Denkmalpflege, Denazification, and the Bureaucratic Manufacture of Memory in Bavaria

in German Politics and Society
Author:
Lauren Schwartz Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

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Abstract

How, in the aftermath of National Socialism and World War II, was the memory landscape of Munich and Bavaria denazified under the Office of the Military Government of the United States? Supplementing existing cultural approaches and scholarship on denazification in Bavaria, this article considers the execution of Allied Control Council Directive Number 30 by the American occupation government (omgus) in Bavaria, in conjunction with appropriated native Bavarian bureaucracies and bureaucrats, to inventory and assess the built environment in order to register militaristic or Nazi monuments and prioritize their removal or modification. The limitations of the project to renew or restore the monument landscape confront in turn the limitations on the “bureaucratic manufacture of memory” in the modification of individual memory.

Contributor Notes

Lauren Schwartz is a graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in German and earned certificates in Studio Art and European Cultural Studies. She subsequently earned her Master of Arts from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in the bmw Center for German and European Studies. She has worked in research and communications roles in several Berlin-based academic and cultural institutions, and currently works in the Washington Office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Her primary research interests concern political culture, constitutional law, federalism, structures of power, democratization, and bureaucracy in historical perspectives.

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