About this place
Viscardigasse is a short, curbless pedestrian lane, barely fifty metres long, officially named after the Swiss Baroque architect Giovanni Antonio Viscardi. During the Nazi years it earned a very different name: Drückebergergasse, or Shirkers' Alley. After the regime turned the nearby Feldherrnhalle on Residenzstraße into a shrine to the putschists killed in 1923, an SS honour guard stood watch there day and night, and every passer-by was expected to raise their arm in the Hitler salute. Many Münchner found a quiet way out. Rather than salute, they ducked into this small side street, bypassing the memorial and its guards entirely. The gesture was tiny, easily dismissed as a mere shortcut, yet repeated thousands of times it became one of the city's most telling acts of everyday refusal. In 1995 the sculptor Bruno Wank set a bronze trail into the paving here, a thin S-shaped line of metal cubes that marks the path the shirkers took. Polished by decades of footsteps, it now glows a soft gold underfoot.
Key facts
- 1995 year — Bruno Wank set the bronze trail, titled 'Argumente', into the lane's paving
- 50 metres — The full length of the lane, one of Munich's shortest streets
- 30 centimetres — The width of the S-shaped bronze line tracing the path of refusal
📍 Viscardigasse, 80333, München