Architecture and political legitimation.

The Nazis probably took links between architecture and society more seriously than any regime that has ever been. Peter Blundell Jones(1) suggests that the monuments of the Third Reich were intended to crush the citizen's sense of individuality, and that attempts to infer that, for instance, Speer's architecture was apolitical are disingenuous.

The cover of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, his admirable history of the twentieth century, shows Hitler as caricatured by Chaplin in that memorable scene in The Great Dictator when he plays with the globe.(2) It was a clever choice, for without making Hitler the hero, it indicates the shadow that evil leader casts across our century, while it also recognises the power of film as the new and dominant medium of artistic expression. Curiously, the credit for the photo does not mention Chaplin at all, but a film made in the 1970s: Hitler, a film from Germany in which it was included as a quotation. This adds another layer of interpretation. The director of that film, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, was among the most courageous of those German artists in the last couple of decades who tried to face up squarely to the unacceptable past. His struggle is a reminder of the acute pain still felt by Germans in relation to their identity. In a radio interview, Syberberg spoke about the problem of Hitler having soiled everything he touched, and having touched so much.

Knowing Hitler's fondness for Wagner's music, for example, and understanding the way in which it seemed to encourage his sense of destiny, we can never listen to it again with quite the same innocence. Associations stick. T. S. Eliot was surely right when he pointed out that the addition of a new work of art changes the meanings of all those in the tradition to which it belongs. One does not even need a new work: a change of interpretation or even of context is enough.

Hitler held power for only 12 years and was dead before most of us were born, yet he looms large, for he changed the world so much. We are still reeling from the extent of the moral collapse, still shocked by how modern technology could so exaggerate the barbarism. What makes it worse is that when Hitler came to power the German-speaking countries were in many ways the centre of world culture. Despite the economic devastation of the First World War, the development of learning had remained intact while the arts flourished to a new splendour under the Weimar Republic. German and Austrian scientists continued to lead the world, to say nothing of German-speaking historians and philosophers. The dominance of immigrants such as Pevsner and Gombrich in our own culture shows how far ahead the German-speaking countries were in art history. They were among the thousands of intellectuals driven out directly or indirectly by Hitler. In a short time the Nazis dismantled so much. How could such unprincipled crooks and bullies have been allowed to wreak such havoc? More to the point, how can we ensure that it does not happen again?

As architects, we need to tease out just what the connection might be between fascist architecture and fascist politics. This is clearest in the most extreme examples - the official architecture of the Nazi party as exemplified by the work of Paul Troost and Albert Speer. There seems to be a strong connection between the buildings and the regime, but it is less easy to prove than one might at first expect, and it has been thrown into question altogether by some in recent years. Leon Krier, for example, suggested in the AR that Hitler's admiration of Classicism was merely incidental.(3) He has tried to depoliticise Speer and rehabilitate him as a mainstream Neo-Classical architect. At the other extreme we have a historian like Bruno Zevi who sees fascism not only in the axes and formality of Classicism but even in something as elementary as the use of bilateral symmetry - he actually writes of symmetry being 'pathological'. For some, the use of a Modernist vocabulary by Terragni for a building like the Casa del Fascio in Como seems to indicate that there is no clear connection between style and politics, yet for Giancarlo De Carlo, the Italian architect who fought with the partisans and has always been determinedly anti-fascist, there is an implicit fascism not only in the original Rationalist work but even in more recent Neo-Rationalist work such as that of Rossi and Grassi.

To try to unravel the issues, we must start with the question of styles. In Italy, the progressive image of Modernism was adopted by the Fascists as it arose, but in Germany much Modernist architecture had been produced by left-wing cities and building societies in the late 1920s, so the associations were different. Even so, the regime defined its artistic policies only gradually. If the Nazis had wanted at the outset to impose a style, one might have expected Paul Schulze-Naumburg to be taken up.

The protege of Rosenberg, he was the darling of the party right, and had also been a scourge of Modernism from the mid 1920s. He had long been a champion of a Neo-Classical - or perhaps more accurately Neo-Baroque - style backed up with the crudest racist arguments set out in such books as The Face of the German House. But he never found favour with Hitler or received any important commissions. Probably Hitler did not care for Schulze-Naumburg's work, but he also liked to play Rosenberg off against Goebbels: there was a surprising degree of divide and rule at the top of the party. Goebbels, on the left of the party (if one can speak in such terms) was sympathetic to the Modernists, and included works by Nolde and Barlach - two artists later defined as degenerate - in an official exhibition. He gave hope to the Modernists in the early days of the regime and encouraged both Mies and Gropius to contribute to the 1934 exhibition Deutsches Volk, Deutsche Arbeit run by the Nazi organisation 'Kraft durch Freude'.

Both Modernists also submitted entries to the competition for the National Bank of 1933 and Mies almost won, indeed only the personal intervention of Hitler prevented him getting the prize. In retrospect this was a vital turning point. Had the decision gone the other way, Mies could perhaps have become a major official architect of the Third Reich, for political scruples would probably not have stopped him.(4) The implicit monumentality and anonymity of his work could have been appropriate to the regime, while the expression of the latest technology would have added a suitably progressive note. But Hitler's tastes were too bourgeois and backward looking, and this was not at all accidental: it was part of his unerring political instinct. Things known and respected by the masses, if only subliminally, had to be cited to impress and to inspire respect. The regime needed a past more than it needed a future, memory more than aspiration.

Hitler was not the first leader to borrow forms from antiquity to substantiate his authority and to give it a pedigree, and he was not the last. Indeed, most societies have to invent and reinvent their traditions and they adjust their myths of origins and their use of relics accordingly.(5) Architecture plays a major role in this process because it has always been one of our main repositories of long-term memory, while it also frames and shapes our rituals.

Stone is among the most enduring of materials, especially when laid heavy and flat, and it gives us a potent reminder of the passage of time. Stone buildings therefore indicate age and stability. Greek and Roman temples are engraved in popular conssciousness as the most ancient and venerable buildings of Western Civilisation. Whatever they originally meant, they have become symbols of permanence and authority, and re-use of their forms for palaces or town halls has reinforced the connection. When one runs across fragments of a Roman city one is also impressed by the scale of the operation and the single-mindedness of it. Such large-scale plans consistently carded out require and reflect a high degree of political organisation, usually involving a hierarchical power structure. The spatial order tends to reflect the social order, whether one is looking at a Roman camp, Baroque Karlsruhe, or even Versailles.

Power and technique

With Roman ruins, even the sheer size of the single stones impresses, because it shows a scale of building technology far beyond that of the medieval or modern fabric lying adjacent. The organisation of technique in itself is an expression of power, and since it is the main reason for the building's persistence, it becomes also an expression of longevity. That large single-minded projects carried out in a short time by emperors and dictators were also often achieved by slave labour is no coincidence, and in such cases self-expression by the builders or even displays of their skill could obviously not be encouraged. This is the opposite of the Ruskinian ideal according to which a fellowship of craftsmen produces a much differentiated whole, combining individual contributions in a collective effort for the expression of common beliefs and aspirations. The cumulative quirkiness of Gothic, which at close quarters dissolves the unity of the whole into a thousand individual gestures of worship, would be of no use to a dictator, especially one like Hitler. His self-appointed mission was to unify the nation, which left little room for individual expression. The party appeared in uniform, and it was something of a shock when these uniforms took over the Reichstag, indicating that members were no longer present as individuals, but only as party representatives.(6) Unity meant excluding all other groups and conflicting views: one party, one nation, one leader.

Hitler had wanted to be an architect, and even sketched designs. As soon as he gained the power to build, he cast around for a suitable architect, lighting in Munich upon the unlikely figure of Paul Troost, who was neither young nor notably successful, and who died before his first large projects for Hitler were complete. But Troost provided just the image that Hitler wanted, and his manner was skilfully developed by the young Albert Speer.

What was it about Troost's work that so attracted Hitler? Not just the Neo-Classicism, evidently, which could be found in many other forms, but perhaps more the sheer spareness of it, stripped to the bone, the relentless repetition and the deliberate overscaling. The Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, for example, is a grim building, utterly forbidding in its monumentality. There are no cosy corners for moments of relief, and no fine detail. Indeed, every element is enormous, suitable for the giant's castle in Jack and the Beanstalk. The doors are enormous but so are the half-metre high door hinges and their great screw heads. There is an awesome melancholy power about it, and the knowledge that such great doors and columns once honoured the Gods of past civilisations makes one worry about twentieth-century Gods on earth.

Another important work of Troost in Munich was the pair of temples to celebrate the heroes of the failed putsch of 1923. Again the language is stripped Classicism, and there is an element of deliberate ruin, for the temples were roofless, leaving the tombs of the heroes open to the rain and frost - such stalwarts would bear it unflinchingly for the sake of their Fuhrer. The site of these temples is also significant. They completed one side of Konigsplatz, an axially placed square in which von Klenze's Glyptothek (perhaps the best Neo-Classical building in Munich) also stands. This square was intended as the focus of party events using Klenze's monument as a legitimating backdrop, just as Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin was used for the May day ceremonies there.(7)

After Troost died in 1934, Speer quickly picked up and developed the architectural style that the older man had invented. He had been well prepared to do so in the role of student, then of teaching assistant under Heinrich Tessenow, a hitherto rather sensitive architect who had developed a taste for austere and minimal Neo-Classicism. In the early 1930s, Tessenow won the competition for the reconstruction of the interior of Schinkel's Neue Wache as a monument to the dead of the First World War. He made it a stark and simple box with sheer stone walls and he set in the middle a stone cube with a simple wreath on it.

Above was a circular skylight. It was altered under the Communists, but now the room has been restored, only with a Kathe Kollwitz sculpture in the middle. It has a strange scale and a quite remarkable poignancy: the monumentality is not overbearing but quietly dignified. You can see in it precisely what Albert Speer took from Tessenow, but the master had a delicacy of touch and sense of humanity quite missing from his pupil.

Speer was a wonderful organiser, and won favour at first within the Nazi party for some refurbishments done with speed and efficiency. But very early on he also started to make suggestions for the staging of the party rallies at Nuremberg. It was Speer in 1933 who suggested the arrangement of triple banners behind the Fuhrer's podium, and Speer who later developed the idea of the so-called Cathedral of Ice using military searchlights at night to create the impression of gigantic columns.(8)

Triumph of the Will

The most impressive record we have of a Nazi rally is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will, showing the rally of 1934. No doubt her skilful camerawork and editing exaggerates the effect, but the whole thing was remarkably well choreographed and Speer's settings also come across as enormously powerful. They got it worked out between them in the nick of time, for the first rally in 1933 had been a somewhat ragged and disorderly affair. Riefenstahl was there and shot a lot of footage, but it was not usable. Triumph of the Will was the result of a second attempt.

It is something to get so many thousands of people together on a field to concentrate on one person speaking, and the effect is greatly intensified when the crowd is in uniform, set out in orderly rows according to rank and file, and when everyone is programmed to execute synchronised manoeuvres, with marching figures creating formal patterns as a great human sculpture. Such events need to be co-ordinated in time and space, and this is where the architecture comes in. For the space to seem unified, it needs to be framed and defined as a single room, in which the whole party supposedly representing the whole German people - is symbolically gathered. To make it read clearly and to give the Fuhrer an appropriate degree of prominence, his podium needs to be on the central axis. Behind the Fuhrer are the three swastika banners, Speer's first invention.

At the height of the ceremony the axis was so-to-speak sanctified by being walked by the Fuhrer personally while the massed ranks of party members to either side waited in respectful silence. Hitler was accompanied by two of his henchmen, to each side and slightly behind, for if completely alone he might have seemed too small, yet five walkers would have been too many. Three also fits in with the banners behind. The end of the journey at the opposite end of the axis was the centre of the other side of the giant room. Here was built a kind of temple for fallen heroes with an eternal flame of remembrance. A break in the leader's address was a pause for contemplation, but the visit to the temple, equal and opposite to the podium, also provided a chance for the Fuhrer himself to adopt a momentary humility, showing respect to the memory of the dead. Were these again the heroes of the party who died in the 1923 putsch, or were they all the German soldiers who died in the First World War?

The Nazis were somewhat obsessed with death, perhaps because only in death would all loyal party members come perfectly together, dissolving all individual differences. Hitler and Speer were fascinated by monumental architecture the architecture of death because such architecture stresses the totality, the whole party, the whole people. Some interesting light was thrown on this in an anthropological study of death by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry.(9) They report on various societies with a double funeral custom, and argue that this was once much more widespread than now, if not universal. The first funeral focuses on the loss of the individual in a way that is familiar to us, and he or she is buried. Sometime later the bones are exhumed for the second funeral: the occasion when the bones are added to others in the ancestral tomb. The second ceremony is almost the opposite of the first, for it celebrates not the individual but the family or clan aS a whole. Hitler's totalitarian regime could borrow the trappings of the second funeral to stress that the individual is nothing, while the state is everything.

Inventing tradition

Just as the Nazi regime looked to a millennial future, it had to have a past, a tradition, a sense of honour. The leader could suggest that he was merely the instrument of a greater cause, the holder of an office that would transcend him. The slow respectful walk down the axis at Nuremberg caused everyone to wait, showed their concentration, while it also defined the space of the assembly ground. Had Hitler merely stayed at one end, it would have had no centre. Had he walked around it in a disorganised way chatting to groups of party members here and there, there would have been no compelling unity. The active establishment of the central axis gave measure and definition to the space. Adding to the spatial unity of the party gathered in the single room of the Zeppelinfeld was a temporal unity linking them with the immemorial German past. The new stone buildings with their sense of permanence could have been there for centuries and seemed certain to persist for centuries to come, the axis walked ceremoniously by the great leader and his successors annually, each time receiving a new breath of life. The buildings were not only supposed to represent the thousand-year-Reich but to persist as impressive ruins. In the event they became ruins earlier than expected.

Doubtless the great axis planned by Hitler and Speer for Berlin would have served a similar ritual purpose at an even larger scale. The leader's speeches would have happened in the great hall at the bend of the Spree, while the heroes were to be remembered in the great triumphal arch, again at opposite ends of an axis, though now so large that it would have to be a motorised parade. The extreme scale is something nobody can miss. Both Hitler and Speer were intoxicated with it. In Inside the Third Reich, Speer reels off the vital statistics of the world monuments of the past, and states quite unequivocally that he and Hitler were out to beat the record.(10) Beside the proposal for Berlin there was also to be a gigantic new stadium to admit even more people for the Nuremberg rallies, and to provide a venue for the Olympic Games, which were supposed to happen in Germany for ever more.(11)

Understanding the Nazi use of axes and symmetry, some have condemned these as necessarily fascistic devices. Bilateral symmetry does make an axis visible, and axes are inherently hierarchical, but they are widespread in architecture and hardly to be avoided. It can be argued that axiality begins with the first rectangular room, for if it is other than square there is always a long axis and a short axis, and the longer is the more important. If a door is made, the most important position for it is in the centre. These things are transposed directly from our own experience of being in the world in our largely symmetrical bodies. Important things go on the ends of axes: fireplaces, altars, windows, the best painting in the room, father's seat at the head of the table, and of course the leader's desk. The axis gives precedence to the things placed at its culmination, and the things can give precedence to the axis: it is a reciprocal relationship.

The authority of a judge in a law court depends on the occupation of the highest seat on axis, and the spatial layout helps define roles of all other participants. This has to be done clearly and quickly, for they are strangers to each other, and yet are dealing with life-and-death issues on behalf of society. Justice must be seen to be done.

The architectural framing which supports authority can easily lend itself to over-authoritarian abuse. Was this not precisely the case with the Zeppelinfeld and the Nazi proposals for Berlin? These architectural settings played a significant role in substantiating a criminal regime and anaesthetising people's sense of personal responsibility, in making them part of a hysterical and malleable mass. The architecture not only has these associations because of the way it was used: it carries excessively authoritarian implications in itself. As a party member at Nuremburg, you would be carried away by the spectacle of the all-powerful: as a secret dissident, you would find it deeply alienating and threatening. In both cases it achieved its objective. PETER BLUNDELL JONES

1 Edited text of a lecture given for the Twentieth Century Society on 20/1/96 at the symposium Architecture in Uniform, Festival Hall, London.

2 Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes: the short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London 1994.

3 See Krier on Speer, AR February 1983.

4 See Elaine S. Hochman Architects of Fortune:Mies van der Role and the Third Reich.

5 For accounts of nineteenth-century British inventions and reinventions, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The invention of tradition, CUP 1983.

6 Conversely, Moseley's Blackshirts were stopped in this country precisely by forbidding them to wear uniforms in public.

7 See Iain Boyd-Whyte's essay 'Berlin, 1 May 1936' in the Art and Power catalogue, South Bank Centre, 1995, pp43-49.

8 For Speer's own account of his entry into providing the settings for rallies see his Inside the Third Reich, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1970, p26.

9 In their book Death and the Regeneration of Life.

10 See Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp67-68.

11 Ibid, p70.