numbered squares.

i Allianz Building

2 Alter Nördlicher Friedhof

3 Alter Südlicher Friedhof

4 BMW Administration Building

5 Feilitzschstrasse Commercial Building

6 Francona Rückversicherung

7 Hertie Department Store (Leopoldstrasse)

8 Hypobank

9 Kaufhof (Rotkreuzplatz)

io Landesversorgungsamt (demolished)

II Ludwig Siebert Siedlung

12 Munich-Riem Airport (partially demolished)

13 Mustersiedlung Ramersdorf

14 Nordbad

15 Olympic Stadium (Olympiapark)

16 Ostfriedhof

17 Parkstadt Bogenhausen

18 Reichzeugmeisterei

19 Schmitthenner House

20 Siemens Administration Building (Obersendling)

21 Siemenssiedlung

22 SS-Standarte Deutschland barracks (current Ernst- von-Bergemann Kaserne)

23 Stadtarchiv

24 Starnberger Bahnhof

25 Verlagshaus-Beck

MONUMENTS

Monuments are denoted by numbered circles.

1 Alfred Delp monument (St. Georg, Bogenhausen)

2 Civilian War Dead monument (Luitpoldpark)

3 Civilian War Dead monument (Neuhofen)

4 Civilian War Dead monument (Nordfriedhof)

5 Death March monument (Allach)

6 Death March monument (Pasing)

7 Displaced Persons gravesite (Perlacher Forest Cemetery)

8 Freiheitsaktion Bayern plaque (Münchner Freiheit)

9 Freikorps monument (demolished)

10 Fritz Gerlich plaque (at Catholic Academy stone lion)

11 German Resistance monument (Hochleite)

12 German Resistance monument (Ostfriedhof)

13 German Resistance monument (Platz der Freiheit, Neuhausen)

14 Hans Leipelt monument (Perlacher Forest Cemetery)

15 Hermann Frieb plaque

16 Jewish Deportation monument (former Heimanlage at Berg-am-Laim)

17 Jewish Deportation monument (site of former Israelitisches Krankenhaus)

18 Jewish Deportation monument (site of former Milbertshofen barracks camp)

19 Julius Spanier plaque

20 Kurt Huber plaque

21 KZ Ehrenhain (Perlacher Forest Cemetery)

22 Monument to Jews Killed in Holocaust (Jewish cemetery, Ungererstrasse)

23 Polish Victims of Nazism monument (Perlacher Forest Cemetery)

24 Scholl Siblings plaque (Franz-Joseph-Strasse)

25 Schuttblume (Oberwiesenfeld Rubble Mountain)

26 Siegestor

27 Stadelheim Prison monument

28 Steel Cross (Oberwiesenfeld Rubble Mountain)

29 Stone Lion (Catholic Academy)

30 Waldfriedhof monument

31 Willi Graf plaque

PREFACE

THIS BOOK is about the reciprocal relationship between memory and urban space. In the pages that follow, I not only examine how memory shapes the evolution of the city’s architecture and monuments but also analyze how the overall form of the urban landscape physically represents memories of the city’s past. I have explored these important theoretical issues not for their own sake, but within a specific historical context, that of postwar Germany. The present book is thus about German memory and German cities. Both are currently undergoing important changes—a fact that lends this study a particularly high degree of topicality and, I hope, enables it to contribute to a deeper understanding of Germany’s mental and physical landscapes. In reflecting upon these matters, I have sought to clarify the general in the particular, focusing the book upon a single city—Munich. The analysis that follows is thus an in-depth historical account of Munich’s struggle to come to terms with its Nazi past. But, as will become clear below, it also represents a more personal struggle to acquire a more critical manner of seeing.

I first visited Munich as a college student during the summer of 1988. On my initial early evening walk through the city’s historic center, or Altstadt, I was duly impressed, as are most first-time tourists, with the its grand, floodlit buildings: the white, neobaroque Justizpalast looming above the kinetic mosaic of speeding automobiles, dancing fountains, and neon-clad commercial buildings of the Karlsplatz, the soaring, twin onion domes of the gothic Frauenkirche, and the monumental, ochrecolored facade of the baroque Theatinerkirche. I confess to having been particularly impressed by the much maligned, overscaled, neo-Gothic Neues Rathaus, or new city hall, at the Marienplatz, whose bewildering array of allegorical and historical statuary depicting former monarchs, Bavarian lions, and grotesque mythic beasts (in particular, a small dragon crawling up the building’s southwest corner) seized my eye and enticed my imagination. Compared to other German cities I had seen, Munich seemed to possess a unique aesthetic charm and allure. I concluded that a visit of three days could not possibly satisfy my curiosity about the city, and I resolved to return.

In the early fall of the fateful year 1989,1 did return to Munich, this time for an extended period of study at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Ironically, however, although I had come to study Germany’s past, I arrived at a time when public attention was directed nearly exclusively towards its present and future. In a sense, I had come to the wrong city. I had been lured by the Munich of a divided Germany, a city whose cultural riches had established it more than a generation before as the Federal Republic’s heimliche Hauptstadt, or secret capital. The collapse of the wall in November, however, removed Munich from the national spotlight and once more cast it in the shadow of its longtime rival, the nation’s true capital, Berlin. This was a period generally unsuited to arouse much interest in Munich or its past.

Yet, it was precisely Munich’s past that began to interest me. During my year there, I came to know Munich through long weekend walks through its various streets, parks, and neighborhoods. But my knowledge of the city, I gradually recognized, was superficial and incomplete. While in Germany, I visited such cities as Berlin and Dresden and witnessed firsthand the many ruins left by the Second World War. Seeing such fragmented edifices as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue, and the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin or the collapsed remnants of the Frauenkirche and the burnt-out shell of the Wettin monarchy’s Residenzschloss in Dresden on a frigid, overcast winter day had a powerful impact and gave me the feeling of having been transported back in time—almost to the day of these buildings’ destruction. I came to realize, in turn, that Munich represented its past architecturally in a far different manner. I knew that Munich too had been heavily damaged in the war, but I had seen few comparable ruins in the city; however, I did not comprehend the extent to which Munich had been destroyed until one day, during a visit to a local bookstore, I glanced through several books of photographs of the city before and after the war. With some surprise I realized that much of the historic architecture I had admired was not historic at all. The tower of the gothic Altes Rathaus, or old city hall across the way on the Marienplatz, for example, was not, in fact, old (as I had been led to believe by the plaque upon the city hall that read, built in 1470 by Jörg Ganghofer) but had been destroyed by bombs and built entirely anew in 1975. Many other buildings that I assumed had withstood the savage forces of the war had likewise been carefully reconstructed. This experience fundamentally altered my way of seeing. While I had previously viewed the city from a purely aesthetic, generally ahistorical perspective, I now began to regard it more critically.

In the years that followed, I attempted to make sense of my time in Munich by merging it with my larger interests in the German collective memory of the Third Reich and the Second World War. It occurred to me that by examining the interplay between memory and the city I could gain new insights into how the Germans had attempted to come to terms with their Nazi past after 1945—the process called Ver- ¿angenheitsbewciltigung. Could it be, I wondered, that the way Munich was rebuilt after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II reflected the local citizenry’s memories of these traumatic episodes in the city’s history? Examining Munich’s reconstruction as an expression of coming to terms with the past provided an initial avenue of inquiry, but I soon decided that a comprehensive examination of the city’s entire urban development over the postwar era would provide the most comprehensive answer to my questions about postwar German memory.

When I returned to Munich in the summer of 1992 and then again for the academic year, 1993-94,1 examined more than just its reconstructed historic architecture. I was now interested in studying its new postwar buildings, its Nazi-era architectural legacy, and its numerous monuments. The present study has thus moved well beyond its initial inspiration and attempts to investigate the city in its totality. By analyzing how Munich’s architecture and monuments were erected, demolished, restored, relocated, hidden, and exposed in the postwar period, I have tried to provide a new perspective on the construction and evolution of local collective memory. I have concluded that the relationship between memory and the city is highly interdependent, and I have come to understand that conflicting memories of the past have not only shaped, but have also been visually represented by, the city’s urban form.

In the final analysis, however, there are no easy answers to the question of what the city of Munich as a whole reveals about postwar German memory of the Third Reich. For all historians, this period of German history is fraught with numerous interpretive and ethical challenges. Over the course of research and writing, I too have faced such challenges in weighing and interpreting the evidence. I have had to reconcile conflicting feelings and balance my empathetic inclinations towards the inhabitants of a city whose urban form I greatly admire with the need for a critical assessment of the problematic means through which that very form has evolved. While it has not been an easy task, I have sought to strike a balance between these two perspectives and to write an urban history of postwar German memory that contributes to a deeper understanding of one of Germany’s most important cities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN THE COURSE of researching and writing this study, I have benefited from the assistance of many individuals and institutions to whom I wish to extend my sincerest thanks. In Munich, the staff of the Stadtarchiv unfailingly provided me with useful advice and regularly helped me find numerous interesting and relevant materials for my project. I would like to particularly thank Dr. Ingo Schwab, Dr. Helmuth Stahleder, and Elisabeth Angermair for their help. Thanks also go to Dr. Lothar Saupe at the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, who also went out of his way to lend me advice and assistance. At the Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, I am grateful to Elke Fuchs for making the agency’s files available to me and to Ingrid Schmid and Dr. H. W. Lübbeke for helping me locate historic photographs. Much of the secondary literature pertaining to Munich used in this study can be found at Munich’s Mona- censia Library, an institution not only indispensable for those interested in studying the city but an enjoyable one in which to work; helping to make it such a comfortable spot were Irmtraud Stockinger, Christine Wagner, and Radu Florian Bar- bulescu, with whom I had numerous pleasant and informative conversations and whom I heartily thank for their assistance. I also am indebted to Walter Sesemann, whom I thank for his generosity in providing access to various files and records pertaining to local monuments at the Munich Hochbauamt. Likewise, Frau Reimann- Grüner and the staff at the Direktorium office of the Munich Rathaus were extremely helpful in giving me access to the transcripts of recent city council debates. I owe special thanks, moreover, to Winfried Nerdinger, professor of architectural history and director of the architecture museum at the Technical University, for his interest in my project and his words of advice. Lastly, I am grateful to Karl-Ulrich Gelberg at the Bayerisches Staatsarchiv; Hermann Neumann at the Bayerische Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten, und Seen; Gabriele Famers at the Oberste Bayerische Baubehörde; Josef Hackl at the Münchner Stadtmuseum; Matthias Bahr at the Katholische Akademie in Bayern; and Munich artist Thomas Lehnerer for providing me with materials relevant to my study.

I would also like to extend most heartfelt thanks to friends whom I had the great fortune of meeting over the course of my visits to Munich. Peter and Gabriele Ficht- müller hosted me at their home for several weeks in 1989-90 as a young Fulbright scholar fresh out of college and generously welcomed me for more extended stays during the summers of 1992 and 1998. During these and other visits, they introduced me to the cultural riches of Munich and displayed genuine interest in my thoughts on its urban development. I am grateful for their friendship and that of their family. I would also like to thank Awi Blumenfeld, a fellow student of history, who generously welcomed me into his family’s home in 1989 and introduced me to Munich’s Jewish community. I am also grateful to Birgit Woldt for her hospitality on numerous visits, for her friendship, and for her unfailingly reliable transatlantic research assistance. Finally, special thanks go out to Eli Bar-Chen, with whom I shared many helpful conversations about my own work and about our mutual interests in German and Jewish history.

This study would have been impossible without the generous support of several institutions, whom I would also like to thank. I am grateful to the Center for German and European Studies for a predissertation fellowship in the summer of 1992 and for supporting my graduate studies at UCLA with additional scholarship funds. I also thank the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for awarding me a dissertation year fellowship during 1993-94, which allowed me to conduct the bulk of my research in Munich. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to the staff at the University of California Press, especially Edward Dimendberg, Stan Holwitz, Laura Pasquale, and Yuki Takagaki, all of whom have been extremely helpful in bringing my book to completion, as well as to John Joerschke for his meticulous copy editing.

At UCLA, I have benefited from years of stimulating intellectual exchange, professorial encouragement, and institutional support. I owe my interest in collective memory to one of the most prominent experts in the field, Saul Friedländer, who has been an inspiring teacher and doctoral adviser. I also thank Robert Wohl, who first introduced me to the study of cultural history through architecture and helped me to solidify my project at its earliest stages. My education in architectural history and theory has been strongly promoted, moreover, by Thomas Hines, whose interest in my study I greatly appreciate. I am grateful, finally, to Peter Baldwin and David Myers, both of whom gave my graduate work close attention over the years and provided me with model examples of teaching and research. In addition, I would like to thank David Sabean for providing a forum at UCLA to present selected features of my research to a larger audience.

To my wife, Dr. Erika Banks, I am grateful for innumerable things, most of which lie far beyond the realm of history. In the past few years, however, I have been particularly grateful for her patience during the many months of separation and writing, for her constant encouragement, and for her critical but gentle comments on my work. I thank her for accompanying me on many walks through the streets of Munich, in both the cold and snow of winter and the hazy sunshine of summer. Our daughter, Julia, was too young to make a direct contribution to the present study, but she has nevertheless provided many hours of joyous distraction from the labors of bringing it into its final form. I am truly grateful for her vibrant presence in my life.

Finally, I owe a special word of thanks to my parents, Alvin and Erna Rosenfeld, who from my first steps have placed the greatest importance on my education and provided me with the means to achieve it to its fullest extent. Not only did they nurture my interest in history at home, they allowed me to further develop it abroad by giving me my earliest exposure to Europe and Germany. For this and so much more, I dedicate this work to them.

INTRODUCTION

Since its emergence from the rubble of 1945, Germany has been haunted by memory. But the term memory is not commonly used in any ordinary sense when referring to the nation’s strained postwar relationship to its past. Memory, rather, has largely been replaced by one of the most complicated and disputed concepts in the German language: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Usually translated as the process of coming to terms with or mastering the past, the term refers to the Germans’ contested and still evolving collective memory of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This particular memory is both like and unlike all others. As a growing body of literature on the subject has shown, memory is collective but not monolithic; it is a focal point of multiple, socially constructed views of the past held independently by various groups within society.¹ Defined in this way, German memory is no exception. And yet, it enjoys anything but a normalized existence. The degree to which a relatively brief period of Germany’s recent history has dominated the nation’s collective memory, disproportionately influenced its contemporary identity, and become an obsessive preoccupation among its people, makes it unique. As the painful, ongoing process that transforms the past into memory, Vergangenheitsbewältigung defines postwar Germany like few other concepts.

For all of its centrality in the Federal Republic’s political culture, however, the idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung is highly ambiguous. When it first appeared in public discourse during the 1950s, the term was used only infrequently—a fact that clouded its meaning and enabled its subsequent politicization during the turbulent decade of the 1960s.² Especially in light of the term’s historic lack of specificity, therefore, defining Vergangenheitsbewältigung remains an important task. Reduced to its essence as the present’s perception of and relationship towards the past, the term is universally applicable to any society. Some scholars, in fact, already speak of Vergangen- heitsbewaltigung in other national contexts.³ Yet, as the two separate parts of the compound term imply, it possesses great historical specificity as well. The past in question (Vergangenheit) is no ordinary past but one that overshadows all others; hence the laconic subsuming of a mere twelve years of German history, usually known as the Third Reich, under the overarching phrase the past.⁴ Moreover, the verb bewältigen (to master or overcome) raises a further question: what kind of past is it that must be overcome? Clearly, not all aspects of a society’s past demand such a response, but only those which involve guilt for serious crimes. Thus, while conflicts over memory are common to all nations, mastering the past is incumbent upon those that have committed criminal deeds which must never again be repeated.

Still, Vergangenheitsbewältigung remains an ambiguous concept, for it uneasily embraces two diametrically opposed methods of coping with the past. On the one hand, Vergangenheitsbewältigung represents an effective means of countering the ineluctable tendency towards forgetting. As it promotes the continued involvement with, and remembrance of, the relics of the old in the new, it assures that the past is forever in the process of being mastered.⁵ At the same time, however, Vergangenheitsbewältigung implies a certain kind of forgetting. As Theodor Adorno noted in 1959, coming to terms with the past does not imply a serious working through of the past… [but] suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and … wiping it from memory. This version of Vergangenheitsbewältigung works through the past only for a limited time, at the end of which, it is finished and unable to affect the present as before.⁶

Not surprisingly, the internal tensions within the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung are mirrored in the historiography on the subject. In discussing the relationship of postwar German society to its Nazi past, most scholars have operated within a discourse of success or failure; that is, they have struggled to determine whether or not postwar German society has successfully come to terms with the Nazi past. This concern with the presence of the past reflects the continuing uncertainty surrounding the stability of the Federal Republic since its founding in 1949. Were the proper lessons drawn from the experience of National Socialism? Would continuities from the Third Reich to the new democracy jeopardize, or perhaps even eventually undermine, the foundations of the new nation? These and similar questions have prompted many scholarly studies of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Yet, scholars who have studied this important issue have frequently disagreed in their conclusions.

On one side of the debate are those who argue that the Germans have largely avoided dealing with the past instead of confronting it directly. The most influential theoretical explication of this position appeared with the famous study by the West German psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn, in 1967. It was this work, in which the Mitscherlichs discussed the Germans’ derealization of their past in the hope of avoiding feelings of guilt, shame, or a sense of complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime, which contributed most to the increasingly psychoanalytic direction of the discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung.⁷ Fol lowing this pathbreaking theoretical study, scholars in and outside of Germany produced more empirical analyses. Many of these early works aimed to expose the restorationist tendencies of the Federal Republic by focusing on the failure of denazification and the continuing presence of Nazi personnel in major West German institutions such as the civil service, foreign office, judiciary, and military.⁸ More recent studies, whether of public controversies over the Third Reich like the Bitburg affair or the Historians’ Debate, or of the private psychological struggles with the Third Reich’s legacy at the personal or familial level, further suggest the unmaster- able nature of the Nazi past.⁹ Underlying most of these works has been the concern that the failure to adequately confront the Nazi crimes might lead to unforeseeable and possibly dangerous consequences for the social and political health of West Germany. Only by forthrightly pursuing the task of remembering, repeating, and working through would the Germans truly come to terms with their Nazi past.¹⁰

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that the Federal Republic has generally done a commendable job in dealing with the legacy of the Third Reich. These scholars reject the Mitscherlichs’ theories as unverifiable and insist that the West German government’s payment of reparations to Jews, its prosecution of German war criminals, and its vigilant stance towards neo-Nazi activity all reflect a serious attempt to come to terms with the past.¹¹ Especially compared with the difficulties of other nations in confronting their own pasts, they insist, the Germans’ achievement is all the more notable.¹² Many, moreover, support the position of Hermann Lübbe who, while denying that the Nazi past was repressed, argued that the successful establishment of a secure German democracy depended precisely upon looking away from the past and integrating former Nazis into the new state.¹³ More conservative critics, meanwhile, angrily reject the charge of insufficient Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung as a mere political tool used by the masochistic German left since 1968 to attack the state and prevent Germany from regaining a healthy national identity.¹⁴ Since the 1980s, these critics have called for a more objective handling of the history of the Third Reich devoid of moralism, forbidden questions, and taboos as a way to relativize the exceptionality of the Nazi past and restore a sense of normality and pride to the German national heritage.¹⁵ This movement has recently gained new momentum, moreover, with the demise of the German Democratic Republic, an event which some say has created the need for a second Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung and, thus, for the completion of the first.¹⁶

The discourse of success or failure, though understandable, presents numerous epistemological problems for the historian. How does one measure how successfully a society deals with its past? What, indeed, would a mastered past look like? Without a commonly agreed upon endpoint, these questions are impossible to answer. It seems undeniable, however, that the act of mastering can in no way mean the complete cessation of inquiry into the past, for the past in its totality continues to evolve in collective memory as long as the society that sustains it exists. In all probability, only when the very question oíVer¿fangenheitsbewAltigung disappears will the past be normalized and, in some sense, mastered.¹⁷ With this in mind, it is best to study the Germans’ relationship to their nation’s Nazi past without simplistic reference to abstract categories of success or failure. Rather than asking if the Germans have come to terms with the past, it is better to examine how they have attempted to do so.¹⁸ Any comprehensive analysis oiVergangenheitsbewältigung in postwar Germany, therefore, must avoid a teleological perspective and view German memory as something both fundamentally pluralistic and dynamic. Doing so helps to illustrate how diverse memories of the Third Reich have competed with one another and have evolved over time, and helps to answer the important theoretical question whether memory wanes or intensifies as a contested period of history recedes further into the past. Whether or not the Germans’ engagement with the memory of the Third Reich has progressively increased with the passing of time, as has been asserted by scholars such as Hermann Lübbe, can be profitably explored by investigating how the process of coming to terms with the past has been pursued within the separate realms of German political and cultural life.¹⁹ Until now, however, most studies of Vergangenheitsbewältigung have focused more closely on the realm of politics than the realm of culture.²⁰ Despite the appearance of perceptive analyses of German film, literature, and art in recent years, the lack of scholarly attention to other aspects of postwar German culture makes our understanding of the working through of the Nazi past in the Federal Republic incomplete.²¹

Entirely lacking in this body of scholarship are works that systematically examine the relationship between memory and the city. Although valuable studies have recently appeared on the postwar reconstruction and architectural development of German cities, most have focused primarily on social, political, and economic factors rather than on cultural factors and have neglected to address the issue of Vergangen- heitsbewiiltigung.²² Works dealing more directly with memory in the fields of historic preservation and monuments, moreover, have generally been few in number and narrow in scope.²³ In short, since these studies have focused on the separate parts of the whole, the need for a comprehensive analysis of the city as a unified entity remains.

Analyzing the city, of course, poses considerable methodological challenges for the historian. Situated at the intersection of complex social, political, economic, psychological, and cultural forces, the city is a daunting object of study. The city’s diverse component parts—its buildings, streets, monuments, and topographical features— are quite different from other cultural artifacts. In contrast to scholars of literature or film, who study fixed narratives generally created by single individuals, the historian of the city analyzes an evolving entity rooted in a nonverbal form of communication and constructed by multiple authors—architects, historic preservationists, citizens’ groups, political officials, and representatives of the media—all of whom, taken together, constitute a broad cross section of society.²⁴ This dynamic complexity makes the city difficult to analyze, but it also allows for unusual insights, for it is precisely the city’s high degree of socio-cultural representativeness, not to mention its public visibility, that makes it uniquely suited for understanding the workings of memory. Scholarship on the interplay between memory and urban development is still in its infancy.²⁵ Still, what previous work has confirmed, and what this study attempts to explore in deeper fashion, is that a wealth of complex links unite memory and the city. This has been demonstrated in particularly convincing fashion by the French sociologist and pioneering scholar of collective memory Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that every memory unfolds within a spatial framework and concluded that we can understand how we recapture the past only by understanding how it is … preserved in our physical surroundings.²⁶ With its buildings and streets encoded with multiple historical associations, meanings, and reminiscences, the city truly can be seen, to paraphrase Leland Roth, as built memory.²⁷ Equally important as this insight is the recognition that cities are also sites of forgetting. In light of the feverish development, destruction, and renewal that ceaselessly reshape the modern city, it is useful to bear in mind Siegfried Kracauer’s observation that steady transformation expunges memory.²⁸ And yet, it is precisely this process of change that allows systematic research the ways in which memory evolves.²⁹ The shifting form of the city provides significant clues about the shifting memories of its inhabitants. Examining the multiple ways in which society interacts with the built environment— how it erects, demolishes, preserves, restores, and commemorates—thus helps to shed light on how memory is infused into, and deleted from, the urban landscape. In so doing, it becomes clear that the city is not merely the passive recipient of accumulated memories. It shapes them and is, in turn, shaped by them.

Exploring the relationship between memory and the city is particularly profitable in the case of postwar Germany. The momentous impact of the turbulent Nazi years upon German cities left them reeling with memory after 1945. The signs of the Third Reich were plainly visible throughout the nation’s urban landscape. German cities had been disfigured by the bombastic construction projects of the Nazis and had been severely damaged by the wartime aerial bombings of the Allies. This radical upheaval left German cities with permanent scars that were unmistakable reminders of the recent past. Yet, Nazism’s legacy was visible not only in the physical scars of German cities but in the mental scars of the cities’ inhabitants. After the war, Germany’s urban centers were populated by human beings deeply shaken by recent events. As victims mingled with perpetrators and as locals mixed with refugees, conflicting emotions—ranging from anger and denial to shame and ambivalence— collided amidst the rubble and ruins of the postwar city. The impact of the Nazi experience upon the nation’s cityscape and citizenry, in short, transformed German cities after 1945 into shattered vessels of memory overflowing with conflicting views of the recent past. These memories constituted the legacy of the Third Reich that, together with other factors, decisively shaped the development of German cities throughout the postwar era.

Few German cities were more directly affected by the tumultuous experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War than Munich. Few cities, as a result, had as difficult a legacy to come to terms with after 1945. As the birthplace and permanent national headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), Munich possessed enormous ideological importance for the Nazi movement. During the Third Reich, the Nazis demonstrated their high regard for the city by taking the unusual step of granting it not one, but two honorific titles: the Hauptstadt der Deutschen Kunst (Capital of German Art) in 1933 and, more significantly, the Hauptstadt der Bewegung (Capital of the Movement) in 1935. The Nazis, however, did not merely transform Munich’s civic identity; they transformed its urban landscape as well. Although the grandiose plans for the radical redesign of Munich into a Führerstadt (Führer-city) were never realized, the Nazis placed their distinctive architectural stamp upon the city through numerous large-scale construction projects. They transformed Munich’s urban form most fatefully, however, by unleashing a criminal war of aggression that brought unprecedented physical destruction to the city through the relentless Allied campaign of aerial bombardment. After 1945, the impact of the Nazi experience constituted a shameful legacy that Munich’s inhabitants were desperate to put behind them. Many were predictably eager, therefore, to erase the memory of the city’s disgraceful identity as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung by suppressing its lingering physical signs in the urban landscape. Yet, this prevailing amnesiac drive did not stand unopposed; in a city composed of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, memory was pluralistic and a frequent source of contention. A competition of memories was thus the Third Reich’s chief legacy and one of the most volatile factors shaping the city’s subsequent postwar development.

To best understand how the memory of the Third Reich influenced Munich’s urban development after 1945, it is helpful to divide the city into its component parts. In many ways, this is a daunting task, for composed as it is of tens of thousands of individual buildings, structures, and sites, the city is far too vast for comprehensive historical analysis. Nevertheless, the present study attempts precisely such an undertaking, examining over 225 of Munich’s culturally significant buildings and monuments. Out of this large body of material, four prominent features of the city’s form are particularly appropriate for study: 1) historic preservation: the reconstruction, restoration, and preservation of existing or destroyed examples of the city’s architecture; 2) postwar architecture: the construction of new buildings in the city; 3) Nazi architecture: the handling of the many physical reminders of the Third Reich; 4) monuments: the demolition, restoration and, most importantly, the erection of new monuments pertaining to the recent Nazi past. Throughout the postwar period, these four features of the city regularly sparked heated local debate among architects, historic preservationists, city and state political authorities, grassroots citizens’ groups, and various representatives of the architectural and mainstream press. These debates revolved around a variety of questions: Should war-damaged buildings be reconstructed to their precise prewar form or torn down to make way for new buildings? Should the city’s new architecture be modern or traditional? What should be done with the numerous examples of Nazi architecture remaining in a city newly liberated from Nazi rule? How should the recent experiences of the Third Reich and the Second World War be commemorated in monuments, if at all? Significantly, the debates that erupted over such questions did not merely revolve around practical or material issues but reflected deeper conflicts over remembering the Nazi past. With recollections of the Third Reich and the Second World War actively shaping the development of the city’s various constituent parts, therefore, Munich emerges as a concrete and highly revealing example of constructed memory.

And yet, the city of Munich has been anything but a stable site of memory during the postwar era. Since 1945 the memory of the Nazi past in Munich has been strongly characterized by both contestation and evolution. As demonstrated by the numerous debates waged over the city’s development, the Nazi past has neither been repressed nor assumed a single monolithic or collective form in local memory; rather, the memory of the Third Reich has fragmented into three perpetually competing views.³⁰ What may be described as modernist, traditionalist, and critical preservationist strategies of coming to terms with the Nazi past have coexisted and competed throughout the postwar era in Munich.³¹ For the most part, the modernist and traditionalist positions have been the most dominant. Both perspectives were alike in offering historical explanations for the origins of Nazism and recommendations for avoiding its recurrence. Modernists, acting upon their view that the Third Reich was a product of antimodern factors rooted in German history and tradition, demanded a complete break with the past and an embrace of the new in a cathartic moment of redemption provided by the so-called zero-hour (Stunde Null) of 1945. Traditionalists, meanwhile, argued that the Third Reich was a product of modernity (understood to mean any combination of factors such as mass industrial society, secularism, technology, or materialism) and urged a postwar strategy of reembracing cultural continuity and tradition. Although both of these positions contained sharp insights into the recent past, they were highly selective and tended to avoid selfcritique. Both, moreover, shied from visibly documenting the recent past in the city’s urban form. It was this task that the adherents of the third position—critical preservation—took upon themselves. In contrast to the modernist and traditionalist positions, critical preservation was underpinned less by a distinct analytical view of the Third Reich than by the conviction that its physical legacy in the city needed to be visually commemorated and preserved in memory. Whether by deliberately leaving the signs of wartime bombings visible in the city’s architecture or by exposing the unseemly origins of Nazi buildings through exhibitions or countermonuments, the cause of critical preservation succeeded at certain sites in Munich. Compared to the modernists’ and traditionalists’ substantial impact upon the city, however, critical preservation has remained an inconsistent and exceptional phenomenon. Nevertheless, it too has played an important, if lesser, role in the development of the postwar city.

The constancy of this mnemonic competition notwithstanding, the relative impact of the three different types of memory upon the city has varied over time. To best understand the evolution of local memory, it is helpful to adopt a synchronic as well as a diachronic approach and to analytically compare the four primary features of the city’s urban form—historic preservation, postwar architecture, Nazi architecture, and monuments—within the three main phases of its postwar development. The first phase was a conservative restorationist era that began in 1945 and lasted until 1958, the year of the eight hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding. In this generally cautious period of economic insecurity, the victory of traditionalists over modernists in the battle to shape the city reflected the citizenry’s general adherence to the traditionalist view of the Nazi past. The second phase was a modernist era that began in 1958 and ended in 1975. During this optimistic period of liberal politics, economic expansion, and accelerated modernization, modern architecture rapidly spread throughout the city, a trend that culminated with the construction of the massive Olympic complex for the games of 1972. These years significantly witnessed the ebbing of debate between modernists and traditionalists and the emergence of a new (if temporary) dominance of a modernist view of the Third Reich, characterized by an ahis- torical mindset attuned more to the present than the past. By the end of this period, however, the emergence of traditionalist protests against the era’s modernizing trends—epitomized by the upsurge in historic preservationist activism—signaled the eruption of new debates over Nazism. The last phase of the postwar era began around 1975 and has lasted until the present, with the dawning of the postmodern era. This period of renewed economic insecurity and conservative politics witnessed a nostalgic return to history and the resurgence of the traditionalist view of the Nazi past. At this same time, however, memory became the object of unprecedented public controversy, as demonstrated by the revival of architectural debate between modernists and postmodernists and the upsurge in critical preservationist engagement. This most recent phase of the city’s development, in short, confirms the continuing divisiveness of the Nazi legacy.

No matter how much competition there has been over the legacy of the Third Reich, however, a careful survey of Munich’s postwar urban development strongly suggests that, in the final analysis, the city has generally adhered to a traditionalist view of the Nazi past. Because of the strong desire to forget the city’s identity during the Third Reich as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, many local citizens tended to embrace a view of Nazism that exonerated local (and, more broadly, German) traditions and instead implicated more abstract, modern, and allegedly un-German factors. This traditionalist perspective at the same time provided crucial moral and historical justification for the prevailing desire after 1945 to reembrace the city’s prewar tradition of architectural conservatism and commitment to historic preservation. In this regard, the aesthetic and mnemonic inclinations of the conservative citizenry dovetailed perfectly. The popular yearning for architectural continuity, indeed, ultimately necessitated the widespread embrace of the traditionalist memory of the Nazi past. For it alone—by explaining Nazism as the product of modernity—could discredit and thus help limit the embrace of modernism as well as justify the return to architectural tradition. In short, only this conservative strategy of coming to terms with the past seemed able to effectively suppress the memory of Munich’s past as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung. The resulting cityscape, in turn, reflects the influence of the traditionalist view of the Nazi past. Today, Munich presents an image of historic architectural harmony generally unsullied by the presence of extroverted examples of modern architecture, by unsightly war ruins, glaring works of Nazi architecture, or highly-public monuments marking the Third Reich. The city represents its past in a highly selective fashion, visually depicting its unique experience as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung in inverse relation to the actual impact of those notorious twelve years upon the urban landscape.

Munich is certainly not an isolated case. Other German cities, especially those that the Nazis substantially redesigned or that suffered extensive wartime destruction, also had to contend with the deep physical scars left by the Third Reich after 1945. The ways in which the inhabitants of such cities as Berlin, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, or Cologne dealt with the legacy of Nazism in their own urban landscapes provide a useful comparison to Munich’s approach. To be sure, any definitive conclusions about Munich must be postponed until the completion of further in-depth research into other cities. Nevertheless, comparisons to selected buildings and monuments in other cities shed light on the shortcomings and accomplishments of Munich’s confrontation with the Nazi past. Recent research on Berlin, for example, suggests that the struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past in the nation’s new capital has been far more open, engaged, and committed than in the former Capital of the Movement.³² It is still too early to determine whether Berlin represents the norm and Munich the exception (or vice versa) in how German cities have confronted the legacy of Nazism. What is clear, however, is that Munich’s pattern of urban development confirms certain scholars’ recent claims that the general process of recovery, reconstruction, and democratization in the postwar Federal Republic was eminently compatible with, and perhaps even necessarily rooted in, conservative, traditionalist, and restorationist tendencies.³³

Munich’s traditionalism notwithstanding, the city’s postwar urban development ultimately demonstrates that the local memory of the Third Reich and the Second World War has been profoundly dynamic, contested, and evolutionary. This continuing absence of consensus on the Nazi past, in turn, makes it unmistakably clear that the task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung has no fixed point of termination. In all likelihood, the long German confrontation with the Nazi past will continue without it ever being successfully mastered. Still, in the long run, this lack of resolution may be all for the best. In light of recent observations to the effect that memory is preserved through contestation and wanes through consensus, the continuing divisiveness surrounding the Third Reich’s legacy provides its best hope of being preserved in memory.³⁴

Part I RESTORATION OR RENEWAL? 1945-1958

MUNICH, IN 1945, was a deeply scarred city. Physically devastated by the wartime bombings, littered with the ruins of its once-glorious architectural legacy, and occupied by enemy military forces, the former Nazi Capital of the Movement had reached the nadir of its more than 750-year existence. Barely over a decade later, however, the city had achieved a recovery as dramatic as it was inconceivable at the end of the war. Like many other German cities, Munich had regained much of its urban form within only half a generation. Yet, as a close analysis of the city’s recovery of its urban identity reveals, the city achieved this feat only by marginalizing its Nazi past in collective memory.

Following the end of the war, Munich—like the rest of the defeated nation of Germany—faced two possible paths of development: restoration or renewal. According to most scholars of postwar Germany, the history of the Federal Republic was marked both by continuities and discontinuities with the recent past. On the one hand, the years following the demise of the Nazi regime witnessed the restoration of traditional political, social, and economic conditions from the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich.¹ At the same time, however, the Nazi dictatorship’s revolutionary policies and then its sudden, violent collapse promoted a sharp break with the fateful deficiencies of the past—the mythic moment of the Stunde Null, or zero hour—that allowed for the renewal of Germany through the establishment of a stable, liberal-democratic, and western-oriented state.²

Significantly, the impulses towards restoration and renewal were each underpinned by a problematic relationship to the recent Nazi past. Restoration entailed what has been called the great peace with the perpetrators—a process of reintegrating former Nazi personnel (as well as ideas or traditions) into the democratic state by hiding their unsavory links to the Third Reich.³ The restorationist acceptance of continuities with the past was thus based upon a highly selective brand of memory. So too, however, was the quest for radical renewal. Indeed, the desire for a new beginning, independent of the past in toto, was rooted in an escapist disposition, if not in the outright repression of guilt.⁴ In short, the tendency to minimize the recent experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War in collective memory underpinned the impulses towards both restoration and renewal.

Examining how the twin trends of restoration or renewal shaped Munich’s urban development during the early postwar era, in turn, sheds considerable light upon the process of coming to terms with the past. Generally speaking, scholars have shown the influence of both continuities and discontinuities on the postwar development of German cities.⁵ In Munich, the opposing trends of renewal and restoration were fought out in the heated debates over the postwar city’s future between two rival groups: modernists and traditionalists. These two groups, composed of a wide range of architects, journalists, politicians, and average citizens, were deeply divided on how the postwar city should develop. Where

Reviews for Munich and Memory

[tmph_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic book. More later. Just what I've been looking for during my last nine years of going to Munich.