Speer's gift: not for architecture but rather for set design

beatriz

I find the topic of Albert Speer fascinating and chilling. Years ago I read Gita Sereny's Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. For anyone who feel that abominable things only happen in 'other' places, to 'other' people, and is done by dislikeable people (not like 'us'), well, Sereny's book may challenge that perception—a must read in my view.
The following article is about another book, one that I haven't read yet and which it also sounds important.

Dear Catastrophe Architect
By Benjamin Tiven, Bidoun, Issue 11, Summer 2007

I have never believed the innovators who maintain that pillars and portals are no longer permissible.

-Albert Speer, from Spandau: The Secret Diaries

During his 1946 Nuremberg trial for war crimes, Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and minister of armaments, gave calm, rational testimony that hinted at remorse. He claimed that Nazi Germany's vast apparatus of genocide had been largely unknown to him; he had simply done what... (...)

In an essay on Hitler's architecture, Speer once wrote, "My buildings were intended, as I specified in 1936, not only to express the nature of our movement. I went beyond that. They were to be a part of the movement themselves." And sure enough, Speer's buildings embodied the jumbled, confused, self-contradictory, and even self-hating relationship with modernity that National Socialism espoused. He ultimately came to feel that his greatest contribution to the Nazi regime wasn't architecture at all, but rather his plan for the 1934 Nuremberg Party Congress. It was Speer who visually coordinated the columns of marching soldiers, and Speer who turned the imposing array of aircraft searchlights toward the night sky, what became known as the "cathedral of light." The outdoor rally was so mediagenic that it became the centerpiece for Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will.

Speer's greatest gift, it turned out, was not for architecture, but rather for set design. He imagined radical possibilities for the visual presentation of power: the style and placement of Hitler's rostrum, the endless repetition of the Nazi flag, the parade routes that moved motorcades of politicians through vividly symbolic scenery. Nazism had a whole host of mythologies, public rituals, and invented traditions that had to be playacted at elaborate social gatherings. The historian Peter Fritzsche explains that the Nazis created a parallel world for their citizens: "Amidst a familiar universe of stable links to family, region, and social milieu, the Nazis constructed a second world out of a network of organizations in which the traditional criteria of social worth and social placement had no validity." Seen in this light, Speer's work makes a different kind of sense. He was to build the scenic backdrop for a fascist dreamworld, stage managing the theatrics of social control among set pieces he had specially designed.

As it happens, the idiom of fascist architecture is actually quite generic. During the 1930s, the style known as "stripped classicism" (or "modernized antique") was as popular with the Works Progress Administration as it was in greater Europe. Paul Cret employed Speer's beloved large-scale Doric motifs for his United States Federal Reserve Board building in 1937....(...)

Continue reading: Biduon, http://www.bidoun.com/issues/issue_11/08_all.html#article