The book's cover displays a familiar image of the Nazi era: Adolf Hitler carefully inspects a grandiose architectural model. And yet, Building Nazi Germany contains much more than first meets the eye, for the book incorporates over 130 images of diverse government construction projects ranging from the monumental to the mundane. These photographs, maps, and illustrations reflect the book's broad coverage as well as its scholarly contribution. Joshua Hagen and Robert Ostergren explore the immediately recognizable elements of Nazi architecture, but they also disrupt this iconography by offering a more comprehensive visualization of the regime's building efforts. Ultimately, the authors show how projects differed in substance, scale, and level of completion yet were nevertheless connected in unexpected ways.
The synthetic approach is critical for the authors’ positioning of the book as a work of geography more so than architectural history. Hagen and Ostergren do not focus on one particular site, architect, or project type but rather aim for an overview of the “extent, variety, and cumulative effects of the Nazi building program” (xi). They argue that the wide-ranging projects aimed for a “comprehensive spatial reordering” of Germany's economy, culture, politics, society, and demographics. Yet contradiction and conflict were also among the overarching patterns in government construction. Hitler saw himself as an architectural savant and enthusiastically intervened in the design process, but he disregarded the details, especially finance. A polycratic tangle, rather than a well-oiled machine, underpinned construction efforts. Officials at all levels vied for favor and authority. Agencies had to piece together funding through various strategies: underreporting costs, appropriating membership dues, exploiting forced labor, seizing assets, deficit spending, raising taxes, controlling wages and prices, partnering with private business, and utilizing war booty. Ultimately, thousands of new public buildings populated the landscape during the Nazi years. They shaped Germans’ lives and communal experiences and lingered long after. However, the most iconic structures in historical memory remain the ones that were never completed.
The chapters progress from the fantastical designs to the ever-grimmer realities of the regime. The first body chapter draws the informed reader onto well-traveled terrain, that is, the prestige projects in Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, and Linz, and the prominent architects who designed them. Still, this coverage serves a purpose. As a kind of primer, the chapter brings together projects previously investigated by individual monographs. In doing so, the authors distill the emblematic features (e.g., grand boulevards and enormous assembly spaces). These monumental yet often unrealized designs set the terms for comparisons to the many projects discussed in later chapters: party headquarters, office buildings, community centers, schools, summer camps, swimming pools, Autobahnen, housing, hostels, barracks, shrines, military installations, submarine bunkers, prisons, and death camps. The sheer volume of examples lends itself to a textbook style that prioritizes documentation over theory and analysis. At the same time, the authors’ argument that a “spatial reordering” occurred depends on the breadth of example, and many of these individual case studies provide new and compelling detail.
Perhaps the authors’ most interesting examples are the projects that received scant attention from Hitler. Compared to monumental facades and vistas, Hitler cared little about “the social aspects of planning” (97). Hagen and Ostergren show in a compelling discussion of housing how Nazi officials nevertheless skewed their achievements by claiming unit credit for the subdivision of existing apartments and the completion of suburban developments begun during the Brüning era. Despite the lack of substantial direction and sustained investment from top officials, emerging suburbs bore the regime's ideological stamp through the rigorous, racialized screening process, naming streets after so-called lost territories, and “ruthless severity” against tenants who neglected their gardens and lawns (165). But costs remained an issue, and rapid construction meant shoddy workmanship. Screening tenants and high prices reproduced the class divisions that the regime publicly repudiated. Losses from aerial bombardment also offset building gains. As the war intensified, officials experimented with prefabricated, emergency “tiny homes,” although only a few hundred prototypes were ever produced. Planners looked to the occupied East as a blank slate where they might free themselves of the constraints, expenses, and frustrations of building within Germany. A particularly chilling example is Himmler's proposal to transform the Auschwitz region into an industrial center, including the promise of model residential districts for “Aryan” workers complete with row houses, green spaces, and a refurbished medieval town center purged of Polish and Jewish influence. The project, like many others, was deferred until after victory.
The tension between totality and its absence remains the central paradox of the book. This raises compelling questions for the further analysis of the Nazi regime and, more broadly, for histories of architecture, urban planning, and geography beyond Germany's borders. To what extent can we see the Nazi building program as comprehensive when it lacked strong central coordination? But, at the same time, how do we explain aesthetic standardization despite the lack of cohesive organization? Since many of the projects never came to fruition, do they constitute part of the regime's “spatial reordering”? Where do they exist “spatially” beyond drawing boards, exhibits, and architectural magazines? These questions are especially important because the projects discussed in the book spillover in terms of time and space. The Nazi regime claimed credit for projects initiated by their predecessors, and a number of the regime's prominent architects and planners had postwar careers. Thus, it is hard to label projects as purely representative of only one era. Furthermore, Hagen and Ostergren point out that, even if the Nazi architects embraced extremes, a near “international consensus” favored “a reduced neo-classicism for representative public buildings” (55). Urban planners worked within a framework of the perceived ills of the modern city that had existed since the nineteenth century: housing shortages, traffic, and poverty. Nazi officials even relied on Chicago School survey methods to designate “slum” neighborhoods for demolition. And while the racial ideology underpinning homestead settlements was more explicit, such designs resemble suburbs in other places and times. Hagen and Ostergren begin and end their book wandering among the ruins of Nazi Germany and identifying the remnants that remain hidden in plain sight to remind us that this past remains more present than we might imagine.
