(ich krieg’ Angst)

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.’