I grew up with an interest in architectural history and followed this interest with graduate work. After attending a convention in Minneapolis in 2000 and discovering the great swath of burned and abandoned early industrial inner city mills, I came away fascinated by these monumental ruins. Last week, while immobilized by a common cold, I was online looking for abandoned structures when I found a link to Geoff Walden’s Third Reich Ruins. There in front of me were hundreds of pages containing an abandoned and ruined powerful political architecture.
Following link after link, I learned
that Hitler rejected the use of the popular, curvilinear “Moderne” as “intellectual
Bolshevism” (www.nzetc.org/). He urged his architect, Paul Troost, a
Bauhaus trained designer, (www.spiritus-temporis.com), to rethink the Roman influence
and mix it with a bit of baroque. This
new pared down Neo-Classical style was established as "the Fuhrer's
Style" before Speer or others became a part of the Hitler’s architectural
hierarchy. This now focused design was
used for the important municipal buildings and large ceremonial areas. The reshaping of
The simple lines and Roman influenced colonnades of the new Nazi formal
architecture were often adorned with many-story-tall flags, and banners in
striking red with the black swastika. Alexander
Scobie writes in Hitler's State
Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity, “Flags and insignia played an important part in
Nazi ceremonial and in the decoration of buildings. The eagle-topped standards carried by the SA
at
<CENTER><IMG SRC=http://www.thirdreichruins.com/lustgarten1mai.jpg
</CENTER>
<CENTER><FONT
SIZE=1><I>Flags flanking the Lustgarten and on top of the May Pole,
Scobie also quotes Speer saying, “The
Romans built arches of triumph to celebrate the big victories won by the
Leon Krier writes in his article The Suppression of Classical Architecture in
Postwar Germany, “It
is undeniable that Classical architecture was one of the most important and
reliable of all the methods of Nazi propaganda.” The grand gathering places such as the
Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, the official buildings in
Many of Hitler’s other grand plans
were not started before the beginning of the war. Some massive groupings of buildings, such as
the Prora KdF Resorts by architect Clement Klotz, remained incomplete by the
end of the war. Geoff Walden writes in Third
Reich in Ruins, “Among the most ambitious of the Third Reich construction
projects were five planned seaside resort complexes for the Kraft durch
Freude (KdF - Strength Through Joy) workers association…..these seaside
resorts were meant to provide affordable vacations for [20,000 of] the average
German worker[s].” Today the several
kilometer long Prora Resort lies empty and crumbling along the seacoast and is classified
as a historical monument. (http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/10_5/rostock15.htm)
<CENTER><IMG SRC=http://www.thirdreichruins.com/prora1deutwochenschau.jpg></CENTER>
<CENTER><FONT
SIZE=1><I>The North arm of the Prora complex from the "Deutsche
Wochenschau" weekly newsreel, from about 1941. Note the three foundations
for Community Houses jutting out onto the beach. Photo and caption courtesy
Geoff Walden, <A HREF=http://www.thirdreichruins.com/index.htm>Third
Reich Ruins.</A></I></FONT></CENTER>
Many individual monumental buildings such
as Hermann Göring's Air Ministry complex, Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of
Propaganda, and the Olympic Stadium by architect Werner March were completed
and survived the war almost intact. Many
other structures were damaged during the war and were destroyed, rather than
rebuilt, post WWII by massive dynamiting in an attempt to remove all signs of
this architectural propaganda. Leon Krier
says, “Classical architecture has become both the unknown ghost and the tragic
victim.” Jeffry Diefendorf writes In
the Wake of War that “Krier admires and applauds the architectural monuments
of the Third Reich as powerful, seductively beautiful objects of art….and
“dares” his readers to “find a beauty in an architecture that has clearly and
intentionally served to legitimize a political system we clearly despise.”
In National Socialism, there were two
distinct architectural approaches. It
took me longer to find a trail to the Volk style. A Thomas Zeller article about Alwin Seifert finally
caught my eye. Almost at the same time
as the neo-Classical style appeared in the German cities, Seifert began to mold
the countryside into a new philosophical and political shape. Zeller wrote of Seifert in Molding the
Landscape of Nazi Environmentalism,
that the arrogant, brusque Seifert made all of
Anthony Storr in Dimensions, (vol.6, No 2),
reviewing Guy Padfield’s Himmler says
that, “The urge to create a mythical
medieval
While searching for these two types
of Nazi fascist architectures, I found myself looking at these structural styles
with a new eye. I noticed that many of
the neo-classical buildings were destroyed, altered, or damaged by order of the
Western occupying forces after WWII. The
large neo-classical pieces, seen to be most representative of Hitler’s larger plan,
policies, and propaganda, were most frequently vilified, dynamited, and
bulldozed away. The
Visible signs of wartime bombing of
the folk style architecture can be seen, but many of these structures were
repaired and put back into service. Some
seem to have survived with little damage. Many murals and mosaics remain intact also with
only the swastikas removed. Postwar, more
of this invented folk architecture was rebuilt because it was truly needed as
housing during the post war period.
Although Hitler’s country home, and the homes of his closest followers
were, in time, leveled to the ground and the materials used to create post war
housing, his small tea house, the Eagles Nest, survived because Hitler didn’t
like heights and visited it only 14 times.
(http://www.kehlsteinhaus.com/)
After days of following leads and links,
I returned to my computer in an attempt to make some sense of these political architectures. As I traced the remarkably rapid recovery of
Post WWII Germany, “which had risen anew by the late 1950s in
<A HREF=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_architecture>Nazi
Architecture-Wikipedia</A>“The
völkish style was primarily used in rural settings for accommodation or
community structures like the Ordensburg in Krössinsee, the
walls and watchtowers of KL Flossenbürg
and KL Mauthausen.
It was also to be applied to rural new towns as it represented a mythical
medieval
time when
LINKS AND FOOTNOTES:
Jonathan Glance
“It so happens that Krier does admire some of Speer's architecture while
despising the regime that commissioned it. His justification - a love of
monumental classical architecture aside - is that of an architect who wondered
why it had been so easy to slam Speer's work (viewed purely, as Ferry put it
himself, "from an art history perspective"), while similar architecture
was built elsewhere in the world at the time, and, particularly, in the
democratic US.”
From
"Oppositions, the journal of the New York-based Institute for Architecture
and Urban Studies (IAUS)” by: K. Michael
Hays
Copied from: “The minority of explicitly ideological
buildings, to which it gave great prominence, reflected two conflicting ideas
of the character of the new society. The
monumental buildings which Hitler described as “Symbols of the heroic scale of
life.” Were intended to reflect the power of the dictator and his modern state
over his subjects in the mass. This view
was wholly incompatible with that represented by the Kleinsiedlungen and folk
styles, which, symbolizing an individualistic pre-industrial society, conformed
more closely to the ideas of the Kampfbund and the earlier critics of the new
style.”
Speer
said later, when it was safe to do so, "The Romans built arches of triumph
to celebrate the big victories won by the
- Scobie, Alexander. Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact
of Classical Antiquity.
Flags
and insignia played an important part in Nazi ceremonial and in the decoration
of buildings. The eagle-topped standards carried by the SA at
- Hitler,
Adolf. Hitler's
Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 3rd Edition.
Speer liberally
used these symbols to reinforce the propaganda uses of the structures and
spaces he created for the third Reich.
me
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/ARCH/Notes-Fascist-GER.htm
The
völkish style was primarily used in rural settings for accommodation or community
structures like the Ordensburg in Krossinsee, the walls and
watchtowers of KL Flossenbürg
and KL Mauthausen.
It was also to be applied to rural new towns as it represented a mythical
medieval
time when
Molding
the Landscape of Nazi Environmental, Thomas Zeller, Chapter 6
http://info-poland.icm.edu.pl/socrealism/tot04/04.html
|
The ideologues of the "Kampfbund"
presented to the artists, as the goals for artistic creations, the renewal of
the "German spirit" in art, the return to traditions and social
hierarchy, the building of a vision of a harmonious life tied to the land,
and consciousness of German culture. In his next work, "Kampf um
die Kunst" (Struggle for Art) published in 1932, Schultz-Naumburg
emphasized the contributions of Nazism to the process of moral renewal of art
and its national values as contrasted to cosmopolitanism and degeneration. In
his activity directed against modern art, Schulz-Naumburg was the first to reach
for the most radical, destructive means. It was on his initiative that in
1929 the frescos by Oskar Schlemmer in the old Bauhaus residence in Within the boundaries of the Nazi movement, efforts were made to
seize at last part of the accomplishments of contemporary German art. In 1933
in |
|
based
on Sztuka a systemy totalitarne (Art and totalitarian systems)
by Waldemar Baraniewski. |
|
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http://www.thirdreichruins.com/prora.htm
AND
http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/10_5/rostock15.htm
Prora
KdF Resort
________________________________________
http://www.guypadfield.com/ppadfield/himmler.html
Review of
Himmler BY Guy Padfield
http://www.thirdreichruins.com/index.htm
Geoff Walden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welthauptstadt_Germania
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSrfp_uJiik
Wikipedia renewal of
Oppositions
Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for
P404 through 406
defense of classical architecture
Destruction of neo classical
"Oppositions,
the journal of the New York-based Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies
(IAUS),
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