Document Type

Grant

Project Title

Curated Bricolage: Questions of Agency, Accuracy, and Complicity in Munich Holocaust Memorialization

Principal Investigator

Jamie Downing

Publication Date

2025

College or Department

Communication

Funder

GCSU Academic Affairs

Award Date Range

2024

Award Amount

$2,222.00

Abstract

As the birthplace of the Nazi movement, Munich has long struggled to reckon with its legacy from World War II and the Holocaust. While some museums in Munich document the rise of the Nazis, the war, and the Holocaust, unlike other European cities, Munich lacks a centralized Holocaust museum or memorial. Instead, across the city there are dozens of mini-monuments—plaques, sculptures, cobblestone markings—that reference different figures and events related to Munich's Nazi history. These sites comprise a decentralized, bricolage approach to memorialization, leaving individuals to happen upon these mini-memorials and make sense of them without much context.

While this approach has the potential to position audiences as active agents constructing their own understanding, the lack of curative framing risks promoting partial, whitewashed, or even problematic interpretations of history. For instance, many prominent mini-memorials focus on German resistance, divorcing broader German society from complicity. Thus, even as audiences construct their own bricolage, the materials available may minimize or erase difficult truths about systemic antisemitism, ableism, homophobia and violence.

Through analysis of historical records and fieldwork, this paper examines Munich’s troubling approach to Holocaust memory. I detail how the carefully curated yet decentralized memorialization uses individual agency to present a distorted narrative that downplays German responsibility. I conclude by examining the pitfalls of “curated bricolage” as a memorial strategy, while considering how audience subjectivity might be reframed to promote more accurate, empowering remembrance of historical tragedy.

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