Exhibition “Pasinger Places of Remembrance” shows historical views – Munich

At the beginning of the last century, Munich residents did not have to travel to Füssen to see a fairytale castle. It was enough to take a trip to the neighboring town of Pasing by train. Anyone who left the train station in a northerly direction immediately saw the most striking and magnificent building in the estate designed by architect August Exter – the Stork Castle. Today the magnificent building, decorated with oriels, turrets, dormers, balconies and jagged gables, can only be found on old photos and postcards. And on the cover of a book about “Pasinger places of remembrance”. Because in 1938 the castle, like many residential buildings, villas and factories, fell victim to National Socialist megalomania – it stood in the way of the expansion of the new main station planned at the time.

Bernd-Michael Schülke can tell many such stories. The former teacher for German, history and social studies is an accomplished connoisseur of Pasing’s history, he knows the importance of the earlier city and today’s district and how all of this has developed. And he is aware of how identity-forming knowledge of the past can be, especially for newcomers, since he himself moved to Munich in 1980 for love. Schülke therefore had an idea: he wanted to develop a kind of city guide that would help people visit places that look very different today than they did a few decades ago. For a year, the now 76-year-old researched for this, collecting things worth knowing and seeing in archives and libraries.

The book “Pasing Memorial Sites”, which was created in this way with the participation of Bernhard Schoßig and Peter Pich from the Institute for Future-Oriented History and contributions by Franz Adam, Almuth David and Bernhard Koch, depicts buildings, squares, monuments, but also people and events that historical layers of the place become recognizable again. For example the “cardboard box”, built in 1921/22 as a placeholder for a later planned, representative town hall on Pasing’s Marienplatz. The provisional stood for 95 years, housing shops, the health department and a practice before it was demolished in 2016. Or the PA-LI, designed in 1929 in the Art Deco style, Pasing’s oldest and last cinema at Spiegelstraße 7. “No one knows that anymore,” says Schülke. The curtain fell in the cinema for the last time in 1982, and in the end the occupancy rate was only 15 percent.

Even before the First World War, Pasing was a popular place to watch films until the late 1940s: there were five cinemas there at the time. And a mini Ferris wheel. “A shoemaker from Schwabing had it built in 1925, and he also used it to move through Pasing,” says Schülke. The folk festival at which this “Russian swing” was operated was located behind today’s Elsa-Brandström-Gymnasium. The “Russian wheel”, so called because it first appeared in Eastern Europe, still exists, but now only makes guest appearances at the Auer Dult and the Wiesn. Pasing’s school history is also interesting. Today’s elementary school on Oselstraße was called “Grotschule” a hundred years ago, named after the founder and first headmistress Martha von Grot, and was a private girls’ high school based on reformist ideas. This school was a decisive factor in establishing Pasing’s reputation as a school town.

Open detailed view

Open detailed view

The first grammar school, however, was the “Royal Progymnasium”, inaugurated in 1910, open to girls from 1919 and oriented towards mathematics and the natural sciences. The school has been called Karlsgymnasium since 1963 and focuses on a humanistic education. A “special treat” for Schülke, who was born in East Westphalia, is the creation of the green corridor along Perlschneiderstrasse. “This route housed a railway track from 1921 to 1968,” he reports. “That branched off on Am Knie street and led to the Pasinger paper factory on Planegger Street, which had already printed Germany’s first postage stamp in 1849 with the black one.” The trains on this section transported both raw materials and finished products. However, because the track did not suit the garden city of Pasing, it was bordered with hedges, shrubs and trees in the mid-1930s. The track was finally dismantled, the green vein remained.

“Almost 20 places of remembrance”, says Schülke, “have already disappeared in Pasing”. Others, such as the local health insurance building between the Pasinger Viktualienmarkt and the street Am Schützeneck, once an “architectural jewel with public baths”, today a functional building, document the change. “But the most obvious thing,” says the local researcher, “is the change at the post office.” In 1908 there was still the Wilhelminian-style post office right next to the train station, in 1963 a sober new building was built there and in 2009 the current building – with only a small room for the post office. About half of the almost one hundred places of remembrance that can be found in the alternative city guide, which is available in bookstores for 19.80 euros, are also shown in an exhibition that can be visited until September 29 in the new building of the Pasing town hall at Landsberger Straße 486 can. However, due to the pandemic, the visit is only possible on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 p.m. as part of a one-hour, free guided tour.

“Perhaps,” Schülke and his fellow campaigners at the institute hope, “stelae or commemorative plaques can still be installed at historical memorial sites.” Because that was the original idea of ​​the club. However, the city has so far rejected this – with reference to a fundamental decision made 20 years ago on the subject of “history and remembrance in public space”. The reason: an “already considerable furnishing of the public space”. In the meantime, however, there is a newly established institute for city history and culture of remembrance in the cultural department, which, so the club’s active members hope, may possibly be rethinking. “In the district of Starnberg, for example, there are already such declarations locally,” says Schülke. “For those unfamiliar with the area, that’s very nice.”