I’ve already been in Munich for two weeks, and it’s suddenly apparent that this big trip of mine is almost over. Technically, it is over. The school term officially ends tomorrow, and from that point I’ll have another three weeks in Germany. It’s strange thinking back on the whole thing—rather than feeling like it flew by, I completely feel like this project and my time in Germany became my life. I have four months of memories, research and drawings to show for it. I actually think back on arriving in Berlin with nostalgia. I don’t feel so much like a tourist as I feel like I’ve really lived out here, going from place to place and site to site, but still sort of grounding myself in each respective city. I can now honestly say that my first apartment away from my parents was in Berlin, that I spent a semester in another country with a foreign language (a language I still suck at speaking, though I can say basic stuff and have small interactions in the language). I know that it’ll only take a few months or a year back in Canada for me to start missing being in Germany. And I want to come back—when I get home, I’m going to start learning the language properly again. With all the research and school work I’ve done here, I’ve had next to no time at all to really sit down and start working with Rosetta Stone and Duolingo (the programs I use to learn German).
My family’s going to be coming here near the end of my trip. With them, I’m going to go to Schwangau (a very small town bordering Austria that is located near the famous castles of Ludwig II), Hamburg, and then back to Berlin. I predict that I’ll be able to notice a shift from artist-in-resident to tourist as I go through this last leg of my time here. After this trip, I think I’ll feel like I never want to be ‘just’ a tourist again. The idea of spending a couple days in a big city with lots of history and culture, only going to the places on the postcards and speeding through museums, taking pictures of everything without really connecting to it, is super unappealing to me. The last time I came to Europe (2012), I went to five countries in ten days. A Europe trip as seen through the windows of a tour bus. I mean, I saw some amazing things, such as the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland, but in general, it was a very hands-off experience. I got just enough of each city to get a vague feel for it, before we left to the next place. I spent two days in Berlin that time. Now I can say I’ve spent two solid months there. At the end of this trip, with my parents, I’ll be repeating the briefness of 2012—we’ll only be in Berlin for three days. In a way, I think that a brief return to Berlin will almost feel like going home. And then it’s off to Canada again. I can now confirm—Halifax is so boring it hurts, compared to the places I’ve seen here.
My family’s going to be coming here near the end of my trip. With them, I’m going to go to Schwangau (a very small town bordering Austria that is located near the famous castles of Ludwig II), Hamburg, and then back to Berlin. I predict that I’ll be able to notice a shift from artist-in-resident to tourist as I go through this last leg of my time here. After this trip, I think I’ll feel like I never want to be ‘just’ a tourist again. The idea of spending a couple days in a big city with lots of history and culture, only going to the places on the postcards and speeding through museums, taking pictures of everything without really connecting to it, is super unappealing to me. The last time I came to Europe (2012), I went to five countries in ten days. A Europe trip as seen through the windows of a tour bus. I mean, I saw some amazing things, such as the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland, but in general, it was a very hands-off experience. I got just enough of each city to get a vague feel for it, before we left to the next place. I spent two days in Berlin that time. Now I can say I’ve spent two solid months there. At the end of this trip, with my parents, I’ll be repeating the briefness of 2012—we’ll only be in Berlin for three days. In a way, I think that a brief return to Berlin will almost feel like going home. And then it’s off to Canada again. I can now confirm—Halifax is so boring it hurts, compared to the places I’ve seen here.
Anyway, Munich.
I got here without much trouble, for once. Got a little lost after getting out of the U-Bahn, but found everything alright before long. I notice I’ve taken things a lot slower here than in, say Nuremberg, where each day was end-to-end sketching. Though, like in Nuremberg, I’ve gravitated towards all the same types of sites, mostly the stuff relating to the Third Reich, and sketched them. It was really nice, considering the weather’s now in the mid 20s and most days are quite sunny. I almost forgot what it was like to walk around in a t-shirt! Anyway, as I’ve said before, it’s so interesting to see the ghosts of this Nazi terror lingering so harmlessly at various sites. Unlike Nuremberg, though, a lot of what I found here is actually not high-profile at all. For example, I found three locations where a swastika motif is still plainly seen, in some cases more blatant than others:
I got here without much trouble, for once. Got a little lost after getting out of the U-Bahn, but found everything alright before long. I notice I’ve taken things a lot slower here than in, say Nuremberg, where each day was end-to-end sketching. Though, like in Nuremberg, I’ve gravitated towards all the same types of sites, mostly the stuff relating to the Third Reich, and sketched them. It was really nice, considering the weather’s now in the mid 20s and most days are quite sunny. I almost forgot what it was like to walk around in a t-shirt! Anyway, as I’ve said before, it’s so interesting to see the ghosts of this Nazi terror lingering so harmlessly at various sites. Unlike Nuremberg, though, a lot of what I found here is actually not high-profile at all. For example, I found three locations where a swastika motif is still plainly seen, in some cases more blatant than others:
The motifs are from the Munich Haus Der Kunst (house of art), the Staatliche Antikesammlungen (State collection of antiques museum), and the Bayerisches Staatsinstitut für Hochschulforschung und Hochschulplanung, respectively. The second building wasn’t built during the Nazi era, but I know that the Third Reich did add a lot of their motifs to buildings that were built before their time, so I dunno what their origins are. I found the bottom image the most interesting—it’s a series of windows running along one side of the building’s stone gates. For some reason, the swastikas have all been removed on the side of the building facing the broad Prinzgartenstrasse, but not on the side facing a smaller street. You can actually see where the swastikas have been torn away. I’m honestly curious why one side of the building would still display these. It was quite bizarre stumbling across these and seeing the exact motifs that adorned just about every large building in the Third Reich, plain as day. Maybe the fact that they are curved defamiliarizes them enough to make them okay? I don’t know. What’s even more interesting is that these symbols are technically not permitted for public display in Germany. I started sketching them, and somebody walking buy made a comment about them being “hakenkreuzen,” the German term for swastikas. So people are aware that the motif is still there. It’s all a bit strange. Especially when you realize that these are only symbols, harmless until they’re being used as a symbol of hatred and nationalist power. They’re practically relics. Finding these swastikas was super surreal to me. Since coming here, I got used to seeing historical buildings from various eras restored and ‘edited’ in such a way as to make them suitable for public consumption, whether as museums or simply historical spots. Getting a glimpse into an unedited version of this fascist architecture brings a new level of reality to the history I’ve read so much about.
Later, when walking around Munich with some people I had spontaneously bumped into at Odeonsplatz, I pointed at the Haus der Kunst and mentioned that the swastikas were right there, under the columns that line the front of the building. They were completely surprised, and though the building was probably familiar to them, they’d never thought to look up.
Later, when walking around Munich with some people I had spontaneously bumped into at Odeonsplatz, I pointed at the Haus der Kunst and mentioned that the swastikas were right there, under the columns that line the front of the building. They were completely surprised, and though the building was probably familiar to them, they’d never thought to look up.
Going through Munich, I settled on a few basic locations: the Koenigsplatz area, the Marienplatz/Odeonsplatz area, and the places mentioned above, such as the Haus der Kunst (I’ll probably go in there and look at some of their contemporary art exhibitions at some point). I visited other significant Munich sites as well, like the Siegestor (Victory Gate) or the Angel of Peace column, but the other sites were what I kept coming back to. I did a series of sketches on these places.
Koenigsplatz (or King’s Square) is a big complex bordered by some pretty epic neoclassical buildings. Two of them are museums, and there are another two museums in the immediate vicinity. Though built before the Third Reich, the area was unsurprisingly appropriated for Nazi rallies and gatherings. Munich is considered really important in the beginnings of this totalitarian regime. It’s where Hitler tried and failed to take over Bavaria (and Germany by extension) in 1923. The so-called Beer-Hall putsch was repackaged as a victory of sorts once the Nazis took power ten years later, with the Nazis who died in the putsch made into martyrs whose tombs were located in the Koenigsplatz. The Nazis had a big death-cult/martyr thing going for them, and anyone who died for the ‘cause’ would be trumped up to an obscene degree on later marches, rallies and gatherings. Hitler’s Munich offices were actually located just behind the “Temples of Honour” that housed the tombs of the dead putsch Nazis. Those temples are now destroyed, but their steps remain, overgrown with moss, weeds and trees. Hitler’s offices are empty now, but they stand next to a museum on the terror of the Third Reich. The Proplaen Gate now seems to be the residence of squatters—I took an audio recording of them screaming and arguing with each other while I was sketching it. Weeds overtake the front of Hitler’s office and the accompanying Nazi office building across the way (they were connected by underground tunnel). It’s another one of those places that just pulses with the weirdness of its history and the juxtaposition to what it looks and feels like now. There’s still a sense of symmetry, though: for every building on one side of the square, a nearly identical building sits on the other side. It’s the same symmetry that was so apparent with the gigantic congress hall and rally ground in Nuremberg, also of Third Reich architecture. And then I think of the way that the museum add-ons to these sites shatter the symmetry: the Third Reich museum on Koenigsplatz is the only building there that breaks the mirror illusion, and in the congress hall, the museum consists of a needle-like structure driving itself through the Nazi architecture like a spear.
The other two areas, Marienplatz and Odeonsplatz, are just a five minute walk away from one another, and both give a great sense of that old European architecture and society. I love the atmosphere of both places, and can’t help but take pictures of everything like any other tourist. It’s probably easier to explain visually anyway:
Once again, I did a bunch of sketches of the area. The Odeonsplatz area is most relevant to my project: it is the place where Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was stopped in its tracks by armed police, leading to 19 deaths. Hitler would have actually been killed if his bodyguard hadn’t literally taken a bullet for him. This history alone might not make the location interesting enough to depict visually, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Feldherrnhalle (the large structure that marks the square) was a very important visual reoccurring visual in Nazi propaganda. It was used on their currency, their stamps, their posters. Historians today usually see Hitler’s putsch as the marker of the first deaths in his name, an ominous foreshadowing of the apocalypse that would be set on Europe in just a couple of decades. The Nazis saw their defeat at Odeonsplatz as creating the first heroes of the Nazi movement, and there are sappily heroic paintings made during the Third Reich depicting the whole thing. Again, I was struck by the symmetry of the Feldherrnhalle, not to mention its size—the aesthetic is startlingly close to what the Nazis would adapt as their architectural style. The sketches I took of the monument would probably be well-used in showing the ominous scale of these buildings that so symbolize totalitarian regimes and dwarf their populations. The heroic and romantic statue inside the Feldherrnhalle is another indicator of the ideological level that nationalists of the time were operating on—virtue and heroism linked to masculinity, war, and the “ideal” European strongman protecting his damsel in distress, probably a symbol of the homeland, given that she is holding a wreath of oak leaves, symbols of German nationality.
And I can’t help but mention that the atmosphere of ideological supremacy and division of peoples that so characterized the Nazi period in Germany is elevated by the almost constant presence of the anti-Islamic protest group,PEGIDA.
To clarify: there aren’t many of them, especially compared to what I saw in Leipzig, but they’re there. I’ve seen them now a total of four times, and they say they will keep protesting each Monday on Odeonsplatz, the place where the Hitler putsch was stopped. The romanticized statue I mentioned looks over them as they protest, and even though I feel it’s somewhat simplistic to call these people Nazis re-incarnate, there are still parallels to the idea of ethnic contamination that Hitler was so worried about. I will admit that people like PEGIDA—especially in organized rallies—intimidate me quite badly. Seeing them behind police barriers with crooked statistics about how they believe that one day Muslims will outnumber non-Muslims in Germany gives me a queasy sort of feeling, but I know that what I’m going through is emotional knee-jerk. Don’t get me wrong, the PEGIDA movement is intellectually dishonest from every angle I’ve looked at, but I know that I can’t properly respond or react to groups like this without doing some background research on what exactly they’re doing and saying. This is where things get hairy. I can’t walk past these people without obsessing over the obvious parallels between them and other xenophobes throughout history. The idea of a foreign contamination, agitating to create fear and suspicion among different ethnic, cultural or religious groups, is something that’s practically prehistorical.
I’ve seen a lot of discourse about the whole thing online. I regularly stumble across putrid comment sections that basically form intolerant echo-chambers that broad-brush entire groups of people and accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with them of being some form of stupid or even conspiratorial. Any article or video that goes against this mentality gets swamped with hatred or threats. I’m probably gonna get more into this during this blog post than I should, but I want to get across some of the things that have been pre-occupying me lately, and this whole tension over immigrants is the biggest on the list. PEGIDA is the embodiment of the tension, though they claim to be the solution.
The big thing that PEGIDA is against is "anti-Islamization." The idea is that, with the influx of more and more Muslim people displaced by various crises, Muslim values are on the verge of superseding Christian (or secular) values. They’ll show you birth rates and talk about how immigrants have more children than native Europeans, and within x amount of years they will therefore outnumber native European people and their respective cultures. Some perspective: the most liberal estimates put the Muslim population of Germany at 5.4%. Alt-right nationalists counter with saying that “the number might be low now, but wait until such-and-such year!” The fact is that, after a given family immigrates, within a few generations their birth rates tend to normalize. Not only that, but a large number of immigrants from Syria have plans to go back to the middle east once tension dies down.
And then PEGIDA will bring up the idea that the “gutmensch” left (basically, goodie two-shoes left) is tolerant of Muslim culture to a fault, and believe that this will open the gate for such a culture to overtake other cultures despite being a minority. But even here, the information gets a bit skewed when PEGIDA talks about it. An example they give as ‘proof’ of a trend of Europeans being pressured to change cultural values is the fact that a couple of German politicians suggested that churches and mosques each sing hymns of the other religion as a sign of inter-religious tolerance. But on a PEGIDA-boosting website I stumbled across, this encouragement of mutual understanding was presented like this: “The Green human rights expert, Omid Nouripour (…) demanded from us Germans that we, as a sign of OUR readiness to integrate, should sing Muslim songs in our Churches at Christmas time.” The PEGIDA article then goes on to speculate that a Christian would be arrested if they went to a mosque to sing Christmas songs. Another piece of ‘evidence’ brought up is that, apparently, Muslims in Germany are allowed to have multiple married partners, while everyone else in Germany is not. I looked this up and found out that, while there are actually countries that give Muslims the privilege of polygamy over other citizens (India, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Eritrea), Germany is not one of them. England used to give special treatment to immigrants from polygamous countries (though such immigrants weren’t allowed to take additional partners after coming to the country), but this is being phased out.Maybe you’ll hear Sharia law discussed, and hear info about orthodox or radical Muslims attempting to spread it. To me this isn’t far different from groups such as the Christian Phelps family, known for spreading hate and promoting religious fascism. But obviously, most Christians are utterly against the Phelps family and other extremist Christian groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and it’s likewise not hard to find Muslims who are against Sharia. There are websites such as muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com, muslimsfacingtomorrow.com, and reformislam.org that are anti-sharia. I admittedly haven’t known many Muslims personally, but all of the ones I’ve met practice a type of Islam that’s planets away from the extremism that PEGIDA contend is inherent in all Muslims. There was actually a study done that pointed out that Sharia law basically means no more than the rules of the Qu’ran and, just like with the Bible, there are countless interpretations that more suit an individual’s temperament rather than the literal meaning of their holy book. From what I’ve seen on various poll websites, even those who support Sharia do not support the traditional extremes of such law and advocate for freedom of religion. I could go on, but I found a great article that does a good job of further ripping apart this myth of Islamization: http://ia600304.us.archive.org/22/items/DebunkingTheislamisationMyth/IslamisationMyth.pdf
and another much shorter one: http://mediendienst-integration.de/artikel/fact-check-for-pegida-and-anti-immigration-arguments.html
And to quote from the first article I linked:
“I am an atheist, a secularist, and an anti-fascist. I have no interest in defending Islamic religious beliefs, nor the Qur’an (quite the opposite, in fact). I also have no time for those who seek to ‘understand’ Islamism or downplay the abhorrent nature of religious fascism. That said, I am also committed to a rational and just approach to my fellow human beings, seeking to treat them in the same way, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on.The ‘Islamisation’ myth is a myth precisely because it is simply isn’t based on credible evidence. The idea that Britain is being ‘Islamised’ is the latest in a long line of Western narratives of cultural decline. It is a dangerous myth (…) that must be repudiated if we are to develop as a nation and articulate a positive vision for the future."
and another much shorter one: http://mediendienst-integration.de/artikel/fact-check-for-pegida-and-anti-immigration-arguments.html
And to quote from the first article I linked:
“I am an atheist, a secularist, and an anti-fascist. I have no interest in defending Islamic religious beliefs, nor the Qur’an (quite the opposite, in fact). I also have no time for those who seek to ‘understand’ Islamism or downplay the abhorrent nature of religious fascism. That said, I am also committed to a rational and just approach to my fellow human beings, seeking to treat them in the same way, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on.The ‘Islamisation’ myth is a myth precisely because it is simply isn’t based on credible evidence. The idea that Britain is being ‘Islamised’ is the latest in a long line of Western narratives of cultural decline. It is a dangerous myth (…) that must be repudiated if we are to develop as a nation and articulate a positive vision for the future."
When you force yourself to go through this debate, exploring the extremes, moderates and in-betweens of both sides, the ironies of a lot of the people arguing becomes almost comical. For instance, one of the gripes that the alt-right and groups like PEGIDA have with the left is that they are perceived as apologists for terrorism, and downplay the extreme sides of a given religion for the sake of tolerance, denying that extremists are mixed in with moderate religious organizations. I see PEGIDA guilty of similar stuff—they deny any links with radical right politics and Nazism, yet it’s not hard for me to find neo-Nazi work linked to the PEGIDA movement. In a February protest in Prague, Molotov cocktails were thrown into a charity organization set up to help immigrants. And on the other hand, I’ve seen some interviews of people marching with PEGIDA who seem confused as to why they’re there at all, making vague statements like “well, there are things that need to change/I think things can be better than they are,” when asked why they’re standing with PEGIDA. Though the official stance of PEGIDA is anti-Nazi (and some will be quick to say that Hitler admired a perceived violence in Islam, so how can they sympathize with his ideals?), yet Lutz Bachmann, one of PEGIDA’s leaders, got some infamy for posting a photo of himself on Facebook styled as Adolf Hitler. The photo was apparently a satirical goof, but they were accompanied by comments by Bachmann on how the immigrants (presumably all immigrants) are “scumbags” and “trash.” He also later changed his story to say that the photo of himself as Hitler was photoshopped. Ultimately though, the photo brought up rifts in the group, as openly-racist supporters were enthusiastic over the photo, while some others left PEGIDA altogether. From what I can see, there’s a lot of ideological schism within the movement, which is what makes it a bit oversimplified to simply call them Nazis, but their underlying mentality towards immigrants and Muslims is still intolerant in essence and only too eager to skew information in order to create a feared scapegoat for Germany’s issues. The point is, PEGIDA is a mixed bag based on upholding ideas of cultural segregation. I find it odd that they are so upset by being stereotyped as mini-Hitlers, yet (based on their signs and slogans) many are fine with stereotyping Muslims under one brush, at times advocating for discriminatory surveillance of Muslims or mosques. This is a conversation I feel will be huge over the next few years, and it’s good to really go in clean and research for yourself, as independent of bias as it’s possible to be. And apologies for not referencing and citing sources like I should—keep in mind I’m treating this blog as more of a diary than an informational news outlet. Maybe I’ll write a proper article sometime in the future. Anyway.
It’s the paranoia and division that interests me. When reading German history, this is what jumped out of the pages: the Berlin wall, which the East German government justified as being a protection against an invasion of fascists. Surveillance and paranoia, as neighbor turned against neighbor during waves of spying and fears of terrorism and military attacks. Division and segregation, as totalitarian thinkers encouraged people to keep their distance from certain religious or ethnic types. Though not on the same scale, I see this mentality playing out with new nationalist groups, and I can’t help but be fascinated by it, just like I’d be fascinated by a train wreck. The good thing is, as I read more and more about this and gain more knowledge, I feel less afraid and more willing to think of ways to represent these dynamics visually. I’m at the end of my project, but I’m still grasping. I know there’s potential here, and I’ll certainly use it towards the second phase of my project when I start creating bigger works at home in Canada.
For now, here’s some more drawings that I’ve been working on. At some point I really need to write a blog about my mindset and though process while I create these works, but at this point it’s mostly trial and error, experimentation. When I get back to Canada, when I’m far away from things like PEGIDA and aggressive political stickers on every lamp post, maybe my head will be clear enough to get into all that. I’ll try to get another blog post or two out before I leave Germany, but unfortunately I’m really running outta steam at this point and finding it harder to write. Oh well.