Category: Familie Mann

In May 2024, dur­ing the man­dat­ory archae­olo­gic­al mon­it­or­ing of the excav­a­tion at Sal­vat­or­platz for the erec­tion of the monu­ment to the Mann fam­ily, remains of buri­als were dis­covered in the cemetery of the nearby Sal­vat­or Church and the cemetery wall. Neu­pert, Kozik & Simm Archae­ology Office was com­mis­sioned to carry out the work and recovered a child’s skel­et­on from the Baroque peri­od. The cemetery was in use until around 1800.

This was actu­ally known, and the cemetery is also des­ig­nated as an archae­olo­gic­al monu­ment, but it was assumed that no finds were to be expec­ted due to the numer­ous con­struc­tion meas­ures on the square after 1945 and an air-raid shel­ter under the square. How­ever, dur­ing an inspec­tion of the base­ment beneath the Sal­vat­or­gar­age, it was dis­covered that it is loc­ated entirely beneath the build­ing, with only a nar­row pas­sage­way beneath the square.

Excav­at­ing the entire site down to the planned found­a­tion depth of up to 1.90 m in some places and hav­ing it archae­olo­gic­ally examined would have been very costly and time-con­sum­ing, so it was neces­sary to halt con­struc­tion and then dis­mantle the build­ing until the situ­ation had been clarified.

The finds, espe­cially at the start of con­struc­tion, were a hard blow and left me in con­flict: on the one hand, I am inter­ested in his­tory and archae­ology myself; view­ing, col­lect­ing, and doc­u­ment­ing finds are part of my artist­ic prac­tice. And the excav­a­tions also attrac­ted the interest of pass­ers-by and employ­ees of the Lit­er­at­urhaus. For a short time, Sal­vat­or­platz was trans­formed into an excav­a­tion site where the remains of past lives and former city dwell­ers became visible—an excit­ing pro­cess in itself. And it seems fit­ting that the Mann fam­ily should have a memori­al here, where traces of oth­er fam­il­ies’ lives are also vis­ible. On the oth­er hand, the finds pre­ven­ted the long-awaited com­ple­tion of the memori­al pro­ject, which has been drag­ging on for sev­er­al years.

The excav­a­tions set in motion a series of renewed coordin­a­tion pro­cesses with the monu­ment pro­tec­tion author­it­ies, includ­ing the Bav­ari­an State Office for Monu­ment Pre­ser­va­tion, where the pro­ject at Sal­vat­or­platz seemed to be called into ques­tion at times, not with regard to the archae­olo­gic­al monu­ment, but in prin­ciple; depart­ments that had appar­ently not been involved before got involved, the State Monu­ment Council—a body I had nev­er heard of before—was asked for its opin­ion and referred the mat­ter back to the monu­ment pre­ser­va­tion author­it­ies, who asked me to sub­mit a new pro­ject descrip­tion with visu­al­iz­a­tions that would more clearly show the effect on the “Munich after 1945” ensemble…

So the cent­ral loc­a­tion in the old town has its pit­falls. Nev­er­the­less, the loc­a­tion remains ideal for the monu­ment in terms of con­tent, in the imme­di­ate vicin­ity of the Lit­er­at­urhaus, with its con­nec­tion to lit­er­at­ure and in par­tic­u­lar its “pat­ron saint” Thomas Mann. I had also designed the monu­ment spe­cific­ally for this square, as a gath­er­ing of the signs scattered through­out the city in a cent­ral loc­a­tion, with the tower­ing, light-giv­ing luminar­ies.
At the begin­ning of 2025, the monu­ment pro­tec­tion author­it­ies signaled their fun­da­ment­al agree­ment with the monu­ment, which mani­fes­ted itself in a per­mit for fur­ther (archae­olo­gic­al) excav­a­tions. Now, in accord­ance with the recom­mend­a­tion, the found­a­tions for the lights must be planned to be flat­ter, and tech­nic­al solu­tions must be found for the changed start­ing pos­i­tion. The plan­ning is now con­tinu­ing! Frosch Archi­tects have been on board since May 2025.

I hope that the monu­ment pro­ject will be com­pleted, if not in the Zauber­berg year 2024, then in the Thomas Mann year 2025!