Odeonsplatz, Munich: The Shirkers and the Goose-Steppers

At the Feldherrnhalle on Odeonsplatz in Munich © Erin Faith Allen

My soul is in her element when absorbing history, stories, new and old places and spaces that exist in pockets of time that dangle in the precipice of almost-forgotten. I walk up to the dangling edge, reach into its pockets, and scoop up the story. The story becomes not-lost, and in that moment I am found.

Wanderlust is a verb. And so is my soul.

Today I am standing at the Feldherrnhalle on the Odeonsplatz in Munich, looking up at a building that was built in 1841 as a tribute to the Bavarian army and had no idea what it would later become. The Nazis turned it into the ideological centerpiece of the movement. SS recruits swore their oaths of loyalty to Hitler on this ground. Every year on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, torchlight processions moved through the city toward this building, the Horst Wessel march carrying bravado through loudspeakers across the entire city and into radio broadcasts throughout the Reich. Torches. Boots in lockstep. Arms raised. Sieg Heil!

Every person who walked past this patch of terrible ground was required to raise their arm in salute.

And some of them did not.

Those who could not stomach this deference to something they could not believe in learned to take a different route: a narrow alley behind the Feldherrnhalle, the Viscardigasse, gave people a way to slip past without feeding the machinery of compliance. The alley acquired a nickname: Drückebergergasserl. Shirkers' alley.

While boots goose-stepped in formation toward the death and destruction they would perpetrate, the shirkers moved quietly in the opposite direction, invisible, meek, mild, and defiant in the only way available to them. No torches and no salutes. Just a back alley and the small, stubborn refusal to perform.

Gold paving stones mark the Viscardigasse today, a quiet acknowledgment that their defiance is remembered.

The goose-stepping was real and it was terrible and it was the foreboding of genocide. It filled this square with hubris, hate, and fire and the terrifying momentum of a movement that believed itself to be unstoppable.

But in the end it was the shirkers who endured. Their resistance was invisible and their victory may have been quiet, but it was a victory nonetheless.

There is no goose-stepping now. It is late and the square is still, the stone holding the warmth of a late summer night. Beautiful and ordinary and unburdened, at least on the surface, by what passed through it decades ago.

I know what passed through it. And I walk up to the edge, reach in, now I write about it.

………………………………

The torches were extinguished on the square, and the war came to its end. My friend Bud Gahs, 42nd Rainbow Division veteran and liberator of Dachau, drove his truck through the heart of Munich in the final days. He remembers it vividly. The city that had goose-stepped its way toward genocide was captured.