Munich appears as both a stage for state-approved spectacle and a storehouse of political memory. The city’s annual Night of the Amazons turns exposed female bodies into a polished display of Teutonic heritage, while later references to the Brown House connect Munich to the movement’s earlier history. In Golo Thomsen’s recollections, the city’s cultivated surfaces sit uneasily beside the violence and political collapse that surround them.

State-Sponsored Spectacle

Between 1936 and 1939, Munich hosted an annual procession called the Night of the Amazons, sponsored and approved by the state. Columns of German women rode on horseback with their upper bodies bare, performing carefully choreographed historical scenes presented as celebrations of Teutonic heritage. The spectacle made the female body part of a public national pageant: erotic display was recast as cultural inheritance and political ceremony.

Thomsen recalls the procession while walking past the site of a synagogue that his side had destroyed two years earlier. The memory leads him to describe a German ideal of male self-command: the man who can desire a woman intensely but, when the occasion calls for it, look upon her with cultured detachment. The poised pageant and the demolished synagogue occupy opposite moral registers in the same recollection, exposing the gap between the regime’s polished self-image and its violence.

Munich and the Limits of Respectability

Munich also serves as a point of comparison in Thomsen’s account of Hannah and Dieter Kruger. Their affair began in Rosenheim, where Hannah was a student and Kruger taught Marx and Engels. Thomsen insists that the relationship would not have seemed as scandalous in Munich or Berlin during the disintegration of democracy; in mannerly Rosenheim, by contrast, the age difference and the couple’s intimacy became a public impropriety. The contrast is part of Thomsen’s own judgment, not a neutral account of the cities: he frames Munich as a place where the same conduct might be absorbed into a more permissive or politically unsettled atmosphere.

The comparison gives Munich a role beyond that of a named setting. It becomes a measure against which Rosenheim’s reputation for decorum can be made to look provincial, while Thomsen’s disapproval of Hannah’s relationship reveals how readily he presents his own possessive concern as moral protection.

Political Memory and the Brown House

In a later exchange, Thomsen considers visiting the Brown House because it holds material from the Sturmabteilung’s years in 1933 and 1934. He describes the building as a cobweb, yet says the surviving records might still be worth examining. The brief intention connects Munich to the movement’s earlier institutional past, though the passage records a plan to look in, not the outcome of a visit or what the materials contain.

Taken together, the procession and the Brown House give Munich two distinct kinds of historical presence: a public image fashioned through ceremonial spectacle, and an archive of the political movement’s beginnings. The novel places both beside the destruction that enters Thomsen’s recollections, making the city’s display of cultural refinement inseparable from the violence and political history that its pageantry seeks to dignify.