National Socialism, Classicism, and Architecture

chapter 15 National Socialism, Classicism, and Architecture Iain Boyd Whyte The strong links between National Socialism in Germany and architecture are well known. Adolf Hitler was an architect manqué who had failed in his ambition to study at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, and had found compensation in the years immediately preceding World War i in mak- ing watercolor paintings of the buildings and cityscapes that he admired in Vienna and Munich. There is even an unconfirmed suggestion that he worked for some months as an architectural draughtsman in the office of OttoWagner’s pupil Max Fabiani.1 Looking back in 1924, he recalled that: “For hours and hours I could stand in wonderment before the Opera and the Parliament. The whole Ringstraße had a magic effect on me, as if it were a scene from the Thousand- and-one Nights.”2 These words were written while Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg Prison in Bavaria after his conviction for the part he played in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich the previous year. As a metaphor for power and for realigning the world according to his own vision, architecture preoccupied Hitler’s thoughts. In Mein Kampf, the call to arms that Hitler published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, he bemoaned the lack of great public buildings in the modern city, buildings like temples, cathedrals, or guildhalls that had sym- bolized their epoch. If a similar fate should befall Berlin as befell Rome, future generations might gaze upon the ruins of some Jewish department stores or joint- stock hotels and think that these were the characteristic expressions of the culture of our time. In Berlin itself, compare the shameful dispropor- tion between the buildings which belong to the Reich and those which have been erected for the accommodation of trade and finance.3 To illustrate what form these missing monuments might take, Hitler produced drawings of domed halls and grand arches during his incarceration, which, 1 See Schwarz (2011), 63 and Hamann (1996), 282. 2 Hitler (1925/1926), 28. 3 Hitler (1925/1926), 230. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004299061_016 national socialism, classicism, and architecture 405 figure 15.1 Fritz Erler, Portrait of Adolf Hitler, 1939 ullstein bild in time, would be incorporated into Albert Speer’s plans for the rebuilding of Berlin. Once installed as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, the role of the politi- cal leader and that of the architect became conflated, and the metaphor of Hitler as the architect of the Third Reich was endlessly repeated. The painter Fritz Erler, for example, portrayed Hitler against the backdrop of the newly- completed Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich, with a stonemason’s hammer and measure at his feet (Figure 15.1). In print, too, he was hailed as the builder of the new German state. In a book on the great Prus- sian architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, published in 1943, we read that:.

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