Walking tour: post-Nazi Munich

The Nazi party was founded in Munich, grew into a mass party there, and kept its headquarters there after it took over the German government in 1933. Architecture and aesthetics were deeply important to the fascists--fascism consisted in them--and the dictatorship had big plans to re-make Munich, but never broke ground on the most ambitious of them. They did, however, build a number of buildings in Munich, many of which survived the war and are still in use today.

What's fascist architecture all about? Are these buildings evil? How do people negotiate the past as they use these buildings?

I went on a walking tour to check it out, with the help of this website along with this book.

First stop: The former House of German Art (Haus der Kunst). Convinced of the need to revitalize German art, by which he meant to get rid of Jewish artists, modern art, and expressionism, Hitler commissioned this museum with much fan fare. Across the street, a temporary exhibition of what the Nazis labeled "degenerate art" (including works by the greats of German expressionism) drew far more spectators than the Nazi-approved art in the Haus der Kunst. Today, it's still a museum, but it purports to display the art that the Nazis tried to suppress.

Above: the doors on the side of the Haus der Kunst. Creepy, huh? The building isn't in great shape right now. When it opened, the stone (granite?) was bright white, and its facade dominated the view from the street (they've let the trees grow up in front of the main facade.)
Above: The Führerbau or Führer building, a major Nazi Party administrative building containing an office and living quarters for Hitler. An integral part of its design was the giant eagle and swastika above its portico, which, like similar garnishes on other buildings, was removed, likely by the U.S. army that occupied Munich. Can you see the spot where the eagle used to be?

Another party administrative building across the street from the Führer building. Although they were built well before the war, a tunnel and air raid shelter connected them. A lot of the building materials for Nazi construction were quarried by concentration camp prisoners in brutal and often fatal work conditions.

These two Party administrative buildings above face a central square that saw the most extensive fascist architectural makeover of any spot in Munich. Here they built two "honor temples" to house the coffins of the Party members killed in the Beer Hall Putsch. The "honor temples" saw an annual pageant commemorating the putsch and expressing fascist aesthetics. Here's a link to see the whole plaza (the gate in the foreground pre-existed the fascist construction.) The U.S. army tore down the "honor temples" and re-buried the putschers.


Above: a party office building, now a Bavarian government office building. Here they just took down the swastika and left up the eagle (the swastika was inside the wreath that the eagle is holding in its talons.)


Above: a fountain that's pretty much the same today as when built. German fascist sculpture can be tough to spot because it's so banal, but you can often spot it because it tends to depict the beautiful, naked male body instead of the female body. The statues I find slightly silly, unlike the buildings. There are a bunch lying around in overgrown Berlin parks, half-forgotten. (Or maybe not forgotten. There's one I used to pass a lot that someone spray painted a message on. The message was, 'this is a Nazi statue.' I wouldn't have known otherwise because it is a statue of a fat baby and a basket of flowers.)

So what's it all about?

One thing that interests me about these buildings is that they're not over the top or campy, at all. Moreover, they seem to have succeeded, in that they express a unique and fascist aesthetic that's about monumentality, a lot of stone and right angles, and a kind of modernist spin on greco-roman tropes (like the square columns).

I feel like they have a dwarfing affect on the viewer. You feel unimportant, and the building doesn't compensate for its monumentality by offering charming ornamentation or beauty. But is that me reading into it? Fascism was all about subverting the individual to the state/nation.

Also, they creep the heck out of me! I sort of can't believe that people go to work in them every day.

What do you think?