Tag: Memorial site

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.

How is history interpreted and by whom? And whose interests are associated with such interpretations? In his multi-part work “Mind the Memory Gap” Franz Wanner contrasts two places—Neuaubing and Ottobrunn—both connected with the history of the Nazi armaments industry. While at one of them the Nazi past has long since been forgotten and a memorial site has now been made possible, at the other this past is being suppressed.

In the film “From Camp to Campus” Wanner addresses the history of the Nazis’ former aviation research institute in Ottobrunn. The Reich Ministry of Aviation commissioned the aircraft manufacturer Messerschmidt AG, founded in 1938, to construct a building for the institute. Hundreds of forced laborers were deployed for this purpose.1 Today the site is home to the Ludwig-Bölkow-Campus, a technology center housing research institutes and industrial concerns.

The aviation and armaments company Airbus also has its headquarters on this site. Airbus took over the military aviation and space technology of the former aircraft manufacturer Dornier-Werke in 2004. During the Nazi era Dornier-Werke also had a site in Neuaubing, not far from the Reichsbahn labor camp.

In the film “Mind the Memory Gap” Wanner stages a fictitious guided tour in which history is employed as a marketing strategy. Attention is focused on certain aspects while others are omitted. He thus reveals the techniques and constructs behind perceived reality.

Here the past is interpreted for commercial purposes, turning remembrance into symbolic capital and at the same time de-politicizing it. Alongside the two films and his texts Wanner uses an interactive tool to reflect on the role of language as a medium with which to generate ideas of reality.

[1] See Elsbeth Bösl, Nicole Kramer, Stephanie Linsinger, “Die vielen Gesichter der Zwangsarbeit. Merkmale des ,Ausländereinsatzes’ im Landkreis München,” in Heusler/Spoerer/Trischler (eds.), Rüstung, Kriegswirtschaft und Zwangsarbeit im „Dritten Reich”, Oldenbourg 2010, pp. 149–162, here p. 156.

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.