Tag: City development

Hadas Tapouchi’s photographs show the everyday cityscape, the ordinary places where people live, work, go to school, and spend their leisure time. It is only the addition of information about the historical context that makes the history of these places palpable and alters our view of them as we discover that these are the very places where forced laborers were housed in Nazi Germany.

Tapouchi’s photographs map historic places in order to investigate how they have become normalized in the contemporary city. Her images bridge the historical distance and thus mediate between between past and present. Especially during World War II, forced laborers were a ubiquitous sight on the streets of Munich. They could be seen on their daily journey to work or at laboring in public space, for example building roads or working for the city. In order to be allocated forced laborers, an enterprise not only had to register its workforce requirement but also provide housing for the workers. For this reason, large companies erected their own camps. Public bodies, such as the City of Munich, provided mass accommodation and rented housing space to smaller companies.

Tapouchi is interested in the potential of collective remembrance to resist the marginalization and invisibility of history in public space. Through what she calls “memory practice” she explores the urban planning of the past and the power relationships it expressed and examines how the memory of the violent history of forced labor has been overwritten by gentrification and value creation. Her project brings history perceptibly and physically closer to those who remember today.

The film “Neuaubing/Freiham” is about the development of the new urban quarter in Freiham and the parallel process of making the historic site of the RAW camp visible. In the postwar years the historic context of the site was increasingly forgotten as ever more time went by and the site was used for various other purposes.

Nationwide social debates about how to confront the issue of forced labor as an aspect of the Nazi past and about possible compensation payments for the former forced laborers took place at a national level in the 1990s, while plans for the 350-hectare new development in Freiham began to take shape in the 2000s. Both of these developments contributed to making the history of the RAW camp more visible again.

The initial planning for the Freiham development included the historic site of the former camp. Plans to build a large supermarket and a furniture store there prompted the users, who had been using the barracks as studios and workshops since the 1970s, and later the City of Munich, to have historical research carried out.

Today, the historic site is subject to a preservation order while in Freiham the first apartments and educational facilities have been completed. Bechtle and Kahane explore the reciprocal effects of these developments from the perspective of the manager of the new quarter, Daniel Genée. This raises questions about what function the future memorial site will have for the diverse local population, what expectations are associated with it, and what its practical implications are.