Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture

5. Windows 33/45

163 In the early evening hours of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler appeared at the window of his new office to present himself to a chanting crowd gathered in front of the Berlin Chancellery at Wilhelmstraße 78. Located on the second floor, the chancellor’s office had three windows, all overlooking Wilhelmplatz. It occupied a modern section of the Chancellery that had been completed only three years earlier under the direction of Eduard Jobst Siedler und Robert Kisch. The functionalism of Siedler and Kisch’s annex had caused considerable outrage among those eager to preserve the neoclassicist milieu of Wilhelmplatz. For Hitler, however, during the first hours, days, and months of his chancellorship, the new annex produced concerns of a very different sort. Not only did it become usual for crowds to gather under the new German chancellor’s office window, demanding to see the Führer and making it impossible for Hitler to work inside. The huge, albeit plain, windows of his office also turned out to be inappropriate for the purpose of staging Hitler’s visual appearance. Siedler and Kisch’s window design forced Hitler to assume awkward postures to enjoy public visibility. In fact, rather than displaying the Führer as a powerful attraction, the frame of the office window dwarfed the Führer’s body and thereby undermined spectacular self-presentation. Hitler’s first public appearance in the role as Reich chancellor thus offered a mixed blessing. “The window was really too inconvenient,” Hitler remarked later to his master architect Albert Speer. “I could not be seen from all sides. After all, I could not very well lean out.”1 A man of extreme obsessions and unsteady emotions, the new Reich chan5 Windows 33/45 Framing Attention 164 cellor set out to have the problem fixed immediately. Because the old office windows, on the one hand, allowed for too much contact and transparency and hence undermined the Führer’s desire for control and privacy, Hitler quickly moved his office to the back of the building. Rather than overlooking the noisy throngs at Wilhelmplatz, the windows of his new office now opened to the building’s quiet garden. On the other hand, because Siedler and Kisch’s design failed to display Hitler as an object of theatrical to-be-looked-at-ness, Hitler had Speer add a new “historic balcony” to the façade at Wilhelmplatz. Siedler protested this new addition, claiming that Speer’s balcony would violate the building’s aesthetic integrity. Hitler, however, resolutely dismissed these objections : “Siedler has spoiled the whole of Wilhelmplatz. Why, that building looks like the headquarters of a soap company, not the center of the Reich. What does he think?That I’ll let him build the balcony too?”2 When it came to matters of stage-managing the Führer’s public appearance, no chances were to be taken. By 1935, Hitler had it both: a historic balcony, which instead of framing his appearance showcased the Führer as a sight of extraordinary meaning, and a secluded office, which allowed him to contemplate strategy and execute the mundane aspects of political leadership. Speer’s later design for the New Reich Chancellery (which opened in January 1939) and the megalomaniac blueprints for the Chancellery of Germania (to be opened in 1950) fed even more Hitler’s desire for separating the interior and exterior spaces of power. Both effectively secluded Hitler’s office from the unruly commotion of Berlin street life, while both elevated the building’s balcony to ever more majestic heights so as to increase the Führer’s visibility when he would step outside and present himself like a modern media star to the gaze of the masses. It is well known that windows have played important roles in democratic as well as nondemocratic politics in order to display power, legitimate authority , and broadcast political change. Think of the infamous Defenestration of Prague of May 23, 1618, symbolizing a political coup that helped trigger the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Think of German Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann using a window of the Berlin Reichstag on November 9, 1918, as a setting to proclaim the first German Republic. Contrary to what we may expect at first, however, Hitler’s relationship to windows was deeply ambivalent , to say the least. As a site of staging power, windows—in Hitler’s understanding —limited perspective and excluded a multiplicity of possible viewing positions. Their frames drew too much awareness to...