Advertisement
Nürnberg was the emotional heartland for National Socialism. A city for nearly a thousand years when it was adopted by Hitler and his movement as its spiritual home, Nürnberg has been a center of culture, commerce, and imperial power for most of its history.
Designated by Hitler as the ‘world capital of Germania,’ architect Albert Speer designed and began construction on the 2700 acre Nazi Party Rally Grounds in the southeast corner of historic Nürnberg. Incorporating several existing structures, Speer set out to raise additional monumental structures to create a grand stage on which to enact the ‘morality play’ of German superiority under the leadership of the National Socialists. None of the intended structures were ever completed (a metaphor for the entire National Socialist program?).
Today most of what existed at the end of the war has been destroyed or repurposed, as park land, a residential development, a venue for rock concerts, or the site of an annual folk arts festival (an event that goes back to the early years of the 19th century). Perhaps the most striking reuse is of the
Kongresshalle. Conceived as a meeting place for annual gatherings of the Party apparatus, the horseshoe-shaped building was designed to seat 50,000 people and contained smaller, but still monumental, reception rooms and functional space intended for meetings and offices. The grand building at the southern end of the “u” now houses the Nürnberg Symphony Orchestra. The main auditorium remains unfinished and roofless, although still impressive at 125’ tall. It draws obvious inspiration from the Roman Coliseum. The building on the other end, houses the Dokuzentrum, a major source of information and education about National Socialism and its program, and its impact on Germany, its victims, and the world at large.
The
Dokuzentrum is a striking building architecturally. It is a large stone-faced block in the monumental, Art Deco style adopted by the National Socialists. A very long glass-and-steel rectangular walkway pierces the original structure diagonally, from one corner, above the entrance, to the opposite upper corner, overlooking the unfinished congress auditorium. The interior design motif is harshly industrial, lots of steel plates, girders, and rivets, and exposed, rough brick walls.
The permanent exhibit provides an exhaustive description and documentation of the step-by-step development and expansion of the National Socialist party and the incremental but rapid imposition of Nazi policies and practices in all aspects of German life. It also catelogues the rapid criminalization of dissent, initiative, and difference. Hitler was named Chancellor in January of 1933. Dachau was opened as a concentration camp (KL in the mind-boggling list of Nazi abbreviations and acronyms) in March. Particularly affecting was an installation commissioned on the occasion of an important anniversary of the
Deutsche Bahn, the German national rail service, to recognize the enabling role of the railways in the Nazi program of conquest and racial extermination. The exhibit consists of two parallel lines of white neon lights representing train tracks laid over 50,000 circular cards containing names of individuals who met their deaths in the camps served by the German railways. It was and remains a haunting image.
I was struck again by pervasive bureaucratization as the National Socialist
modus operandi. Each policy, each decision, and each tightening of restrictions was an incremental intensification of the preceding one. Officials followed the internal logic of the foundational legislation or ruling. And each functionary was responsible for following procedures.
As we learned in Kraków, the Jews were forced to depart the city because the German leadership, who had confiscated apartments and houses, were having to encounter those Jews on a daily basis coming to and from their homes, going to and from work. This was considered a threat to the purity of the National Socialist ideal, and a hazard (because of the contagion associated with being Jewish). It was also obviously something that could have been anticipated. The bureaucratic solution was NOT to reassign the Germans, but to expel the offending Jews from homes they had occupied for years if not generations.
Redefining the presence in their midst of Romani or Jews as a public health problem paved the way for isolation and exclusion. Officials enforcing sanitary regulations or licensing requirements need not believe in the Nazi ideology, merely ‘law and order’. It could be left to the true believers and the antisocial to do the difficult, ugly or dangerous work.
It left me wondering how difficult it would be for American administration inclined to racism or nativism to enlist the efforts of clerks, inspectors, police officers, court officials in the work of promoting good hygiene and public safety as the political leadership defined them. People were just doing their jobs, jobs they were glad to have after the horrific hardships and dislocation of the post-World War 1 era. The angry anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, racist rhetoric of our current political environment contains frightening echoes of the scape-goating harangues of Germany in the 1930s.
I also found myself wondering about the dynamics of remembering and forgetting as exemplified by the Dokuzentrum on one hand, and the repurposing of the
Luitpold arena or the
Große Straße, the Great Road, on the other.
Obviously, leaving valuable or desireable land ‘fallow’ because of its associations with the Nazi past perpetuates in some ways their domination. Converting too quickly or without thought about whatever may have gone on there could ‘erase’ important reminders without which the past could become all too easy to repeat. We learned that one developer had proposed turning the Kongresshalle into a shopping mall.
The German nation, at least in the cities we visited, appears to have made a real commitment to owning and passing on the specifics as well as the generalities of their National Socialist period. We saw memorials and “documentation centers” in Munich, Nürnberg, and Berlin, and numerous school groups everywhere we went. Frankly, it stands in stark contrast to our own, American, eagerness to move on, to deny those stories and episodes that challenge or undermine the grand narrative that many of us prefer, of America’s unique, unbroken heritage of freedom and opportunity. The virtual stranglehold of the ideology of American exceptionalism makes an open discussion of the contradictions and convolutions that punctuate US history politically impossible. Knowing what to preserve and what to reclaim seems a very tricky kind of thing. I am pretty sure it is too big a question to begin to sort out in our brief, whirlwind tour of this part of Europe.
Hannah’s and my disappointment at not being able to stand on Hitler’s rostrum and conjure up scenes from Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” by staring down the
Große Straße is our problem. How we learn from the past is a task we all share.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.083s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0518s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
BRian
non-member comment
Nurnberg
I am just reading (thanks to your influence) the early part of Shirer, recording the first Nazi events in Nürnberg. So this adds some visuals to my imagination, thanks. I like the way you put the tension between remembering and healing-- there is a time after which remembering is re-wounding, unless it involves some transformation by art or philosophy or prayer. There's then always the temptation to forget the real stuff that lies behind the transform -- I think Germans in many ways have tried to keep that balance. Bureaucracy-- I really don't think I understand it as an element of modernity. It is such a powerful feature of our institutional life. John Ralston Saul argues that there's a deep relationship between the ideal of the "Hero who will fix things for us" and the deepening power of expertise, which can shape and re-define what is important (and what can be hidden). Scary, and I am aware of how hard it is to imagine a different way of running a modern society.