The Haus der Geschichte in Bonn may very well be the best museum I have ever stepped foot in. We were only there for an hour and a half, but I could have easily spent all day strolling its halls. Given our limited time, we saw just a fraction of the museum, skipping over the current exhibit – German Myths Since 1945 – and heading to the permanent collection. Spanning multiple stories, the Haus der Geschichte’s permanent collection traces German history from the fall of the Third Reich through the divisions between communist East Germany and capitalistic West Germany to reunification. It consists of over 7,000 artifacts from 7 decades, so I was like a kid in a candy shop. Sure, some of the posters, cartoons, and films went over my head because I don’t speak a lick of German, but I was enamored with the place. The sections flowed seamlessly from one to another, carrying visitors through post-war German history with ease. Well, mostly with ease. Every so often large, black boxes obscured our path and blocked the view of Germany’s ever brighter future. They were filled with photographs of the Third Reich and that regime’s atrocities. According to our tour guide, each box represented the Reich’s blot on Germany history and was a way of forcing museum visitors to deal with the nation’s horrible past. It was brilliantly done, but it does raise one question: why are there still swaztikas in Cologne?
Our first day in the city, our guide pointed at the first ones. They were chiseled into the frieze of a shopping center dating to the 1930s and were hard to see if you didn’t know to look for them. Connected to one another, the swaztikas formed a swirling pattern similar to those found on Grecian temples. The next ones were located at the bottom of a fountain next to the Cologne Cathedral. Red and jagged, they too formed an interconnected pattern that one could easily miss if not on alert. It was strange to me that they could be so easily overlooked, that these swaztikas had remained a part of the daily landscape long after the others had disappeared. Had no one noticed? Or did no one care?