ADOLPH HITLER, CHARISMA AND TOTALITARIAN ARCHITECTURE

EDWARD W. WOLNER Ball State University

To my knowledge, no English-language studies of the monumental and the standard, the copious and [the] Nazi architecture in the 1930s examine the relations grandiose." These tendencies in Wagner's work reflected between Adolph Hitler's charismatic leadership and his many social,political and artistic transformations of literally building projects. In both the fascist and totalitarian epic scope, such as the industrial revolution, the phases of Hitler's Germany, architectural projects development of nation-states, the modern novel's embodied the features that Max Weber ascribed to the comprehensive views of human nature and human history charismatic leader: His visionary sense of mission, his - particularly those in Toistoy's War and Peace and legitimation not through any public office but by Balzac'svoluminousHuman Comedy - and the romantic extraordinary acts in crisis and war, and his rejection of phase of opera itself, which in last century often focused constitutional process, rational economic conduct, and on the mythic origins of the community or the nation- bureaucratic control. state, the subject for which Wagner's works were in Thomas Mann's 1933 essay, "The Sufferings and Mann's view the century's supreme elaboration. In this Greatness of Richard Wagner," analyzes how Wagner regard the novelist cites composer's techniques of typified major tendencies in nineteenth-century European "deliberate and splendid longwindedness," his highly Komanticism. Without direct or indirect references to orotund musical structures, and his insistence "on saying Adolph Hitler himself, the essay's core ideas nevertheless a thing until in desperation one believes it." These illuminate just how stronglyrooted Hitlerwasin the same rhetorical tendencies were an integral part of the century's tendencies. As such, Ipropose that Mann's essay provides various Romantic genres, as works by such writers as a framework for understanding Hitler's political charisma John Kuskin and William Morris attest, to cite only English and his attempts to make architecture serve and amplify prose examples. it. The reconstruction of a nation-state crippled by One qualification. I think that the film and book World War I was, of course, the task Hitler assigned versions of Schindler's List, and the increasingly detailed himself. Less obviously, the rhetorical Germany he documentation of Nazi horrors and German collaboration constructed in speeches, actions and programs was in recent scholarship and in the archives of the Holocaust literally epic in scope and depended for its appeal on Memorial Museum in Washington, DC have not only feelings of an intensity aroused in the arts only by opera. failed to remove Hitler from the historically This is the art form which most fi~llyexalts the power of incomprehensible world of the monster but, ironically, the elemental emotions: love, hate, terror and ecstasy in hare actually lodged him more securely within it. Perhaps all their mythical amplitude. It was the license that fascist a mature study of the subject Ipropose - developed well oratory gave to the expression of these emotions, all of beyond the framework I present here - might by one which lie outside the realm of polite or circumspect small increment help ground this mythically evil figure a political discourse, that provided the orator with that full little more firmly in German and European cultural history. range of feeling which alone releases the incantatory I emphasize that this paper can only outline a framework power of the charismatic voice. or part of a framework, since fill1treatment of the subject Mann also emphasized Wagnerian opera's integration requires amuch lengthier analysis than a brief presentation of mythic amplitude and psychological acuity. Often allows, and much more labor than I, who am at this point considered in the 20th century to be incompatible with no more than a dilettante-scholar on the subject, have yet one another, these qualities regularly appeared in the given it. Two other caveats: First, in linking Hitler's work of such representative 19th-century<ural figures charisma to 19th century Romanticism, I have nointention as Friederich Neitzche, Hendrik Ibsen, Soren Kirgegaard of making kchard Wagner's artistic achievements into a and Walt Whitman. Hitler's own capacity to connect proto-Nazi manifesto; second, the paper assumes that the these two opposed states was evident from the twenties audience is familiar with the more spectacular parts of through the mid-thirties in his successful multiplication Hitler's building programs and Leni Riefenstahl's films. of the number of groups who supported him. With The starting pcint in Mann's essay is how Richard increasing skill Hitler systematically exploited the Wagner's operas embodied the 19th century taste "for grievances and injuries, real or imagined, of masses of Germans: The country's thousands of unemployed the annual rallies; ritual gestures of solidarity and martial veterans, its farmers made poor by steep declines in crop discipline like the goosestep, the straight-arm salute, and prices during the twenties, its industrialists wary of any throngs of civilians waving arms; the ritual regalia and the political program that would inhibit market conditions operatic spectacle of flags, banners, batons and scepters, favorable to them, and the multitudes humiliated or of hierarchically coded uniforms and vestments in various angered by the Versailles reparations, pained by the two styles and colors for the different military and civilian million soldiers who died in World War I. and fearful of groups building the new state; ritual consecration and the social disorder associated with democratic rededication through the operatic din of streetside and modernization, socialist revolution, and the modernist stadium cheering, through the recitative interludes of art and architecture directly related to these developments. anonymous soldiers, through the choral apostrophes of That is, much of what gave Hitler's speech its party leaders articulating a ruthless doxology of the state, charismatic force depended on its oscillation between through the charismatic arias of a self-anointed,Luciferian the two oratorical poles where Wagner's operas displayed pseudo-prophet founding and leading an unholy order; so much facility, poles that Hitler made central to the and, finally, an architecture demanded by the ritual political rhetoric of modern fascism. Psychologically, programs, building projects that quickly resulted in the Hitler was among the first modern practitioners of that operatic super-grandiloquence of colossal stadia, assembly politics of mass resentments which both Neitzche and halls, ministerial palaces, urban axes, parade gro~unds, Kirkegaard, before the turn of the century and and the exalted folk vernacular of the medieval German independently of one another, had predicted would city and "timeless"agrarian culture. In Hitler's rhetorical characterize modern political life. Mythically, Hitler seizure of absolute political power he displaced ritual sought to unify a nation by creating purified images of affirmation into quasi-operatic exaltations. German's past and future, images often based on certain And he did so by constructing a fiction of the state as kinds of aichitecture and summed up oratorically by a a total w-ork of art. The movement and color of urban tribal nationalism in which visionary leadership would pageantry, the size and extraordinary nature of the built redeem a nation from the discontents of contemporary and unbuilt projects, the aural plenitude of music and life. In effect, Hitler brutalized the subtleties and greatly speech and cheering crowds, and the massedparticipation overextended several of the themes Mann placed at the of thousands constituted more than the traditional center of Wagnerian opera, with its emphasis on heroic demonstration of extraordinary leadership by the leadership, on communal redemption, and on what Mann charismatic individual. Hitler gave to this den~onstration phrases as "the glorification of the slain and [the] a uniquely modern rhetorical power through the first martyrized and [the] fallen." fully systematic political use of the modern mass media, How did Hitler do this? And what did his techniques new machines which were collectively available for the have to do with his charismatic appeal and his building first time only in the postwar period. Hence, the aural programs? The answers to these questions bear on immediacy of radio's magnification of the voice inside bpera's inherent constitution as a total work of art, on the listener's brain, the triumphant camera angles in the how Hitler exploited in particularly modern ways both an newsreel, the pseudo-documentary film and the historicist architectural ideology and the traditional idea photographic essay in magazines and newspapers; the of the total work of art. Mann thought that the sequence automobile and motorcycle in motorcades of of Wagner's operas culminating in Parsifal dramatized unprecedented mobility. The coordinated use of these "the secret longing and ultimate ambition of all theater - novel machines gave Hitler an omnipresence that to return to the bosom of the ritual out of which it sprang immeasurably reinforced the omniscient aura in which in both the pagan and the Christian world. The art of the he sought to envelop his regime. theatre is already baroque, it is [metaphorical] Catholicism, It is striking that in his major propaganda campaigns it is the church ..." Mann did not say so, but the more Hitler rarely failed to couple modern mass media to elaborate the ritual, the more it requires a physical architecture's traditional rhetorical power. Even the environment defined by the total work of art, for nothing blind medium of radio often depended on the architectural less thanit seems appropriate to ritual's timeless, totalizing enhancement of the leader's speech and the cheering and mythic dimensions, in which everything as-it-always- crowds as their voices rang out against the steep buildings was merges with everything as-it-always-will-be,in which and echoing streets, or the stone steps of the centuries- people seek redemption by stopping the flow of history old building type of the imperial reviewing stand. Although itself. subsequent experience with modern media revealed a That is, Hitler undertook a task that Walter Benjamin rhetorical potency so formidable that it substantially actually understated when he referred to fascism's diminished the communicative power of architecture "aestheticization of politics." At the annual Nuremburg itself, the thirties were a transitional period in which party rallies, in Leni Reifenstahl's films on the 1934 party these media and the traditional medium of architecture congress and the 1936 Olympiad, in widely distributed mutually reinforced their distinct powers of persuasion, newsreels and radio broadcasts, in magazine and with the result that together they heightened Hitler's newspaper photography and reportage, and in the charismatic appeal to a degree that either of them alone regime's extensive plans for new building projects, Hitler could not. hybridized features common to religious ritual, the total In these ways, Hitler conscripted for demagogic work of art and opera. These features include: the politics the core idea of both ritual and opera, the total orchestration of multitudes for the ritual processions at work of art not simply as the fu~lfillmentof all artistic desire but of all human yearning that finally matters. functioned as the indispensable frames for the animated Using modern media to multiply the number and impact middle ground of militan- and civilian multitudes, who in of his public appearances through their repeated replay turn served as the backdrop to the Fuhrer's movements at the different locations in a comprehensive distribution across these interlocked stages. system, Hitler transferred into the reality of political time Where architecture at its most profound aspires to and space the shifts in physical and temporal locales unify people and space in n transcendent whole that is formerly available only within the omniscient points of communicated even when such buildings are empty, the view adopted by opera composers and creators of other power of scenography lies solely in background types of fiction. conditions, which become meaningful or galvanic or Pulling out all stops in both modern and traditional spectacular only when the sets are in use. In the work of means of communication, and projecting buildings that Hitler and Speer, and in the various media through which would outdo in size, magnificence and longevity Roman they recycled their designs to multiply Hitler's movements imperial and Napoleonic architectural achievements, and appearances, we have the entirely choreographic. Hitler sought to achieve an exponential amplification of scenographic and pagan equivalent of the total work of what Mann identified as Wagnerian opera's "density of art. Where each of the component parts of Wagner's mythological atmosphere,"and its "immediate,complete opera communicated something rank and lawless th:~t communication to the senses of everything that was to be finally disappeared when blended into the noble whole, said. " Programmatically, Hitler's communal pageantry both the component parts and the cornplcte ensemble in exploited operatic sublimih by emphasizingpure national Hitler's totalizing scenography communicated an origins, the redemptive power of violence, the cult of the expanding lawlessness, in which the architectural supreme leader, the arrival of the new fascist man, the disregard of classical proportions and a mo~unting promulgation of a 1000-year Reich signified most obsession with greater than colossal scale corresponded dramatically by the unbuilt Nuremburg andBerlinprojects, with unusual precision to the leader's ongoing arrogation and Albert Speer's theory of ruin value, intended to to himself of the power and authority normally conferred prolong memory of the Reich into the millennia beyond only through constitutionally sanctioned offices. its first thousand years. In the figure of Kundry in Parsifnl, Mann recognized Mann maintained that each of the component parts the dramatic power in Wagner's creation of the "ucr.orld- of Wagner's operas - the words considered as free- demonic female,"the "Rose of Hell" who as the instrument standing poetry, the libretti as song unaccompanied by of evil contends with the opera's major and lesser agents the orchestra, the instrumental music heard by itself - of salvation. She exhibits the Romantic fascination with "breathe[s] something rank and lawless that disappears infernal soul-states, morbid psychology, and extravagant only when [it] blend[s] into the noble whole." The appeals to the primitive parts of brain. The several such operas, Mann continued, have "something majestically antagonists in Wagnerian opera - females whose "lofty and sovereignly inept, side by side with such passages of hysteria" is expressed in somnambulistic, mesmeric, and absolute genius, power, compression, primeval beauty, ecstatic states - exhibit what Mann characterizes as "an as disarm all doubt. " odd, uncanny modernity in their heroics." Hitler is their As architecture, of course, the Berlin and Nuremburg perverse cultural descendent, the world-demonic male projects never achieved the power of great architecture, who usurps and distorts into a malevolent charisma the which, as in the Roman Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia, role of the morally unassailable Wagnerian hero typified profoundly impress upon believers and unbelievers alike by Parsifal, whom Mann described as "[the] free man, a higher order of existence to which even the most [the] breaker of tablets and [the] renovator of broken powerful representatives of the cultures that produced society." these buildings willingly subordinated themselves. Even From 1934 onward Hitler built a totalitarian state. In when densely peopled for civilian or religious ceremonies Hannah Arendt's analysis in her Origins of these buildings did not recede into the background; Totalitaria~zism,front organizations, the party itself, and rather, the building enveloped its ceremonial population elite militasy units constn~cteda fictional state whose in a physical subordination to a metaphysical reality, the logic, consistency, and organizational efficacy competed people acting out the beliefs embodied even more with and redeemed the confi~sions,inconsiste~icies and vividly in the architecture itself. humiliations of everyday life. Uniformly dismissed by In contrast, the Chancellory balcony, the Nuremburg architectural historians as banal or megalomaniacal, the reviewing stand and parade ground, the searchlight distortions in classical scale, form, proportion and detail "Cathedral of Ice," and the Nuremburg's bannered in later Nazi building programs expressed exactly this medieval buildings were scenographic excess imported imperative to establish a totalitarian counter-reality Thus, from the opera stage, inflated from two to three the fanatical precision, martial repetition and classical dimensions, and greatly jumped up in scale to intensifi stasis in Hitler's unbuilt Berlin and iYuremburg projects one thing -only, the leader's charismatic presence, the not only appealed to the industrial elite and others model for which is perhaps that of a pagan god. Beyond necessary to support the Nazi war machine; the projects a certain cold rigidity, these designs communicated little were also intended to sustain the loyalty of the front or nothing when empty. Once in use, however, they, organizations, the party membership, the elite military unlike the all-envelopingPantheon or Hagia Sophia,ceased units, and the general populace, to extend Hitler's to be in the foreground or at the center of attention, charismatic reach. becoming instead visually powerful backgrounds that Most important, these projects were physically represented what Hitler inMein Kampf called the "living .ascrewingup his ianguage to the highest pitch and then organization" of a movement, in contrast with the "dead unconsciously seeking ever stronger and more intense mechanism" of a bureaucratic party They embodied the situations to go with them," Hitler and Speer's most trajectory of Hitler's own career, in which an ordinary hyper-grandiose designs approached a politically apt human being transformed himself in a series of economic, Burkean sublime that mixed awe with fear or even terror. political and personal crises and was now using Reaching for a charismatic power specific to totalitarian architecture among other tools to help precipitate a control, the impossible scale of these projects - as Speer commensurate transformation in followers, to create a belatedly discovered some years later in Spandau Prison new communal identity out of the ashes of a damaged -would have reduced Hitler, even in his most impressive state. Just as Wagner, in Mann's view, was continuously oratorical performance, to a charisnxitic or visual nullity.