The nsdoku

Max Mannheimer (February 6, 1920 – September 23, 2016), businessman, artist, Holocaust survivor, president of the Dachau Camp Community, vice president of the International Dachau Committee, co-initiator of the Munich Documentation Center.  

The Holocaust survivor and contemporary witness Max Mannheimer died on September 23, 2016. As a permanent memorial to him and as a tribute to his unique social engagement, the square in front of the Documentation Center was named Max Mannheimer Platz on February 6, 2018, the day Max Mannheimer would have celebrated his 98th birthday.  

Because of his Jewish origin Max Mannheimer was deported by the Nazis from his home in Moravia to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his parents, his wife, and three of his siblings were murdered. Together with his brother Edgar, Mannheimer was sent from Auschwitz to the Munich-Allach and Mühldorf subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp to perform forced labor. Close to starvation and seriously ill, the brothers just barely survived the camps. After the war Max Mannheimer met his second wife, a German resistance fighter, in his Moravian home town. Together they moved to Munich where Mannheimer worked as a businessman and became active in the Jewish community and the Social Democratic party. Mannheimer was an advocate for many charitable organizations and under the pseudonym “ben jakov” produced a notable oeuvre as a painter. From the 1980s onwards he made the fight against right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism his life’s mission. As a contemporary witness he related his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, seeking personal encounters and an open dialogue, especially with young people

The media artwork Brienner 45 by the brothers Benjamin and Emanuel Heisenberg is located outside the Munich Documentation Center. In a film collage the artists juxtapose and contrast texts from key Nazi-era documents with historical and contemporary images. The film clips are shown on monitors distributed around the outside space rather like the walls of a ruined building. The installation is designed to draw the attention of passers-by, visitors, and local residents to the historical significance of the location.

Benjamin and Emanuel Heisenberg’s media artwork created in collaboration with Elisophie Eulenburg was the winning entry in a competition held by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich under the heading “The Origins of the Rise of National Socialism in Munich—Consequences for the Present and Future.” The jury praised the artistic approach, which, it said, set out to deconstruct Nazi semantics by highlighting its contradictions and referencing the present in disturbing ways. .

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The architecture of the Documentation Center and the shaping of the outside space were designed to signal a fundamental break with the history of the location and with the former Nazi buildings in the neighborhood. The design by the Berlin architects Georg Scheel Wetzel won the competition for the new Munich Documentation Center. 

The cube-like building marks the place associated with the perpetrators of Nazi crimes without actually referencing the “Brown House.” The louvered windows allow visual connections to be made with the architectural remains of the Nazi era, thus incorporating the authentic locations into the exhibition. Alongside its compact, cube-like form, the architecture of the new building is strongly defined by its materials. White fair-faced concrete is the dominant feature of both the exterior and interior architecture, forming a strong contrast with the surroundings. The light, unbroken surfaces of the facade are punctuated by dark windows that in some cases extend over several floors.

During the 1980s citizens’ initiatives and history workshops increasingly began campaigning for a critical examination of the traces of Munich’s Nazi past in public space.  In 1988 plans to build over the plinths of the so-called “Temples of Honor” were abandoned following fierce public criticism and demands to take an offensive approach to this central location associated with the perpetrators of Nazi crimes. In the following years art campaigns and exhibitions drew attention to the history of the location, and in 1995 an information board was erected by the northern plinth for the first time

Beginning in the 1990s the City of Munich commemorated the Nazi era with a number of exhibitions and events. In 2001/2002 the city council took the decision to create a Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. The Bavarian government and the German federal government each shouldered one third of the investment. In 2005 the city established three bodies—a Board of Trustees, a Scientific Advisory Board and a Political Advisory Council. Together with a group of scholars attached to the Department of Culture these prepared the way for the new project. 

At the end of 2005 the Bavarian government made the site of the former “Brown House” available for building the documentation center. The remains of its cellars were excavated, documented, and demolished. On March 9, 2012, the foundation stone of the new building was laid. The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism opened on May 1, 2015.