History of certain places often reveals itself unexpectedly. Symbols on façades, unusual road patterns, and abandoned buildings quietly reflect past violence and disruption that often go unnoticed. Many structures built under the National Socialist regime still function today, while the circumstances of their construction remain obscured.
Die Geschichte bestimmter Orte offenbart sich oft unerwartet. Symbole an Fassaden, ungewöhnliche Straßenführungen und verlassene Gebäude spiegeln still vergangene Gewalt und Umbrüche wider, die häufig unbemerkt bleiben. Viele Bauwerke aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus erfüllen noch heute ihren Zweck, während ihre Entstehungsumstände im Verborgenen bleiben.
Some years ago, I experienced an electricity shortage in my rented flat in the southern part of Munich. As the failure met me in the middle of my laundry, I had to move my soaking wet clothes to the shared laundry room in the cellar of the building. Despite having lived in this building for three years, I had never been in this room before. After successful handling the “laundry situation,” I curiously looked around. The interior was old, raw and rather practical then decorative. On the wall there was only one frame. Not with relaxing landscape, though. The yellowed from age document appeared to be a list of rules that users of the laundry room must obey (“Verordnung über die Einrichtung und den Betrieb von Mangelstuben und Waschküchen”). It did not surprise me – after living in Germany for some years, I was used to rules and instructions that regulated everyday life. I quickly skimmed through a page-long text and the date under the whole text struck me. “München, den 4. September 1937.“ I had many questions and so far no answers. Who had lived in this building at that time and since when? Who built it? And, last but not least, why wasn’t this document in a museum?


List of rules for the laundry room users, photos taken by the author, 2025.
These questions came to me as I wasn’t expecting to find myself, and definitely not living, in a building with very likely NS past. My neighbourhood area, located remotely from the historic city centre is one of the youngest of Munich’s districts, so the history doesn’t haunt t continuously he residents as it happens in centrally located Maxvorstadt or Schwabing. If the building was constructed after the war, the presence of the housekeeping rules from the 1930s could be explained by transfer of the “neutral” and yet still applicable document to the new postwar reality. The presence of the housekeeping rules and circumstances made me reflect on the fate of the “Nazi contaminated” buildings and infrastructural sites such as roads or pump stations in categories of double standards and utilitarian approach. Yet, this approach was not uniform across all kinds of Nazi structures.
In the postwar period, many buildings with a „brown past” were demolished or repurposed. This was the fate of rally grounds in Nuremberg and “temples of honour” in Munich, the latter were also left abandoned, deemed for forestation. The transformation of monumental structures was more difficult, but not impossible, as examples from Berlin like the Detlev Rohwedder House that housed the Third Reich’s Ministry of Aviation show. In this and many similar cases, the initial function has remained the same. Since 1999, the building once being a domain of Hermann Goering, currently is a seat of the German Finance Ministry. However, there are also examples of rather radical processes of repurposing. A case from Weimar continues to provoke debate: here a monumental “Gauforum” from the 1930s was transformed in 2005 into an “Atrium” shopping mall.

Yet, as the repurposing of empty buildings entails filling them not only with new décor, but foremost with new meanings, the infrastructural places retain their functional value, which in most cases does not involve an ideological agenda. The airfields from the First World War served their role in the next one and in postwar times under changing political systems. The airfield in Cheb, Czechia, serviced planes during both wars and today still functions as recreational airfield.
Under the NS regime, development of the transport infrastructure became a priority task as it was bonded with national politics, expansive economic plans and military manoeuvres. Thousands of kilometres of roads, railways and bridges were built by forced laborers. However, despite their gloomy origins, the transportation networks were not dismantled after the war. Their continuity relies foremost on their importance and perseverance. As material scientist Deb Chachra claims, infrastructural systems are repaired and rebuilt, but very rarely completely ripped out and constructed from scratch.1 Infrastructures are highly political constructions that represent power and dominance.2 In the case infrastructures are (re)built, developed and used in totalitarian, oppressive periods of rule – unless they were destroyed during military manoeuvres – they thrive under the new political system and accumulate new meanings and functions over time.
As a researcher, I am genuinely intrigued by such places, their transformations and “long history”. In my new project, I want to examine the postwar roles and implications of infrastructural sites in Poland, Czechia and Germany that carry a burden of totalitarian origin. Yet, in many cases the gloomy beginnings remain less known to collective memory due to the lack of “guardians of memory” and witnesses who would advocate for preservation both memory and physical remains. Over the past decades, infrastructural sites have obtained new meanings that overlay and create a fascinating assemblage of politics, micro histories and personal experiences. This is the case of motorway A4 (precisely its part in Lower Silesia), whose history presents artist Agata Ciastoń in her photographic documentary essay. This motorway was part of the “Reichsautobahn” project and was executed through tremendous work of forced labourer’s and prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. Following Chachra’s claim, this strategic infrastructure remained in place and the major repairs occurred only in the last decade of the 20th century. Despite its utilitarian and rather neutral character, the motorway acquired some “stamps of time,” such as a Soviet inscription of one of the motorway’s pillars saying: Водрузим над Берлином знамя победы (“We will raise the banner of victory over Berlin”) – a remnant from the end of war and the approaching Red Army.

Another example from the same motorway are petrol stations from 1937 (designed by Friedrich Tamms). They are in constant use, yet with modern adjustments. Since 2012 they remain under conservatory protection as a historical monument. The overlapping of histories and meanings and research potential hidden behind infrastructural sites was also noticed by Ciastoń:
It seems to me that the A4 still exists somewhere in between the powerful propaganda project of the “Reichsautobahn,” Jean Baudrillard’s trance-like “freeway,” and the tamed – former and now little-used – “our motorway,” recalled with nostalgia, as it is called by the residents of the towns scattered along its route.3

Many infrastructural sites carry a difficult history while being embedded in entirely new contexts. Yet in most cases, they are not “spectacular.” We pass them every day, sometimes even use them, without pausing to think about their stories. They blend into the routines of daily life, quietly present rather than demanding attention.
Although people often try to forget or intentionally erase the physical reminders of painful or uncomfortable histories, these places are stubborn. They linger in the landscape, refusing to disappear completely, as if the past itself is not quite ready to let go. Often, the reasons are practical rather than symbolic: continued use, economic necessity, or the sheer cost of dismantling what already exists. As a result, history lingers in concrete, asphalt, and grass growing where it was never meant to grow.
My research is driven by an interest in these overlooked sites and the contemporary conditions that allow them to persist. By looking closely at such spaces, I hope to open up questions about memory, environmental history, and social history and about how the past quietly shapes the landscapes we continue to inhabit today.
1 Chachra, Deb. How infrastructure works: inside the systems that shape our world. Penguin, London 2023, 7.
2 Larkin, Brian, Promising forms: The political aesthetics of infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The Promise of Infrastructure (pp. 175–202). Durham, Duke University Press 2018.
3 Ciastoń, Agata. Na środkowym pasie latem trawa była wysoka, Wydawnictwo Warstwy, Wrocław 2024, 230.

Izabela Paszko is a cultural anthropologist and social historian specializing in the social history of Poland under the Nazi occupation. Currently she works as a researcher (postdoc) at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she investigates the structural factors shaping history exhibitions related to the Second World War and the Holocaust. In February 2026 she was a Value of the Past Fellow at Herder Institute in Marburg.
Title picture: Emergency exit of an air-raid shelter from World War II with the inscription Mannesmann-Luftschutz, Munich Ludwigstraße. Photo taken by the author, 2025.































