Although he will go down in history as one of the most evil and destructive dictators of all time, Hitler saw himself as a creative soul. He and his chief architect Albert Speer pored their plans for post-war Munich, complete with a giant obelisk topped by a swastika-clutching German eagle (pictured, on the left)
2,000 documents and sketches have been released by Munich archives
They show Hitler's plans for a post-war City Of The Movement
The centrepiece would have been a dome over underground train station
A swastika-holding German eagle would sit atop an obelisk 600-feet tall
The city would have rivalled Germania, Hitler's rebuilt capital in Berlin
The plans were shelved as the war turned against Germany in 1943
Hitler imagined a giant new underground railway station, covered by a huge dome 900 feet across (pictured), which would be bigger than St Peter's Basilica in Rome. But the plan never made its way off the drawing board.
Among the archives released this week by the Munich authorities were detailed maps proposing the new station. Trains would bring commuters in from colonies to the south and east and would take settlers to the occupied territories in what is now Ukraine and Belarus.
Hitler's preferred style of architecture had similarities with what Mussolini was doing in Italy and was later copied by Stalin and Ceaucescu. This sketch shows the railway station dome dwarfing other buildings in the proposed City Of The Movement (Hauptstadt der Bewegung)
The Königsplatz
in Munich, where in 1935 two "Honour Temples" were erected for the
remains of the 16 Nazis who died in the abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.
The
inside of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Despite their rejection of the
modern style, the Nazis often used the most advanced building
techniques hidden behind neoclassical facades.
As the Nazis
believed in the superiority of Aryan people over all others, this
message was one that artists had to incorporate into their works. The
manner in which this was achieved is illustrated by the types of
sculpture that appeared in the Nazi period. Basically, all carved or
moulded three-dimensional representations of the human form - that is to
say, of German people - depicted an idealized race of physically
perfect supermen. Being cast in the Hellenistic style of ancient Greece,
these images depicted Germans not just as modern-day heroes but also as
the heirs to Europe's greatest cultural and imperial tradition, that of
Alexander the Great and of Caesar.
Paul Troost was commissioned by Hitler to build this Temple of Honor (“Ehrentempel’’) to commemorate those who died in the abortive Munich putsch of 1923. The annual reenactment of this event became part of the Nazi calendar.
No art form has been more consistently associated with fascism than architecture. Yet architecture under fascism was more diverse than is popularly thought and cannot be reduced to a specific “fascist style.” Fascist architecture is more correctly defined by how it was used to support or carry out specific ideological aims or political goals, rather than as a coherent set of symbolic forms. As evidenced in particular by the sponsorship of large-scale public works in Italy as well as the personal involvement of Hitler in architectural projects in Germany and Austria, monumental building became a key element upon which a political ideology could be projected and, in some cases, through which specific policy goals could be enacted. While most interwar states favored some variation of classicism for their major public buildings, for several fascistic regimes, architectural production was more central to their cultural and social concerns. This was particularly true in Germany and Italy. By the end of World War II, a series of high profile architects and major public commissions had become firmly associated with their respective governments and leaders. Because of the massive scale of the projects, the involvement of political leaders, including the dictators themselves in specific instances, and the use of building and construction for the enactment of political and ideological goals, architecture continues to be crucial for our understanding of the relationship of art and politics under fascism.
Italy was not only the first state in which a fascist party came to power but also the first to use public commissions to establish an ideological connection between architecture and fascist politics. In the capital, many of these projects related to Mussolini’s interest in connecting his regime to the political symbols of Augustan Rome, a period of consolidation of political authority that was also well represented in such famous works as the Ara Pacis in the forum. Not only were Augustan sites like this forum excavated and studied but, in addition, imperial building types like the triumphal arch and the classical temple front were reintroduced in commissions for memorials and party buildings in Bolzano, Genoa, and Florence, among other cities. In addition, the interest in the urban form of the ancient forum, marked by an open space at the intersection of a major east/west and north/south axis, was also revived, particularly in plans for new cities such as the provincial city of Littoria (1932; now named Latina) and the famous Rome Universal Exposition (EUR) grounds begun in 1937. The latter was to be the site of a proposed 1942 World’s Fair, but the buildings were subsequently turned over to government administrative work. The prominent architect Marcello Piacentini led the team that developed EUR’s marble-clad buildings with stripped-down neoclassical details. Piacentini had already shown early on in the regime his ability to adapt classical prototypes to contemporary state and party ideological needs. Such ideological claims became active policy in 1935, with the very real expansion of imperial interests through the invasion of Ethiopia, after which Addis Ababa was remodeled and some sections of the city based on classical Roman urban prototypes.
Yet while a modified neoclassicism was used in particular projects, it is important to emphasize that no single official style can be claimed for Fascist Italy. The streamlined and modernist-inspired work of the group of architects known as the Italian Rationalists, as well as regional variations by lesser-known designers that invoked vernacular medievalist traditions, could also be adapted to an often contradictory Fascist ideology. The range of building styles and types reflected the interest of particular patrons, regional administrations, and immediate propagandistic needs that could encompass claims of Italy’s modernity and technological sophistication alongside arguments for a premodern return to the land. For example, the abstract forms and structural emphasis of the Rationalists were not rejected as too removed from the classicism favored in other commissions but rather celebrated in cases such as the famous Casa del Fascio in Como (1932–1936) by Giuseppe Terragni. Still, Terragni’s modern structural expression nevertheless was complemented by the use of traditional materials like marble that could be interpreted with a specifically nationalist rhetoric, as well as interior decorations that included not only abstract sculpture but also images of Mussolini.
The range of stylistic options that allowed for a variety of patrons and propagandistic interpretations of architecture existed as well in National Socialist Germany. However, given the key role of Hitler and his greater influence on major commissions, the plurality of formal variations was more limited for major commissions and the political instrumentality of the building process more intense than in other authoritarian regimes. Architecture in Germany was not only a matter of promoting the physical presence of the Nazi Party—for example, through such commissions as Paul Ludwig Troost’s party buildings for the Königsplatz in Munich (1933–1937). It was also a matter of enabling and promoting the governing principles of the regime in terms of a polycratic system of patronage for which Hitler was the final arbiter. Reflecting his interest as a young adult in becoming an artist and his experience in trying to live off of his sketches of buildings and tourist locations prior to World War I, Hitler had strong opinions about what he considered suitable state and party architecture. He was more decisive in his intervention in architectural production than were other fascist and authoritarian leaders.
Architecture had been crucial to National Socialist politicians and propagandists even in the struggle for power at the end of the Weimar Republic. Hitler signaled the importance of architecture to the Nazi Party by proclaiming in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that powerful architecture was an expression of a strong Volk, praising dynastic cultures like ancient Egypt and Rome while decrying Berlin and its Jewish department stores. But further, Nazi denunciations concerning the supposedly internationalist and Bolshevik tendencies of the flat-roofed architecture of the Bauhaus and other modernist architects became one part of the antidemocratic propaganda.
Yet once in power after 1933, neither party leaders nor Hitler came out with an officially decreed style. Rather, different kinds of architecture tended to be favored by specific patrons, while politically or ideologically suspect architects were purged from public commissions. In this sense, architecture followed the general Gleichschaltung, or coordination, of other cultural administrations. So, for example, the SS often favored medievalist architecture for its buildings, and certain industrial and military complexes like those of the Luftwaffe might use the steel and glass of modernism. Still, for large-scale public and party commissions involving Hitler, architects tended to stick to a stripped down neoclassicism massive in scale and solid in its masonry. Such buildings could be variably interpreted as either examples of an ideology of racial purity, in which contemporary Germany was linked to the supposedly Aryan peoples of classical Greece, or as manifestations of a new and powerful imperial state rivaling that of ancient Rome. Different patrons in the Nazi Party proposed these varying meanings for the built environment. Beginning in 1937 and the architect Albert Speer’s announcement of plans to rebuild Berlin as the first of five “Hitler Cities” (including Munich, Nuremberg, Hamburg, and Linz), it had become clear to all who wanted to gain Hitler’s attention that architecture and urban planning would be key to his peacetime initiatives.
But architecture served not only practical and ideological goals within the Nazi state. Architectural production was also integrated into specific policy initiatives and hence functionally related to the radicalization of racism and militarism. Speer’s architectural office in Berlin, for instance, began to promote as early as 1938 a new policy for the concentration of the Berlin Jewish community and the deprivation of its property rights. For the architects, this was a way of gaining control over the property of displaced German Jews that could then in turn be used for non-Jewish citizens who needed to be compensated should the government appropriate their property for the massive site clearing necessary for the rebuilding plans. Furthermore, architects and urban planners also took part in streamlining specific aspects of the most extreme anti-Semitic policies. For example, the ghettoization of Jews in Eastern Europe depended on the manipulation of space and structures by professionals; most grotesquely, the SS architectural staff at Auschwitz helped make it possible through efficient planning of space to kill even more of European Jewry. In these instances, as in others, the Nazi state was the extreme example of how far architecture could be instrumentalized to promote a fascist project.
While fascist patrons made use of architecture in Italy and Germany to the greatest extent, architecture could also play a significant role at particular moments for other fascistic or right-wing authoritarian states. Most famously, at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, not only was the face-off of the Soviet and Nazi pavilions much discussed, but, in addition, the steel and glass structure for the Spanish Pavilion by Josep Lluis Sert and Luis Lacasa was seen with its art (including Picasso’s Guernica) as a modernist rejection of the massive masonry structures of both the fascist and Soviet states. As a Republican building, it signaled the Popular Front policy of the government, which extended from the liberal to the left in their struggles against Franco. Yet while the pavilion might appear ideologically neutral because of its simple materials, the context of the other monuments of the fair, the content of the Spanish exhibition, and the use of the facade as a support for statements promoting the Republican government meant that the architecture naturally paralleled the antifascist message. After defeating the Republicans, Franco did not devote his regime to architecture anywhere as much as Hitler did, but he did patronize several large-scale ideological projects, such as the massive complex in the Valley of the Fallen (1959) to memorialize supposedly both the fascist and antifascist soldiers who had died in the Civil War, although the antifascist message remains unclear at best.
With the defeat of the Axis powers at the end of World War II, the scale of the interwar projects and, particularly, those that focused on neoclassical masonry construction became associated not only with the extreme fascist Right but also the bombast of the Stalinist Eastern Block. Such associations further played a postwar role as polarized definitions of fascist or communist architecture were juxtaposed to the apparently democratic architecture of modernism, even though such easy transparencies between architecture and ideology would not have been recognized before the Cold War. Civic and corporate patrons in democratic capitalist cities increasingly favored modernist architects and steel and glass structures as a way of distinguishing themselves from the interwar politicization of masonry construction. Public interest continued to be drawn most intensely to Hitler’s biography (including his early years as a failed artist) and the revelations brought forward by Speer, who completed several autobiographical accounts after his release in 1966 from Spandau Prison. In the postwar period, while modernists like Terragni had been relatively easily accepted as a focus of aesthetic study, Speer and other more traditional architects were not systematically treated in relation to their contribution to cultural policy. That situation began to change, particularly with the publication of several foundational texts from the late 1960s and early 1970s that confronted the role of architecture in fascist states.
References
Ades, Dawn, et al., eds. 1996. Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930–45. London: Hayward Gallery.
Etlin, Richard. 1991. Modernism in Italian Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ghirardo, Diane. 1989. Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
Jaskot, Paul B. 2000. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. New York: Routledge.
Miller Lane, Barbara. 1968. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scobie, Alex. 1990. Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity. University Park: Penn State UniversityPress.
Foreign tourists flock to the Third Reich walking tours in Munich. Even now, 64 years after World War II ended, visitors from abroad still only seem to associate Germany with two things -- beer and Hitler. The country's image seems to be changing far more slowly than it would prefer.
Three tour guides are standing next to each other on Munich's central Marienplatz square, and one could almost feel sorry for two of them: the man with the spectacles and the Spanish woman. But Jeff Cox, the third, is doing very well.
It's Easter, the sun is shining on the neo-Gothic façade of Munich's town hall, and the city is full of tourists. Ideal conditions. Cox and the other two have been waiting for customers. Each of them is offering a different tour.
These days, city tours are tailor-made for certain target groups. The Spanish guide has a sign that says "El centro en espanol!". The man with the spectacles has a board offering a "Walk Around the Old Town." The tourists walk past them. Not a single customer shows any interest in them.
Jeff Cox doesn't have a sign. Just a blue folder containing photos. He doesn't even have to hold the folder up. You have to step up close to read what Cox is offering. "Third Reich Tour. Munich Walk Tours in English."
The Third Reich in Munich. That means Hitler, Göring, the Gestapo, the SS. Hitler in the city where everything started. The "Capital of the Movement." Cox is pleased. He's got 18 tourists standing in front of him. British, American, an Indian family. Each one of them has paid €12 ($15.50). When it comes to city tours, Hitler is a surefire bet. Nazis always sell.
Cox speaks beautifully clear English. He would have made a good history teacher. He's an affable Londoner who tries to get his listeners interested rather than boring them with dry lectures. He's been a city guide for 10 years.
He's just been talking about Hitler's time in the Austrian town of Linz, then his time in Vienna. Later on he'll take the group to the legendary Hofbräuhaus beer hall where Hitler held several speeches. Then to the corner of Brienner and Türkenstrasse. That's where the Gestapo headquarters was. The tour ends on Königsplatz square, where the Nazi party staged its early rallies.
"Who knows what Adolf Hitler was almost called?" says Cox. "Schicklgruber; his father was called Alois Schicklgruber but changed his name."
Alan Stark has read seven biographies of Adolf Hitler. He listens attentively to Cox, even though he knows most of it. Stark has blond hair and lives in California, he likes to wear running shoes in his free time, and he's interested in German history. When Stark says German history, he really means Adolf Hitler.
Stark is in Germany for six days. It's really only four days if you subtract the travel time. So he and his wife have to focus on what's essential.
Day one: Nuremberg, the site of the Nazi party rallies. Day two: Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg, the site of Hitler's mountain retreat. Day three: Munich, Third Reich tour. Day four: the highlight point, Bayreuth. "Parsifal," five hours of Wagner.
"I'm really no Nazi," says Stark. "I'm just interested in Germany."
Stark would make a lot of Germans sad. But tourists who come to Munich, Berlin or Heidelberg have a pretty preconceived notion of this country: Beer and Hitler.
If Germans think the world now sees them differently, they may well be suffering from a misconception. Despite 60 years of the Federal Republic, despite the Soccer World Cup in 2006,when Germans wore wigs in their national colors of black, red and gold and played host to the whole world.
The Nazi story is over, and a colourful, easygoing patriotism has dawned. Or so they thought.
Adolf Hitler Beer Tables
Cox has led the group into the Hofbräuhaus. Some waiters are standing between the large wooden tables of the vaulted hall. They know the score. The Hitler tours are here every day. "There on the right, that's where Adolf Hitler stood," says Cox. The group takes photos of a beer table.
"This is where Hitler presented the Nazi party's first party manifesto." Stark walks along the rows of tables and takes pictures. He'll be taking a lot of beer table images back to San Francisco.
The Starks will show their friends a Germany that is alien to most Germans. The world is changing: An African American is the most powerful man in the world, a white man is the best rapper, and Britain has the world's most famous chef. But Germany remains the land of Adolf Hitler beer tables.
"In Britain schools virtually only teach German history from 1933 to 1945," says Cox. He tries to change that image of Germany in his tours, he says. Germany is changing, Cox tells his listeners. He also talks about the resistance of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose and how some people in Munich refused to say "Heil Hitler" instead of "Grüß Gott," the standard phrase used to greet someone.
But his group is clearly more interested in his descriptions of where the SS was founded and where Hitler drank his beer. After all, the tourists want to hear about the Nazis, and not about the new Germany.
The tour is over a little after noon. Three American women walk up to Cox and ask him to recommend a good café. Cox tells them to try the district of Schwabing.
"Where is Schwabing?"
"That's easy," says Cox. "You walk straight on up to the traffic lights. Then turn left at Gestapo headquarters."
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.
Review "Mentioned in a publication of "The Architectural Review, ." June 2001
An important contribution shedding light upon the manifold interrelations between politics, architecture and the economy of the camp system. - Planning Perspectives, 17 February 2002
An invaluable understanding of the politics of architecture, one that complements and enhances those investigations to Nazi architectures expression, ideological function with which we are already familiar. - Oxford Art Journal
It does cast a significant new light on attempts to strip Nazi architecture of its political and moral associations. - Building Design, April 20, 2000
Jaskots attention to actions rather than motives, and to quarries rather than aesthetics, gives precision and weight to his argument about the importance placed upon monumental architecture in Nazi Germany, - Harvard Design Magazine
Paul Jaskots book is a welcome injection of life into what had become a stale debate. - Building Design, April 20, 2000
The Architecture of Oppression could become a prime reference for the issues of art, architecture, and urban design, and the role of politics in general and the Nazis in particular. - Town Planning Review
This book is the result of painstaking research ... Jaskot has put another nail in the coffin of Leon Kriers extraordinary attempt to exonerate the Nazi monuments by removing them from their political context. - The Architectural Review
Mentioned in a publication of The Architectural Review,. June 2001
Product Description Exploring the reasons why the SS chose to focus so many of its forced-labor concerns around the production of building materials, The Architecture of Oppression argues that the architectural history of Nazi Germany is inextricably linked to its most punitive institutions. Through an analysis of such major Nazi building projects as the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds and the rebuilding of Berlin, Paul Jaskot ties together the development of the German building economy, state architectural goals and the rise of the SS as a political and economic force.
**The Architecture of Oppression has all the hallmarks of Jaskot's articles: brilliant writing, impeccable scholarship and surprising wit. It is likely to become the standard work in the field, and would also make an excellent primer on fascist architecture for the general reader.**
Paul Jaskot teaches courses in modern art and architecture (Europe and North America), the history of architecture, art historical methodology, and specific courses on the relationship between politics and art. His research focuses on modern German art and architecture. His book, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy was published by Routledge (2000). He is the founder of the Radical Art/Art History Caucus, an official affiliated society of the College Art Association.
