NS-Documentation Centre in Munich - Counterpoint on Koenigsplatz

摘要

Having been demanded for de- cades, now it has finally opened: Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. The director of this "place of learning and memory" in the Maxvorstadt is Winfried Nerdinger, previously head of Munich Architecture Museum. Repressing history Munich, after the First World War the nucleus of National Socialism and on this account given the title "Capital of the Movement" by Hitler, began only at a very late stage to investigate its Nazi (NS) legacy, far later than Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne or Nuremberg. Although back in 1976 there was a major exhibition in the Munich Stadtmu-seum on the theme "Resistance and Persecution 1933-1945" this initiative by the associations of those persecuted in the war was not followed by a response from the official side. After a second, unsuccessful exhibition on the "Capital of the Movement" shown in 1993, again in the Stadtmuseum, the theme was only taken up again in 2000. This was due largely to architecture historian Winfried Nerdinger, who had repeatedly accused Munich of being the "capital of repression". But it still took a further 15 years until the NS Documentation Centre was finally opened: on 30 April, exactly seventy years after the liberation of Munich by the US army. This long wait is all the more astonishing when one considers that since the war Munich has been governed almost continuously by Social Democrats who included figures from the resistance as well as Jews who returned from forced emigration. But like in many German and Austrian cities in Munich a kind of "truce" (Nerdinger) was made with Nazi perpetrators as they were needed for post-war reconstruction.