After 1945, Munich was the first large city and contact point in the American sector on the west side of the Iron Curtain for hundreds of thousands of refugees, people who had been driven from their homes, and those returning from the war.

Here you met compatriots, people who shared your fate, here you found work - including at the radio stations Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL), operated by the Americans from the 1950s with the task of creating a counter-public to the state media of the United States to create Eastern blocs.

Up to 1,400 employees from forty nations were in the service of the Americans – the foreign intelligence agency CIA financed the transmitters in the English Garden well into the 1970s, which broadcast their message via medium and short wave from Holzkirchen and two Hessian locations in Lampertheim and Biblis.

RFE served the smaller countries,

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

  • Follow I follow

The Munich City Museum and the neighboring Jewish Museum are currently joining forces and intend to focus more on coming to terms with the immediate post-war years in the coming years.

A small first step has now been taken with the “Radio Free Europe” exhibition.

Five selected employee biographies are used to tell where people came from, how they found RFE, what they did there and how they live today.

Four biographical stations are exhibited in the Einwand Gallery on Sebastiansplatz, one module in the Jewish Museum deals with the Prague Germanist Peter Demetz, who ran a poetry and music program as an editor from 1950 to 1952, every night from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.

It was easier in Munich than in New York

The job: listening to messages from the Eastern bloc and responding with counter-propaganda.

Demetz describes himself as a "counter-trumpet" in an online interview. One is amazed at the vivid memories of a man who will be a hundred years old in a few days.

He survived the "Third Reich" as a forced laborer, unlike his mother, who was murdered in Theresienstadt.

Staying in Germany was not an option for Demetz, so he emigrated to New York.

Although, as Jutta Fleckenstein of the Jewish Museum points out, Demetz later said it was easier to be a refugee in Munich than in New York.

The other four paths of life are of the most varied type.

There is Tibor Molek from Slovakia, who worked for RFE for forty years as a speaker and producer and still lives in Munich today.

Etienne Bellay, born in Paris in 1953 as the son of a Czechoslovak emigre in the diplomatic service, came to the station through his father;

Ewgenij Repnikow was born in Rosenheim in 1953 to Russian parents who had met as

displaced persons

in Kempten.

He grew up in the Ludwigsfeld settlement, is connected to the Russian Orthodox Church in Munich;

he also found RFE through his father.

The children did not understand the life plans of their parents

The stations were cool, their hosts stars: The Americans used rock and pop as a means of democratization, says Hannah Maischein from the Stadtmuseum, whose exhibition concept is clearly aimed at younger generations, to show them what one is talking about when one says Cold War .

Accompany short graphic novels and interviews.

As much as block thinking determined everyday life, the gray areas in the individual were just as large.

While the first generation after the Exodus and Holocaust had asked itself how things could go on at all, their children faced other challenges and had difficulties in accepting their parents' life plans.

Most were anti-communists.

Even more, however, many wanted to see the independence of their home countries restored.

Making a contribution to the overthrow of communism, this attitude could probably be considered the lowest common denominator.

The story is not over yet

Eta Tumanov, born in Riga in 1959, found out that her husband, who was Liberty's editor-in-chief, worked as a double agent for the KGB.

The Soviet Union was not at all squeamish when it came to countering American jammers;

a sad highlight was the bomb attack on the broadcasting building in February 1981, injuring eight.

For Munich, the RFE/RL story did not end until 1995, when the stations moved to Prague, from where they are still active today.

Radio FreeEurope.

Voices from Munich during the Cold War.

In the Einwand gallery of the Munich City Museum and Jewish Museum Munich;

until March 5, 2023. No catalogue.