THE ARCHITECTURE OF OPPRESSION: THE SS, FORCED LABOUR AND THE NAZI MONUMENTAL BUILDING ECONOMY.Paul B. Jaskot. London: Routledge. 2000. [pound]18.99 We have long known that the celebratory architecture of the Third Reich Third Reich Official designation for the Nazi Party's regime in Germany from January 1933 to May 1945. The name reflects Adolf Hitler's conception of his expansionist regime—which he predicted would last 1,000 years—as the presumed successor of the Holy Roman was built by slave labour slave labour, slave labor (US) n → trabajo de esclavos slave labour n → travail m d'esclave; it's just slave labour (fig , but not the gruesome details of how it happened. This book is the result of painstaking research into questions such as how many thousand cubic metres of stone were required for Speer's Nuremberg stands, where it was obtained, who dug it and transported it, how it was accounted for within the bureaucracy of the Nazi regime, what kind of laws were passed to make all this possible, how it was affected by the rivalry between leading Nazi figures and their departments, and so on. It is clear that concentration camps were sited with stone quarrying for particular projects in mind, and that they were run with great brutality, working not only Jews and Communists but also Jehovah's witnesses Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian group originating in the United States at the end of the 19th cent., organized by Charles Taze Russell, whose doctrine centers on the Second Coming of Christ. and prisoners of war prisoners of war, in international law, persons captured by a belligerent while fighting in the military. International law includes rules on the treatment of prisoners of war but extends protection only to combatants. to their deaths. All these people were expendable, mere raw material for the production process, and even the inefficiency of failing to look after them could be disregarded as punishment. The megalomaniac meg·a·lo·ma·ni·a n. 1. A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence. 2. An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions. Hitl er/Speer projects required immense quantities of stone and brick, and despite the war, production went on even as late as 1944, though at reduced scale. Indeed, about a quarter of the stone for Kreis's gigantic Soldier's Hall was actually quarried and delivered to Berlin. This temple to the fallen would have been part of Speer's new Berlin Axis, sited where the Philharmonie now stands. The area was cleared in preparation for it, including of course the convenient expropriation The taking of private property for public use or in the public interest. The taking of U.S. industry situated in a foreign country, by a foreign government. Expropriation is the act of a government taking private property; Eminent Domain is the legal term describing the of Jewish property. Jaskot has done much useful research, and his facts and figures as well as translated extracts from key letters will be of great value to scholars working on the period and on architectural politics more generally. But the book is too repetitive and poorly written to interest the general reader, and its scope is too narrow for it to serve as a general account of the period. It has the pedantic pe·dan·tic adj. Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules: a pedantic attention to details. style of a raw PhD, and the new material could surely have been presented much more concisely. Jaskot has nonetheless put another nail in the coffin of Leon Krier's extraordinary attempt to exonerate the Nazi monuments by removing them from their political context. The intimid ating and oppressive nature of this architecture is reflected quite as much in the way it was procured and built in its style. |
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