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Anti-Semitic policy in Albert Speer's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin

Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1996 by Paul B. Jaskot

Berlin was the preeminent building site in National Socialist Germany through the late thirties and into World War II. Its position at the center of state and Party architectural policy was achieved both through Hitler's direct interest in the redesign of the capital and through the centralization and extension of Albert Speer's control over architectural policy as Inspector General of Building for the Reich Capital Berlin (Generalbauinspektor fur die Reichshauptstadt Berlin). Because of the scale of the urban plan, quarries and contractors, architects and bricklayers were all mobilized by Speer's office of the GBI,(1) making his proposals the largest single architectural project in the German building economy. The actual plan, announced publicly on January 28, 1938, included a north-south and east-west axis at the heart of the city, a concentration of subway and train facilities, a redesign of the Konigsplatz, and a major housing program. The north-south axis became the core of the urban design and was meant to function as the main ceremonial boulevard of the new Berlin [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(2) While little of this axis was ever completed, the construction of particular buildings and the actualization of the site as a whole dominated the activity of construction firms and architects in Berlin. Realization of the plan rested on the ability of the GBI to work with every major political, social, and economic institution with interests in the organization of the city.

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The few art historians who have analyzed National Socialist art and architecture have consistently turned to Speer's redesign of Berlin as paradigmatic of the overblown schemes of the Party to project its ideological goals through visual form, to create literally the "word in stone."(3) Scholars have most often emphasized three key components of the Berlin redesign: the massive scale of the plan, the iconography of neoclassical forms, and the choice of materials, above all stone. Alex Scobie, for example, has argued that the scale, materials, and iconography of prestige projects in Berlin were used by Nazi architects and critics to promote an ideological connection to classical political and social institutions.(4) Even Speer, in his memoirs, suggests the parameters that have grounded the art-historical debate:

There was no "Fuehrer style," for all that the party press expatiated on this subject. What was branded as the official architecture of the Reich was only the neoclassicism transmitted by [Paul Ludwig] Troost; it was multiplied, altered, exaggerated, and sometimes distorted to the point of ludicrousness. Hitler appreciated the permanent qualities of the classical style all the more because he thought he had found certain points of relationship between the Dorians and his own Germanic world.(5)

Size, the indestructible nature of stone architecture, and the iconography of neoclassicism: with reference to these categories, the art-historical investigation of Berlin has attempted to analyze the reception and interpretation of Speer's designs by a people and Party subject to extreme ideological mystifications.

When considered in terms of anti-Semitism, this scholarly concern with architectural form in general, and with the urban planning of Berlin in particular, has led to an investigation of the specific Party and state institutions that used architecture to reinforce a connection to a specious racial history or some supposed essence of Germanness.(6) Hence, the destruction of the European Jews has been linked to pseudo-scientific Nazi racial theories as such propaganda was buttressed by art or architectural production and contemporaneous critical response. Yet this interpretive stance, oriented as it is to an interest in the meaning of forms, has avoided the much more brutal connection between architectural history and anti-Semitism. In this essay I propose to study the function of Speer's architectural goals as they were integrated into the creation and implementation of state policy against the Berlin Jews. Certainly, the oppression of the Jews was initially characterized by slurs and stereotypes that were supported by fallacious racial propaganda. But this propaganda was quickly backed up by more concrete tactics that concentrated the Jewish community in Berlin and, after 1941, led to its deportation and murder. To grasp how the decisions made concerning the formal design of a monumental urban plan for Berlin functioned as part of a developing anti-Semitic policy, one must go beyond a generalized account of anti-Semitic ideology and concentrate on the implementation of particular economic and social policies aimed at the Berlin Jewish population.

Specifically, anti-Semitic housing policy (concerned as it was with controlling and then removing the Jewish population) became a focus of key efforts made by Speer to complete the monumental plans for the rebuilding of Berlin.(7) Since the rapid industrialization of Berlin in the late nineteenth century, housing had been a perennial problem and concern of the city's building administration and a factor in every major site plan for monumental architectural projects. Speer was no less preoccupied with the problems of housing than were his predecessors. A lack of suitable housing reached crisis proportions with Speer's attempt to impose a massive urban design on a city that already suffered from an insufficient number of dwellings for the ever-growing industrial working population. Within the context of the housing debate, Speer even interested himself in particular modernist solutions, such as mass-produced housing units. Yet important here is not a stylistic or technical affinity with past administrations, but rather the clear historical distinctions between housing policies in reference to the political uses to which urban planning was put. While the political function of architecture has been a major focus of a critical discussion of, for example, planning in Berlin under Martin Wagner's Weimar Republic administration, an equivalent analysis of National Socialist urban planning has yet to be undertaken.(8) By focusing on the planning and construction process, the interrelationship between Berlin architectural goals and state anti-Semitic policy can be clearly analyzed.

Anti-Semitic policy in Albert Speer's plans for the rebuilding of Berlin

Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1996 by Paul B. Jaskot

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