MadNihilist
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09:21:04 pm on November 12, 2009 | # |
Albert Speer and the Fascist Theory of Ruins
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The building of the Zeppelin field was begun at once, in order to have at least the platform ready for the coming Party Rally. To clear ground for it, the Nuremburg street-car depot had to be removed. I passed by its remains after it had been blown up. The iron reinforcements protruded from concrete debris and had already begun to rust. Once could easily visualise their further decay. This dreary sight led me to some thoughts which I later propounded to Hitler under the pretentious heading of “A Theory of Ruin Value”. The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that “bridge of tradition” to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate the heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. My “Theory” was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.
To illustrate my ideas, I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin field would look like after generations of neglect, over-grown with ivym its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognisable. In Hitler’s entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler’s closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principle of this “law of ruins”
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p.96-98
So, what’s this all about? What can we ascertain about ruins from this brief and (given Speer’s proclivity for telling porkies) uncertain passage? At first glance it is a perfect little example of the intellectual shit that was the Nazi brand of romanticism. Zeitgeist? Check. Nationalism? Check. Institutionalised self-pity? Check. But should be taken at least a little bit seriously.
The first paragraph in particular goes against the usual grain of ruinenlust, the Ozymandius-style ‘all things pass’ attitude, by pushing through the melancholy and seeing it as an exhortation to greatness. It’s a bitter and reactionary sense of the lost object, one so very common to fascism, which requires a fictionalised eden-like historical condition that must somehow be returned to (We even see this now in the UK with the appeal to some mythical ‘indigenous Britain’). The contemporary left-variation on this sense of the ruin is that longing for the future we were promised yesterday, so it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. But what the ruin is doing here is that the condition of stable decay, of disuse, is creating the conditions for the fictionalised history to be narrated in the first place (for example; if Hitler was really interested in what had remained of the emperors of Rome, a certain basement in Siberia would have given him a better answer). Ruins here become totems, fetish-items for invigorating ideological narratives.
The second paragraph is brilliant however. Reactionary aestheticisation unfolding before our very eyes. Speer, with posterity and grandeur on the mind, finds himself traumatised by the sight of a bus station being demolished, which sends him scuttling further into the syrup of pseudo-posterity. Sighting the genuinely perishing remains of concrete and steel, he encounters the trauma of guaranteed disappearance, but has to somehow contain it. It’s almost as if ‘the ruin’ here becomes a safe point after encountering an unbearable truth- with the knowledge of disappearance now apparent, any disavowal has to concede at least some ground to it – ‘the Ruin’ here becomes an adopted immortality, a quasi-immortality. Even if the complete object is no longer viable, rendered meaningless through guaranteed loss, the ‘trace’ has become reified. There is also the irony of his fear of modern materials and their ‘ugly’ state of decay, which is a gut-reaction that casts a long shadow into architectural aesthetics. I’d be wary, however, of suggesting that this particular reaction guarantees the progressive power of reinforced concrete, even if that is hinted at.
And the third paragraph, which mirrors JM Gandy’s paintings for Soane, or Hubert Robert’s paintings of the Louvre, is a classic example of using the sentimental image of the ruin as a ‘temporal flag’- staking a claim for posterity, based on the persistence of architectural objects of antiquity. It’s not a particularly controversial point, to be honest.
So what are the basic points of the ‘fascist theory of ruins’?
(…)
