The project’s concept of remembrance will provide information both on and in the buildings on the history as well as the functions of the buildings during the National Socialist era. This will be done through the installation of plaques and pedestals. In addition, project organisers will discuss and explore the former functions of the buildings in various educational and mediation formats.

Dr. Horst Henrici, Chancellor of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, explains:  »The university acknowledges its responsibility to address the history of the facilities that we routinely use. We hope, in the trust sense of the word, to ›stop‹ students, researchers, instructors and employees, as well as visitors and tourists. We want everyone who enters these buildings to engage with the history that tends to be hidden behind a generically formulated commemorative plaque. The ›Erinnerungsmedien‹ project provides the foundation for making memory visible.«

The project, initiated by the Faculty of Media and the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, is directed by Jannik Noeske, scientific employee at the Institute for European Urban Studies and also involves the university’s Service Centre for Facility Management and the International Heritage Centre.

Background 

The City of Weimar was strongly affected by the crimes of National Socialism, and buildings used today by the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar are representative of this past. Already 2018, an inter-faculty project was initiated and has been working towards ensuring that the history of Bauhausstraße 11 is documented on site. The building was constructed in 1937 by the »Kassenärztliche Vereinigung« (Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians) as a so-called »Ärztehaus« (medical centre) and later became the National Socialist control centre for healthcare policies. The current owner of the building, the »Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Thüringens« (Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians), funded a research project on the history of the building (2021-2023). The remembrance concept will be extended to this building after the planned relocation of the Faculty of Media and completed renovation. 

The buildings at Marienstraße 13 and 15 were the headquarters of the »Thüringer Landesamtes für Rassewesen« (Thuringian State Office for Racial Affairs) between 1935 and 1945. The Office, together with scientists from the University of Jena, carried out racially motivated studies of the Thuringian population, provided training courses on the subject of so-called racial science and eugenics, and offered expert opinions to the decision-making bodies of eugenics crimes (euphemistically referred to as the Hereditary Health Court). The director of this Office, Nazi sports physician Karl Astel, served as rector of the University of Jena from 1939 until 1945 when he took his own life. Since the 1950s, the buildings have been used by Weimar’s University of Architecture and Civil Engineering (HAB) and then the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The fact is, the buildings themselves reveal little about their dark history. However, university members have taken it upon themselves to address the history of the buildings and to commemorate it.

The Belvederer Allee 6 building, now home to the Chancellor's Office and the Human Resources Department at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, was once a so-called ghetto building. Built in 1900, the family home of Art School Professor Friedrich Fleischer passed to his wife, Jenny Fleischer-Alt, a singer famous in Weimar and beyond. The racist legislation of the National Socialists increased disenfranchisement; starting in 1940, Jews were forcibly moved into the Fleischer-Alt house. As a result of being persistently humiliated and out of fear of impending deportation, Jenny Fleischer-Alt and her niece Edith Gàl took their own lives in 1942. The other residents of the house were subsequently deported and the house was converted into an isolation ward for the municipal hospital. Following its use as an engineering office in the post-war period, the building then became home to the HAB Weimar’s Institute for Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s. After 1990, it was renovated and has served as a building for university administration since that time. A memorial plaque was placed at the entrance of the building in 1996 commemorating the Jews who were housed there.