Gastón Gordillo: Nazi Architecture As Affective Weapon
One of Adolf Hitler’s most cherished dreams was to build the largest monument ever created. With the guidance of “the chief architect of the Reich” Albert Speer, he planned to remake Berlin around what he saw as the future core of the Germanic empire: the People’s Hall (Volkshalle), a dome that was to be 290 meters (950 feet) high and able to accommodate 180,000 people. Hitler was so “obsessed” with his gigantic dome, Speer wrote, that he was “deeply irked” when he learned that the Soviet Union had begun constructing an even larger building in Moscow: The Palace of the Soviets.
This palace was to be 495 meters (1,624 feet) high and was to be crowned with a huge statue of Lenin. Hitler was furious, for he felt “cheated of the glory of building the tallest monumental structure in the world.” When Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Speer realized that “Moscow’s rival building” had preyed on Hitler’s mind “more than he had been willing to admit.” As the German armies advanced toward Moscow, Hitler said: “Now this will be the end of their building once and for all” (155).
Speer’s memoirs Inside the Third Reich, published in 1969 after he served a twenty-year sentence for his role in the Nazi hierarchy, often reads like a self-critical, melancholic confession haunted by guilt. This self-criticism is politically shallow, for Speer is notably silent about the genocide of the European Jews (which he claimed he was unaware of at his trial in Nuremberg) and about his own use of slave labor as Minister of Armaments (a topic he touches upon only in passing). The text is nonetheless an extraordinary document about the core of the Nazi machinery and about Hitler’s bodily, spatial, and architectural sensibilities.
The book reveals, in
particular, that Hitler viewed in monumental architecture a way of creating in
the body a disarming state of awe. He was convinced that monumental buildings
were powerful weapons, and assumed that political
supremacy depended, as his desire to crush the Palace of the Soviets illustrates,
on erecting structures that would dazzle and intimidate multitudes, inhibiting
their bodily disposition to act critically and assertively. Efforts to
cultivate reverence through monumental buildings have certainly existed for
millennia. But Speer’s account reveals the political intricacies of the
affective dimensions of monumentality, and the fact that these live in one of
the most distinctive affective weapons of capitalism: skyscrapers.
Speer shows that architecture was central to the Nazi
project. Furthermore, he demonstrates that architecture was Hitler’s one true
passion in life, the only topic that made him joyful, cheerful, and exuberant….
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