Monumentality and Modernity in Hitler's Berlin: The North-South Axis of the Greater Berlin Plan

ISBN-13: 9783034307550 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 243 str.

Lutzeier, Peter Rolf

Opis

The contentious relationship between modernism and totalitarianism is a key element in the architectural history of the twentieth century. Post-war historiography refused to admit any overlap between the high modernism of the 1920s and the architecture of National Socialism, as it contradicted the definition of modernism as the essential architectural expression of liberal democracy. However, National Socialist architectural history cannot be fully explored without the broader historical context of modernity. Similarly, a true understanding of modernism in architecture must acknowledge its authoritarian aspects.
This book clarifies the architectural discourse in which the Greater Berlin Project of the Third Reich was produced. The association of monumentality with National Socialist architecture in the 1930s created a polarization between the classical tradition and radical modernism that provoked vigorous and acrimonious debate that lasted into the 1980s. In the attempt to reconcile the paradoxical and competing aspirations for monumentality and historicity on one hand, and for technological advance on the other, the planning of Berlin is shown to reflect the wider paradoxes of National Socialist ideology.

Spis treści

Contents: Modernist architecture and National Socialism - The discourse of monumentality before 1933 - Reshaping Berlin: The metropolis and urban planning in the early twentieth century - Monumentality and major projects on the North-South Axis - Private commissions and monumental constructions on the North-South Axis - Architecture and the mass psychology of monumentality.

O autorze

Hsiu-Ling Kuo is Assistant Professor of History at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her main research areas are art and architectural history, urban studies and critical cultural theories and her current research focuses on the politics of hygiene in the urban planning of National Socialist Germany.