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    History of Architecture (AP313) | Term Paper | 2013

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    Architecture Of The Third Reich- Neoclassicism Under The Nazis

    Term Paper for History of Architecture (AP131)

    Deepak Kumar Singh

    Roll Number: 01616901611

    Sushant School of Art and Architecture

    FINAL DRAFT

    Order from Stone:

    Nazi Architecture

    Hitler used architecture as another boulevard to advance the power of the state. Nazi buildings weredesigned to intimidate and overwhelm. Architects like Albert Speer, Hermann Giesler, and Fritz Todtworked on projects that used plain facades with columns, pilasters, and clean lines on a massive scaleto create a new aesthetic. Like the Fascist "New Man," this new building style would display power andauthority. Anyone who ventured into one of these buildings would see in their size the tempting wealthand power of the Third Reich. Berlin was to become "Germania," a city to rule the world. It neededmonuments. In their greatest flight of fancy, Hitler's architects created a model of this new city, one withpublic buildings on a scale never seen, to celebrate the power of the German state. Though this hugeproject never succeeded, many buildings survive that show the unique inclinations of the state. InNuremberg, seat of the Nazi party, the rally grounds show the particular style of intimidationarchitecture found throughout the party's building efforts. Images of the New Reich Chancelleryvalidate deliberate attempts to use architecture to intimidate foreign diplomats. Other buildings notrepresentative of the Nazi style nonetheless reference Nazi aims by glorifying both the Teutonic pastand rural culture. Always, Nazi architects worked to ensure that their buildings served the purposes ofthe regime. Influenced by classical Greece and Rome, they cultured an aesthetic of order, usingminimal decoration and highlighting straight lines. From the baroque era, they realized the power ofbuildings as expressions of wealth and power, and they tried to integrate that expression into theirbuildings. Nazi architecture served the state by underlining its values, demonstrating its power, andcreating edifices capable of lasting for centuries.

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    The Propaganda Ministry, Berlin

    Albert Speer's Zeppelintribune, Nuremberg

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    What the Nazis liked

    Hitler, as a trained artist, was well-conversant in the history of architecture. In the Nazi's quest for an"orderly" aesthetic, much attention was paid to the classical buildings of Greece and Rome. It is easy tosee the similarities between Albert Speer's Zeppelintribune, shown above right, and the PergamonAltar of Zeus housed in the Berlin Pergamon museum:

    The Pergamon Altar to Zeus

    In fact, Speer himself stated that the Tribune was based on this Pergamon monument (Scobie 87). Thereare also noticeable similarities between the Colosseum in Rome and the Olympiastadion in Berlin. Inparticular, the two buildings share a stratified system of pillars and arches. However, the stadiumdiffers from the Colosseum in its lack of curves or circular arches. Olympiastadion's exterior is flat, anddepends on rectangles formed from strong horizontal and vertical lines to attain its clean, orderlyeffect. Further, the stadium exterior is bare: there is no decoration of any kind, only lines. Thesepreferences for strong lines and bare exteriors are a common feature of Nazi buildings, especiallythose designed by Albert Speer, and marks them as distinct from the classical structures that influencedthem, Classical buildings were heavily decorated, sometimes almost entirely covered with statues. Nazibuildings are remarkable for their almost total lack of decoration.

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    The Colosseum, Rome

    Hitler himself was as a young man first impresssed with the highly wrought, ornate, neo-Baroquestyle found in many Habsburg-era public buildings. Even then, he felt that the key qualification for aneffective public building was that it expressed the strength of its owner. These buildings, with theirexcessive numbers of pilasters, porticos, columns, arches, and pediments, manifested the wealth andpower of the German and Habsburg states. While these highly-decorated buildings are markedlydifferent from those designed during Hitler's reign, they possess symmetry, a formal element of designthat both Speer and Hitler believed was essential to creating order. The grand Berlinerdom exudes

    wealth, with decoration in every corner. According to Hitler, the cathedral,though too small, was"suitably impressive." (Taylor Illustration 5) The long arcades of the New Hofsburg and the Museum ofFine Arts, both in Vienna, hint at the colonnades and grand entrances found in later buildings,especially Speer's New Reich Chancellery.

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    The Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna

    The New Hofsburg, Vienna

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    Detail of the Berlinerdom

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    The Berlinerdom as it looked in the 1930s

    What they Built

    Perhaps the most archetypical of Nazi buildings was the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The buildinghoused administrative offices for senior officials of every branch of the Nazi regime. This building,designed by Albert Speer, was the nerve center of the government. Speer and Hitler agreed that thisbuilding needed to be impressive and intimidating, and wanted it to express Nazi ideals of order andstrength. The Chancellery, actually an extension to the Kaiser-era Reichskanzlei, displayed all thefeatures that have since come to be associated with the Nazi architectural style. The Voss-strasseentrance, seen below, used high columns and massive doors (topped with an eagle) to create an awe-inspiring entrance to the seat of Nazi power. (Speer Architecture). The long facade, noticeably lacksdecoration. There are no columns or statues, only rows of windows, evenly aligned. These parallelrows, with small stone ridges running along them, emphasize the formal element of line. There is nothingexciting happening on this facade, no writhing sculptures or twisting baroque decorations. Instead,Speer's design focuses on line. Nothing pushes against the lines and nothing curves. There is noopposition in row after row of horizontal lines, only order. Speer's design reinforces the Nazi ideal oforder, leaving no space for dissent. Everything is totally controlled.

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    The New Reich Chancellery

    Inside the Chancellery, the emphasis on order is combined with an increased sense of grandeur. In themiddle of the building was Speer's Ehrenplatz, or court of honor. This courtyard existed solely to makethe Chancellery a more intimidating place for foreign diplomats. With its stark facade and massivescale, the courtyard could do little else. It was entirely symmetrical, and though it incorporated round

    columns, the emphasis was again on line and symmetry. Even the sculptures, "Army" and "Party," byArnold Breker, posed stiffly and oppositely, so that their forms would not disrupt either symmetry orline.

    The Ehrenplatz inside the Chancellery

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    The entrance to the mosaic hall, sculpture by Arno Breker

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    Beyond this courtyard were the mosaic hall, rotunda, and marble gallery. These led to Hitler's office,a well-lit, well-furnished, and suitably massive room. Importantly, it was larger than Mussolini's. Hitlerliked it very much, though he apparently used it infrequently (Lehrer 75).

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    The Rotunda

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    The effect was overwhelming. A visitor to Hitler's office arrived at the Chancellery to find a block-longbuilding (1,400 foot), climbed up the steps, entered the Ehrenplatz, traversed it and climbed up morestairs, entered a tiny reception room which opened into the mosaic hall, walked down that, entered therotunda, then the Marble Gallery, in the middle of which they found Hitler's office. The goal of thisjourney? "The diplomats sitting in front of me . . . [will] learn to shiver and shake," said Hitler (Lehrer75).

    Encouraging the Volk

    The Nazis glorified the rural lifestyle and Germany's Teutonic past. In builidngs not intended to be partof diplomatic life, they imitated traditional German dwellings. The Hermann Goering Youth Home andSpeer's West front headquarters both imitate this traditional style. The Tannenberg Memorial drawsinspiration from the castles of the medieval Germany's Hohenzollern era and combines it with the newNazi aesthetic of clean lines and stark, blank facades. This style echoes the glory of Germanconquerers like Barbarossa, and reminds the Volk of their history of greatness.

    The Hermann Goering Youth Home, Melle

    The Tannenberg Memorial

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    West Front Headquarters

    Creating Mass Experiences

    As part of their campaign to unify the German people behind Nazi ideals, Hitler enouraged hisarchitects, especially Albert Speer, to create places for Germans to have what he termed "massexperiences." To do this, they created assembly halls, stadia, and assembly grounds where thousandscould gather to display their patriotism and be edified by the speeches of party leaders. The mostsignificant of these places was the Zeppelin Field at Nuremburg, where the Nazi Party held annualrallies celebrating the anniversaries of its formation in 1920 and the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. TheZeppelintribune was the centerpiece of the Nuremburg party monuments. As discussed above, itincorporated classical elements, but modified them to emphasize line, cleanliness, and order. From thisbuilding, Hitler and other party leaders gave speeches to assemblies of tens of thousands of germans.The most effective part of this assembly grounds was not the building, but the light. Speer surroundedthe assembly area with hundreds of spotlights pointed skywards. The effect was to create a "cathedralof light," aLichtdom, and its impact was tremendous.

    The Zeppelin field Lichtdom

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    The Zeppelintribune during a nighttime rally

    The rally grounds at Nuremberg also included the Luitpold Arena, a space used for rallies of as manyas 150,000 SS and SA men. The buildings here also show the Nazi emphasis on order, with starkfacades and straight lines. At one edge of the arena is the Ehrenhalle, a monument to Nazi war dead.

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    The Ehrenhalle is just one example of the thousands of memorials built by the Nazis in an effort toinspire the German people to greater effort in the war.

    Luitpold Hall, at one edge of the arena

    The grandstands and grounds of Luitpold Arena during a rally

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    The Ehrenhalle

    The New Germany

    Hitler and Speer together planned one of the greatest undertakings ever conceived. To create a"thousand year Reich," they devised monuments on a massive scale, and planned out new cities builtmore around the need to glorify the state than to accomodate a populace. Munich, the site of the BeerHall Putsch, was one of the cities they planned to rebuild, and there they were to put up grand edificesglorifying the party. The whole city would revolve around a single grand avenue bounded on one endby a huge assembly hall and on the other by a bulky obelisk. This road would be used for ceremonialpurposes--parades and rallies. The project would be expensive, the size of the monuments ensuredthat, but costs were to be kept down through the use of slave labor (Scobie 130). While this projectwas itself startling for its scale, it was nothing compared to their plans for Berlin.

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    The planned main avenue in Munich, with Hermann Giesler's train station dome in the background andobelisk in the foreground

    Berlin was to be the capital of the Nazis' empire, and as such, needed to exude the power,domination, and superiority of the Nazi party. Invoking images of the Roman empire, the remadeBerlin would be called Germania, the old Roman name for Germany. The city would change shaperadically, with a tripled population and thousands of new public buildings. Speer planned to create anew city center surrounded by public housing and government facilities. This new center, like Munich,would revolve around a long, wide, single avenue that stretched on for miles. While the road, whichlacked crosstreets, was totally impractical, this mattered little to Hitler and Speer, who saw the projectpurely from an ideological perspective. The broad street was a tool for propaganda, aparadegrounds. Careful urban planning was far less important than ensuring ideological compliance.This was a "highly politicized approach to city building . . . [in] conflict with conventional views of bothfunction and aesthetics" (Helmer 3). The conflicts were never satisfactorily resolved, and StephenHelmer rightly described the whole project as "generally inept" (Helmer 3).

    The great buildings of the new Berlin were to be of incredible size. The grotesque Great Hall(Volkshalle) seen below was to hold 180,000 people, its dome rose 290 meters into the air (951 feet),had a diameter of 250 meters, and sat atop a granite podium 315 meters (1033 feet) square (Scobie112). It was topped with an imperial German eagle clutching a globe perched on a gigantic lantern.On a similarly massive scale was the triumphal arch in the center of the avenue. It was so large that theplan to build it collapsed when engineers realized it was so heavy that it would sink into the earth.

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    Speer's model of the planned North-South avenue in the new Berlin

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    The Volkshalle from the front

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    A closeup of the Volkshalle showing its preposterous size

    Even more so than in Munich, this project would have been expensive. The Nazis were creating not justa new city, but a monumental one, with buildings so massive as to be beyond belief. Speer estimated

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    that the total cost would have been between 64 and 96 billion dollars at a rate of 8 billion dollars peryear (Helmer 61). Despite the cost, Hitler was intent on seeing the project completed, to the point thathe continued to divert men and material to it well into the war (Helmer 61). Germania represented theultimate triumph of ideology in architecture. Integral to the grandiose plans were features designed toenable mass experiences and display the might of the Third Reich. These concerns far outweighed anyissues of practicality.

    Speer and Hitler both subscribed to a "theory of ruin value" (Scobie 113). They intended that theirbuildings would last for centuries, and were accordingly to be built mostly of rock and other verydurable materials. In this desire for size and durability, and the supremacy of ideological concernsover function, it is clear that the Nazis saw architecture as a key tool in the creation of their thousand-year Reich. With Germania, Hitler wanted to create edifices capable of sustaining the German empireby themselves. Obviously, this was a ridiculous scheme, a fact that explains why these outrageousstructures could ever have been taken seriously.

    Conclusion

    The Nazis attempted to control every aspect of Germans' lives; architecture played a key role in this.The order and plainness of Nazi facades reflected the order idealized by Nazi theorists. Placesdesigned for mass community experiences built unity around the party. Buildings reflecting rural andTeutonic pasts emphasized the Nazis' glorification of those times. The same aspects of Nazi buildingsintended to impress foreign diplomats served double duty by expressing the power of the Nazi partyto everyone who passed by. Hitler and Speer believed that architecture had the power to profoundlyinfuence peoples's thoughts and actions. In their delusional plans for Germania, they showed explicitlythat architecture was a tool of the state. It would be used to promote ideology, even at the expense oflivability. Hitler wanted buildings to be "the word in stone," durable, visible representations of Naziideals. Like all other forms of art during the Nazi regime, architecture was a tool of the state.

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    Bibliography

    Helmer, Stephen D. Hitler's Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City. Ann Arbor: UMIResearch Press, 1980.

    Lehrer, Steven. The Reich Chancellery and Fhrerbunker Complex: An Illustrated History of the Seat of theNazi Regime. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006.

    Rasp, Hans Peter. Eine Stadt fr tausend Jahre: MnchenBauten und Projekte fr die Haupstadt derBewegung [A city for the millennium: Munichbuildings and projects for the capitol of themovement]. Munich: Sddeutscher Verlag, 1981.

    Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the ThirdReich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

    Scobie, Alex. Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity. University Park: ThePennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

    Speer, Albert. Architecture, 1932-1942. Edited by Leon Krier. With contributions by Lars Olaf Larsson.Brussels: Archives d'Architecture Moderne,1985.

    Sudjic, Deyan. The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World. London: PenguinBooks, Allen Lane, 2005.

    Taylor, Robert R. The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology. Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.

    Photo credits

    Photo 1: Geoff Walden The Reich Propaganda Ministry, designed by Albert Speer

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    Photo 2: Geoff Walden, The Zeppelintribune, Nuremberg, designed by Albert Speer

    Photo 3: Courtesy of Calvin College, Hitler's Office in Der Neue Reichskanzellerei, designed by AlbertSpeer

    Photo 4: G. Ray Thompson, The Pergamon Altar ofZeus

    Photo 5: Wolfgang Schche, Norbert Szymanski Das ReichssportfeldBerlin - Brandenburg: be.bra -Verlag 2001

    Photo 6: Leo Curran, Maecenas: Images of Ancient Greece and Rome (c) 1997

    Photo 7: Andrew Boss, Art History Museum, Vienna, 2007.

    Photo 8: Peter Gerstbach, The New Hofsburg, 2004.

    Photo 9: Andreas Steinhoff, View of the Berliner Dom. (c) 2005

    Photo 10: The Berlinerdom, ca. 1930. From Taylor, Robert R. The Word in Stone: The Role ofArchitecture in the National Socialist Ideology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1974.

    Photo 11: The New Reich Chancellery. From Scobie, Alex. Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact ofClassical Antiquity. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

    Photo 12: The Chancellery Ehrenplatz. From Speer, Albert. Architecture, 1932-1942. Edited by LeonKrier. With contributions by Lars Olaf Larsson. Brussels: Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1985.

    Photo 13: Ehrenplatz entrance. Ibid.

    Photo 14: Chancellery mosaic hall. Ibid.

    Photo 15: Chancellery rotunda. Ibid.

    Photo 16: Courtesy of Calvin College, Chancellery marble gallery, designed by AlbertSpeer

    Photo 17: Op. cit. Hitler's Office, Calvin

    Photo 18: Hermann Goering Youth Home, Melle. From Taylor, Robert R. The Word in Stone: The Roleof Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1974.

    Photo 19: Tannenberg Memorial. Ibid.

    Photo 20: West Front Headquarters. Ibid.

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    Photo 21: Geoff Walden, The Zeppelinfeld Lichtdom, Nuremberg, designed by Albert Speer,

    Photo 22: The Zeppelintribune during a nighttime rally. From Speer, Albert. Architecture, 1932-1942. Edited by Leon Krier. With contributions by Lars Olaf Larsson. Brussels: Archives d'ArchitectureModerne,1985.

    Photo 23: Geoff Walden, Luitpoldhalle, Nuremberg,

    Photo 24: Geoff Walden, Luitpold Arena, Nuremberg,

    Photo 25: Magnus Gertkemper, Ehrenhalle at Luitpoldhain, Nuremberg,

    Photo 26: Ost-West Achse, Munich. From Rasp, Hans Peter. Eine Stadt fr tausend Jahre: MnchenBauten und Projekte fr die Haupstadt der Bewegung

    [A city for the millennium: Munich

    buildings andprojects for the capitol of the movement]. Munich: Sddeutscher Verlag, 1981.

    Photo 27: Nord-Sud Achse, Berlin. From Speer, Albert. Architecture, 1932-1942. Edited by Leon Krier.With contributions by Lars Olaf Larsson. Brussels: Archives d'Architecture Moderne,1985.

    Photo 29: Front view of the Kongresshalle. Ibid.

    Photo 30: Closeup view of the Kongresshalle. Ibid.

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