China’s Triumph of the Will
Aug 2nd, 2008
by Nina L. Khrushcheva
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Nina Khrushcheva, author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, teaches international affairs at The New School and is senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York |
MOSCOW – When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins in a few days, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch. Of course, images that recall Hitler’s goose-stepping storm troopers are the last thing that China’s leaders have in mind for their Olympics; after all, official Chinese nationalism proclaims the country’s “peaceful rise” within an idyll of “harmonious development.” But, both aesthetically and politically, the parallel is hardly far-fetched.
Indeed, by choosing Albert Speer Jr., the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing Games, China’s government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China’s leaders have sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible proof of their fitness and mandate to rule.
Speer Jr.’s commission was to lay out a master plan for the access to the Olympic complex in Beijing. His design centered on the construction of an imposing avenue to connect the Forbidden City and the National Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place. His father’s plan for “Germania,” the name Hitler selected for the Berlin that he planned to construct after World War II, also relied on such a mighty central axis.
China’s rulers see the Olympics as a stage for demonstrating to the world the exceptional vitality of the country they have built over the past three decades. And that demonstration serves an even more important domestic political objective: further legitimizing the regime’s continuing rule in the eyes of ordinary Chinese. Given this imperative, an architectural language of bombast and gigantism was almost inevitable.
So it is no surprise that the Beijing Games may resemble the hubristic Games that beguiled the Führer and enthralled the German masses in 1936. Like the Beijing Games, the Berlin Olympics were conceived as a coming-out party. Josef Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine was fully deployed. Athletic imagery – used to brilliant effect in Leni Riefenstahl’s acclaimed documentary – appeared to create a link between the Nazis and the ancient Greeks, and to confirm the Nazi myth that Germans and German civilization were the true heirs to the “Aryan” culture of classical antiquity.
While designing the master plan for the Beijing Games, Speer Jr., an acclaimed architect and town planner, also sought, like his father, to create a futuristic global metropolis. Of course, the language that he used to sell his scheme to the Chinese was very different from the words his father used to present his plans to Hitler. Instead of emphasizing his design’s pomposity, the younger Speer insisted on its environmental friendliness. The 2,000-year-old city of Beijing should be transported into hyper-modernity, whereas his father’s 1936 Berlin design was, in his words, “simply megalomania.”
Of course, the sins of the father should never be visited on the son. But, in this case, when the son borrows essential elements of his father’s architectural principles and serves a regime that seeks to use the Games for some of the same reasons that animated Hitler, is he not willingly reflecting those sins?
Totalitarian regimes – the Nazis, the Soviets in 1980, and now the Chinese – desire to host the Olympics as a way to signal to the world their superiority. China believes that it has found its own model to develop and modernize, and its rulers regard the Games in the same way as the Nazis and Leonid Brezhnev did, as a means of “selling” their model to a global audience.
Obviously, the Chinese were politically tone-deaf in choosing an architect whose name carried such dark historical connotations. The name of Speer itself probably did not matter to the officials who chose him. They sought to stage an Olympics that made manifest their image of themselves, and Speer Jr., looking back to his father’s mastery of the architecture of power, delivered the goods.
The realization of Speer Jr.’s Olympic vision, and that of his patrons, marks the end of a welcome interlude. For years following the end of the Cold War, politics had been removed from the Games. A gold medal signified the sporting abilities and dedication of individual athletes, not the supposed merits of the political system that produced them.
But now we have returned to an aesthetic of political mesmerization, reflected in the host government’s declared aim that China should win more gold medals than any country before. As the Olympic torch relay – itself a creation of the Nazis, first employed in the Berlin Games – makes its way down Speer Jr.’s avenue of power, the world will once again be made to witness a triumph of the totalitarian will.
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Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
www.project-syndicate.org
August 4th, 2008 at 3:44 am
This is amazing news. Has this ever been reported before in the Western press? The CHINESE have fooled the world again! OUCH
August 4th, 2008 at 4:43 am
“If this Nina Kruscheva is the Nina Kruscheva whose grand-dad was Soviet
Union cold warrior Nikita Kruschev you would think she’d be a little
circumspect about visiting the sins of the father..etc etc..”
August 4th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Fri, 28 Feb 2003 04:33:07 +0800
The House of Speer: Still Rising on the Skyline
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
MUNICH — His name is Albert Speer, and his profession is architect
and urban planner, and this Albert Speer shrugs with a certain
resignation over the inescapable fact that his father had the same
name and the same profession.
‘I can’t help it,’ Mr. Speer said over lunch in Munich, where he was
on business trip, speaking of his name and the family heritage. ‘It
is as it is.’
Mr. Speer’s father, about whom many books have been written, was, of
course, Hitler’s favorite architect, the man who developed the
grandiose-totalitarian style of Nazi buildings. The elder Speer died
in 1981 after spending 20 years in prison as a Nazi war criminal.
His son has been getting some attention in Germany lately because he
recently submitted a grand design for the future development of
China’s capital, Beijing, as it prepares to hold the Olympic Games
in 2008.
The plan submitted by Mr. Speer’s Frankfurt-based Company, AS&P,
involves a vast North-South axis some 10 miles long that would reach
to the Olympic village in the north of the city, connect it to the
Forbidden City, former home of the emperors, and finish at an
immense new railroad station that would link China’s capital with
the rest of the country.
Not surprisingly, the question has been raised in Germany — though
apparently not in China — whether something ghoulish from the past
was being resurrected in the younger Mr. Speer’s Beijing design. Was
the son, consciously or not, trying to resurrect the spirit of his
father, to build in Beijing what his father had been prevented by
Germany’s defeat in the war from building in Berlin?
‘His Beijing axis is re-awakening old memories,’ read a recent
article a week ago by Sophie Mühlmann in the German newspaper Die
Welt. ‘Wasn’t there a legendary north-south axis planned by the
elder Speer for Hitler’s new Berlin, which was to be called `world
capital Germania?’ Is his son trying to copy him, or rather outdo
him?’
Mr. Speer’s short answer to that question is: No, he was not copying
or outdoing or even thinking much about his father as he conceived
his design for the Beijing of the future.
But Germany is a country where questions about the past are always
being raised. Berlin’s recent re-emergence as the capital of a
united Germany has been the occasion for repeated, often heated,
debate about architecture, marked by concern that nothing be built
to suggest the monumentalism of the Nazi era.
For Mr. Speer, who, despite his name has made a highly successful
career elsewhere in Germany and around the world, questions about
his axis and that other axis are both inevitable and not very
welcome.
‘We’re even bigger here, much bigger, but the two are not
comparable,’ Mr. Speer said, contrasting his plans for Beijing with
his father’s never-built concept for Berlin. Over the centuries, Mr.
Speer said, architects have conceived large, all-encompassing
designs, including grand urban axes, and they do not usually become
occasions for speculation about the dark nexus of politics and art.
‘This is an idealistic axis,’ he said of his concept for Beijing.
‘This is not an axis representing power. It’s an axis that looks
back to two and a half thousand years of Chinese history.’
For him there is no escaping the fact that his father was the Hitler
intimate who is among the Nazi leaders most studied and written
about — a puzzling, complex and morally crippled figure who, though
refined and intelligent, served the Third Reich loyally to the end.
‘I’ve read the books,’ Mr. Speer said, mentioning two of them in
particular, Gitta Sereny’s ‘Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth’ and
Joachim Fest’s ‘The Final Verdict.’ The son, in other words, is
interested in his father and his complicated, much studied role, but
he is clear that their professional attitudes are entirely unalike.
The proposed blueprint for Beijing, which, though requested by the
Chinese government, has not been formally adopted, is the latest of
many big ideas that Mr. Speer has developed over the years. Among
his other projects, for example, undertaken in collaboration with
the New York architect Peter Eisenman, is a design for the 2012
Olympic Games bid of Leipzig. Before that, he designed Expo 2000 in
Hanover, a project that did bear an uncanny parallel to one of his
father’s, who designed the German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s
Fair.
Mr. Speer maintains that an Expo is an Expo and there’s no ghostly
communication between father and son just because they have done
comparable projects. Indeed, Mr. Speer’s reputation is for the
opposite of what his father did — not monumentalism for its own sake
but environmentally conscious buildings in the tradition of what is
sometimes called progressive humanism in architecture.
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And yet, not very many sons had fathers who were in the innermost of
Hitler’s inner circles, and not many of those sons chose the same
profession as their fathers. Speer senior was not only Hitler’s
architect, but also Hitler’s efficient armaments minister and as
such a user of slave labor, for which he was convicted in the
Nuremberg trials.
The son spent his early childhood at Berchtesgaden, the town where
Hitler had his Bavarian country house, going to school in the nearby
village.
‘I was 9 or 10, and from that perspective I imagined him like an
uncle,’ Mr. Speer said, responding to a question about his childhood
memories of Hitler. ‘For a child, he was a man like anybody.’
Mr. Speer gently declines to elaborate on these particular memories,
even when a questioner expressed some skepticism that Hitler could
have made so ordinary an impression.
‘Only in the media there is the shadow of my father,’ Mr. Speer
said. ‘I’ve been out of the shadow of my father for many years.’
Certainly, Mr. Speer seems a self-assured man, friendly, casual, the
kind of man who wears a suit jacket over a navy blue turtleneck. If
you’ve seen photographs of his father, you can see the family
resemblance in Mr. Speer, the trim, regular features, gray hair,
blue eyes. Mr. Speer looks at the world through rimless glasses.
In many ways, it is almost surprising how little Mr. Speer’s name
and family heritage have impeded his professional progress. He
suspects that he has never worked in Berlin because nobody there
would hire someone named Speer to work in the former Nazi capital.
But Mr. Speer says that Berlin is ‘the only case’ of that nature in
a career that has, literally, spanned the continents.
When Mr. Speer was a boy, he stuttered, and he attributes that to
the traumas of the war and its end, which included his father’s
trial and conviction. As a young man, he worked as a carpenter.
Then, in 1955, he went to Munich to study architecture, a choice
that a psychologist might suspect bespoke an effort to identify with
his father.
But Mr. Speer points out that his father’s father, the first Albert
Speer, was an architect too, some of whose buildings are now classed
as historic monuments in Germany. His great-grandfather, Bertold
Speer, was also an architect. His mother’s ancestors were craftsmen
and artisans.
‘Actually, I wanted to be an urban planner,’ Mr. Speer said, ‘but
you couldn’t study urban planning in those days, so I studied
architecture.’
In 1964, he won a competition that gave him enough money to travel
in the United States. Back in Germany, he began to win commissions,
many in the developing world — the Parliament building in Yemen, a
Foreign Ministry complex in Saudi Arabia, a new town in Belize.
But it is in China that Mr. Speer has done some of his biggest
projects — for example, the construction of an International
Automobile City outside Shanghai, which a company brochure calls
‘the prime focus of China’s future automobile industry.’
And then, there is the concept for a north-south axis in Beijing,
roughly 10 miles from end to end.
‘It’s not a project, it’s an opportunity to catapault Beijing into
the 21st century,’ Mr. Speer said. That might sound grand, but there
are no triumphal arches three times the size of the Arc de Triomphe
of the sort his father used to talk about with Hitler, no intention
of outdoing the Pyramids.
Mr. Speer, who clearly enjoys talking about architecture and
planning far more than he does about his father’s Nazi past,
describes as one of his principles an effort to adapt a design to
its location, rather than to impose a recognizable architectural
signature wherever he puts a building.
‘My philosophy is to find something related to the situation,’ he
said, ‘to the climate, to the history, to the people who are there.’
In the Chinese case, he said, the history incorporates the ancient
Chinese imperial idea, in which the emperor was placed toward the
north of the urban axis, and beyond him was the North Star.
‘It’s not only an urban axis,’ Mr. Speer said about his Beijing
proposal. ‘It’s a philosophical and religious axis. We used that in
our design. We transformed the Chinese character `zhong,’ which
means middle, into an axis surrounded by an ecological garden.’
August 5th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
It does not matter if her father is Kruschev. If he IS, then she is atoning for her father by pointing out the Speer Connection. This is SUCH a huge revelation. We have all noted the similarity between the Beijing and Berlin OlympiGs, but I never realized until now, just how much similar it all was. No wonder the grandiose Chinese architecture harked back so much to the megalomania of Hitler’s architecture. Whatever the father Speer showed, the son Speer certainly shows it well, in fact, too well — it speaks volumes about the mentalitaet of the chinese, how similar it is to the nazi Hitler.
Thank you, BD Editor, for publishing this article and Thank You, Ms. Kruscheva, for these very revealing article and for the research you did into the Speer father and son connections/ramifications
August 13th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Leni Riefenstahl is history. It’s Zhang Yimou’s turn now
Zhong Guo Zhong Guo über alles
Über alles in der Welt
(ich krieg’ Angst)
August 19th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
So many wise words here. What fools they are for building all these nice, big modern buildings, with 24-hour electricity and all that, when they could still be living in slums!