Interpreting Nazi Architecture: The Case of Albert Speer

Architectural Histories, 2018

Albert Speer (1905–1981) undoubtedly occupies a special position in architectural history; his biography differs from that of all other 20th-century architects. The importance we attribute to him today is due not primarily to his work as an architect but to his role as one of the leading protagonists of the National Socialist regime, about which he spoke as a firsthand witness after World War II. The new, comprehensive, modestly illustrated biography Albert Speer. Eine deutsche Karriere, is by Magnus Brechtken, the deputy director of the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte and a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. Magnus Brechtken has produced a superbly researched and brilliantly written biography. Thanks to intensive use of archival material, he not only succeeds in unmasking the remaining myths about Albert Speer, but also in deconstructing the disastrous influence of the Speer memoirs and biographies. One can only hope that more architectural historians will follow Brechtken’s methodological example and pursue a similarly critical approach. He sets standards not only for critically investigating an architect’s life and work from a contemporary ‘Täterforschung’ perspective; his biography also is an important lesson in critically revising architectural history, especially oral history, by scrutinizing memoirs and self-portrayals.

SCROOPE: Cambridge Architecture Journal, 2017

Furtively scribbled down on anything that he could find to write on, including tobacco wrappers, toilet paper, calendar pages and cardboard packaging, the former Nazi armaments minister and architect Albert Speer smuggled 25,000 diary notes out of his tiny cell in Spandau Prison over the 20 years that he served there in solitary confinement for crimes against humanity. Published later as Spandau Diaries, Speer charts what seems to be a calculated course between the rhetorical device of apologia, in which a person seeks to clarify and defend their conduct against an accusation in order to earn vindication and regain acceptance, and its counter, apology, as a regretful acknowledgement of wrongdoing. This essay extracts for discussion some of the entries that particularly address concerns central to architecture. And it pairs these with a close analysis of one of Albert Speer’s diminutive and apparently inconsequential buildings—his own Atelierhaus [studio-house] built at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps in 1938. Proposing to be local, the small building with a steep gable roof evidently sought to be simultaneously the modest embodiment of traditional building practice, and its superior architectural apotheosis. There is a removed, designerly clarity to the geometric armature of the architecture that discloses a desire to ‘clean up’ and reify a deep tradition of building, serving as a didactic architectural demonstration. The section is divided into three strata. The lowest ‘classical’ stratum communicates with the earth. The walls are raw stone, and the ceiling is composed of four shallow masonry vaults. The uppermost ‘gothic’ stratum is the domain of timber. The white-washed ‘modern’ middle stratum hosts Speer’s drafting room that is demonstrably open to the landscape. What is unsettling is that the kinds of decisions about the design of the Atelierhaus that Speer made over the drafting board, such as the play of modules in the plan and section drawing, are the kinds of decisions that architects regularly make. It is rather the nearness of some aspects of his thought to his peers than the remoteness of others that is disturbing.

1973

Skilled stonemasons and stonecarvers are now difficult to find, and there are few books in print on these hard crafts. The Stones of the Vienna Ring, subtitled Their Technological and Artistic Significance, is an extraordinary volume.

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM, 2014

Book review of Léon Krier’s "Albert Speer. Architecture 1932–1942" Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 38(3), p. 210-212

Springer series in design and innovation, 2022

For Albert Speer, official architect of the Third Reich, the graphical representation of architecture played an important role, more than was normal in his profession. A series of early sketches exchanged with Adolf Hitler have been preserved as witnesses to the architectural debates between them, forerunners of major projects implemented by armies of technicians at his service. Moreover, the dictator and the architect shared another unique interest, a nostalgic attraction for paintings and engravings depicting ruins of the great ancient empires. This peculiar interest gradually became an obsession as to how the ruins of the works they were building would be seen in the future. This is like the funeral arrangements for a baby being established before it has even been born. This fixation resulted in idealised perspectives, commissioned by the architect during the construction of the works, and in other clandestine drawings produced during his captivity in Spandau prison. The text specifically analyses the role of graphical representation in the concept of the perception of future ruins through artistic references from the past, reflections written in his memoirs and drawings by Speer himself. Although his architectural and urban development work has been extensively analysed, his drawings have not aroused much interest, despite their importance to him. This activity also allowed him, during the twenty years he spent in prison, to record and summarise his memories and lost dreams on paper.

has a twofold purpose. First, by comparing some aspects of the lives and works of Ernst May and Albert Speer, it illuminates the special experience of architects in power in the twentieth century. Throughout history, architects have had a greater need for wealthy patrons than have other artists because of the great expense of buildings. And government buildings, because of their size and visibility, have always been the most attractive of commissions. Thus, architects have always been involved to some extent in politics, and have nearly always sought positions of power and influence. But never before the twentieth century, when the scale of government building has often transformed architecture into planning, and the relative democratization of politics has vastly increased the size of the audience, has the need for power among architects been so great. Both May and Speer held positions of authority which enabled them to make decisions as planners and as architects. Both were strongly supported by powerful patrons, but both also had to deal with the realities of politics and public opinion in a democratic, or at least a populist, era. I have written before about the work of both men, but have never attempted a direct comparison in order to examine the phenomenon of the architect in power.1 A second purpose is methodological. In the process of explaining the goals of their work to their patrons and to the public, May and Speer often made statements which were not entirely true. They described themselves as creators of an architecture Barbara Miller Lane is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Growth and Structure of Cities Program at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., i968; new ed. i985). This article is dedicated to Franklin Lewis Ford, teacher and friend, on his sixty-fifth birthday. (? i986 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. I Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., i968; new ed. i985); idem, "Albert Speer," Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects (New York, i982), IV, II 5-I i6.

word count: 296 words Essay word count (excluding headings and bibliography): 3,999 words Abstract: (296 words) This extended essay investigates the question, 'Art and architecture, which was more effective in propagating Nazi ideology in Germany?' The essay begins by outlining the criteria of effectiveness so that art and architecture can by assessed by their effectiveness of propagating these ideals. Next, the essay comments on the specific elements of how Nazi art were used as a propagandistic tool. The factors that will be discussed are how art targeted the mass audience, censorship in art, Hitler's disapproval of Degenerate art and Degenerate Art exhibition. Each section will offer a careful analysis as it relates to the effectiveness of art as a promulgation of Nazi ideologies. The next section focuses on the crucial role of architecture as a propagandistic tool for the dissemination of Nazi ideology. The essay then continues to comment on how the Nazi used different architectural constructions to promote different Nazi ideologies and assess its effectiveness.

The debate surrounding the relation between Hitler’s interest in architectural neo-classicism and his reception of antiquity has often proceeded from the assumption of a deep nostalgia for a (deeply mythicised) classical ‘Aryan’ past and an instinctive drive to use anti-modernist art for solely propagandistic ends. Whereas some have attempted to invert this causal relationship, the present study situates Hitler’s artistic passion within his ‘biopolitical’ vision of the new Germany, cleansed of all that was deemed degenerate (entartet) and unassimilable within the national community (gemeinschaftsunfähig). Through an analysis of the Third Reich’s vast civic building programmes, which takes into account Hitler’s personal discourse on the ancient past, we will show how both elements, that is Hitler’s ‘modernised’ neo-classicism and his view on antiquity, can be seen as essentially complementary, and integral to his political programme. We will do so by firstly presenting an overview of the most typical examples of Hitler and Nazism’s use of an idiosyncratic version of neo-classically inspired civic architecture. After this we will focus on the Führer’s ‘artistic’ persona, both in the sense of his love for the arts, especially those referring to the formal language of antiquity, as in the sense of his biopolitical conception of Nazi life as a ‘work of art in progress’. Finally, Hitler’s vision of artistic renaissance is located within a discourse of racial renewal which embraced the past and future within a this-worldly ‘eternity’.