In Bavaria, the Nazi past is seeping up again through the cracks in its historical floorboards.
At a Monday press conference, the world will learn the fate of the suspected looted art hoard – including works by Picasso, Matisse and Chagall – discovered by chance in a rancid Munich flat and made public last year.
News of the find electrified the world and turned the media spotlight on Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive guardian of his art dealer father’s collection for half a century until his death last May.
As work continues to identify the rightful owners of the Gurlitt collection works, attention has shifted to the Bavarian authorities. Outspoken critics say their pace and secretive approach to the case is symptomatic of a broader go-slow in how Bavaria has dealt – or has not dealt – with its Nazi past.
With the 70th anniversary drawing near of the second World War’s end, the Bavarian question is already looming large in Germany’s latest round of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – or coming to terms with the past.
Bavaria’s capital, Munich, was both founding city and nerve centre of the Nazi party, but does that mean the Bavarians have a special historical case to answer? And, if so, how has it been dealt with?
You don’t have to look far in Munich to hear complaints over how the state government’s policy towards the Nazi era is one of not having a policy. But opinions diverge sharply on whether this is a deliberate strategy or simply omission through political opportunism.
Munich loomed large in Hitler’s rise to power. In the postwar chaos after 1918, the Bavarian city and its rowdy beer halls offered the failed Austrian painter and returned soldier an ideal stage and receptive audience for his firebrand politics.
Munich was a hotbed of right-wing nationalist opposition to the Weimar Republic, and a logical place for Hitler to co-found his National Socialist Party (NSDAP) in 1920.
A decade later, author Lion Feuchtwanger asked in his novel Success, why “everything that was rotten and bad in the Reich fled, as if by magic, to Munich”.
Local historians insist Munich was not irredeemably Nazi, with the party never scoring consistently high support from voters, largely thanks to strong local Catholic opposition. But, once in office, Hitler bestowed two ideological titles on his beloved Munich: “capital of German art” in 1933 and “capital of the [Nazi] movement” in 1935.
Berlin may have been the Reich capital, but Munich remained the nerve centre of the Nazi movement until 1945.
In the subsequent years, as Munich and other German cities struggled to rebuild their wartime ruins, the daily struggle to survive understandably took precedence over debates on the Nazi era. Once Munich had found its feet, however, critics suggest the city was less interested than others in exploring the dozen Nazi years. Instead it hitched its historical wagon to the memory of King Ludwig and the historical tradition that went before.
Only a few Nazi buildings were torn down, with most simply stripped of swastikas and eagles and still in use today. Some argue that, given the shortage of buildings in postwar days, this was a pragmatic step similar to that in other German cities. But in his book Munich and Memory, historian Gavriel Rosenfeld argues the “normalisation” of Nazi buildings in Munich was a special case, reflecting a “prevailing desire . . . to forget the war and, more specifically, the city’s responsibility for nurturing the political movement that produced the [wartime] destruction in the first place”.
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