Cold War: Murder in Munich

In the post­war peri­od, Mu­nich de­veloped into a center of (anti-communist) East­ern Euro­pean exile. This at­tract­ed the atten­tion of the East­ern Euro­pean secret ser­vices, which car­ried out nu­mer­ous bomb­ings and assas­sina­tions in Mu­nich until the 1980s. The stu­dents of the 18th cohort of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram for East­ern Euro­pean Stud­ies de­voted a year of work to this com­para­tively unex­plored part of Mu­nich's urban histo­ry.

The goal was to pro­vide in­sights into the histo­ry of Mu­nich at the time of the Cold War, as well as to pre­sent the histo­ry of East­ern and Southeast­ern Euro­pean migra­tion to and en­tan­gle­ments with Mu­nich. The work of the secret ser­vices in the con­text of East­ern Euro­pean histo­ry in Mu­nich was also exam­ined. Over­all, the focus was pri­marily on the Yu­goslav and Ukrainian exile com­muni­ties in Mu­nich as well as the for­mer prem­ises of Radio Free Eu­rope and Radio Liber­ty.

The students of the Elite Graduate Program "East European Studies" wrote texts about se­lected plac­es, which were then rec­orded by pro­fes­sional speakers. The tech­nical im­ple­men­tation of the digital city guide was car­ried out in coop­era­tion with the ber­lin­Histo­ry app, which will ensure the sus­taina­ble avail­ability of the con­tent even after the course is over. The results of the pro­ject are avail­able to the public in the ber­lin­Histo­ry app. In­for­mation on the indi­vidual loca­tions is con­veyed in the form of audio files, in par­ticular the stu­dents' rec­orded texts, imag­es and, in some cases, short text de­scrip­tions.

The fin­ished Digi­tal City Guide was pre­sent­ed to the public on Octo­ber 7, 2022, as part of the aca­demic con­fer­ence "East­ern Euro­pean Mu­nich in the Post­war Peri­od and the Cold War," orga­nized in coop­era­tion with the Mu­nich City Mu­seum and the Jew­ish Mu­seum of Mu­nich. The presentation took place at Oettingenstraße 67, at the for­mer prem­ises of Radio Free Eu­rope.

Text: The stu­dents of 18th cohort of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram "East Euro­pean Stud­ies"