Sit Down Be Ehrfürchtig

Two identical buildings sit on opposite sides of Briennerstrasse, along the eastern edge of Königsplatz.  Grey stone, three stories high, no domes or other architectural flourishes.  Walking by, you wouldn’t notice anything special about them, and neither did we when we were in Munich a few weeks ago.  It wasn’t until our guide pointed them out that we noticed their understated neoclassical impressiveness.  Tall, round-arched windows set inside rectangular reliefs which formed their own frame and obviated the need for a lintel.  Squared-off doric columns supporting twin porticos that extended toward the street, shielding the entrances from the elements and offering a platform from which orations could be given.

The building to the north, our guide explained, was the Führerbau, built by the Nazis in the mid-30s.  It’s where Hitler and Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938 (“peace in our time,” etc.), and it was the party’s HQ until the end of the war.  With this added context, the building took on an awesome / fearsome aura, which I suppose was the point when it was built, even though there’s nothing sinister per se about the architecture.  The only overt political symbols – two immense eagles, cast in bronze, which originally hovered over each portico just below the roof – have been removed; only the holes from the giant screws that held them in place remain, like the bullet holes one still sees pocking other sites in Munich.  Today these two buildings are home to the University of Music and Performing Arts and the University Art Library.  Some of the original fixtures are still inside, our guide noted, and indeed I spied a couple of cool art deco light fixtures through one of the windows. 

In 1945, I imagine it must have been extremely tempting simply to tear these buildings down, given what they represented and what went on inside them.  The Allies did in fact raze a nearby memorial commemorating the Nazis who had been killed in the Beer Hall Putsch. But rather than demolish the Führerbau, the Germans planted a row of trees across the street, to neuter the buildings’ dominance over Königsplatz, and rededicated them to art and music – a graceful middle finger to the National Socialists, who had gone to great lengths to persecute and shame so-called “degenerate artists.”

We continued walking toward the Alte Pinakotek, which had been partially demolished by American bombs near the end of the war.  The jigsaw of newer and older brick revealed how the museum was rebuilt, intentionally allowing the scars to remain visible. 

Inside the museum, like everywhere else in Munich, people wore masks.  Disposable white medical masks, plain fabric ones, hospital-grade ones, sequined fashion-y ones, homemade t-shirt reboots.  One man improvised with a cone paper coffee filter.  This did not prevent life from going on: people rode the metro, they went out to bars and restaurants, they stayed in hotels.  At most of the places we went, you scanned a QR code that sent you to a contract tracing form.  Once you got seated at your table, you could remove your mask, but if you got up to leave or to go to the bathroom, you put it back on.  In the dozen or so restaurants we visited over a week, every single person did this.  On the odd occasion when someone would absentmindedly forget, a waiter would dash over to remind them, and they would quickly and apologetically put their mask on.

Right here is where I was planning to draw a nifty compare-and-contrast between Germany and my home country.  How the fatality rate from COVID-19 in the US is six times what it is in Germany.  How one country is run by someone with a PhD in quantum chemistry, and the other by a landlord who muses about drinking Clorox. How I haven’t seen any reports from Germany of politicians suing each other over mask regulations, or of dudes with assault rifles storming government buildings over public health measures.  How Germany’s response to the pandemic has demonstrated above all a sense of humility: a respect for mysterious, often destructive forces which are more powerful than our own will, wishes, or pride.  Humility which has obvious roots in the country’s own past demons, and which has inspired gestures like Willy Brandt’s kneeling before the Warsaw ghetto in 1970.  Humility which has allowed artful acknowledgements of the darker elements of the country’s history, rather than the frantic, often hypocritical attempts to efface them that one sees elsewhere.

The problem is that this comparison doesn’t completely hold up.  In fact, there are dudes in Germany storming government buildings, minus the assault rifles, but plus the far right banners and sentiments.  The anti-mask protests are not confined to the Boogaloo crowd; they’ve sprouted up in London, and Zurich, and Geneva.  Even in Germany, where atonement for the sins of the Nazis has been deeply socialized into the post-war generations, around half of the population did not approve of the Warsaw Genuflection.  And to be fair, there are plenty of places in the US where officials are trying to do the right thing: my daughters’ school district in Massachusetts, for one, is being thorough and responsible with their plans for the fall (certainly moreso than the public schools here). 

Still, the numbers are what they are.   As of September 16^th, 9,371 people had died from COVID-19 in Germany, or 11 per 100,000 inhabitants.  In the United States, those figures were 196,676 and 60.  There is selfishness and denial everywhere, and to some extent, in all of us.  But where we live, and how we live, and the people we elect to run things, still mean something.