Party and State Architecture

Architecture was accorded a prominent position in the Third Reich on the basis of its social function. Its ubiquity made it one of the most effective propaganda instruments that could be deployed in manipulating the masses for nationalist purposes. By creating backdrops for public space, it generated the framework of order and discipline that the National Socialists deemed necessary for their ongoing staging of power and dominion. They had conjured up the idea of the "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft) and architecture formed the dialectical counterpart to members of this community marching in block formation, while conveying the physical experience of authoritarian state power. Given the agenda that informed it, architecture was thus geared not to social needs but to the exercise of social control. In terms of the architectural projects undertaken by the National Socialists, their political ideology and self-understanding were most clearly reflected and directly palpable in the buildings designed for the state and the party: these were obsessively focused on projecting power and overwhelming the emotions. Their development can essentially be broken down into four phases, characterised in each case by different semantic content and varying forms of architectural expression. The first phase, which covers the Nazis’ "period of struggle" (Kampfzeit) in the late 1920s, through to their consolidation of power in 1933, was followed by the years between 1934 and 1936, marked by the search for and establishment of a formal repertoire that could be put to service as a symbolic representation of the future Reich. The third period, stretching from 1937 to 1942, is inextricably linked with the Nazis’ grandiose "redesign plans", in which projects of monstrous proportions were proposed as a primary means of reifying the state’s claim to power. The final phase, from 1943 to 1945, was ultimately defined by the onset of "total war". As the "thousand-year Reich" foundered, its relics manifested as barracks, bunkers and rubble.

Compiled by Wolfgang Schäche, using the research findings of André Deschan; Paul Sigel; Benedikt Goebel and Jörg Rudolph; Rainer Schmitz and Johanna Söhnigen

Translated from the German by Simon Cowper