Your Munich tour guide here again ... Of course, you are travelling to Munich to delve into the city's Nazi past, and Third Reich tourism is actually a thriving business in Munich, bur frankly, many Muencheners would prefer to just forget it all. For the most part, Germany - especially Bavaria - still has a difficult time coming to grips with its Nazi past. Many public figures, even historians, would prefer to keep this past hidden so it remains forgotten. Even when the monumental Nazi buildings cannot be hidden, most areas do very little to call attention to them.
To be completely honest, tours like ours are sometimes denigrated as "Brown tourism" (brown being the Nazi color). Some think that to tour a concentration camp site is all the attention that should be given to Third Reich history, and any other site should be ignored. It has only been in the past few years that some historians have expressed the opinion that not only the sites of the victims of Nazism should be preserved and interpreted, but also the sites where the crimes were planned and regulated ... the Nazi government sites.
This is just some information to bear in mind during our tour ... as we visit the Nazi headquarters in Munich, which is now a music school, and the Feldherrnhalle monument on the Odeonsplatz, where the Nazis celebrated the "martyrs of their cause" who were killed during the 1923 putsch, and which today has no reminder of that time.
This is an example of an intriguing larger issue: how are events, especially dark ones, commemorated? What do cultures choose to remember and build monuments to? It's perhaps understandable why Muncheners, particularly the great majority born since the war, might prefer that visitors don't dwell on the Nazi past. But there are endless other, less extreme examples - one of my favorite is a Virginia battlefield. There George Washington (and a whole lot of French troops) forced British Gen. Cornwallis to surrender at the Battle of Yorktown, the climax to the American Revolution. But it's also one of the places where Union Gen. George McClellan faced off against Robert E. Lee's Confederates during the Peninsular Campaign, a series of battles in which Lee, with fewer troops, befuddled and outfought McClellan and "forced" him to withdraw. Same place, some of the same trenches, some 80 years apart. How is it remembered? As of several years ago, anyway, the site has been heavily memorialized and promoted for the patriotic victory at Yorktown - and the confusing, embarrassing, and inconclusive battles of 1862 are almost completely ignored.
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