The Great German Art exhibition was housed in a
purpose-built museum, designed in the style of an antique temple by the
architect Paul Ludwig Troost. Its heavy, squared-off columns marching in front
of a solid rectangular block of a building were a long way away from the
delicate and subtle neo-Classical architecture that Troost sought to imitate.
Like other Nazi buildings, it was first and foremost a statement of power. The
House of German Art was only one of a large number of prestigious projects
Hitler had begun as soon as he took power in 1933. Indeed, he had been thinking
about them since the early 1920s. Hitler imagined himself an architect even
more than he thought of himself as a painter, and paid more attention to
architecture than to any other of the arts. ‘Every great era finds the
concluding expression of its values in its buildings,’ he declared in 1938:
‘When peoples inwardly experience great times, they also give these times
external expression. Their word is then more convincing than when it is spoken:
it is the word in stone!’
The new public buildings of the Third Reich were all
conceived in this massive, pseudo-Classical, monumental style. Like the public
buildings Hitler had observed and drawn on Vienna’s Ringstrasse in his younger
days, they were intended to project permanence and durability. All of them were
influenced by Hitler’s own personal architectural and design plans. Hitler
spent hours working with architects on refining their ideas, poring over models
and discussing the finer points of style and decoration. Already in 1931-2 he
had collaborated with Troost on redesigning the Königsplatz in Munich, and when
he came to power, these plans were put into effect. The old Party headquarters
at the Brown House were replaced by a gigantic Leader Building and a huge
Administration Building, housing vast reception halls and decorated with
swastikas and eagles on the façade. There was a balcony on each one from which
Hitler could speak to the crowds who were expected to gather below. Despite
their appearance, the new buildings incorporated advanced technology in their
construction and equipment, including air-conditioning. Adjoining were two
characteristic expressions of the Nazi cult of the dead: temples of honour
dedicated to the Nazis who had been killed in the 1923 beer-hall putsch. In
each of them, an atmosphere of reverent sacrality prevailed, with the bodies of
the recently exhumed martyrs displayed in sarcophagi mounted on a dais, open to
the elements, and flanked by twenty limestone pillars lit by flaming braziers.
The huge grass arena of the Königsplatz itself was paved over with 24,000
square feet of granite slabs. ‘Something new has been created here,’ remarked a
commentator, ‘the deepest meaning of which is a political one.’ Here the
organized and disciplined masses would gather to swear allegiance to the new
order. The whole ensemble was, he concluded, ‘ideology become stone’.
As in other fields, Nazi cultural managers took some time to
impose their views. The Reich Chamber of Architects soon expelled Jewish
practitioners from the profession, but despite Nazi hostility to ultramodern
architecture, it was slower to move against the modernists, some of whom, such
as Mies van der Rohe, remained in Germany for a while, though finding it
increasingly difficult to practise. By 1935, however, the more experimental
types of modernism had been effectively routed; Mies soon emigrated to New
York. By the mid-1930s, constructions of the Weimar era such as modernist
apartment blocks were no longer in fashion. Instead, the Nazi ideal of domestic
architecture favoured a vernacular, pseudo-peasant style such as that practised
by the leading proponent of racial theories of modern art, Paul
Schultze-Naumburg. These were only showcases for the suburbs; necessity meant
that blocks of flats still had to be constructed in the inner cities, where
pitched roofs, however, were now preferred over flat roofs because they were
believed to be more German. But it was into public buildings that Hitler put
his real passion. In Munich, the foundations were laid for a gigantic new
central railway station that was designed to be the largest steel-frame
structure in the world, with a dome higher than the twin towers of Munich’s
signature landmark, the Frauenkirche. Not only Munich, but other cities too
were to be transformed into massive stone statements of the power and
permanence of the Third Reich. Hamburg was to be graced with a new skyscraper
for the Nazi Party’s regional headquarters higher than the Empire State
Building in New York, crowned by an enormous neon swastika to act as a beacon
for incoming ships. Down-river, the suburb of Othmarschen was to be demolished
to make way for the ramps and piles of a gargantuan suspension bridge across
the Elbe. The bridge was to be the largest in the world, larger by far than the
Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, on which it was modelled.
In Berlin, a huge new airport terminal was built at
Tempelhof, with over 2,000 rooms. A grandiose new Ministry of Aviation
incorporated lavish, marble-floored halls, swastikas and memorials to famous
German aviators. A vast Olympic Stadium, costing 77 million Reichsmarks, held
100,000 spectators, attending not only sporting events, but also major Nazi
rallies. Here too, in adjoining towers, there were memorials for the fallen, in
this case German soldiers of the First World War. By 1938 Hitler had also
commissioned a new Reich Chancellery, since he now found the existing one too
modest. It was even bigger and more imposing than the Munich buildings. The
main gallery was nearly 500 feet long; twice as long, as Hitler noted, as the Hall
of Mirrors at Versailles. Inaugurated in 1939, the new Reich Chancellery, one
commentator recorded, advertised ‘the eminence and richness of a Reich which
has become a super-power’. In fact, the gigantism of all these projects, planned
for completion by the early 1950s - a remarkably short space of time - was
intended to signify Germany’s arrival by that date not just as a super-power
but as the dominant power in the world.
The new Reich Chancellery was designed not by Hitler’s favourite
architect, Paul Troost, who had died in January 1934, but by a newcomer who was
to play a central role in the Third Reich’s later years, Troost’s young
collaborator Albert Speer. Born in Mannheim in 1905, Speer belonged to a
generation of professionals whose ambitions were framed by the bitter and
chaotic experiences of the First World War, the Revolution and the
hyperinflation. The son of an architect, and thus a member of Germany’s
educated upper middle class, Speer trained with the architect Heinrich Tessenow
in Berlin, and formed close friendships with a number of Tessenow’s other
pupils. Their teacher imbued them with an open approach to architecture,
espousing neither modernism nor its antithesis, but emphasizing simplicity of
form and the importance of rooting their style in the experience of the German
people. As in every university in the mid-to-late 1920s, the atmosphere among
the students was strongly right-wing, and despite his liberal background, Speer
succumbed. In 1931, Hitler addressed Berlin’s students at a beer-hall meeting.
Speer, in the audience, was, he later confessed, ‘carried away on the wave of
the enthusiasm which, one could almost feel this physically, bore the speaker
along from sentence to sentence. It swept away any scepticism, any
reservations.’
Overwhelmed, Speer joined the Nazi Party and threw himself
into its work, volunteering for the National Socialist Drivers’ Corps and
exploring, though not taking up, the possibility of joining the SS. By 1932 he
was practising architecture independently, and began to use his Party contacts
to get commissions. Goebbels asked him to help with the conversion and
refurbishment of the Propaganda Ministry, a building by the great
nineteenth-century architect Friedrich von Schinkel which Goebbels had
vandalized with the help of a gang of brownshirts on moving in. Not
surprisingly, Goebbels scorned Speer’s attempt to preserve what was left of
Schinkel’s Classical interiors, and had the work redone in a more grandiose
style a few months after Speer had completed his task. The young architect’s
next project was more successful, however. Seeing the plans developed in the
Propaganda Ministry for the celebration of the Day of National Labour on the
Tempelhof Field in Berlin on 1 May 1933, Speer complained about their
unimaginative quality and was commissioned to improve them. His successful
innovations, including massive banners, swastikas and searchlights, led
Goebbels to commission him to design the surround for the Nuremberg Rally later
that year. It was Speer who, in 1934, created the ‘cathedral of light’ effect
produced by upward-beamed searchlights that so impressed foreign visitors. Soon
he was refurbishing Nazi Party offices and remodelling the interior of
Goebbels’s new house on the Wannsee, just outside Berlin. Speer felt himself
energized by the purposeful atmosphere surrounding the Nazi leaders. He worked
extremely hard and got things done quickly. In no time at all, still only in
his late twenties, he had made a name for himself amongst the Nazi leadership.
The death of Troost, whom Hitler had revered, catapulted
Speer into the Leader’s personal entourage, as Hitler co-opted the young man as
his personal architectural adviser, someone to whom he could talk about his
favourite hobby without the deference he had felt was owed to Troost. Speer was
overwhelmed by this attention, and moved his family and home to be near to
Hitler’s Bavarian retreat above Berchtesgaden. A frequent guest at Hitler’s
mountain lodge, Speer was carried along by the Leader’s desire to construct
huge, monumental buildings in a style ultimately derived from Classical
antiquity. Soon he was being entrusted with schemes of rapidly increasing
ambition, many of them based on sketches Hitler had himself made in the early-to-mid
1920s. Speer was commissioned to rebuild and extend the Nuremberg Party Rally
grounds in a series of imposing new buildings constructed at vast expense from
the late 1930s, including a stadium that would hold 405,000 people, a Congress
Hall seating 60,000 and two huge parade-grounds, the Zeppelin Field and the
Mars Field, flanked by rows of columns and providing standing room for 250,000
and 500,000 people respectively. Meanwhile he designed and built the German
Pavilion at the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, another huge, bombastic
structure, the largest in the entire exhibition. It was dominated by a massive
pseudo-Classical tower of ten fluted piers joined by a cornice at the top,
towering over all the nearby structures, including the Soviet pavilion, and
outdone only by the Eiffel Tower, which stood at the end of the avenue on which
the pavilions were located. Red swastikas glowed at night from the spaces
between the piers. Next to the tower, the long, rectangular, windowless main
hall projected a monolithic sense of unity to the outside world. Its interior
was compared by an exiled German art critic, Paul Westheim, in a macabre,
prophetic image, to a crematorium, with the tower taking the place of the
chimney.
Speer’s success as the architect of propaganda constructions
such as these led to his appointment by Hitler on 30 January 1938 as the
General Building Inspector for the National Capital, charged with putting into
effect the Leader’s megalomaniac plans for the transformation of Berlin into a
world capital, Germania, by 1950. A huge axis of wide boulevards designed for
military parades was to be cut through Berlin. In the middle would stand a
triumphal arch 400 feet high, more than twice as big as its counterpart in
Paris, the Arc de Triomphe. The main avenue would lead up to a Great Hall,
whose dome was to be 825 feet in diameter, the largest in the world. At the end
of each of the four boulevards there would be an airport. Hitler himself had
drawn up the plans many years before and discussed them with Speer many times
since they had first met. Now, he decided, was the time to begin to put them
into effect. They would last for all eternity, a monument to the Third Reich
when Hitler had long since departed the scene. Evictions and the bulldozing of
houses and apartment blocks levelled the ground for the new boulevards, and
part of the scheme was eventually opened to traffic. Meanwhile, fresh buildings
were added, including the new Reich Chancellery, and soon Speer had built a
scale model which Hitler spent many hours in the following years poring over in
his company, making adjustments, and bemoaning the fact that he himself had
never become an architect.
By the mid-1930s, Speer was heading a large firm of
architects and gaining managerial experience that would stand him in good stead
when he was suddenly catapulted into a much larger and more important role
during the war. Many of his most striking designs were not purely his own but
were worked out in a team whose members, notably Hans Peter Klinke, a fellow
student of Tessenow’s, played a role at least as creative as his own. Moreover,
the firm’s designs were far from original or even particularly Nazi in style:
the civic architecture of the era drew on Classical models in other countries
too, and the idea of remodelling cities along geometrical lines, with broad
boulevards and great public buildings, was hardly new either; in many ways, for
instance, Speer’s plans for Berlin bore a striking resemblance to the centre of
the Federal capital of the United States in Washington, D.C., with its wide
central mall surrounded by large colonnaded neo-Classical structures all in
gleaming white stone. What distinguished Nazi civic architecture and city
planning was not the Classical derivation of its style but the maniacal
gigantism of its scale. Everything might not be very different from civic
structures elsewhere, but it certainly was going to be vastly bigger than
anything the world had so far seen. This was already apparent in the models of
Berlin that Speer spent so much time inspecting with his master. On one
occasion, he showed them in a private session to his 75-year-old father,
himself a retired architect. ‘You’ve all gone completely crazy,’ the old man
said.
