Friday, August 24, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
PastFinder Publications - Berlin Guide
Maik Kopleck
In das Stadtbild von Berlin hat sich die Geschichte unwiderruflich eingebrannt - ganz speziell die Zeit des National- sozialismus. Das geschah nicht nur durch den Bombenkrieg und die vielfältigen Zerstörungen beim Endkampf um die Reichshauptstadt, sondern auch durch die gewaltigen Umbauarbeiten der braunen Herrscher selbst, die hier eine künftige Welthauptstadt Germania errichten wollten.
Der PastFinder von Maik Kopleck führt zu den bekannten und weniger bekannten Orten dieser Geschichte, erklärt auf kompakte Weise die historischen Ereignisse und stellt die wichtigsten handelnden Personen vor. Durch mehrere Karten und eine übersichtliche graphische Aufbereitung der Fakten kann sich jeder Leser seine individuelle Besichtigungsroute zusammenstellen und vor Ort schnell orientieren.
Der PastFinder Berlin 1933-1945 mit eigenen Kapiteln zum Regierungsviertel, der geplanten Welthauptstadt Germania, dem Bombenkrieg, der Schlacht um Berlin, den Innenstadtbezirken und den Außenbezirken mit Brandenburg.
English Version
Broschiert: 96 Seiten Format: 23,2 x 10,4 cm
Sprache: Englisch ISBN: 978-988-9978-83-9
12,90 EUR
LINK
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Hitler's Berlin by Thomas Friedrich, translated by Stewart Spencer - review
Adolf Hitler and, second from left, Albert Speer inspect an architectural model. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
A detailed survey of Nazi architectural dreams
Chris Hall
The 20th century is littered with the febrile architectural dreams of
megalomaniacs: Mussolini's modernist recreation of imperial Rome, Saddam
Hussein's Mother of all Battles mosque and the Arc of Triumph, the
monumental kitsch of Kim Jong-Il's horrific Ryugyong hotel to name but a few. But there are none more deranged than Adolf Hitler
and Albert Speer's vision of Germania. Hitler wanted to tear down
Berlin to rebuild his world capital, poring over the architectural plans
for hours on end. Chillingly, Speer wanted to make sure the buildings would also make great ruins. The realisation of Germania would have made Haussmann's reconfiguration of Paris seem cosmetic.
The plans for the Great Hall (Volkshalle) were kept from the public until 1943, though Hitler hinted at its size when he said in 1938 that Berlin Cathedral, which had seating for 2,450 people, "should hold 100,000 people ... we must build ... as big as today's technical possibilities permit, and above all we must build for eternity!" It would have been the largest enclosed space in the world, holding up to 180,000 people – there were worries that the exhaled breath of the audience could create its own precipitation. This inhuman scale only made sense in terms of Berlin being made a global capital. Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome (and especially its oculus), it was essentially a temple to Hitler.
It's a shame that the photograph of the model showing Speer's plans for the creation of a north-south axis for Berlin in the endpapers have the 7km-long, 120m-wide central thoroughfare and Triumphal Arch obscured by the fold of the book, for this is the very centre of Germania. The arch in front of the new South Station was to be dedicated to the German dead from the first world war and, writes Friedrich, "It made sense that the Great Hall marking the northern boundary of the north-south axis should ensure that Hitler's rewriting of history should find its architectural counterpart in a quasi-religious edifice celebrating the victory of the troops of the 'pan-German Reich' in the coming world war under Hitler's supreme command."
If Berlin is indeed the abused city of the title, then Friedrich has written a kind of autopsy report, a brilliant examination of the way Hitler used the city, treating it as a "lab rat on which he could try out his architectural experiments and ideas on urban planning". Hitler's Berlin is a comprehensive account of the rise of the National Socialism that details precisely how it emerged from within the city itself rather than being imposed from outside, and how Joseph Goebbels as the Gauleiter used violence, propaganda (especially in his newspaper, Der Angriff) and the incitement and blame of the communists to further its reach.
Friedrich argues that scholars have read too much into a handful of quotations from Mein Kampf that suggest Hitler "never liked Berlin" and was forced against his will to leave Munich. He challenges the biographer Joachim Fest's view of Hitler that he "despised its greed and frivolity … he stood baffled and alienated by the phenomenon of the big city, lost in so much noise, turbulence, and miscegenation". Hitler hated the Weimar decadence, and no doubt the lack of party-political success he had there played its part, but what, asks Friedrich, of his visits to Luna-Park; his praise for the Tiller Girls, his cinema-going and enthusiasm for cars? Is this a man terrified of the urban jungle? Rather, Friedrich argues, Hitler had an "instrumental relationship" to Berlin, first regarding it as "wonderful" in its "visible power and grandeur", but ultimately as a place where "antisemitic attacks could be staged, Nazi rituals could be rehearsed and the conquest of the public arena could be planned in detail".
Friedrich quotes from postcards Hitler sent from Berlin to his friend Eric Schmidt in his 20s and articles he wrote, to paint an intriguing and detailed picture of how his conception of Berlin evolved. When he was younger, Hitler saw himself working as an architect there, "fascinated first and foremost by the buildings", especially of the neo-baroque and neo-classical type. At a meeting in 1933 he announced that Unter den Linden, the palace and their immediate vicinity were "the only monumental buildings", marking "the high point of the city both culturally and in terms of its urban design", having earlier railed against "a thousand superficial impressions – cheap neon advertising, sham politics everywhere you look".
Perhaps the most disturbing monument to Germania and Hitler's plans is a huge circular concrete block weighing more than 12,000 tonnes in the Tempelhof district – the Schwerbelastungskörper – that was put there to test whether the sandy soil could take the vast weight of the proposed Arch of Triumph. Friedrich writes with weary pathos that this "massive and mysterious concrete building … continues to weigh figuratively on Berlin ... a symbol of the way in which the city remains oppressed by Hitler's legacy".
Hitler's Berlin: Abused City by Thomas Friedrich, translated by Stewart Spencer
• Chris Hall contributed to Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard, published by HarperCollins in September.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Germania: Hitler's Dream Capital
Albert Speer presents Hitler with a model of the German Pavilion designed for the World's Fair in Paris, 1937. Mary Evans Picture Library
By Roger Moorhouse | Published in History Today Volume: 62 Issue: 3
Albert Speer’s plan to transform Berlin into the capital of a 1,000-year Reich would have created a vast monument to misanthropy, as Roger Moorhouse explains.
In 1937 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer was given the task of transforming Berlin from the sprawling metropolis that it was into Germania, the gleaming new capital of a Greater German ‘World Empire’, the centrepiece of the civilised world.
It was a vast undertaking. Plans, swiftly drawn up by Speer’s office, were presented to the public on January 28th, 1938. The reaction within Germany was predictably enthusiastic, with newspapers carrying detailed explanations and commentaries. Der Angriff stated that the designs were ‘truly monumental … far exceeding all expectations’, while the Völkischer Beobachter proclaimed grandly that ‘from this desert of stone, shall emerge the capital of a thousand-year Reich’. The foreign press, though less effusive, nonetheless concurred. The New York Times, for instance, described the project as ‘perhaps the most ambitious planning scheme’ of the modern era.
The plans certainly did not want for ambition. In accordance with Hitler’s original sketches they centred on a grand boulevard, which was to run from north to south for around seven kilometres through the heart of the city, linking two proposed new rail termini. Given carte blanche in redesigning this vast swathe of the city centre, Speer and his minions had had a field day and their plans read like a catalogue of comparatives and superlatives. The vast Grand Hall, for instance, close to the Reichstag, would have been the largest enclosed space in the world, with a dome 16 times larger than that of St Peter’s in Rome. Designed to host 180,000 people, there were concerns among the planners that the exhaled breath of the audience might even produce ‘weather’ beneath the cavernous coffered ceiling. The 117-metre tall Arch of Triumph, meanwhile, was designed – on Hitler’s express instruction – to carry the names of Germany’s 1.8 million fallen of the First World War engraved upon its walls. Similarly massive, it would have comfortably accommodated its Parisian namesake beneath its arch. Linking these monuments along the new axis would be a plethora of new buildings, civic and commercial, flanking broad avenues, ornamental obelisks, an artificial lake and a vast ‘circus’ peppered with Nazi statuary.
The Mosaic Hall of the new Reich Chancellery, 1939. AKG Images.
The
image that will be familiar to many is of Hitler inspecting the white
scale-model of this main axis, which was presented to him on his 50th
birthday in April 1939 and was erected in a side-room of the Reich
Chancellery. Though Hitler’s interest in the project was restricted
almost exclusively to the north-south axis – and he would often return
to muse over the model – the plans were not limited to that one area.
Speer had succeeded in incorporating those headline designs into a much
more thoroughgoing reorganisation of the city’s infrastructure. First of all, Berlin’s rail network was to be overhauled, with the two new stations replacing three old termini and with many miles of sidings being replaced by a new line that would circle the city centre. Roads, too, were to be redrawn. The two new boulevards – the proposed north-south axis and the east-west axis, completed in 1939 – were only the centrepiece of a radical redevelopment. In addition Speer foresaw the city’s formerly organic urban growth being rationalised by the addition of radial thoroughfares and four concentric ring roads, the outermost of which would provide a direct connect-ion to the German autobahn network.
Of course only a tiny fraction of these grandiose designs would ever be realised. The visitor to Berlin today will struggle to see much evidence of Speer’s Germania unless he or she knows where to look. Most obvious is the boulevard west of the Brandenburg Gate, which is the old east-west axis and which is still illuminated by some of Speer’s original – and rather elegant – street lamps. Meanwhile the Victory Column (inaugurated in 1873 following Prussia’s victories over Denmark, Austria and France in the 1860s and 1870s) was moved to its present location to make way for the projected north-south Axis. Most bizarrely, the southern suburb of Tempelhof still contains a huge circular concrete block weighing over 12,000 tonnes – the Schwerbelastungskörper, or ‘heavy load-bearing body’ – which was supposed to help Speer’s engineers gauge the ability of Berlin’s sandy soil to take the vast weight of the proposed Arch of Triumph. Too large and too solid to demolish, the block stands to this day as a silent monument to Nazi megalomania.
More than a pipedream
Given that so little of Germania was ever completed and that only a fraction of it remains, it is easy to underestimate its significance. Speer’s planned rebuilding of Berlin is too readily dismissed as a Nazi pipedream; a still-born manifestation of Hitler’s architectural fantasies thankfully confined to the drawing board. Yet, in spite of the fact that Germania never came into being it would be a mistake if we were to allow ourselves to view it merely as an abstract: a folly, or an architectural curiosity somehow divorced from the odious regime that spawned it. For, as we shall see, Germania was in many ways a rather perfect representation of Nazism.First, the issue of its feasibility must be assessed. Despite its soaring ambition the plan to re-model Berlin was part of a veritable orgy of building that had gripped the later, peacetime years of the Third Reich. Much of that, certainly, was relatively small-scale – barracks, settlements, schools and so on – but a number of projects showed similarly monumental tendencies and were themselves considerable feats of planning and construction. Most famously, perhaps, there is the example of Hitler’s vast new Reich Chancellery, which stretched the entire 400-metre length of the Voss Strasse in Berlin and was completed in 1939 at a cost of over 90 million Reichsmarks.
Other Berlin landmarks were similarly grandiose: the Olympic Stadium, opened in 1936, seated 100,000 spectators and was part of a much larger complex that was intended as much for political as for sporting ends. Göring’s Air Ministry, meanwhile, also completed in 1936, was once the largest office building in the world, offering 2,800 rooms across seven floors with 4,000 windows and nearly seven kilometres of corridors. Today it is home to the German finance ministry.
Elsewhere construction was no more modest. In Nuremberg Speer’s famed tribune on the Zeppelin Field was dwarfed by the nearby Congress Hall, modelled on the Colosseum in Rome, which was built to accommodate 50,000 of the Nazi faithful. Though it only reached a height of 39 metres – as opposed to the 70 metres that was planned – it is still the largest surviving building of the Nazi period; while at Prora, on the Baltic coast, a huge holiday resort was constructed, which, though unfinished at the outbreak of war in 1939, stretched for 4.5km along the seafront and would have housed over 20,000 holidaymakers. Even Hitler’s folly above Berchtesgaden – the Kehlsteinhaus, or ‘Eagle’s Nest’ – was an ambitious project. Completed in 1938, after little over a year in construction, it was sited atop an Alpine ridge at an altitude of over 6,000 feet and was accessed via a purpose-built seven-kilometre mountain road, which had to be blasted into the mountainside.
When considering Hitler’s plans for Berlin, therefore, one must bear in mind the wider context of Nazi construction and the astonishing track record that Hitler’s architects already had in successfully realising his visions. Germania was not mere Nazi ‘pie in the sky’. It was a part of a concerted programme to provide Germany with a portfolio of grand-scale, monumental architecture, which, Hitler believed, would be seen as the defining buildings of the age, rivals to Egypt, Babylon and Rome, inspiring future generations of Germans. It was certainly not merely a dictator’s architectural wish-list.
Quarries and camps
Given its central importance to the Nazi vision, the building frenzy – of which Germania was part – was thoroughly integrated into the Third Reich’s economy and terror networks. Indeed it is not widely understood just how close the relationship was between the building programme and the concentration camps. The vast expansion of the camp system from 1936 onwards had, in fact, been fuelled primarily by the demand for labour and materials from the burgeoning construction sector, with Albert Speer – and Germania – in the vanguard.Consequently, many of the most infamous concentration camps of the Nazi era – Mauthausen, Gross Rosen and Buchenwald among them – were established close to quarries. The camp at Mauthausen, for instance, was set up in 1938 alongside the granite quarry that had supplied much of the stone used to pave the streets of Vienna, while the camp at Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, was close to what was intended to be one of the largest brickworks in the world. The camp-quarry at Flossenbürg in northern Bavaria, meanwhile, was the source of much of the white-flecked granite that was going to be used in Berlin, some of which is still stacked inside the Congress Hall in Nuremberg. Thus Germania was not only central to the Nazi aesthetic, it also played a vital role in the establishment and maintenance of the concentration camp network. Nazi architectural planning, it seems, had synchronised perfectly with the interests of the SS.
Germania’s financing was also not as utopian as one might imagine. Speer estimated the total cost of the project, perhaps optimistically, at six billion Reichsmarks, five per cent of Germany’s GDP in 1939. Yet such was the Byzantine nature of economic relationships in the Third Reich that only a fraction of that figure would have to be paid directly by the Reich government. For one thing, the vast majority of the building materials that were prepared for the project came from the concentration camps dotted across Nazi Germany, while the quarries and brickworks themselves were owned or leased by an SS-owned company, DEST (Deutsche Erd-und Steinwerke). So Germania effectively got its materials for free, with the added bonus – in Nazi eyes – that their political opponents were being ‘re-educated by labour’ in the process.
In addition the construction and demolition costs were to be spread across the annual budgets of numerous ministries, organisations and Nazi fiefdoms. And there was no shortage of willing donors, with some, such as the Nazi Labour Front, being deliberately kept at arm’s length for fear that they might wield too great an influence. The city of Berlin was required to shoulder much of the financing, with various appeals for donations and contributions to make up any shortfall. It also would not have escaped Speer’s attention that his projected costs equated exactly with the total estimated value of Jewish property in Nazi Germany. By these measures, Speer recalled, the costs of the project could be divided (and effectively concealed), leaving central government directly liable only for the Great Hall and the Arch of Victory. Hitler, meanwhile, tended to wave away any complaints from his ministers by stressing the large numbers of wealthy tourists that – one day – would visit the new capital of the Greater German Reich.
So, although little of it was actually constructed, Germania was not merely theoretical, it was very real. And it would have felt all the more real to those concentration camp inmates at Mauthausen or Flossenbürg, who had to quarry the granite slabs for Berlin’s new Reich Chancellery or the Soldier’s Hall. Even sites that never saw the light of day were prepared for; stone was cut, bricks were fired and men died. It is reasonable to assume that, of the 100,000 or so concentration camp inmates who perished at Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen, a large proportion of them died preparing the stone for the rebuilding of Berlin.
Germania was also very real for ordinary Berliners. From 1939 to 1942 the areas of the city earmarked for the project were being cleared and existing properties demolished. Even the nocturnal visits of the RAF in 1940 were welcomed by Speer’s staff as providing ‘valuable preparatory work’ for the demolition programme. Preparations elsewhere were similarly thorough. The district of the Spree-bend to the west of the Brandenburg Gate, for instance, was criss-crossed with test trenches and foundations, while to the south, by the end of 1939 the project’s first building, the Foreign Travel Office, was already completed in its essentials. Beneath it all, meanwhile, the complex of underpasses that would take through-traffic away from the new centrepiece of the Reich, had already taken shape.
The human cost
In all this demolition and construction countless thousands of people were directly affected in the German capital. Foremost among them were prisoners of war and forced labourers, who were housed in often substandard conditions and made to work around the clock and in all weathers. Despite his later protestations of innocence, Speer was never shy of exploiting PoWs as labour. Indeed in November 1941, after the opening successes of the war against the Soviet Union, he petitioned Hitler with a request for some 30,000 Soviet PoWs specifically for use in the construction of the ‘new Berlin’. Hitler acceded to the request, thereby bringing the total workforce overseen by Speer’s staff and working directly on Germania to around 130,000.Civilians, too, faced considerable disruption. Those ‘Aryans’ who found themselves living in the way of Speer’s plans were rehoused, either in modern, purpose-built accommodation in the suburbs or else, as was more usual, in properties from which Jewish owners had been evicted. Already in 1938 Speer had suggested that the capital’s Jewish community should be moved into smaller properties, thereby freeing up larger buildings for the use of those Aryan Berliners displaced by the ongoing demolition works. By 1940 this process was well under way and many thousands of Jewish properties were being vacated.
Those displaced Jews, however, often found themselves – perversely – being moved into the path of Speer’s bulldozers. As the housing crisis in the capital worsened, many of them were unable to rent property and were forced into so-called ‘Jew-houses’, which were often those substandard blocks, already slated for demolition, that stood along the route of the construction works. There, amid chronic overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions, with as many as 200 families inhabiting a single block, they were effectively stripped of their few remaining legal rights as tenants. They could have had little inkling that worse was to come, but in October 1941 many of them would be aboard the first transports that would leave Berlin, destined for the ghetto at Łódz.
In this way the Germania project, despite being largely stillborn, had profound consequences, becoming a catalyst not only for the evolution of the concentration camp system but also for the development of Nazi policy against the capital’s Jews.
Speer’s plans for Berlin are fascinating. In an architectural sense, they are – if nothing else – a potent display of the astonishing extremes that can be reached by sycophantic architects. Yet any assessment of the Germania plans must reach beyond the narrow sphere of architecture, even if only a fraction of those designs ever graduated from the drawing board. Speer’s plans cannot simply be viewed from the architectural perspective alone: in examining them one is morally bound to consider not only the designs themselves but also the brutal methods by which they were brought into being.
Germania, though largely unrealised, nonetheless projected its malign influence into many other spheres of life – and death – in the Third Reich. Its contempt for mankind was demonstrated not only in the treatment meted out to those doomed to cut its stone in the concentration camps or those who found themselves living in its path; it also extended to those who might one day have walked those granite-clad boulevards. It is notable, for example, that in all the plans a human dimension is almost completely lacking. Hitler, it appears, had absolutely no interest in the social aspects of the planning that he oversaw; his passion was for the buildings themselves rather than for the human beings who might one day inhabit them. Indeed it has been plausibly suggested by Frederic Spotts that the plans for Berlin’s reconstruction were themselves simply a manifestation of Hitler’s desire to reduce cities and even individuals to the status of mere playthings. When one recalls the images of the Führer stooped like some malevolent deity over his architectural models in the Reich Chancellery this is an interpretation that becomes instantly and chillingly persuasive.
Just as Albert Speer was never just an architect, therefore, Germania was never merely an architectural programme. It was, in fact, a perfect reflection of the dark, misanthropic heart of Nazism.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Germania Redux
The 1930–31 worldwide economic collapse halted Berlin’s social housing experiment, leaving the Nazis to beat a dead horse. Just as the “Brown” cloud approached, Berlin’s 1931 Building Exhibition (titled “Dwelling of Our Time”) introduced modernism to a wider audience. Berlin’s historicist tradition of outstanding villas in suburban districts (Hermann Muthesius’s 1907–08 half-timbered Haus Freudenberg or Behrens’s 1911–12 classical Haus Wiegand) had already been updated with Hans and Wassili Luckhardt’s Le Corbusian Zwei Einfamilienhäuser (1928) and Mendelsohn’s Expressionist Haus Sternefeld (1924). Yet the 1931 Exhibition publicly interjected “Bolshevist” aesthetics into bourgeois—as opposed to proletariat—homes. Mies translated his German Pavilion at Barcelona into a lush exhibit house that the Nazis labeled a “horse stable.”
Greater Berlin 1933 to 1945
Capital of Adolf Hitler’s “Third Reich.” Hitler planned to rebuild Berlin as a vulgar imperial capital to govern and intimidate the huge empire he intended to carve out of Europe and western Russia. The totally rebuilt city was to be called “Germania.” It was designed by his personal architect, Albert Speer. Hitler tinkered with scale model plans for Germania to his final days, even as he led Berliners into moral and physical devastation. Berlin was occupied by four Allied armies from 1945. West Berlin was later formed from the British, French, and American occupation zones, while the old Soviet zone became East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic (DDR). The Western Allied military presence was more voluntary than an occupation from 1949 to 1994. The Soviet occupation was rougher. The first rudimentary structures of the Berlin Wall were erected on August 13, 1961. Its cynical builders called it the “anti-fascist defense barrier.” The Berlin Wall remained in place until November 9, 1989, when it was torn down and the city reunited. Allied occupation forces officially departed Berlin on September 8, 1994.
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For the city of Greater Berlin, the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (synchronization) resulted in the loss of its municipal self-administration and the placement into power of a Prussian State commissioner under the direct control of the Prussian minister of the interior, Hermann Goering, who purged the city administration of civil servants with democratic party affiliations or those of Jewish descent. Berlin’s schools were affected by this measure. Starting in 1937, principal matters of urban planning and representative architecture in the capital of the Third Reich were placed under the responsibility of Adolf Hitler’s personal confidant, the architect Albert Speer. At the same time, the successive waves of political repression and ostracism against minorities hit segments of all the classes of the Berlin population: Among the first to be interned in the makeshift concentration camp set up in 1933 in nearby Oranienburg were activists of both working-class parties, liberal politicians, publicists, and Christian priests of both confessions. Anti-Semitic purges also hit large parts of Berlin’s universities, the liberal and artistic professions, and the upper class, triggering off a brain drain to Great Britain and the United States from which the capital’s intellectual and cultural life never fully recovered. State terror was moderated for a short period around the Olympic Games of 1936 to provide an opportunity to present Berlin as a modern and highly civilized metropolis to the international public, while the celebration of the (alleged) seven-hundred-year anniversary of Berlin in the following year was extensively used to display the reconcilability between Nazi ideology and Berlin’s sense of local pride.
Also in Berlin, the so-called Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938 marked a first climax of public anti-Semitic terror supported by state authorities. During the years of World War II, the Reich capital acquired an eminent and to some extent ambivalent role in the history of the Holocaust. On the one hand, it was the site of the large administrative staffs designing and organizing the registration, expulsion, exploitation, deportation, and murder of the Jewry in Germany as well as in occupied Europe. Of the 161,000 Jews living in Berlin in 1933, only 1,000 to 2,000 still lived in Berlin at the end of the war. The great majority emigrated, while 56,000 were killed by the Nazi terror, often following long years of increasing discrimination and eventual denunciation by their fellow citizens. On the other hand, no other urban agglomeration in Germany provided comparable possibilities to escape and thereby resist the Gestapo thanks to the anonymity that is typical in large cities. Berlin offered myriad opportunities for going underground, hiding with the help of informal networks, and adopting false identities. Thus, although the last two years of the war were marked by the intensified terror of Berlin Nazi ‘‘Gauleiter’’ Goebbels’s ‘‘total war’’ mobilization, by increasing the chaos and the disintegration of the city’s vital functions due to bombing raids, mass evacuation, and, in the last weeks of the war, massive westward flight from the approaching Red Army, it was also a site of survival for thousands of individuals persecuted by the Nazi terror machinery.
Book Excerpt: A Conversation With Albert Speer
Excerpted from “Witness to an
Extreme Century” by Robert Jay Lifton. Copyright 2011 by Robert Jay
Lifton. Excerpted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon &
Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton, in his memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century,”
interviews Albert Speer about his 15 years as a prominent Nazi and
“Hitler’s architect.”
Three
of our four meetings took place at his home on the outskirts of
Heidelberg, and the fourth at his isolated retreat in southern Bavaria.
His Heidelberg home seemed isolated enough, high in the hills behind
the city’s famous castle. I remember the house seeming cavernous, its
furnishings neither attractive nor cozy. Speer himself was welcoming
but I was struck by how old he looked (he was then seventy-three), by
the awkwardness of his movements (he had considerable difficulty getting
up and sitting down, leading me to wonder whether he had Parkinson’s
disease), and by his “thousand-mile stare” (the term we used to describe
the psychological remoteness in repatriated American prisoners of war
in Korea in 1953). The word I used to characterize his general demeanor
was weary (though I should add that a little more than a year
later he was to be enlivened by a passionate love affair with a younger
woman).
Speer was interested in talking
to me, and made clear that nothing he said was confidential. But he
quickly suggested an agenda of his own centered on his bond with
Hitler. He told me how he had heard the Nazi leader speak at his
university in Berlin in 1930, was “really spellbound” at the time and
remained so for the next fifteen years covering the entire Nazi era.
His question for me was how, in retrospect, he could have been so
enthralled by such a man. He then made a startling proposal: that he
undergo psychotherapy with me in order to better understand how that had
happened. The strong implication was that the relationship still had a
hold on him, from which he wanted to extricate himself. I was much
interested in hearing more about his conflict but had no wish to take on
responsibility for his psyche. I needed my freedom as a researcher and
did not see my task as one of easing the pain of a prominent former
Nazi. Nor did I wish to have our meetings structured around his way of
framing his problem. So I suggested instead that we explore in some
detail his relationship with Hitler without my becoming his therapist.
Speer agreed and we did so, but we were able to explore much else that
enabled me to relate this strange bond to larger questions of evil and
knowledge of evil, and of death and immortality.
Speer
explained that the speech that had so moved him was Hitler’s relatively
intellectual and historical treatment of German history, as opposed to
his more demagogic, rabble-rousing street version. The narrative was
one of revitalization: now Germany is weak and everything seems hopeless
but by uniting behind Hitler and the National Socialist movement – and
above all renouncing the guilt for World War I assigned by the
Versailles Treaty – Germany and its people can once again be strong.
Speer was then a twenty-five-year-old instructor in architecture in a
collapsed economy and he and others around him were experiencing only
despair about their future. Images of … humiliated German troops
returning from World War I twelve years earlier were still fresh in his
mind, as were postwar scenes of every kind of social chaos. Hitler’s
words were for him transformative, a message of new hope and a promise,
as he put it, that “all can be changed” and “everything is possible.”
Feeling “drunk from the talk,” Speer walked for hours through the woods
outside Berlin, seeking to absorb what he had heard. He was in the
process of experiencing a secular form of a classical religious
conversion, described by William James as “perceiving truths not known
before” that enable a “sick soul” to “give itself over to a new life.”
Intense “self-surrender” is accompanied by new spiritual strength.
Speer demonstrated the emerging power of the combination of national and personal revitalization, which I came to see as the psychological core of Nazi appeal throughout the German population.
Speer
joined the Nazi Party soon after that speech and told me of his rapid
rise within tis circles, first as an enthusiastic party worker and then
as an architect. From his sensational early success in designing the
light and space for the large Nuremberg rallies, beginning in 1933 (as
depicted by Leni Riefenstahl in her film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will),
he progressed to the planning of vast buildings, even cities, to extol
the omnipotent Nazi regime and, above all, its Fuhrer. He emphasized
how, in becoming “Hitler’s architect,” he was drawn toward a vision of
personal immortalization, of “having a place in future history books,”
“building for eternity,” and becoming in that way “someone who is
surviving his own life.” The sense of immortality, which I emphasize in
my work, intoxicated Speer to the point of becoming something close to a
promise of literally living forever. So grandiose were the projections
he and Hitler made together that some of the buildings were to hold as
many as 150,000 people on vast balconies in a new Berlin that would
become the center of the world, dwarfing the grandeur of Paris and the
Champs-Elysees. Few of the structures were actually built but many were
imagined, as part of what Speer called “a daydream that was a very
serious daydream.”
On one of my visits to the Heidelberg home, he showed me a large glossy book that had just been published, titled Architecture of the Third Reich.
It contained gaudy photographs of buildings I noted to be “profoundly
vulgar” and “totalitarian,” and Speer seemed initially to share that
judgment: “I admit that the proportions are all wrong,” he said, and “I
criticize the grandiose side.” Then, without the slightest trace of
irony, he added, “But of course it was what the client wanted.” He
attributed all excess to that “client,” but he could hardly dissociate
himself from the grandiosity involved. Indeed, his pride in the volume
was clear enough as he clutched it affectionately and pointed also to
pictures of rally sites he had designed: “I was one of the first to use
light in nighttime as a device for creating space. The searchlights
came so high that when you were standing inside you saw it as being in
the stratosphere.” He did not say that his innovative lighting enabled
the Fuhrer to be seen as descending from the heavens. I thought of
Speer’s overall contribution to the mystical appeal of the Nazi
movement, converting Nazi darkness into a manipulated sense of
illumination. Witnessing his enthusiasm for that early work and his
nostalgic pride in projections of architectural world domination, I felt
that whatever sympathy I had for Speer was dissolving. It occurred to
me that Nazi architectural hubris had a certain parallel to its
biological hubris: apocalyptic architecture followed upon apocalyptic
biology.
Speer made it clear that Hitler
was more than a mere client: he was the closest of collaborators.
Hitler was not only a constant critic and appreciator of Speer’s
architectural suggestions; the Fuhrer became himself an architect and
even provided sketches of his own. As they imagined the unprecedented
grandeur of buildings, highways, archways, and cities, their thoughts
blended to the degree that it became unclear who had provided the
original idea. The two men shared this descent into a version of
apocalyptic fantasy: they were re-creating a perfect Nazi world from the
ruins of what they were destroying. It is this merger in fantasy that
constituted their architectural folie a deux.
Yet
however superior Speer’s knowledge of architecture, Hitler remained the
guru. As Speer put it, “I was so much in that ambience that I was
infiltrated with [Hitler’s] ideas without realizing how much I was
infiltrated.” He said that even now, when working on his writing, he
frequently has the experience in which “I see that it’s an idea Hitler
had in some way” and “I’m quite astonished.” In their particular
fashion, the two men formed a close personal relationship. Speer would
later write that if Hitler were capable of having a friend, he, Speer,
would have been that friend. But gurus, especially the most paranoid
and destructive among them, do not have friends; they have only
disciples. Speer believed that Hitler was drawn to him as a fellow
artist, and that appreciation worked both ways: “For an artist to see
somebody at the head of the state who is something of an artist too …
has a gift of excitement. Being overwhelmed by … a Wagner performance
or a ballet in Nuremberg, this for me was a strong, positive
influence.” They also shared an intense theatricality – Speer with his
dazzling night-lighting of rallies, and Hitler, whose “whole life,”
Speer told me, “was acting, performance, theatre.”
Speer’s
merging with Hitler resembled the kind of fusion of guru and disciple
that I encountered in studying fanatical religious cults, notably Aum
Shinrikyo in Japan in the nineties. But with Speer and Hitler the
fusion involved the shared hubris of a perceived artistic and structural
project to transform the world. In that way Speer was probably, at
least for a period of time, the disciple most important to Hitler in
affirming his omnipotent guruism. But Speer also provides for us a kind
of window to more ordinary German people who also experienced fusion
with a guru/leader rendered godlike. As Speer poured out details of his
interaction with the Fuhrer, I could be there with the two men at
various levels: observing them pore over their architectural plans as
“friends” and “colleagues”; and imagining their fusion in a version of
architectural madness perceived as an all-consuming gift to the world.
And here was this man sitting opposite me describing quite rationally
and methodically this most bizarre expression of evil from his past –
wishing to separate himself from it and renounce it, but not entirely.
No wonder that Speer was so difficult for me to grasp.
An
important clue to his psychology was the anxiety he began to develop in
connection with his projections of grandiose building. As he explained
to me, he found himself as a young architect with little experience
thrust into a situation without rules or boundaries, one in which
“nothing is fixed.” He had no clear tradition or architectural group
that could guide and constrain him, so that professionally “I could do
what I wanted,” and despite Hitler’s support, “I was alone.” The
Fuhrer’s involvement, far from a steadying influence, obliterated limits
and took the fused duo more deeply into unmanageable architectural
fantasy. At some level of his mind, Speer perceived this gap between
the grandiosity of the shared vision and what could be called
architectural reality. He also had inner doubts about the quality of the
architecture, “fear as to whether it would stand [the judgment] of the
times, of how it would be acknowledged in future times.” Related to
that fear was his discomfort, as a highly educated upper-middle-class
intellectual, among the mostly crude members of the Nazi inner circle.
He
told me about experiencing two kinds of symptoms. The first took the
form of claustrophobia: in certain enclosed spaces, particularly when on
trains, he would feel anxious and would nearly pass out. On one
occasion the symptoms were sufficiently severe that there was talk of
stopping the train in order to get him to a hospital. The second set of
symptoms required no particular locale, and were those of acute anxiety
(or panic attack): he would experience a feeling of great pressure in
his chest and a terrified sense that he was dying. These two sets of
symptoms occurred only during his time of intense, unlimited
architectural dialogue with Hitler and what he called his accompanying
“burden.” In my work I have related such symptoms both to feeling too
much (the overwhelming anxiety) and too little (the numbing toward what
one could not allow oneself to be consciously aware of). Speer was
fending off his conflicts not only about his illegitimate architectural
freedom, but about his overall role in the Nazi regime. Something in
him began to doubt the Hitlerian vision of brutally remaking the world.
In
our discussions he tried to explain – or explain away – his problem
mainly in terms of his susceptibility to Hitler’s charisma. That
charisma was real enough but Speer would seem at times to hide behind it
in order to avoid the probing of still more difficult questions of his
own ethical responsibility. What I believe was involved in these
symptoms was his struggle against the realization of the fraudulence of
the Fuhrer’s larger vision, and of his own corruption personally and
professionally. His architectural folie a deux with the Fuhrer
epitomized the problem. As in the case of doctors at Auschwitz, Speer
could adapt sufficiently to diminish his anxiety and serve the regime,
in his case with high energy and intelligence. His symptoms contributed
to that adaptation by covering over existential truths, and then
disappeared when he ceased to be “Hitler’s architect” and became instead
minister for armaments. Nor did they reappear during his imprisonment
or the years following his release … .
In
keeping with my concerns about different forms of participation in
evil, I focused much of our discussion on Speer’s relationship to the
“Final Solution,” the Nazi program of systematic mass murder of the
Jews. Over the years he had claimed ignorance and uninvolvement, a
claim that seemed increasingly untenable, and toward the latter part of
his life he backtracked and admitted having sense that “something was
happening to the Jews,” without having wished to learn any more about
what that was. As evidence mounted against his earlier claims, many who
had been sympathetic to him became critical, including one of his
biographers, Gitta Sereny, who concluded that he was “living a lie.” In
order to explore the matter with him I pressed him on the sequence of
his attitude toward Jews and encounters with their suffering.
He
made clear to me that he was by no means immune to the anti-Semitism of
the time, resonated to it in Hitler’s early speech, resented “rich Jews
in furs” during times of economic deprivation, was critical of the
Jewish domination of the medical profession, and, more to the point, of
what he took to be the inordinate Jewish influence on German
architecture in determining who received commissions for buildings. As
he rose in the regime, Speer did not emphasize anti-Jewish ideas in
speeches or writings but blended with the existing ambiance, with an
anti-Semitism that was, as he put it, “standard” and “legalized” so that
“one felt at home in it.” He was aware of Hitler’s rage toward the
Jews, but the two men did not talk about the subject during their
architectural meditations, or later when they were preoccupied with
armaments. But he recalled … how the Fuhrer would, in small groups of
his inner circle, “Speak in that cold, slow voice in which he revealed
terrible decisions” and declare that he would “destroy the Jews.” Speer
even came to realize that doing so was a central motivation, Hitler’s
“engine.” The murderous “engine,” that is, did not interfere with
Speer’s fusion with his guru; indeed one could say that the fusion
required that he himself connect in someway with the engine.
Speer
admitted to me that he encountered considerable evidence of Nazi
brutality and Jewish pain: the suicide of a distinguished scientist his
family knew at the University of Heidelberg, a scene at a railroad
station in which a few hundred “miserable looking people” he knew to be
Jews were “loaded on trains to be taken from Germany,” and selective
tours of Nazi concentration camps in which he claimed to be convinced by
his manipulative hosts that the inmates were in reasonably good shape.
More damning, he told me of providing certain materials for the work
camp at Auschwitz in 1943 and having at the time “some insight into the
bad conditions of such camps.” But he insisted that the construction
materials were only for improving the facilities, and when I asked about
his knowledge of the rest of Auschwitz and its role in extermination,
he insisted sharply that “I knew nothing of the other.” I had never
before heard anyone claim in this way close knowledge of the slave labor
function of Auschwitz and ignorance of its function as a death camp.
(Nor did we discuss Speer’s early participation in removing Jews from
their Berlin homes and later suppression of that episode, or his
providing, as minister of armaments, slave labor to German industry.)
Speer
told me how he “pushed aside very quickly” all such matters, sensing
that dreadful things were happening to Jews but stopping short of fully
realizing what they were because “I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want
to see it.” Very much at issue was his sense that confronting the truth
would have undermined his entire Nazi worldview and deepest life
commitments and required him “to admit that all this was for nothing,
that it wasn’t right.” At the end of our third interview I noted that
one had two choices with Speer: either one could believe that he was
consciously lying all along, or one could see him as involved in a
sustained inner struggle around the psychology of knowing and now
knowing. I favored the latter view. I thought he was “living a lie”
but that he had not experienced it as a lie. Because of his extreme
psychic numbing, he had ceased to feel almost anything of the
abuse and suffering of Jews. And because of his “derealization”
(emphasized by Mitscherlich in connection with Nazi behavior), he could
avoid experiencing his participation in the Holocaust as actual or
real. Speer could explore his participation in a regime he now
condemned but could never allow himself to experience the dimension of
guilt associated with its mass killing. Therefore, he could never allow
himself fully “to know.” His wish to focus exclusively on his
emotional bondage to Hitler – and with my help find a “cure” for it –
was an effort to psychologize his Nazi behavior in a way that avoided
ethical truths. None of this makes him any less culpable for what he
did and did not do, but it does help explain his contradictory
statements about what he knew.
Throughout,
I had been more critical of Speer and more reserved about his
“repentance” than had such people as Alexander Mitscherlich, George
Mosse (a scholar whom I knew and greatly respected), and Erich Fromm
(the well-known psychoanalyst who befriended Speer and expressed great
enthusiasm for his change). Still, I had conversed with him in a civil,
even friendly fashion, finding him at least at moments likable, and had
been impressed by the fact that someone so high in the regime was
making this kind of articulate turnabout – even if Hitler was always
there with us. I concluded that our interviews had revealed
extraordinary dimensions of enthusiasm and corruption, of complex
immersion in evil – and that to learn about all this I had no choice but
to sit in that room with him and his Fuhrer.
Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir
By Robert Jay Lifton
Free Press, 448 pages
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