The exhibition brought to light the history of a unique experiment in the remodelling and symbolic seizure of space to which Kraków was subjected during the German occupation of 1939–1945. The transformation of the city into the capital of the General Government and its unilateral recognition as an ‘ancient German city’ was accompanied by a brutal and bloody policy toward Kraków and its inhabitants. The exhibition, which showed this tragic and little-known chapter in the city’s history, was part of the ICC’s research and popularisation of this ‘dissonant heritage’.

In the exhibition, we presented the Nazis’ bid to remodel Kraków during the Second World War, to turn it into the ‘Nuremberg of the East’. Above all, however, we wanted to encourage reflection on contemporary attitudes to this unwanted heritage. In the various sections of the exhibition, we presented urban and infrastructure plans, including the most important architectural projects and realisations, which, according to their creators, were intended to turn the pre-war Polish city into a model German one.

Kraków was meant to become the easternmost outpost of the Thousand-Year Reich and, as the capital of the General Government, was to receive a new urban design. Architecture was also used as an instrument of repression against the people of Kraków. Local elites and cultural and scientific institutions were destroyed, works of art were plundered. Monuments and Polish national symbols were eradicated, and the names of squares and streets were changed to German ones. Ubiquitous swastikas loomed over the city, and Nazi propaganda was broadcast from loudspeakers.

The Nazis expanded the city’s area, and rebuilt and modernised the transportation system, including railways and roads. As this city was to become the capital of the first eastern colony, space for the new German administration had to be constructed. There were consecutive plans to build a government district in Dębniki and an administrative district on the Błonia (the city’s common), and the latter would have included the destruction of the Kościuszko Mound. A German residential district was created in the western part of the city, and a new housing estate for military families and officials was established on Królewska Street. Major changes also affected Wawel Royal Castle and the historic centre of Kraków, where elegant hotels, restaurants, casinos, recreational and sports areas were created for the German community, primarily for the multitude of officials in uniform.

Architecture also played an important role in the implementation of the Holocaust. Kraków was the only city in the world on whose territory the Germans established a concentration camp — KL Płaszow. It was deliberately located on the site of two Jewish cemeteries, only a few kilometres away from the city centre, which the occupation authorities were in the process of modernising.

The exhibition was part of the ICC’s research on and dissemination of the field of so-called dissonant heritage, which includes the legacy of the Third Reich. Our pioneering research was initiated in 1994 with the publication of Piotr Krakowski’s book Sztuka Trzeciej Rzeszy [Art of the Third Reich]. In 2018, we organised an international conference The Dissonant Heritage of the Third Reich in Poland, and in 2020 we published the book Dissonant Heritage? The Architecture of the Third Reich in Poland (2020). The exhibition on the architecture and urban planning in Kraków during the Nazi occupation brought to light a topic that had been ignored by researchers for many years and even banned during the communist era.

Curators

prof. dr hab. Jacek Purchla (PhD)

Curator

dr Żanna Komar

Curator of the International Cultural Centre

dr Monika Rydiger

Curator of the International Cultural Centre

Curators

prof. dr hab. Jacek Purchla (PhD)

Curator

He is full professor of humanities and an active member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He created and founded the International Cultural Centre in Kraków and served as its director from 1991 to 2017. From 2015 to 2020 he was chairman of the Polish Committee for UNESCO, representing Poland on the UNESCO Executive Council in Paris. He was chairman of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee from 2016 to 2017. His areas of research include urban development, social history, and art history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the preservation of cultural heritage. He has authored more than four hundred academic works, including many books. A member of numerous organisations and associations, he is the president of the Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa (The Society of Friends of Kraków History and Heritage) and editor of the Rocznik Krakowski. In 2018, he was elected vice-president of Europa Nostra.

dr Żanna Komar

Curator of the International Cultural Centre

Art and architectural historian, curator. She works in the Institute of European Heritage of the ICC. She has curated such exhibitions as Ukraine: A Different Angle on Neighbourhood (2021-2022), Architecture of Independence in Central Europe (2018-2019), Lviv. 24th June 1937. City, Architecture, Modernism (2017-2018). Author of the book Trzecie miasto Galicji. Stanisławów i jego architektura w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej (Kraków, 2008).

dr Monika Rydiger

Curator of the International Cultural Centre

Art historian and critic, curator. Creator and co-creator of exhibitions such as: Hunting Down Modernism: The Prohibited Arts in the Third Reich (2011), Memory: Registers and Territories (2013), Makom. Dani Karavan: The Essence of Place (2015), The Logic of the Local: Norwegian and Polish Contemporary Design (2016). Member of the Polish Section of AICA (International Association of Art Critics), vice-president of the Kraków branch of the Association of Art Historians in Poland. Author of many essays and articles on modern and contemporary art, particularly sculpture and architecture.

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