Nazi Document Center Opens
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 29, 2015
MUNICH — Tomorrow, a year behind schedule but 70 years to the day since Munich fell to the Allies, a six-story-high, slatted white cube opens for visitors here: the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, or NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum. Significantly, it stands directly on the site of the former Brown House, where the fascist leaders maintained offices. As the center’s website points out:
“The City of Munich is aware of its special obligation to keep alive the memory of the Nazi era and its crimes and to inform citizens and visitors about it. After all, it was here in Munich that the rise of the National Socialist movement began after the First World War. Munich was also the scene of the beer-hall putsch of 1923 and of Hitler’s subsequent trial. Here Hitler found influential patrons who gave him entry to bourgeois circles. And it was here in 1938 that Goebbels called for the nationwide pogrom against the Jewish population. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Munich was chosen by Hitler as the place to celebrate the cult of Nazism and given the titles Capital of German Art and Capital of the Movement.”
Designed by Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten, the 5,000-square-meter facility also happens to be a few feet from Germany’s top conservatory, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, itself housed in the Nazi-built former Führerbau. Harshly its positioning and aspect interrupt Bavarian King Ludwig I’s two-century-old, Neo-Classical civic plan between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz. Munich moved at a snail’s pace to realize the cube, which provides permanent and temporary exhibition space as well as study rooms. In contrast, Cologne and the Obersalzberg resort area, location of the Eagle’s Nest, have long operated similarly purposed learning facilities. Now this city can do the strongest job in furtherance of “nie wieder.”
Photo © Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten
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Tags: Commentary, Georg Scheel Wetzel, Hochschule für Musik und Theater, München, Munich, Nazi Germany, News, NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum