Nazi mural shows image of a Germany divided

A Nazi-era mural discovered and restored at a health club where modern-day racists like to pump iron has become the subject of fierce debate about what is worthy of historical salvation in a Germany racked by far-right violence.

The mural at the fitness studio Valhalla in Leipzig is a skillfully executed piece of typical Nazi hogwash; Ayran volk dancing around a maypole, a farmer about to embrace his child, a Hitler youth man and an SA man standing side by side with red and white flags that, despite having no swastikas - the restorers baulked at putting them back in - are clearly the banners of the Third Reich.

It was discovered in the former Neukrichen brickworks in the old DDR industrial city last year by Leonhard Kasek, a freelance social scientist. The brickworks, a decrepit relic of the outdated industry of the kommissars, was given over to a dance club, offices and a swimming baths and health centre in 1995.

Valhalla occupies some 1500 sqft of space in what used to be the bathhouse for local miners. A mural of a ship at sea was painted by the new owner on a wall in the stairwell beneath what looked like a display of figures aged by time. The owner, Jens-Torsten Blazy, called in the experts from city hall who had the mural cleaned and restored by artists from Poland.

A plaque was put beneath it explaining it to be the work of Nazi propaganda painter Toni Schnecker in 1939, commissioned by the Nazi "Kraft durch Freude" - Strength Through Joy - leisure organisation.

The restroration was carried out with the blessing of, and funds from, local officials who viewed it as "a valuable historical document of the 20th century" It soon dawned on a Germany sickened by the rise of the far right last year that this was a case of the public purse being used to finance Nazi propaganda.

Moreover, the health club is often used by skinheads - some of them were filmed by the German television culture programme Artour going into Valhalla for a workout, their shaven heads and tattooed bodies presumably about to draw nourishment through working out beneath an icon of their paradise lost. Regional newspapers and TV reports have fuelled the controversy, forcing a public debate in the health club between the owner, councillors and the public.

Herr Blaa insisted that his club was attended mosly by families and that his last encounter with skinheads was "three years ago when I was beaten up by a bunch of them in a disco. I was the only one who went to court to testify against them," he added. The senior editor for the Artour programme told the assembled crowd that "no-one could pretend the area around here is an island free from right-wing radicalism."

Indeed Leipzig is one of the eastern cities with several incidences of race crime in the past 12 months. While the debate about the mural rages, Wolfgang Hoquel, Leipzig's curator of monuments, and Hartmut Rffert, the project leader on the restoration of the Neukirchen complex, stand accused by local politicians of going ahead with restoration without consulting higher authorities.

"One word in advance would have started a nationwide debate and probably stopped this renovation," said a critic in the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper. Two art historians from Leipzig joined the recent debate at Valhalla where they offered the intellectual viewpoint that Germany was now a safe democracy, one where the fact that "these terrible times were simply airbrushed out of history" was no longer acceptable. The debate drags on in newspapers, TV reports and among local politicians. As yet the mural remains, a signboard to times past that continue to provoke deep feelings of unease in times present.

Copyright 2001
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