The Documentation Center will be closed for renovation until the beginning of May 2025. In line with the Open Doors concept developed in cooperation with the designers and spatial consultants of Studio Miessen in 2024, the building will be furnished with new spaces where the city community can congregate. These will include a new cafe on the ground floor and a reconfigured foyer and auditorium. The renovation will improve disabled access and safety, and the new areas in the foyer and on the first floor will offer space for communication and dialogue. The building will reopen on May 8—the date that simultaneously marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II and the tenth anniversary of the Documentation Center's opening. Our diverse anniversary program will feature a new object intervention and a video installation, both of which will be on display in the exhibition area.
Memory is…
Intervention in the Permanent Exhibition May 8, 2025 to May 10, 2026
A hat, a puppet, a tablet tube, a beer mug. What memories are associated with these things, what stories do they tell? For one year the Documentation Center's Perma-nent Exhibition will feature selected objects, expanding its narrative with new stories. Some of the objects are large, some small, some of them everyday, others more unusual, but all of them will allow us to access history through our senses and view the past from a different perspective. Tangible things and individual perspectives make the bigger picture easier to grasp. On the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Documentation Center Memory is… will invite visitors to reflect collectively on how difficult and painful experiences can be portrayed, communicated, received, and interpreted.
overexposed/underexposed
Video installation by Daniel Asadi Faezi and Mila Zhluktenko | May 8 to October 19, 2025
In the video installation overexposed/underexposed Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi investigate eight locations in different parts of Munich that are imbued with the experience of terrorist violence. These are places where people were killed, injured, or traumatized. Some of the crimes have become well known far beyond the city limits, others still do not have a permanent place in the collective memory. In some cases, the crimes are still being investigated while people continue to struggle to have the victims properly remembered. Every act of terrorism has its own com-plex history, and yet they are all connected. A network of lines—some of them invisible—also links these events with the Nazi past.
overexposed/underexposed brings together all these events into a single space where visitors can pause to reflect. How can a city arrive at a collective confrontation with such terrorist attacks? How can the victims be remembered? The camera captures each of the eight locations in turn at the time the crime was committed. The result is a continuous narrative that follows the progression of a day, conjuring up past events.
The installation takes the exhibition Munich and National Socialism as its starting point and adds a new aesthetic experience to it. At the same time the project should be understood as a memorial in film dedicated to the memory of the victims of the attacks.
Memory Is a Space Out of Time (working title)
Exhibition of contemporary art | October 30, 2025 to July 12, 2026
The exhibition Memory Is a Space Out of Time (working title) brings together works of art concerned with the after-effects of various wars in Europe and elsewhere since 1945 as well with the new orders that have emerged from the ruins. The focus is on external and internal landscapes—in the sense of political geography and testimonies of resistance as well as places of refuge, living archives, or spaces for imagining things to come. Beyond political and discursive imperatives, post-war landscapes carry traces of conflicts that defy "normalization" processes and fundamentally change social environments and ecological habitats. The artworks highlight relation-ships between space, time, and memory in multi-layered experiences and practices that go beyond political norms. War forces those who survive it to make a radical new start and carries the potential for a more just future world—a world in which societal conditions are socially negotiated and in which the suffering of those who have experienced war and persecution is of primary importance.
Events
Until the Documentation Center reopens on May 8, 2025, events will take place at other venues or online in cooperation with our partners. The Literarische Woche gegen Antisemitismus (Literary Week against Antisemitism), for instance, will be conceived and developed together with literary institutions and other cultural ven-ues. This event will coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 and will feature a program of workshops, discussions, films, and talks intended as a token of solidarity with Munich's Jews and as a gesture against antisemitism throughout Germany. The Documentation Center will also contribute to the city-wide program 1945 – 2025 Stunde Null? Wie wir wurden, was wir sind (1945–2025 Zero Hour? How We Have Become What We Are) which will be staged from January to May 2025.
The main focus of this year's events program is the reopening in May, for which we are planning a diverse program of tours, workshops, concerts, and activities to re-welcome the people of Munich to the Documentation Center.
Education and Outreach Program
Together with its longstanding cooperation partners Culture Clouds e.V. and the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the Documentation Center is planning a conference on Performative Practice and Memory to be held from November 26 to 28, 2025. The conference will take place in the Fat Cat / Gasteig and will encompass a wide variety of workshop and lecture formats.
The Erinnerungssprechstunde (Memory Surgery), developed by the Documentation Center in 2024, will continue this year. As a participatory format it invites the public to take part in open discussions about memory culture and in this context to address their wishes to the Documentation Center. We will expand our tour program to include tours around the city, at the Neuaubing Memorial Site, and in cooperation with other institutions such as the Lenbachhaus. Creative workshops, including with comic artist Barbara Yelin, and theater projects for young people—such as the play Verboten, verfolgt, erinnert (Banned, Persecuted, Remembered) performed to mark the anniversary of the Nazi book burnings—are a regular feature of our education and outreach program. The inclusive offers for hearing-impaired persons will be further expanded with translations of selected evening events and a dialogue with DGS interpreters on discrimination-sensitive sign language in Nazi-related topics.
The media guide published in 2015, which contains multimedia tours of the historic exhibition, will be technically upgraded and visually redesigned as a new web app. In addition, the online scrollytellings #nsdokuStories will continue as a digital component of our program.
Research and Publications
The digital publication infrastructure will be further expanded and the content refined. In addition to downloadable online publications, the existing online magazine (www.nsdoku.de/magazin) will be restructured and its content expanded to include contributions by both German and international guest authors. By increasing our digital content, we hope to be able to respond more quickly to current discourses and thus extend the Documentation Center's digital and international reach.
The book Fragile Demokratien. Was freie Gesellschaften bedroht – und was sie zusammen hält (Fragile Democracies: What Threatens Free Societies – and What Holds Them Together) will be published both by the Federal Agency for Civic Education and by its branches in the federal states of Hamburg, Berlin, Saarland, and Hesse. The new book cafe to be created in the course of the renovations is intended not only to optimize the sale of publications but also to provide a space for readings and book presentations.
For some years we have been collaborating with Public History Munich within the Culture Department on merging the various data bases concerning the victims of National Socialism. This project will continue and the database will be technically upgraded and its content renewed in order to be able to provide various public interfaces for future use. Our research cooperation with the bank Stadtsparkasse München, which we launched in 2024, will continue. Its aim is to evaluate the processes that took place under the Nazis from 1933 to 1945 in the "Städtische Sparkasse München," as the bank was called at that time.
nsdoku Neuaubing
We plan to establish our Neuaubing Memorial Site branch by fall 2026. The juxtapo-sition of programs in history education, art, social affairs, and crafts will turn the former forced labor camp into a place of living memory that invites visitors to address the history of Nazi forced labor and its connections with the present day. In the process of the building work currently taking place at Neuaubing Barracks 2 and 5 will be refurbished to provide spaces for exhibitions and educational programs and events. The concepts for analogue and digital exhibition formats in Barrack 5 and in the outside space will also be finalized and an exhibition concept developed. Currently, work on film and artistic contributions for the exhibition is in progress, collection objects are being prepared, and loan requests for exhibition objects are being sent out. The educational and outreach program will be further developed and in preparation for the opening the ongoing events series Arbeit und… (Labor and …) will address the main focuses of the planned main exhibition.