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As we were driving by, we thought that we’d pop into BMW Welt to see what the hype seemed to be about given the very positive on-line reviews. This is effectively a decadent car showroom which is free of admission, located opposite to the BMW Museum. This is the heart of Bayerische Motoren Werke and their global HQ, despite huge efforts being made by Dereham Town Council to get them to relocate to the centre of Norfolk.

Some BMW cars.

I was surprised just how busy this whole arrangement was.

An old BMW car. I don’t think I’ll start a blog about cars if I’m being honest.

The Rolls Royce Spectre, which apparently retails in the UK for a third of a million pounds. That’s a lot of Greggs.

You can personalise your Rolls Royce should you wish.

Richard didn’t like it as it wasn’t British enough.

The Rolls Royce Cullinan, which is a little cheaper, but it still seems a lot of money for a car to me. Not that I’m in the market to buy a car, but I wouldn’t dare leave it anywhere in case it was scratched, vandalised or just stolen.

This was Richard’s favourite car.

Looking over the ground floor of the building.

A BMW motorbike.

We didn’t have time to go in, but this is the BMW Head Office on the left and the museum building on the right, both of which are located opposite to BMW Welt.

BMW Welt is an impressive building insomuch as it’s clearly a popular place to visit. They had a few cafes, but they had rather forgotten to provide sufficient seating, but I’m sure anyone actually wanting to buy a car would be given a free hot drink. I did wonder whether if Richard bought a Rolls Royce whether they’d buy us lunch, but then he declared he didn’t like the designs and so that plan went out of the window. I suspect that I would be more engaged with this if I knew anything about cars of motorbikes, but it was an interesting place to see and especially as it was free.

This is one of the exhibits at the museum which questions what the visitor thinks about them being present, noting “what kind of feelings do these traces of the past trigger in us?” as they’re cutlery from the Brown House which was formerly on this site. The Brown House (Braunes Haus) was the Nazi Party’s headquarters in Munich, set on Brienner Straße between Karolinenplatz and Königsplatz. The building began life in 1828 as a neoclassical city palace, later known as Palais Barlow, designed by Jean-Baptiste Métivier. In May 1930 the NSDAP bought it, financed in part by donations and loans from industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick and they then had architect Paul Ludwig Troost refit the villa into a suitably imposing party HQ. It opened for business in early 1931 and served as the movement’s nerve-centre until the end of the regime. The house was badly damaged in wartime bombing, effectively destroyed, and its ruins were cleared in 1947. For decades the plot remained an empty scar in a quarter that had also included the Führerbau and other party buildings framing Königsplatz, a showpiece space the Nazis had reworked for rallies and ceremony.

The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism (NS-Dokumentationszentrum) opened here in 2015, bringing a more positive use to the previous empty space. This seems the ideal place for exhibits such as this to be displayed, they’ve survived for nearly a century now and they may as well be on display in locations which explain the war and the reasons for it. It’s an intriguing survival and the Brown House is where the Blutfahne, or Blood Flag, was stored and Hitler had offices, the centre of where the Nazi movement grew in the early 1930s. If forks from the Brown House can trouble us, it is because they expose how the regime embedded itself in rooms that felt safe and respectable.

Just some random photos from Munich at 6am today…. I was still tired from the overnight coach journey, so they might be a little bit wonky.

Karl Vossler (6 September 1872 – 18 May 1949) was a German Romanist and linguist who became one of the leading European scholars of Romance literature before 1933, then a conspicuous academic opponent of Nazism in Munich. It’s for that opposition to the Nazis that has led this museum to feature him and his bravery in opposing the regime. He was born in Hohenheim near Stuttgart and Vossler studied German and Romance philology in Tübingen, Geneva, Strasbourg, Rome and Heidelberg, taking his doctorate in 1897 and his habilitation in 1900. He held the chair at Würzburg from 1909 and moved to the University of Munich in 1911, where he taught for the rest of his life. His standing brought election to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and, in 1926, the Pour le Mérite for the arts and sciences.

Politically he was no revolutionary in 1914, signing the wartime ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three’ (an interesting document in its own right), yet by the 1920s he was speaking publicly against rising antisemitism and the völkisch right. In a 15 December 1922 lecture to students he likened the swastika to barbed wire and during his 1926–27 term as rector he insisted on including Jewish student fraternities in university ceremonies while ordering the republican black-red-gold flag to be flown on campus. After Hitler’s takeover Vossler tried to shield colleagues, notably defending the philosopher Richard Hönigswald’s position in 1933. The regime soon branded him “politically unreliable” and on 1 October 1937 he was forced into early retirement and barred from teaching, a measure the Nazi lecturers’ association justified by casting him as an ideological opponent.

When the war ended he returned to public academic life, serving as rector of the University of Munich from March to August 1946 to rebuild the institution and he delivered the memorial address that November for the university’s victims of National Socialism, including the White Rose. Vossler died in Munich on 18 May 1949 and was given an honorary grave in the city’s Waldfriedhof. At least he got to see the Nazi regime that he so hated coming to an end and he is now one of the city’s heroes.

This is another exhibit at the museum which is from their special exhibition “Memory Is” which is running until May 2026. I’ve visited a lot of museums which have exhibits about the Second World War and the advance of the Nazis, but I can’t recall ever seeing an item which was in a shop during Kristallnacht on 9 and 10 November 1938. This hat was located at the Heinrich Rothschild Hat and Accessories Stall in Sendlinger Strasse (the site is now the Tretter shoe store) and it was badly damaged during the pogrom and then forcibly liquidated soon after.

The above photo was taken after the pogrom and shows the shop boarded up following the attacks. The Munich City Museum’s director, Konrad Schießl, purchased 92 of the shop’s hats at a heavily discounted price, something which I think showed some considerable foresight. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew what to do with the though and they languished in the museum’s stores and their provenance was left unquestioned. In 2016, the museum wanted to put them on display and they made efforts to find the descendants of the owners and the family allowed the museum to keep the items so that they can remain as exhibits.

Katrina Recker, the great-granddaughter of the former shop owner Heinrich Rothschild, noted:

“In the name of my family, I am deeply grateful that this hat, a very personal and moving contemporary witness, now stands as an eternal reminder of the fate of millions of Jewish families during that time. Never forget and never again.”

And it’s an intriguing thought that this hat was inside the shop when the pogrom took place, it’s another very powerful exhibit that the museum has chosen to put on display.