Munich’s Nazi museum fails to interrogate history

The best thing you can say about Munich's new National Socialist Documentation Centre is that Adolf Hitler would have hated it.

The stark white concrete cube irritates the eye and disrupts the line of the Königsplatz, a neo-classic-fascist square favoured by the Führer for massive marches in the city where he founded his party.

When the failed Austrian painter with conservative aesthetic tastes assumed power in 1933, the Königsplatz tickled his vanity so much that he supplemented the 19th-century temples left here by the Bavarian kings with his own pompous Third Reich additions.

Yesterday, 70 years after Hitler killed himself, the former “capital of the movement” finally grabbed the historic nettle and opened its museum documenting the Nazi rise and fall from a Bavarian perspective: a €28 million wasted opportunity.

This museum will be a huge draw but visitors should bring time, patience and reading glasses if they are to plough through all the text on display on tableaus, tables, even walls. There are pictures and a few video screens, but almost everything is explained on over 100 panels, many blocking the windows to the authentic Königsplatz outside.

Wasted opportunity

For newcomers to Nazi history, particularly younger visitors, the breadth of issues and the hail of text may be overwhelming. For others, the 250-word summaries on dozens of issues offer nothing more than you can find in countless other German museums. The Munich museum misses its unique selling point: explaining on an authentic site how the rendezvous of an Austrian opportunist with a conservative, reactionary establishment bore such terrible fruit.

With no original objects – curators feared cultivating a “Nazi aesthetic” – and endless panels, it’s like being trapped in an oversized, upright museum catalogue.

Hitler is rarely seen and never heard; the “Führer” phenomenon remains a mystery. The Nazi movement, with its psychology of inclusion and exclusion, is addressed in short texts. Yet Nazism was an appeal as much to the heart as the head, but the movement’s emotional appeal is not deconstructed.

The museum grinds on to its inevitable conclusion: the post-war denazification questionnaires where people fell back on their friends and neighbours – the same collective that supported Nazism – to mutually exonerate each other.

Of 6.8 million questionnaires filled out in Bavaria, we learn, 4.9 million applicants were considered outside the process remit. Of the remaining 1.9 million, 1.5 million were granted an amnesty. And what of the remainder? Three-quarters were given the lesser label of Nazi sympathisers or “followers” while just 4.1 per cent were considered senior Nazi perpetrators. The curators offer no comment or context on that striking legacy.

There are occasional reprieves, like a striking time-lapse video installation showing the concentration and eventual deportation of Munich’s Jews as points of moving, extinguishing light on a map of the city.

After decades of debate, Munich's belated National Socialist Documentation Centre could have delved into how this city nourished Nazism in its early years yet also produced, in people like teenagers Sophie and Hans Scholl, some of its bravest opponents.

Instead of probing these contradictions on an authentic site, however, this sterile box serves up superficial history.