Well… aren’t they? These bunkers were instrumental to “total war”, “resistance to the last”, that whole thing… dragging out the war, and implicitely, the holocaust, as long as possible. In a certain way, they are even more questionable symbols than obvious sites of terror - they are symbols of the apologetic, right wing/conservative narrative that paints Germany as just another victim of the war. That’s probably one reason why they don’t lend themselves to be a museum, or memorial site.
That. They’ve been sitting untouched on prime real estate for 74 years for a reason. Which IMHO, makes this hotel kind of tolerable - it’s probably better to give them a new purpose, a new meaning, than let them sit untouched and speak for themselves, so to say.
and many historical buildings have scuff, burn, or tool marks purposefully to show where they were chiseled off as a reminder.
i’m not sure razing it is a good idea. there are people who have vested interests in pretending the nazis were a party in 1945, and that fascism stopped being a threat on VE day.
Exactly. They’re a ‘symbol of militarism’ in the same way as the Maunsell Forts in the Thames Estuary or ex-missile silos in Indiana. Yes, they were built by the Nazi regime, but they’re not specifically an expression of nazism.
Doesn’t that apply to any WW2 civilian air raid shelter? How does this one functionally differ from using London Underground stations as shelters? Okay; apart from the AA-gun emplacements on the roof, but London had them too, if not in the same buildings.
Okay, that argument could be made, but it seems you’d have to actively try to formulate it - I wouldn’t say it’s instantly obvious.
C’mon. That’s not a fair comparison. Some aspects of German society during WW2 were no more or less ideological than in any country at war. Germany still had farms, sewage works, etc. Not all police officers were Gestapo members. The nazis used railways to transport people to extermination camps, but that’s not a reason to rip up all German railways.
No-one is suggesting that nazism was absent from such institutions, just that they also served everyday, pragmatic needs common to any society at war. I presume you’re not saying that the German government shouldn’t have provided air raid shelters?
Absolutely. But that purpose could be served by plaques, maybe even a couple of rooms of explanatory boards and artefacts. There isn’t a need to devote whole structures (and remember, major cities had several Flakturmer each) to museums, not least if there are already museums in other, more overtly nazi buildings nearby.
Yes. That would probably be best - if there’s a need for such services in those locations.
I largely agree with that, apart from:
“Economic class” - that sounds more like a modern objection to modern capitalism than nazi ideology.
“Nazi ideology the structure first served” - That is my point. I don’t think a combined civilian air raid shelter and AA-gun battery specifically, exclusively, served nazi ideology, any more than comparable structures in London.
So Germany shouldn’t have allowed civilians to shelter from air raids? Really? Was every single member of the German people personally responsible for killing Jews? To the extent that they deserved to die?
Yep. They stood silent while people were slaughtered like animals and burned like yesterday’s trash and could have stopped Hitler when they had a chance.
Fascist ideology in practise creates economic stratification, with high-ranking party members enjoying the same extra privileges as the captialist elite they partner with.
They were built by the Nazi regime, to defend the Nazi regime, due to a disastrous war of choice that the Nazi regime started. No Nazi regime, likely no eyesore flak towers in 2019 (or at least, none as ideologically fraught as ones associated with a genocidal regime).
It’s been argued that those who tolerated the Nazi regime were culpable to an extent.
There are legitimate criticisms of Goldhagen’s thesis, to be sure (as distinct from the bogus ones from Holocaust denialists). And Goldhagen himself never argues that German civilians deserved to die in bombing raids. But none of those reputable historians pretend that flak towers or the German military of the time somehow existed separately from the Nazi regime that built them.
As a side note, flak towers were designed first and foremost in this near-indestructible way to protect the AA guns shooting down Allied bombers and the soldiers that operated them (as well as to protect interceptor command staff and their radio antennas). The civilian bomb shelter aspect was a secondary concern for the regime, as narratives from German civilians who lived through the air raids attest (guess which members of German society got first dibs on places in the flak tower shelters, somehow always a bit ahead of the public sirens going off).
"If I can’t turn this building into a Tiki Bar in 2019, that just means you wanted innocent people to die in WWII."
Nobody’s going back in a time machine to take away shelters from people in WWII.
Nobody’s going to die from a falling bomb if these buildings aren’t made into modern hotels.
This is about today, and using these things as hotels is foolish for specific reasons. Hotels intrinsically base their worth on if they’re providing a pleasing context for rest. The architectural elements of a hotel are a specific, unavoidable feature of their external marketing and daily function, not something hidden.
A hotel can’t market itself without, in some way, directly glorifying their building.
Using the buildings Nazis provided, is almost always going to involve pretending that actually poisoned fruit is somehow “great, tasty, highest quality fruit”.
That’s not a moral thing to do when you have the same option not to do it.
It can’t? As it has been post above, other building like this have been repurposed. The building is currently a night club with dozens of concerts listed.
So do other businesses not glorify the building? Or does it being a hotel some how make it different, and if so, in what way?
Just because someone’s doing something, doesn’t mean that what they’re doing doesn’t have a degree of fucked-up-ness about it.
“But some German people are okay with it” isn’t a strongly compelling argument in any way.
Also, your specific example? The nightclub is called “Sick & Dangerous”. They are making coin off of the buzz of it being a former Nazi building, and it’s not as a repudiation. It’s in every review of the place. It’s most definitely an example of people exploiting the origin of the building for glamor and profit. Why would you ever use it as a positive example? “We need to keep Nazi buildings up so that darkedge nightclubs feel more dangerous” is a unique argument, but not a good one. There are many better ways to feel dangerous while dancing that don’t glorify Nazism.
I couldn’t find a better wording in the middle of the night.
As my dad, who was involved in the Yiddish theater (and was with the USO in Germany at the end of the war) would point out, humor is also a good way of dealing with Nazis.
