The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

There is something disturbing about the uncompleted Speer plan, something more than its scale and the name of its patron. It proposed to subordinate the bustling city to a higher purpose. The rail stations, for example, represent an element of practical city planning, but they also contribute to the plan’s essential theatricality. As the writer Elias Canetti has pointed out, Hitler’s sense of power depended on the attraction and subjection of crowds.12 Canetti sees the names of Hitler’s fellow World War I soldiers, carved on the Great Arch, as his first crowd, but new crowds would perpetually have to be fed into his boulevard, his square, and his hall. The rail stations would produce them somehow, but not in the same way that rail stations and other transportation nodes produce the crowds in any city center. Hitler’s Berlin would replace the chaotic bustle of shoppers and flaneurs with the regimented order of marching men and cheering hordes, something Speer partly recognized after serving a twenty-year sentence for war crimes. Upon his release from Spandau prison in 1966, he drove by the war-damaged ruins of the one building actually constructed for the north-south axis, the House of German Tourism near Potsdamer Platz. (It was demolished soon afterward to make way for Hans Scharoun’s new State Library.) “I saw in a few seconds what I had been blind to for years: our plan completely lacked a sense of proportion.”13 In planning for vast, manipulated crowds, Hitler and Spee...