The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right

5. The Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds and Local Politics: The Historicized Perpetrator

By the end of the Weimar Republic, Nuremberg had already become a popular site for the rallies of the faithful of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Almost as soon as Hitler came to power, he chose the location as the permanent home of the annual rallies and began his plans for the monumental architecture that would famously frame these events. Throughout the mid-1930s into the early years of war, work continued on the architecture and urban plan, coordinated by Albert Speer. By war’s end, the Reich Party Rally Grounds remained as the largest architectural remnant of the monumental state building of Nazi Germany (Figure 5.1). Approximately two kilometers wide and three kilometers long, the postwar site maintains the massive scale that was so much an integral part of the architectural and urban projects favored by Hitler and his architect, Speer. From the moment the war ended to the present day, this architectural complex has served as the backdrop for contemplating the propaganda of the Nazi past and its seductive effect. In response to this past, city officials and private interests have dramatically altered much of the landscape and added several new buildings to the site. Still, the Reich Party Rally Grounds have indelibly marked Nuremberg as the place where Nazi perpetrators were initially made, an association that continues today.1 An analysis of the political reception of the rally grounds indicates the long shadow of the Nazi perpetrator that hangs over German art in most of the twentieth century. As has been shown in these pages, postwar artists, architects, and audiences interested themselves in the shifting definition of who that perpetrator was and how he or she related to contemporary conservative politics in particular. In spite of Nuremberg’s midsize population 167 5 THE NUREMBERG PARTY RALLY GROUNDS AND LOCAL POLITICS THE HISTORICIZED PERPETRATOR and its secondary status to Munich, the capital of Bavaria, few cities other than possibly Berlin are more firmly fixed in the public consciousness as being so directly associated with Hitler, his policies, and his followers.2 Whereas the other chapters of this book have focused on relatively discrete synchronic periods of debate, in the following, I wish to analyze changes to the built environment of the rally grounds diachronically. How one site architecturally transformed throughout the entire postwar period highlights the complex dynamics of ignoring or engaging the criminal past over time. Further, the brief and surprising rise in the 1990s of a conservative coalition in the city government led to a new way of thinking about the relationship of the present with the Nazi perpetrator. This new conception of the past projected an opposition between current Nuremberg residents and former perpetrators, a position strangely analogous to the general public attitude in the immediate postwar era. Tracing the changes to the Reich Party Rally Grounds entails attention not only to alterations of the major National Socialist remnants but NUREMBERG PARTY RALLY GROUNDS 168 FIGURE 5.1. Albert Speer, Plan for the Reich Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg, 1937. Photograph A76-RF79 -F1-17. Courtesy of Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. also new additions to the site, as well as housing estates and other vernacular structures that have received little scholarly attention. Such architectural additions shared thoroughly accepted aesthetic conventions with contemporaneous examples of West German design. But did the architects, officials, or the general public respond to these seemingly common design decisions differently because of the politically charged nature of their location and the historical built environment that surrounded them?3 However much their Modernist gestures turned their back on Speer’s neoclassicism, private and governmental decisions about the site still necessitated the recognition of the political significance of the Nazi past as a massive and unavoidable presence. A more materially grounded account of the impact of Nuremberg’s political and architectural past points to the general relevance of Vergangenheitsbew ältigung (coming to terms with the past), a term historians have thoroughly discussed over the past several decades.4 Still, the specific context of Nuremberg’s past meant that Nazi history here had a particular impact on how citizens and officials used and interpreted the architectural remnants distinct from national trends, especially after reunification. In Nuremberg, a public debate emerged about the Rally Grounds that differed from more famous cases, such as Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe...