GERMANIA-SPEER: Nazi's Biggest Building Reborn as Concert Venue

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Nazi's Biggest Building Reborn as Concert Venue

Part of the huge Congress Hall in Nuremberg is reopening as a concert venue. - 03/06/2008

Part of the largest building the Nazis ever began is to reopen as a concert hall. Nuremberg is set to inaugurate the rebirth of the Congress Hall with a klezmer concert on Friday.

It was the biggest construction project ever begun by the Nazis, but it was never completed. Now, six decades after the end of World War II, part of Nuremberg's Congress Hall is reopening -- as a concert venue.

The new 515-seat venue will be inaugurated Friday with a concert by clarinetist Giora Feidman, who specializes in Jewish klezmer music. The concert hall, which cost €2.5 million ($3.8 million) to renovate and develop, will be used by the city's symphony orchestra in the future.

The huge oval-shaped building, designed in the typical Nazi neo-Classicist style, was modeled on Rome's Colosseum and designed to seat 50,000 people. The foundation stone was laid in 1935 but the building was never finished. After the end of the war, the city of Nuremberg kept the ruins as a reminder of the dangers of fascism.

The structure is part of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds where Hitler held massive military parades during the 1930s. The parades were memorialized in Leni Riefenstahl's controversial film "Triumph of the Will." Today, the grounds are home to a documentation center that chronicles Nazi crimes.

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ALBERT SPEER

I was sometimes shocked but in the same way I was enthused about the possibilities he saw in the field of new buildings and it was a mania in any case and, as I see nowadays, it was an expression of the whole system of his schemes. But in the time when I was working for him I thought those buildings are just matching the political era which was coming with Hitler, with his successes in which were still to be due.

It shouldn't be forgotten that to be in the middle of a powerful group, a very powerful man admired by people, is so tempting that it's very difficult to get away. Thinking back to my time when I was at the height of planning those huge buildings, of course it was a chance to be one of the well known, even in the history of arts, and this was a chance no young man would willingly destroy. And afterwards when I was a minister, the sweetness of power also was tasting very good to me. Certainly all power corrupts and certainly in Hitler's circle the power was [of an] extraordinary scale, so the corruption was much larger than [it] is normally.

Finance Minister's Nightmare

"If the Finance Minister could realize what a source of income to the state my buildings will be in fifty years! Remember what happened with Ludwig II. Everyone said he was mad because of the cost of his palaces. But today? Most tourists go to upper Bavaria solely to see them. The entrance fees alone have long since paid for the building costs. Don't you agree? The whole world will come to Berlin to see our buildings. All we need to do is tell the Americans how much the Great Hall cost. Maybe we'll exaggerate a bit and say a billion and a half instead of a billion. Then they'll be wild to see the most expensive building in the world."

Adolf Hitler

(Quoted in Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich", Chapter 10.)