The curator, historian, and author Mirjam Zadoff will leave the Munich Documentation Center on March 1, 2027, to take up a position at Haus der Geschichte Österreich (hdgö) in Vienna. She has been director of the Munich Documentation Center since 2018.
“I congratulate Mirjam Zadoff on this new, challenging position in Vienna and thank her sincerely for our longstanding, trustful collaboration, which has been highly enriching at so many levels,” said Munich’s cultural officer, Marek Wiechers. “Under her intelligent and courageous leadership, the Munich Documentation Center has, over the past eight years, become an important venue for education, remembrance, and discussion. Today, the Center on Max-Mannheimer-Platz is an internationally connected cultural institution that is highly respected well beyond the city limits. Mirjam Zadoff deserves our greatest thanks for her tremendous engagement, her single-mindedness, and her integrity.”
Mirjam Zadoff has shaped the profile of the Munich Documentation Center in key ways. Her interdisciplinary, multi-perspective, and inclusive work has enabled the history of National Socialism to become accessible to a broad public and to be linked to current discourses. She and her team have developed participatory formats, invited internationally renowned artists, and put together a varied events program for a diverse audience. Via cooperations and projects with partners in Munich and elsewhere, she has networked the Documentation Center locally, nationally, and internationally.
With the reopening of the Documentation Center in 2025 following a six-month closure for refurbishment, Mirjam Zadoff was able to realize her vision of an open and lively venue architecturally as well. In addition to a new, inclusive cafe, the alterations to the building also yielded new spaces for communication and for visitors to linger. The redesigned Max-Mannheimer-Platz is now a popular meeting place in Munich’s art district.
With the first exhibition under her aegis in 2019,Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, Zadoff set new standards at the Munich Documentation Center. As well as displaying contemporary art not only in special exhibitions but also as interventions in the permanent exhibition and in the forecourt and the grounds, Mirjam Zadoff set out to highlight themes that had previously received little public attention. The exhibition TO BE SEEN was dedicated to queer life in Munich from 1900 to 1950 and received the 2023 Grimme Online Award for the digital storytelling that accompanied the show. In cooperation with Polish partners, Zadoff also staged the exhibition Wichtiger als unser Leben about the so-called Ringelblum Archive, a project by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum to assemble a unique collection [of documents] in the Warsaw ghetto. It was subsequently shown at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in Australia and at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre in South Africa.
Over the past eight years, twenty exhibition projects and interventions have been realized under Mirjam Zadoff’s direction, many of which have attracted record numbers of visitors. Alongside the exhibitions, many new educational formats have been introduced, especially for a young audience, as well as digital offerings, publications, and much more besides. The nsdoku team will continue all of these, not only at the main Königsplatz site in central Munich, but from 2027 also at the new memorial site in the suburb of Neuaubing, the location of a former forced labor camp. In recent years, Zadoff has contributed in key ways to shaping this branch of nsdoku, which is due to open in October 2027. With an innovative exhibition and outreach strategy, digital formats, and facilities for artists as well as in cooperation with the associations, artists, and institutions already present there, nsdoku Neuaubing will be a further Munich location that carries Mirjam Zadoff’s signature.
On November 30, the Munich Documentation will open The Class Photo, the last exhibition for which Mirjam Zadoff holds responsibility as director.