Indiana University Press

Altar, Stage and City: Historic Preservation and Urban Meaning in Nazi Germany
Author(s): Rudy J. Koshar

Source: History and Memory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 30-59
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25618610 .
Accessed: 20/06/2014 20:48
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and
Memory.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Rudy J. Koshar
Altar, Stage and City: Historic Preservation

and Urban Meaning in Nazi Germany1
Partof the recent "self-archaeologization"2 of Western

society has consisted of historic preservation, the project of
intervention in built environments to maintain or restore
buildings, districts and townscapes that are said to have

important links with the past as well as present value.
Increasingly strong in Europe and North America in the past
three decades, historic preservation (Denkmalpflege) was so
popular in West Germany after the late 1960s that critics,

echoing the fin-de-siecle language of the Viennese art historian
Alois Riegl, wrote of a "cult of monuments" that claimed
historical value for one of every twelve buildings in the
Federal Republic.3 Partly a reaction of younger West Germans
against the postwar generation's disregard for history, the cult
of monuments was also a release from connotations that the
Nazi dictatorship gave official heritage preservation. "Seldom

has historic preservation ... seen better times than in Germany
after 1933," wrote the conservator Reinhard Bentmann in
1976, who
hastened to add that the state agencies and
concerned with preservation in the 1930s had
voluntary groups
been "coordinated and system-conforming" and thus much
different from their recent counterparts.4 The comment reveals
not only how one generation of professionals was engaged in
but
creating a public image of the German past in the 1970s,
also how that generation remembered an earlier generation
remembering.
Such is understandable, given not only the
distancing
horrific political history in which preservationists of the 1930s
and 1940s were implicated, but also the political changes and
of interest in historic places in the last two
popularization
decades. Yet we must not overlook that present-day official
- as both establishment
preservationism enemy and emotional

Altar, Stage and City
- bears traces of the

cult of monuments
ally of that popular
Nazi era. The main preservationist journal, Deutsche Kunst und
on earlier models,
Denkmalpflege, though based assumed its
current name and format in 1934. Major legislation passed in
1936, the Decree on Building Design, facilitated the protection
of historic places and had effects after World War II.5 During
the Nazi dictatorship the preservation of monuments and
landmarks gained a social relevance for city planning that
today seems self-explanatory.6 And the nostalgic popular 3:
interest in heritage preservation after 1933 resembles similar
waves that followed 1945. All this suggests the need to rethink
the retrospective assessment of strict difference between a
"coordinated and system-conforming" preservationism of 1933
to 1945 and a new preservationism of the 1970s. At the same
time, however, one must avoid overdrawn interpretations of
continuity. By focusing on historic preservation's discursive
role in the formation of "urban in Nazi
meaning" Germany,
this discussion makes a beginning in that project.
Scholarship on official historic preservation is very uneven.7
We have a specialized literature on heritage preservation,
much of it by art historians and conservators, but the
sociopolitical history of efforts to manage historic
environments has been studied tangentially, if at all, usually by
scholars who mistakenly assume that preservationists spoke the
Utopian language of architects, the functionalist language of
planners, or the reactionary language of cultural pessimists.8
There is a growing scholarship on national monuments (in
the specific sense of the term) and political culture in
Germany, especially for the Imperial period,9 but this literature
cannot readily be deployed to talk about historic preservation.
Protecting historical buildings required different practices and
words: historic environments were exposed to a wider range of
threats involving social change, urban planning, and everyday
use. We have neither a synthetic
history of German historic
preservation in the twentieth century nor a systematic
exploration of its workings from 1933 to 1945.10 We have,
moreover, no fuller study of the changing rhetoric of historic
preservation, a fundamental problem that goes to the heart of

Rudy J. Koshar
current interests in memory, language and cultural

representation.
The recent
process of self-archaeologization referred to
above hasoften included restoration of old urban centers
("German cides now have their Altstadt" writes Maier11). But
this is not only a characteristic of the 1970s. Although castle
ruins in rural settings and provincial townscapes were among
the most cherished objects of preservationist desire, German
32 historical preservation has cared about the city for the whole
twentieth century, or rather about how historic urban centers
could be used to refer Germans to a common
notionally past.
I want to discuss preservationism's role in shaping this kind of
urban meaning.
Castells defines
urban meaning as "the structural
as a goal to cities in general (and to a
performance assigned
particular city in the inter-urban division of labor) by the
conflictive process between historical actors in a given
society.''12 Urban meaning, argues Castells, is neither simply
the result of intellectual tradition nor a functional response to
structural contradictions. In my opinion, it is the result of a
indeterminate discourse, a form of enablement
relatively
involving possible ways of talking, writing and thinking.13
Castell's work has concentrated mainly on urban meaning with
reference to political economy, but I explore it with reference
to political culture. More specifically, I discuss a key spatial
metaphor embedded in preservationist language, what I will

call the metaphor of the urban altar, as part of an attempt to
a cultural (and moral) role for the city and the urban
project
past. My goal is not to consider what images of the past are
deployed (that is another topic), but what figurative language
is used in preservationism's "imaging" of the historic city, and
how that language creates urban meaning that works in
(and partly antagonistic) ways in relation to Nazism.
particular
Lakoff and Johnson discuss metaphor as a "matter of
that an understanding of one
imaginative rationality" "permits
kind of experience in terms of another." "Not just a matter
of language," metaphorical understandings permeate everyday
a political dimension because
thought and action.'1 They have
our choice of language suggests our view of the world. Their

assumptions are often unstated, resting on perceptions that are

partly or fully hidden from their users. In Western urbanistic
discourse there has been a shift from to spatial
organic
metaphors, arguably an expression of a more fundamental
process modern culture turns to
whereby "spatialized"
thinking.1'
German history since 1870 was marked by contentious
debates over what figurative discourses should be used to
understand the role of cities. German capitalism had imposed 33
a sense of the city as commodity that seemed to dominate all
other meanings, but critics on both the Right and the Left
sought alternative ways of reading urban landscapes marked by
the "heartless and colorless qualities of money."1" Weimar
Germany featured especially intense debates on such matters.
It would be mistaken to reduce these debates to a binary
opposition of urbanism and anti-urbanism.1' In fact, urbanistic
discourse before and during the Weimar Republic cut across
this opposition, pitting advocates of modernist "new building"
historicists in architecture, traffic-conscious
against progressive
city planners against the romantic defenders of picturesque
squares and streets in both small towns and major cities, and
Social Democratic supporters of public housing on the urban
fringes against conservative champions of historic city centers.
The Nazi dictatorship tried to halt this conflict, imposing its
own racialist meaning and thinking of the city not only as a
commodity but as a mass political stage whose backdrops
consisted partly of historic environments, partly of grandiose
neoclassical architecture.18
Preservationists were most often found on the side of the
-
historicists, romantics and Altstadt defenders groups whose
public image benefitted from Nazi propaganda's ceaseless
praise of German heritage and whose goals were often closely
identified with the regime. Yet there was an important
difference between National Socialist and preservationist
readings of the city. Leading preservationists, devoted to a
burgerlich tradition of approaching "culture" in quasi-religious
terms, convinced that the nation was a secular church, saw the
city not as a mass stage but as an altar, whose holy vestments
and vessels were the historic places that symbolized an

Rudy J. Koshar
institutionalized national religion. This paper is about that

difference.
The following discussion begins with a brief exploration of
the development of historic preservation into the early years of
the Nazi dictatorship, stressing the active use of a narrative of
redemptive heritage to enlist Nazism for the preservationist
cause. The next two parts the of urban
explore metaphors
stage and altar. The last section outlines the most salient
34 discursive differences between the two metaphors, arguing that
the preservationist metaphor achieved a from Nazi
distancing
rhetoric that amounted to a "privileged in the
marginality"
political culture. The conclusion briefly suggests the
implication of the argument for preservationism's relationship
to ceaseless search for a "usable
Germany's past."
A Narrative of Redemptive Heritage
Looking back to sixteenth-century precedents and inspired

by nineteenth-century Romanticism, historic preservation
gained an unprecedented public resonance at the turn of the
century in Germany. Whereas government inventories of
historic landmarks had been published as early as 1870 in
Bremen and Hesse-Kassel, it was after the 1890s that
specialized publications, tougher building laws, and the
of new associations the creation
appearance voluntary signaled
of a preservationist public.19 Like so many other movements of
this period, historic preservationism was part of a sea change
in German public life that included "a dramatic increase in
massive movements of men and women into new
population,
environments, the of new sorts of the
growth occupations,
dissolution of old patterns of social interaction, and the slow
emergence of new kinds of relationships and values."20 More
was one element of popular
specifically, preservationism
cultural commentary that was increasingly allied with the
Heimat movement, a congeries of organizations promoting the
protection and study of local history, folklore and nature.21

Germany was losing its "documents of stone," preservationists
as the national was being dissolved by
argued, heritage
socioeconomic change, by town planning's one-sided

concentration on traffic and

health problems, by insensitive
municipal building policies and by improper restorations.
Finally, official preservationism was the creation of a new form
of professional activity distinguished from architecture or
planning and increasingly anchored in universities, technical

colleges, municipal and state agencies, and voluntary
associations.22
In this period, historic preservation drew its supporters
mainly from the Bildungsburgertum, that increasingly fragmented 35
stratum of the educated middle and upper classes. The makers
of the preservationist public consisted of state and municipal
conservators, restorers, architects, and amateur
university
historians, archaeologists, government cultural officials, city
and mayors. Semi-annual
planners, journalists, politicians
conferences, often held in conjunction with the key national
Heimat organization, Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz, provided one
of several public spaces for dialogue and social interaction,
while regional and national publications sustained professional
discourse and heightened public awareness. Provincial elites
a big role, partly because the federal states and
played
Prussian provinces were responsible for heritage policy, partly
because local building bylaws gave city officials much control
over aesthetic matters, and partly because the educated classes,
of themselves as the "consciousness" of the nation,
thinking
argued they were morally

that bound to "beautify" and
preserve townscapes that "spoke" a of German
language
heritage. Although most of the daily work of preservation was
conducted by government agencies, elite voluntary groups such
as the Rhenish Association for the Protection of Historic Sites
and Culture (Rheinischer Verein fur Denkmalpflege und
Heimatschutz, or RVDH) also had an advisory and financial
role. Aside from such direct preservation activity, the educated
middle and upper classes were the most avid "readers" of
historic environments through tourism, the purchase of
postcards and illustrated publications (for example, the Blaue
Bucher series) and participation in beautification, historical,
and preservation societies. In short, the educated middle and
upper classes not only organized a industry," of
"heritage

Rudy J. Koshar
which historic preservation was a key part, but were also

among the main consumers of its products.23
Anchored in the professions and government, permeated
with the moral impulse of the Bildungsburgertum, historic
preservationists believed they were stewards of the historic
landmarks of the cultural nation. They used a language of
nationalist "entitivity," based on the assumption that the
cultural nation was an extant, bounded and continuous entity
36 whose "memory,"
however contested or
dependent
on
subjective rather than notionally "objective" characteristics,

could be symbolized in objects such as historic buildings. This
on a metonymy that identified the historic
symbolization relied
as the effect of a national culture. But nationalist
place
a type of
entitivity relied more specifically on synecdoche,
metonymy, which figuratively portrayed historic sites as symbols
of qualities characteristic of a holistic cultural experience
a bounded nadonal
possessed by group.24
These tropes were deployed in a broader narrative. Relying
on a Romantic form of emplotment characterizing history as
an ascending, conflictive spiral, preservationism recontextual
ized the Biblical story of the Fall and prophecy of redemption
by identifying the (re)development of historical consciousness
with a renewal of national heritage after an era of decline.25
However, it would be inaccurate to think of this as a purely
Romantic narrative of the ultimate triumph of good over evil,
since preservationists also relied on a comic emplotment based
on the chance of "provisional release from the divided state
in which men find themselves in this world."26 The first issue
of the journal Die Denkmalpflege, appearing in 1899, set the
tone for this story of redemptive heritage, noting the serious
destruction of historic places in the preceding decades of
industrialization and urbanization, but also saying that people
had begun to heed the "golden words of Bismarck" that it
was "of greatest harm to a nation when it allows the living
consciousness of its connection to its heritage and history to
fade."27
Historical narration is based on several functional elements.
The was grounded mainly in a
preservationist perspective
narrative outlining the development of "alien forms
genetical

of life into proper ones" - from crass materialism to a

reverence for the German past, for example. This also
necessitated the use of critical narratives that "live on what
they destroy."28 But this criticism never assumed the darker or
apocalyptic tones of volkisch anti-Semites, radical nationalists,
cultural or modernists. Conservationist
pessimists reactionary
a relatively positive and forward-looking
discourse originated in
cultural nationalism whose particular way of using narrative
elements persisted through World War I, the Weimar Republic 37
and the Depression, when the Viennese building official
Wilhelm Ambros, speaking for the preservationist lobby in
Austria and Germany, argued "there is no reason to speak of
a crisis of historic
preservation."29
This essentially optimistic narrative of redemptive heritage,
notionally rooted in the "natural" balance and good sense of
the cultured classes even when it was aligned with nationalist
chauvinism, was used to incorporate National Socialist rhetoric
into preservationist discourse. No better illustration can be
found than Paul Clemen's book Die Deutsche Kunst und die
Denkmalpflege. Ein Bekenntnis, published in Berlin in mid-1933
and one of the central texts of twentieth-century historic
in Clemen was a famous if autocratic
preservation Germany.
Bonn art historian, a member of the Lutheran church, first
conservator of monuments in the Prussian Rhine
province
in
1892, and chair of the national congress of conservators from

1923 to 1932. He won the Goerres prize of the Goethe
Stiftung and the Goethe Medallion in 1942 and played a role
in reviving Rhenish preservationism before his death in 1946.30
Consisting of essays and addresses written from 1911 to 1932,
Clemen's book featured detailed discussions of the goals of
as well as a semiotics of monuments.
preservation rudimentary
The author referred to a
range of thinkers, including Le
Corbusier, Nietzsche, John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, Ernst Junger,
Oscar Wilde, and Stefan George, for whose work Clemen had
a particular fascination. Clemen identified preservationism
direcdy with the new regime, including a preface, dated July,
in which he spoke admiringly of Hitler's
"deep empathy for
the mysterious magic of monuments" and quoted "the
Fuhrer's words" of that spring regarding the importance of

Rudy J. Koshar
"the great tradition of our people, its history and its culture"
as sources of "a possible renewal in troubled times."31 Here
redemption took the form of liberating the German nation
from its self-destructive disregard for the past; if Bismarck's
"golden words" had performed this function more than three
decades before, then Hider's belief in the magic of
monuments now achieved a similar
goal.
Other writers redeployed the narrative, giving it their own
38 inflections, but having identical political aims. One method
was simply to mark off a rather indefinitely defined past from
the present while retaining that element of continuity that
genetical narratives depend on. A typical example was the
article by the municipal building official Hanns Klose in 1938
on the adaptive re-use of several buildings in Wesel, which
opened with the remark "immediately after the seizure of
power the Wesel city administration undertook a
building
program that included the renewal of several historic buildings
whose facades and interiors have unfortunately deteriorated
much in recent decades despite being categorized as historic
landmarks."3" This description, bland and innocuous,
nonetheless identified the new regime with renewal, the old
with decline, and preservationism with a faithful realization of
the new spirit through its traditional role as steward of the
architectural heritage.
Some narratives were more For
explicit. many
Nazism brought long-awaited political a
preservationists,
mobilization of great landmarks such as Frederick the Great's
Sanssouci in Potsdam. "Since the von Potsdam'," wrote
'Tag
the Berlin National Gallery's Paul Ortwin Rave in 1934,
"Sanssouci is once again at the center of nationalist festivals.
The Hitler Youth regiment's consecration of the colors this
past winter will remain unforgettable. Lit by floodlights,
Sanssouci hill rose in blinding radiance, as if enchanted, out
of the evening shadows."33 Here the magical quality of place,
rationalized and commodified under the regime of liberal
was This
type of emplotment
regained. could be
capitalism,
articulated even more
directly with counterrevolutionary
thinking. When the technical college instructor F. Hermann
Flesche commented on a badly needed renewal scheme for

Braunschweig's superficially picturesque medieval town center

in 1934, he reminded readers that "the revoludon of 1918
crept out of this hiding-place." Only the Nazis could
undermine this privileging of piety for the past over the social
racial need for better housing: "It was the National Socialist
regime that first understood the problem and did something

about it with real conviction. Renewal of the first block had
begun."34 Here synecdoche served to infuse the task of
Sanierung with the political and social urgency of National 39
Socialist ideology.
Not all was unanimity. The preservationist public was the
location of conflicts that reflected the social differentiation of
state and city officials, free professions, and other parts of the
Burgertum. Conservators and other officials worried aloud about
what effect Nazi "coordination" of cultural policy would have
on their activities.35 Just as they had before Hitler's rise to
power, contributors to newspapers and professional journals in
architecture and historic preservation debated methodologies,
goals and functions. Preservation projects set off fierce public
as when a Berlin-Wilmersdorf official
exchanges, building
referred to plans for a reconstructed historic district in Berlin
in 1936 as "romantic gush." Such debates appear slightly
absurd if it is forgotten that they dealt with salient questions
of a secular based on reverence for an
religion imagined
national past. But these differences were never strong enough
to subvert preservationists' active reutilization of Nazism as a
fulfillment of a narrative of redemptive heritage.
City as
Stage
The cause
of heritage preservation appeared to find direct
support from Nazism. Hitler had made much of his love of
monumental buildings, characterizing the Vienna Ringstrasse
as an "enchantment," and speaking of "the magical spell of
the sites of Mecca and Rome."37
The Nazi party addressed
preservationists directly, coordinating their organizations while
assuring them of a special role in a "cultural revolution" that
demanded "preservation in the grand style." Die Baukunst,
architectural supplement of Die Kunst imDeutschen Reich, edited

Rudy J. Koshar
by Albert Speer, ran lavishly illustrated features of historic

buildings and praised provincial and municipal conservators.
Preservationists benefitted from a 1934 campaign to control
advertising in the countryside, 1936 legisladon that created
stricter guidelines for new building in historic districts, and
the adaptive re-use of old buildings by party and Hitler Youth
groups. These and other measures seemed to legitimize the
regime's claim that it had "unchained" cities such as Aachen
40 from decline after "the great purification" of 1933 by saving
historic downtowns, promoting local festivals and creating or
-
Heimat museums actions that, not
maintaining incidentally,
were placed on the same moral
plane as the regime's attacks
on "cultural deprivation" caused in the case of Aachen by the
now departed French occupation troops "with their substantial
female entourage."38 Despite the selective destructiveness of
Nazi urban planning, despite Nazi unwillingness to endorse a
completely historicist architecture and despite the rampant
consumerism of German public life in the 1930s, both
preservationists and the NSDAP could easily think of the
as a serious of
dictatorship proponent heritage preservation.
Scholars have noted the radical political functionalism of
Nazi urban thinking, stressing Speer's monumental building
projects above all. Much less attention has been devoted to
the already built environment in such schemes. Yet we need
only look to Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of theWill, which
used the beflagged Nuremberg Altstadt as a theatrical
backdrop for Hitler's triumphant entry into the city, or Paul
Herrmann's 1942 painting "Die Fahne," which reduces
Munich's to a shadowy mass of geometric shapes and
cityscape
turrets framing the 1923 Beer Hall putschists.39 In both
a traditional center's association with a
representations, city
"vision of origin" was
articulated with Nazism's project of
Germans back to their presumed racial heritage.40 In
leading
both representations, moreover, major urban centers rather
than small towns were used to bring about this association,
suggesting Nazism's ideological investment in the metropolis.
This metaphorical understanding of the city as theater has
become more influential throughout the twentieth century;41
only the extreme politicization of the metaphor distinguishes

the Nazi era from later periods. The sources of this

were truly eclectic and cannot be reduced to any
politicization
or political strand. In urban
single cultural planning Nazism
created a racist conglomerate of ideas constructed out of
traditions, conservative-technocratic of
garden-city theorizing
the 1920s and the expressionism of radical thinkers such as
Bruno Taut. By 1936 urbanistic thinking had shifted from a
to a more technocratic inflection.
"volkisch-organic"
Meanwhile, limited urban renewal schemes were undertaken in 41
Frankfurt-am-Main, and Kassel, and a
Braunschweig
monumental rebuilding of key urban ensembles was begun in
Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg and elsewhere. In architecture,
Nazism drew on a similarly eclectic mix of influences,
including not only the classicist and regionalist traditions of
conservative architects, but also modernist models.42
Despite this chaos of influences, and despite much anti

urban rhetoric from many different sources, the most salient
was not to oppose the metropolis, but to redefine urban
goal
meaning. The city and the urban region would retain their
functions as spatial settings for commodity production, albeit
without liberal capitalist, Jewish and Marxist influences. The
with the spirit of a new political
city would be permeated
culture, aware of its racial heritage and subjugated totally to
the new state. National Socialism tried to disengage the city
from historical contingencies, creating a sense of absolute time
and place, privileging the metaphor of the city as stage whose
actors were the masses and whose star was Hitler himself.
as Altar
City
Conservationists subscribed to a "culturalist" of

perspective
the city that "was retrospective in that it clung to the
coherent and exemplary image of the preindustrial city in
opposition to the contemporary image of urban
incoherence."43 Yet also welcomed "the new,"
preservationists
taking their cue from thinkers such as Camillo Sitte, who

the city as an value as as a few public
accepted exchange long
squares could be preserved to provide a dramatized
"spatially
memory" of a proud Burger past.44 This goal of preserving a

Rudy J. Koshar
limited number of commemoradve spaces sometimes

rather exaggerated language, as when the Strassburg
generated
art historian Georg Dehio, author of a famous multivolume
handbook of German cultural landmarks, claimed that
was by necessity "socialistic" because of its need
preservation
to abridge property rights in the interest of heritage
protection.45 Yet the desire to disengage certain districts or
landmarks from the quotidian violence of capitalist market
42 forces was present. What then was to be saved?
It is commonplace to argue that preservationists in the first
half of the twentieth century were most concerned with
"nonurban fortresses, castles, and cloisters" along with a few
urban churches.46 There can be litde doubt that
were enamored of "public symbols," objects
preservationists 4
that were very imageable in that they had a 'high probability
of evoking a strong image in any given observer." These could
be formal gardens, monuments to historic personalities or
events, monumental architecture, public squares or ideal cities.
But since the late nineteenth century preservationists had also
discussed "fields of care." These differ from in
public symbols
that they command not immediate attention but affection,
on the part of their inhabitants. They are less
especially
than public symbols, often inconspicuous, and,
imageable
unlike public symbols, they are firmly entrenched in everyday
life. They may include parks, homes, shops, taverns, street
corners, or whole towns. These
neighborhoods, marketplaces,
structures often form those "unintentional" monuments whose
commemorative value stems not from an

"original purpose
and but from subsequent perceptions and
significance,"
actions. Government funding and group activity to save such
objects lagged well behind theory until recently, but current
interest in conserving historic fields of care was prefigured
in preservationist discourse at the turn of the
rhetorically
century.47
Preservationists therefore envisioned a capitalist city dotted
with ensembles of public symbols and a limited but growing
number of fields of care. In the case of smaller towns and
cities, these ensembles could be much larger, sometimes
entire old city centers, towns and rural
encompassing

landscapes. It would be difficult to argue that such

morphological and architectonic configurations suggested
unalloyed anti-urbanism. Indeed, it was not the big city per se
that preservationists criticized, but rather its tendency to
transgress distinctions between and small-town
metropolitan
habitats that possessed a quality of spatial and
temporal
closure, a coherence that made them a "total work of art"
(Gesamtkunstwerk),48Even then preservationists never thought of
the metropolis as an undifferentiated whole since, as we have 43
seen, some big cities (Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden) or parts
of big cities (the Frankfurt-am-Main Altstadt) were worthy of
substantial
preservation.
If much of the urban landscape could be surrendered to
market forces, then highly valued public symbols and fields of
care would serve as moral stabilizers in a
necessary constantly
changing social reality.49 Nationalist symbolism played a major
role in this project of finding in the physical landscape a
of a collective interest, a
representation "magical" meaning
beyond the marketplace.50 If cosmology had performed this
function in ancient civilizations, then in the modern period
nationalism offered new ways of believing. The uneven
breakdown of older forms of social integration in the modern
period had given way to nationalist imaginings that required
many different referents to dissolve social tensions that were
ultimately indissolvable. This need to find more ways of
symbolizing national integration in a time of disintegration
exerted a on discourse that resulted in
pressure preservationist
a constant of the of the monument. As
widening concept
social became ever more unrealistic, nationalist
integration
intervened in discourse to create an
thought preservationist
ever-increasing need for the return of "aura" to the physical
a connection to the
landscape, unique, solidarity-giving fabric
of time and place that capitalist development and class tension
destroyed. Moreover, as the audiences for whom historic
environments could in fact be "historic" or symbolic of a
national interest became more fragmented, so the array of
artifacts became larger and more varied.
From this perspective it is not surprising that preservationist
readings of the city often had an integrative, religious tone.

Rudy J. Koshar
Clemen's work again provides a key example. Balanced and

practical, Die Deutsche Kunst und die Denkmalpflege was
nonetheless a "confession" of the author's love of historic
places, as the subtitle, Ein Bekenntnis, suggested. This religiosity
was made as
explicit, when Clemen singled out historic
churches and city halls as vehicles through which a "living
Christianity" and a communal could be
"living spirit"
preserved. Influenced by the later work of Stefan George,
44 Clemen's thought took on a mystical tone in his poem cycle
"Mitternachtsgesprach im Naumburger Dom," in which the
life-size statues of cathedral donors in the early Gothic west
choir were made to speak as "protectors of cathedral and city,
worshipers of the Holy Land." Clemen persisted in seeing
historic places in this manner until the end of his life, relying
on a that characterized cultural monuments as the
synecdoche
"embodiment of sacred sentiments."51
religious
Related partly to long-standing Romantic and conservative
influences and partly to the quest of German intellectuals for
a new religiosity adapted to twentieth-century needs,52 this
found an echo in other preservationist texts.
language
"Reverence" and for the were the
"piety" past among key
words of discourse. Professional conservators
preservationist
spoke of their "pastoral" mission of advice and good counsel

to city mayors, cultural officials and the public. The 1936
preservationist congress in Dresden, like many previous events,
used religious imagery of the Holy Mother to represent its
devotion to Heimat. More popular publications used a similar
such as Richarda Huch's introduction to an
language,
illustrated volume of German architecture, in which she wrote
of the "religiosity" of early Germanic peoples.53
All this suggests that if the spatial metaphor of the political
stage applied to National Socialist urban practice, it was the
metaphor of the altar that operated in preservationist
discourse. Several "entailment were at work
relationships"54
here. The metaphorical of the nation as a
understanding
church, that nationalism had replaced religion as a source of
entailed that national culture was a religious
meaning,
practice. This entailed that cities and towns, as expressions of
a bounded, individuated national entity, were forums for the

manipulation of sacred utensils and vestments, of which

historic places were the most visible, durable and imageable in
the creadon of public memory. The city was a secular altar -
surrounded by a volatile and destructive capitalism to be sure,
assaulted on all sides by nonbelievers - but still present in its
role as a public space from which the rituals of a national
religion could be conducted.
Privileged Marginality 45
National Socialism and historic preservationism used a

similar language of nation, race and heritage. Yet
never strove for a full articulation of altar and
preservationists
stage, wishing instead to situate themselves securely in the
dominant political culture while creating distance from it. I
want to suggest that this distancing resulted in a privileged
marginality for the preservationist metaphor: privileged
because the metaphor was already imbricated with the
language of state cultural policy and elite social networks, and
marginal because National Socialist repression of urbanistic
discourse in the wider society was unquestioned.
Nazi metaphors of the urban stage presupposed large public
spaces in which Hitler or leading Nazi performers "played" to
huge, enthusiastic audiences. The difference between this
approach and the spatial referents of the preservationist
metaphor was alluded to by Hitler himself in a 1939 speech
that made unfavorable comparisons between the small spaces
of historic churches and the spaces of mass
large spectacles.53
These spadal contrasts articulated with differences in the
status of Whereas the or was a
performers. priest pastor
recognized representative of an institutionalized religion, the

performer of the urban stage gained his following through
charisma alone. The conservator, trained
professional usually
as an architect or art
historian, expressed this difference
succinctly by likening his task to a "pastoral" mission of
a collective
teaching piety for national memory.56 Nazi
advocates of heritage and preservation, by contrast, used the
language of struggle, mastery and unending crisis, creating an
imagery of the urban warrior defending historic environments

Rudy J. Koshar
masses
against destruction and calling on the to wage battle
for the collective heritage.
The implied "reader" of each metaphor was
correspondingly different. The urban stage, situated in
monumental spaces and fired by the performances of
charismatic leaders, presupposed an audience that was made
up of a disparate array of social groups, a cross-class
In addition, this heterogeneous audience was
conglomerate.
46 because it was imprisoned not only by the
doubly passive
of a deep, continuous racial heritage, but also by
knowledge
an inescapable propaganda that demanded total commitment
to the preservation of fascist community.57
was also passive,
The implied reader of the urban altar
because piety for the past created a kind of cultural
partly
"iron an quietism that Nietzsche had
cage," antiquarian
attacked in the 1870s.58 Yet inscribed in this passivity were
remnants of the notion of a culturally homogeneous audience
of the city as a text and arriving at some
capable "reading"
critical appreciation of its content. In a range of areas -
architecture, painting, literature - the degradation of this
bourgeois tradition of the cultural reader had been attacked
and proclaimed dead, but in historic preservation the world of
that "wider, but now dying circle that one likes to call the
cultured (Gebildeten)," in Clemen's words, still informedi#a
substantial of discourse.59 Indeed,
part preservationist
a virtue of being at the historical end
made
preservationists
of that tradition, assuming it could be continued in
point
some marginal way in the future.
The foregoing suggests that each metaphor invoked different
of Monumental spaces, charismatic
strategies consumption.
performers doubly and passive readers were conjoined

with
Nazi goals of producing a volkisch mass consumer whose
chief
was the gargantuan building project in Berlin.
symbol
Regarded
so often as a project whose main goal was to
a renewed national political power, the Berlin
represent
scheme, which paid substantial attention to the needs of
was also an invitation to mass
private business, conspicuous
consumption.*10

Official heritage preservation could likewise be thought of as

"the product of social differentiation" through conspicuous
consumption.61 Yet this was not Nazism's "populist luxury." It
was an elitist market strategy which the
through preservationist
public "consumed" historic artifacts by studying, touring,
photographing, restoring and discussing them. It was
conspicuous because these activities demonstrated the notional
superiority of the consumers, giving them, in Pierre
Bourdieu's words, a "social power over time" not because they 47
possessed historic places individually (although some did), but
because showing concern for them, visiting them and reading
about them, knowing about their history and architectural
styles, was something "like the taste for old things" and was
available only for those "who can take their time."62 In short,
whether they acted as government stewards or
passive admirers
of medieval town halls or historic districts, the educated
middle and upper classes, through government agencies and
voluntary groups, used this "cultural to assert a social
capital"
vis-a-vis other domestic
superiority groups.63
That some Nazi party members understood this aspect of the
heritage industry was clearly demonstrated in Goebbels'
thinking. The propaganda minister said that German culture
was imprisoned by "tradition and reverence." He cheered the
World War II destruction of German cultural monuments, the
remnants of an "old and used up
past" and "last obstacles to
the fulfillment of [Nazism's] revolutionary' goals." More
significant than such ranting, however, were disagreements
that stemmed directly from within the preservationist
public.
When a technical instructor sympathetic to the Nazi
college
cause suggested in a 1934 article in Deutsche Kunst und
Denkmalpflege that members of the Committee for Monuments
and Historic Sites in Braunschweig would never condescend to
live in the substandard housing of that city's protected town
center, and that only the Nazis understood the problems of
German Altstddte, he pointed to a serious
incompatibility
between a cultured piety for the past and a National Socialist
discourse on social biology. A similar incompatibility, a harsh
difference between elite and mass consumption associated with

Rudy J. Koshar
two opposed urbanistic metaphors, was discussed the

during
urban renewal project for Frankfurt-am-Main in 1936.^
a discussion of nationalism would seem to
By contrast,
suggest compatibility between the metaphors. Here indeed
historic seemed to have its best
twentieth-century preservation
chance of joining the national "revolution," by stating that
the subject of its narrative, its "real hero," to use Dehio's
words, was the German Volk. Much of this nationalism was
48 influenced by civil service traditions, clearly stated in the claim
that state conservators had a "particular ethos" of anonymity
not unlike that of the medieval artist, whose personality was
subsumed in the work of art. This meant that individual
interests were subjugated to "God and community." No less
was a broader cultural nationalism, rooted
important
ultimately in Herder's "contextualistic" understanding of
human nature by which the individual finds identity through
"inclusion in a broader an inherited
linguistic community,
stream of words and images which he must accept on trust."
Subsequent aggressive readings of this cultural nationalism
obscured the essential tolerance of Herder's ideas, which were
based on a
theory of freedom for each national group. Post
World WarII preservationists and their Heimatschutz allies
that this theory of freedom was misused after 1933,
argued
seemingly excusing themselves for their enthusiastic support
for Nazism. Yet there is something to the claim. Not only in
Clemen's work, which stressed a conservative-Christian
tolerance in public life, but in other preservationist texts also,

we find continued adherence to this earlier, less aggressive
cultural nationalism. The contradictions of this perspective
were obvious: preservationists praised the French cultural
they helped to save in the wartime program of
heritage
artistic treasures while the German
protection of (Kunstschutz)
army occupied France. The victimizer admired the victim. Yet
the theme of tolerance persisted, an untimely inheritance
a place of privileged marginality in a
perhaps, occupying
that preached and fanaticism and mass
dictatorship practiced
murder.*5
One could make a similar point about regionalism. Like its
Heimatschutz ally, historic preservation used the metaphor of

the altar to stress the imageability of local settings, invoking

differences in architectural style,materials, levels of destruction
of historic built environments, and an array of other factors.
For preservationists, the persistence or restoration of unique
townscapes made local imageability not just a matter of
imagination but a physical fact reinforced the federal
by
structure and legislative mechanisms of official heritage
Nazi made use of also,
preservation. propagandists regionalism
but they relied on local traditions to demonstrate the regime's 49
ability to regiment difference. For the preservationist, however,
regional peculiarities functioned as local detail did in Theodor
Fontane's novel as a of
Irrungen, Wirrungen, namely way
a relative
establishing "stability of place" in the midst of
threatening social and political transformation.66 The local
facticity and detail of preservationist discourse, examples of its
Romantic heritage, continued to serve this defensive function
in the Nazi dictatorship. They suggested no meaningful
resistance to the regime, but they did point to one discursive
limit or blockage, marginal but palpable.
Conclusion
This paperhas suggested that there was a substantial inter

penetration of preservationist and National Socialist discourse.
However, I have also argued that preservationists' metaphorical
understanding of the city projected certain discursive limits on
this interpenetration. This is not quite a case of that
subversion without resistance that Michel de Certeau has so
skillfully discussed.67 Yet it does suggest that the idea of a
totally "coordinated and
system-conforming" preservationism
requires considerable rethinking.
Jiirgen Habermas has argued that the only useful way of
regarding the German past is a critical of
appropriation
tradition that does not simply emphasize what is about
"right"
German history, but accepts that what is
"right" is inextricably
interwoven with the darkest and most barbaric chapters of the
past.68 I noted in the introduction that the popular cult of
monuments relied partly on an ahistorical of
uncoupling
nostalgia from its associations with the era of the National

Rudy J. Koshar
Socialist dictatorship and partly on a more critical dismissal of

official heritage preservation of that era as utterly implicated
in the regime's actions. I want to suggest that a more fruitful
way of remembering how earlier generations of Germans
remembered is to examine the discursive differences in
preservationist and Nazi discourse, appropriating and refining
those elements that seem useful in the present, but
simultaneously recognizing their association with the crimes of
50 the past.
It is no doubt true that German historic preservation of the
1930s and early 1940s contained remnants of earlier traditions
of Romanticism, historicism and the bourgeois cult of high
culture - and allowed these traditions to be engaged by Nazi
propagandists. No one would suggest that the preservationist
of the city as altar should be revived. Yet the
metaphor
of the city as stage, now stripped of its authoritarian
metaphor
political implications, but fully deployed in the marketing of
historic city centers and other environments,69 has drastically
reduced the educative potential of historic places. Perhaps
of the earlier interest in,
something preservationists' passionate
if not their reverence for, history could be recovered if
alternative metaphors were engaged. As Terry Eagleton has
remarked, all the best radical positions are thoroughly
traditionalist ones,70 and a critical of such
appropriation
traditions may contribute to those parts of current postmodern
discourse that aim for more than a theatrical nostalgia. To
learn from the urban past, to "see" how both past crimes and
are inscribed in urban environments - this
accomplishments
in the history of preservationism's
potential is worth preserving
making of urban meaning. But it is worth preserving with a
substantial dose of reflexivity: since any understanding of the
consists of our and since no full
past linguistic projections,
reconstruction of the past is possible, we can only engage in
an with earlier hoping to
imaginary dialogue generations,
recycle those dispersed fragments that can be used for
life. This is true in the German case. If
contemporary doubly
the recycling of historic urban fragments in Germany is to be
more than a self-indulgent and forgetful play with "stranded
objects," itmust be done under the sign of mourning.71

Notes
1 Research for this project was made possible by a fellowship 51

from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
2 See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History,
Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.,
1988), 123.
3 The terms Denkmalpflege (literally the encouragement and
guardianship of monuments, in the broadest sense),
Denkmalschutz (which stresses the element of protection) and
Baudenkmalpflege (which specifically stresses architecture) are
no more than the terms "historic or
precise preservation"
"conservation." Each term is a shorthand for
expression
many different practices ranging from the complete
restoration of single buildings (or even single objects) to
minimal protection of entire districts. In the following, I
refer to architectural preservation, which is arguably the
dominant connotation of the term. See David Lowenthal,
The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), for some of
the complexities and references to a technical
large
literature in the Anglo-American world. For the German
case, see the many sources cited below. For Alois see
Riegl,
his moderne
"Der Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine
Entstehung," in Gesammelte Aufsdtze (Augsburg and Vienna,
1928), 144-93.
4 See Reinhard Bentmann, "Der Kampf um die Erinnerung.
Ideologische und methodische Konzepte des modernen
Denkmalkultus," Hessische Blatter fur Volks- und Kultur
2/3: Ina-Maria Greverus, ed., Denkmalraume-Lebens
forschung
raume (Giessen, 1976), 213, 215.
5 Max Buge, Der Rechtschutz gegen Verunstaltung. Ein Wegweiser
durch das Recht der Baugestaltung und Aussenwerbung
(Dusseldorf-Lohausen, 1952).

Rudy J. Koshar
6 Otto Borst, "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Denkmalpflege

fur das Leben," Die Alte Stadt 15, no. 1 (1988): 10-11
(hereafter DAS).
7 In general, the best sources for recent writing on the
subject in Germany are the journals Deutsche Kunst und
Denkmalpflege (hereafter DKD) and DAS (formerly Zeitschrift
fur Stadtgeschichte, Stadtsoziologie, und Denkmalpflege). Much
on takes an "internalist/' art-historical
writing preservation
52 viewpoint that considers individual objects virtually isolated
from larger social processes. Some exceptions for Germany
are: Klaus von Beyme, Der Wiederaufbau. Architektur und
Stddtebaupolitik in beiden deutschen Staaten (Munich and
Zurich, 1987), chap. 9; Michael Brix, ed., Lubeck. Die Altstadt
als Denkmal (Munich, 1975); Werner Durth and Niels
Gutschow, eds., Architektur und Stddtebau der Funfziger Jahre
(Bonn, 1990); Ekkehard Mai and Stephan Watzoldt, eds.,
Kunstverwaltung, Bau- und Denkmal-Politik im Kaiserreich
(Berlin, 1981); Cord Meckseper and Harald Siebenmorgen,
eds., Die alte Stadt: Denkmal oder Lebensraum? (Gdttingen,
1985).
8 Typical in this regard is Joachim Petsch, Baukunst und
Stadtplanung imDritten Reich (Vienna, 1976). Evidence for an
alternative view is provided in Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart
und Durerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im
Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Gottingen, 1969), which, by
attacks arguments of an inevitably
implication only,
core to discourse. More recently,
reactionary preservationist
see Mai and Watzoldt, Kunstverwaltung.
9 For example, see the substantial literature cited by
Hard twig, "Burgertum, Staatssymbolik und
Wolfgang
Staatsbewusstein im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871-1914,"
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16, no. 3 (1990): 269-95. Still one
of the best discussions of national monuments is Thomas
"Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in
Nipperdey,
Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert," in idem, Gesellschaft,
Kultur, Theorie. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur neueren Geschichte
(Gottingen, 1976), 133-73.
10 See Winfried Speitkamp, "Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz
in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkritik und National

sozialismus,', Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 70, no. 1 (1988):

149-93, which makes a similar point about the need for
study of historic preservation in the Nazi period. Speitkamp
also stresses the ambivalence of historic preservation in
relation to Nazism, but says little about urbanisdc discourse
or the formal attributes of preservationist discourse.
11 Maier, Unmasterable Past, 122.
12 Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots. A Cross-Cultural
Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 53
1983), 303.
13 For this definition of discourse, see H. D. Harootunian,
Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa
Nativism (Chicago, 1988), 3.
14 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago, 1980), 235, 6.
15 Ibid., 236-37; on spadalization, see David Gross, "Space,
Time, and Modern Culture,', Telos 50 (1981-82): 59-78. On
metaphor and the city, see William Sharpe and Leonard
*
Wallock, "From Great Town' to Urban Realm':
'Nonplace
Reading the Modern City," in idem, eds., Visions of the
Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (Baltimore,
1987).
16 The quote is from David Harvey, Consciousness and theUrban
Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist
Urbanization (Baltimore, 1985), 16-17. For background on
urban debates, see Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society
in European and American Thought, 1820-1940 (New York,
1985), esp. 82-90, 142-48, 239-47, 269-88. For good
examples of urban planning in individual cities in this
period, see Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in
Germany, 1860-1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
17 See Lees, Cities Perceived, which is detailed and useful, but
which relies on this binary opposition.
18 See Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany,
1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), for essential
background. A very recent contribution to debates over
architectural modernism in the Weimar period is Richard
Pommer and Chrisdan F. Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the
Modern Movement in Architecture (Chicago, 1991).

Rudy J. Koshar
19 Regine Dolling, ed., The Conservation ofHistorical Monuments

in the Federal Republic of Germany, trans. Timothy Nevill
(Munich, 1974), 9-10, 12; Hans Peter Hilger, "Paul Clemen
und die Denkmaler-Inventarisation in den Rheinlanden," in
Mai and Watzoldt, Kunstverwaltung, 383-98; Stefan
Muthesius, "The Origins of the German Conservation
Movement," in Roger Kain, ed., Planning for Conservation
(New York, 1980), 37-48.
54 20 James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in theNineteenth Century
(Chicago, 1983), 219.
21 For the Heimat movement, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of
Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1990).
22 "Rheinischer Verein fur Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz,"
printed announcement of founding, 20 Oct. 1906, in
Nordrhein-Westfalisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dusseldorf
(hereafter NWHSAD), Regierung Dusseldorf, Prasident
(RDP), 534; Muthesius, "Origins of the German
Conservation Movement," 39, 46; Otto Sarrazin and Oskar
Hossfeld, "Zur Einfuhrung," Die Denkmalpflege 1 (4 Jan.
1899): 1-2 (hereafter DP); Paul Clemen, "Was wir wollen.
Ziele und Aufgabe," Mitteilungen des Rheinischen Vereins fur
Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz 1 (1907): 7-16; Michael Brix.
"Fassadenwettbewerbe. Ein der
Programm Stadtbildpflege
um 1900," in Meckseper and Siebenmorgen, eds., Die alte
Stadt, 67.
23 On Burgertum, see Jurgen Kocka, "Burgertum und
als Probleme der deutschen Geschichte vom
Burgerlichkeit
spaten 18. zum fruhen 20. Jahrhundert," in idem, ed.,
Burger und Burgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen, 1987),
34. See also idem, Burgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland
im europdischen Vergleich, 3 vols. (Munich, 1988). My
discussion of the social makeup of the preservationist public
is based on a still incomplete analysis of participants in
preservationist congresses and RVDH membership lists. For

one such congress, see Tag fur Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz
Dresden 1936. Tagungsbericht (Berlin, 1938). For an overview
of the RVDH, see Josef Ruland, "Kleine Chronik des
Rheinischen Vereins fur Denkmalpflege und Landschafts

schutz," in Erhalten und gestalten. 75 Jahre Rheinischer Verein

fur Denkmalp/lege und Landschaftsschutz (Neuss, 1981), 28. The
RVDH changed "Heimatschutz" to "Landschaftsschutz" in
1970. On the consumpdon of heritage, see Robert Hewison,
The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate ofDecline (London,
1987).
24 For the problem of entitivity, I rely on Richard Handler,
Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison,
Wisconsin, 1988), esp. chap. 1. For metonymy and 55
synecdoche, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baldmore, 1973),
31-38.
25 See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supematuralism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), 179-84.
26 White, Metahistory, 9.
27 Sarrazin and Hossfeld, "Zur 1.
Einfuhrung,"
28 See Jorn Rusen, "Historical Narration: Foundation, Types,
Reason," History and Theory, Beiheft 26: The Representation of
Historical Events (Middletown, Conn., 1987), 87-97, esp. 92
93.
29 "Denkmalpflege in Krisenzeiten," DP 34 (1932): 3.

30 See Hilger, "Paul Clemen und die Denkmaler
Inventarisation," and Albert Verbeek, "Paul Clemen (1866
1947)," in Bernhard Poll, ed., Rheinische Lebensbilder, vol. 7
(Cologne, 1977), 181-201.
31 Paul Clemen, Die Deutsche Kunst und die Denkmalpflege. Ein
Bekenntnis (Berlin, 1933), viii.
32 Hanns Klose, "Umbau der Kommandatur und Komturei in
Wesel," DKD 5 (1938): 49.

33 Paul Ortwin Rave, "Sanssouci," DKD 1 (1934): 49.
34 F. Hermann Flesche, der Altstadt-Braun
"Sanierung
ibid., 78.
schweig,"
35 See "Rheinischer Verein fur Denkmalpflege und Heimat
schutz," Nachrichten-Blatt fur rheinische Heimatpflege 4, no.
11/12 (1932/33): 417.
36 Landesbaurat Wohler, "Kunstliche Altstadt in Berlin?" DKD 3
(1936): 73.
37 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston,
1943), 19; Manfred Bultemann, Architektur fur das Dritte

Rudy J. Koshar
Reich. Die Akademie fur Deutsche Jugendfuhrung in Braunschweig

(Berlin, 1986), 36.
38 Ruland, "Kleine Chronik des Rheinischen Vereins," 28-34;
Burkhard Meier, 4'Der Denkmalpflegetag in Kassel, 5. bis 8.
Oktober 1933," DP 35 (1933): 197; "Denkmalpflege und
Denkmalschutz in der Rheinprovinz," National Zeitung, 20
June 1937; Alexander Heilmeyer, "Neue Wege der
Denkmalpflege," Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich 3, Folge 10,
56 Ausg. A (Oct. 1939): iii-iv (hereafter KDR); Karl Friedrich
Kolbow, ed., Die Kulturpflege der preussischen Provinzen
(Stuttgart, 1937); Buge, Der Rechtschutz gegen Verunstaltung,
Peter Schmidt, 4'Aachen: eine entfesselte Stadt,"
Westdeutscher Beobachter, 19 May 1941.
39 On "Die Fahne," see Werner Rittich, "Malerei im Haus der
Deutschen Kunst," KDR 5, Folge 11, Ausg. B (Nov. 1942):
267.
40 On the city and notions of primeval origin, see John G.
Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown, Conn.,
1968), 30-32; Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of
Experience (Minneapolis, 1977), 126.
41 See Werner Durth, Die Inszenierung der Alltagswelt. Zur Kritik
der Stadtgestaltung (Braunschweig, 1977), 33-41.
42 Bultemann, Architektur fur das Dritte Reich, 30-45; Lane,
Architecture and Politics, 147-216; Petsch, Baukunst und
Stadtplanung, 187-92.
43 Francoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th
Century (New York, 1969), 102.
44 Preservationists accepted modernist architecture in the form
of progressive historicism, which simplified and abstracted
Gothic and baroque styles, but criticized "new building" of
the kind represented by the Bauhaus. But vituperative
4
criticism of 4new building" such as that used by Konrad
Nonn, DKD co-editor in 1921-27 and 1934, was rare for
On Nonn, see Lane, Architecture and Politics,
preservationists.
For an to
81-85, 128. example of preservationist openness
modern architecture, see Richard Klapheck, Neue Baukunst
in den Rheinlanden (vol. 21, no. 2 of Zeitschrift des Rheinischen
Vereins fur Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz) (Neuss, 1928). On
Sitte, see Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and

Culture (New York, 1980), 72.

45 Norbert Huse, "Denkmalwerte: Alois Riegl und Georg
Dehio," in idem, ed., Denkmalpflege. Deutsche Texte aus drei
Jahrhunderten (Munich, 1984), 128.
46 Franziska Bollerey, Kristiana Hartmann, and Margret
Trankle, Denkmalpflege und Umweltgestaltung (Munich, 1975),
19.
47 On public symbols and fields of care, see Yi-Fu Tuan,
"Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective," Progress in 57
6 on
Geography (London, 1974): 236-45; imageability, Kevin
Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 9; on
unintentional monuments, Alois Riegl, "The Modern Cult
of Monuments: Its Character and Origin," Oppositions 25
(Fall 1982): 23; on funding in the 1930s, see
"Denkmalpflege und Denkmalschutz in der Rheinprovinz,"
National Zeitung, 20 June 1937.
48 On the "confusion of the concepts of city and
countryside," see the report of the 1911 RVDH annual
conference in Durener 4 Dec. 1911. Numerous
Zeitung,
thinkers thought of the built environment as a total work of
art, as noted by Lane, Architecture and Politics, 6-8; for the
concept applied in preservationist thinking, see Rudolf
Pfister, "Die Erneuerung von historischer
Ziegeldachern
Gebaude," DKD 1 (1934): 143.
49 See, for example, the letter from a Cologne technical
college instructor (signature illegible) to Regierung
Dusseldorf, April 1933, NWHSAD (Kalkum), RDP, 56235,
which pleads for preserving Lower Rhine peasant houses.
50 The following discussion relies on: Walter Benjamin, "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
idem, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Zohn
Harry
(New York, 1969), 217-51; Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a
Town. The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the
Ancient World (Princeton, 1976); Manfredo Tafuri,
Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), esp. 104-24; Patrick Wright, On
Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary
Britain (London, 1985), esp. 1-32.
51 Clemen, Die Deutsche Kunst, 27, 129; on influence
George's

Rudy J. Koshar
on Clemen, see Verbeek, "Paul Clemen," 97, 200; for the

last quote, ibid., 197.
52 See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the
Rise of theGermanic Ideology (New York, 1965), 120-21.
53 Dagobert Frey, "Der Denkmalpfleger. Robert Hiecke zum
sechzigsten Geburtstage," DKD 3 (1936): 296; on Heimat
imagery, see the text of the song "Heimatschutz," by
Arnold Findeisen and Kurt Richter, for the 1936 Tag fur
58 Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz in Archiv des
Landschaftsverbandes Rheinland-Koln-Deutz, 11041; Richarda
Huch, in Martin Hurlimann, ed., Deutschland.
"Einleitung,"
Landschaft und Baukunst (Berlin, 1934), 6.

54 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 9.
55 "Rede des Fuhrers zur Eroffnung der 'Zweiten Deutschen
Architektur- und Kunsthandwerk-Ausstellung'," KDR 3,
Folge 1, Ausg. A (Jan. 1939), 7.
56 Frey, "Der Denkmalpfleger," 296.
57 I rely here on Russell A. Berman's discussion of Hans
Grimm and Ernst Junger in The Rise of theModem German
Novel: Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 206.
This excellent book has influenced much of the present
discussion on implied readership.
58 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1988), 72-75.
59 Clemen, "Zum Gedachtnis an Georg Dehio," DP 34 (1932):
77.
60 I extrapolate here from Stephen D. Helmer, Hitlers Berlin:
The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1985), 17.
Definition and the Aesthetics of
61 Michael Jager, "Class
Gentrification: Victoriana in Melbourne," in Neil Smith and
Peter Williams, eds., Gentrification of the City (Boston, 1986),
79.
62 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of theJudgement

of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 71-72.
63 On cultural capital, see Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction
and Social Reproduction," in R. Brown, ed., Knowledge,
Education and Cultural Change (London, 1973), 71-112.

64 The Goebbels quotes are taken from Hans Dieter Schafer,

Das gespaltene Bewusstein. Uber Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirk
lichkeit 1933-1945 (Munich, 1981), 132; and Bultemann,
Architektur fur das Dritte Reich, 38. On Braunschweig, see
Flesche, "Sanierung der Altstadt-Braunschweig," 78; on
-
Frankfurt, Alfons Paquet, "Die Frankfurter Altstadt Abbau
oder Sicherung? Das Fur und Wider des Sanierungsplanes,"
Beilage zum 'Baumeister' 10 (Oct. 1936): 205-12.
65 On the conservator's ethos of state service, see Frey, "Der 59
296; on Herder, Brian J. Whitton,
Denkmalpfleger,"
"Herder's Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural
Community Versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism," History and
Theory 27, no. 2 (1988): 151, 156. On post-World War II
disclaimers, Karl Arnold, "Volkstum, Heimat und Staat," in
50 fahre Deutscher Heimatbund (Neuss, 1954), 8-9, and Karl
Zuhorn, "50 Jahre Deutscher Heimatschutz und Deutsche
in ibid., 46-50. On Clemen's stress on
Heimatpflege,"
tolerance, see his Die Deutsche Kunst, 62. On preservationist
praise of French heritage, see Clemen's review of Franz
Albrecht Medicus, ed., Kathedralen in Frankreich unter
deutschem Schutz (Paris, 1942), in DKD 8 (1942/43): 99-100.
On the wartime see
heritage preservation program, Margot
Kunstschutz in den von Deutschland besetzten
Gunther-Hornig,
Gebieten 1939-1945 (Tubingen, 1958).
66 Berman, Modern German Novel, 143.
67 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice ofEveryday Life (Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1984).
68 Jurgen Habermas, "Concerning the Public Use of History,"
New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988): 45.
69 See Durth, Inszenierung der Alltagswelt, 80-87.
70 Terry Eagle ton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis,
1983), 206.
71 I draw here on the terminology of Eric L. Santner, Stranded
Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany
(Ithaca, 1990).


Indiana University Press

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Indiana University Press

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Indiana University Press

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Altar, Stage and City: Historic Preservation and Urban Meaning in Nazi Germany

Author(s): Rudy J. Koshar

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

Altar, Stage and City: Historic Preservation

Partof the recent "self-archaeologization"2 of Western

buildings, districts and townscapes that are said to have

popular in West Germany after the late 1960s that critics,

Nazi dictatorship gave official heritage preservation. "Seldom

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

- bears traces of the

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

current interests in memory, language and cultural

metaphor embedded in preservationist language, what I will

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

assumptions are often unstated, resting on perceptions that are

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

institutionalized national religion. This paper is about that

A Narrative of Redemptive Heritage

Looking back to sixteenth-century precedents and inspired

protection and study of local history, folklore and nature.21

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

concentration on traffic and

planning and increasingly anchored in universities, technical

argued they were morally

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

which historic preservation was a key part, but were also

subjective rather than notionally "objective" characteristics,

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

of life into proper ones" - from crass materialism to a

1892, and chair of the national congress of conservators from

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

Braunschweig's superficially picturesque medieval town center

regime that first understood the problem and did something

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

by Albert Speer, ran lavishly illustrated features of historic

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

the Nazi era from later periods. The sources of this

Despite this chaos of influences, and despite much anti

Conservationists subscribed to a "culturalist" of

taking their cue from thinkers such as Camillo Sitte, who

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

limited number of commemoradve spaces sometimes

commemorative value stems not from an

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

landscapes. It would be difficult to argue that such

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

Clemen's work again provides a key example. Balanced and

spoke of their "pastoral" mission of advice and good counsel

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

manipulation of sacred utensils and vestments, of which

National Socialism and historic preservationism used a

recognized representative of an institutionalized religion, the

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

performers doubly and passive readers were conjoined

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM

Official heritage preservation could likewise be thought of as

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 20:48:12 PM