ABSTRACT
In 2001 some of the Faculties of the University of Frankfurt began to move physically from the often shoddy and distinctly run down looking post-war accommodation that had served them since the early 1950s into an architecturally spectacular set of buildings designed by Hans Poelzig in the late 1920s and set in a large park with an impressive view over downtown Frankfurt. Unfortunately, these buildings, known collectively as the ‘Poelzig-Bau’, had served as the Corporate Headquarters of I.G. Farben between 1931 and the occupation of the city by the US Army in March of 1945. What this means is that in the year 2009 a student could find that he or she was taking a seminar on Descartes, on Rimbaud, or on early Church history in the very rooms in which in the early 1940s gas chambers and crematoria for extermination camps were designed. In the period between 1945 and 1995 the complex served as the Headquarters of General Eisenhower and then of the Fifth US Army. When the US military moved out upon German reunification, the question arose of what to do about the huge I.G. Farben complex, and it was only after a certain amount of political wrangling that the decision was taken to move the University into it. There was finally a sense that if the complex was not simply to be torn down, it would have to be symbolically detoxified, but how could that be done? The solution finally reached was that a permanent exhibition about its history would be installed in the building, which would be as uncompromisingly truthful about its past as possible, the main building itself would retain the historical name ‘I.G.-Farben-Haus’, and the large and impressive open space one encounters upon first entering the building, which is now the student café, but in the late 40s was the antechamber of Eisenhower’s offices, would be named the ‘Eisenhower Rotunda’. Finally, one of the squares on the new campus would be named after a former forced labourer in one of the I.G. Farben Works: ‘Norbert Wollheim’, a name that has special resonance for a philosopher because it is the surname of an important British philosopher, Richard Wollheim, who happened himself in the second World War to have participated in the liberation of Belsen. It is possible, in fact almost inevitable, that there will be no consensus on whether this series of decisions and actions was in fact appropriate
and adequate – that is in the nature of a complex historical and political process like this one – but I would ask you now to accept for the sake of argument my view that this was a reasonable and laudable attempt to deal with a difficult situation. Let me, however, now engage in some counterfactual history. Suppose the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe had not been the traditionally conservative Eisenhower, but Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur, who was during the same period effectively Supreme Commander in the Pacific. MacArthur was a man of extreme right-wing political views, who came to be notorious for his persistent advocacy of the use of nuclear weapons against the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. MacArthur saw this as a prelude to the extension of the war to be conducted with nuclear weapons into China proper, which he also advocated. When he failed to obtain authorisation for this policy, because the then US-President Harry Truman refused to countenance it, he tried in various ways to use his military position to undermine or circumvent the civilian political apparatus in the US, until Truman was finally forced to dismiss him from his post. I suggest that naming the entrance to Poelzig’s complex the ‘MacArthur Rotunda’ would not have had the same effect of at least partially rehabilitating the building. On one final note, I should mention that parts of the Poelzig-Bau served as the Headquarters of the CIA in Germany, and that in the 1970s and 1980s it was the object of three terrorist attacks, probably by members of the RAF (‘Rote Armee Fraktion’), a splinter group that had its origin in the German Student Movement of the late 1960s. In a bomb attack by the RAF on 11 May 1972, one US officer was killed and thirteen further people wounded.1
