German city launches €85m plan to prevent further decay of infamous rally grounds
Should a modern democracy preserve an architecture and landscape designed to glorify the 20th century’s most infamous dictator? And, if the answer is yes, how?
The city of Nuremberg has grappled with these questions for years. It is now about to embark on an €85m plan to conserve the vast Nazi party rally grounds designed by Adolf Hitler’s architect Albert Speer.
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Unlike other Nazi edifices such as the Haus der Kunst in Munich, which is now an exhibition hall, or the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, which still serves as a sports arena, the rally complex—designed for enormous crowds, choreographed military parades and torchlit processions—was hard to repurpose in the new, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Intended to survive the “Thousand-Year Reich”, it is now a decaying endangered historic site.
“We won’t rebuild, we won’t restore, but we will conserve,” says Julia Lehner, Nuremberg’s chief culture official. “We want people to be able to move around freely on the site. It is an important witness to an era—it allows us to see how dictatorial regimes stage-manage themselves. That has educational value today.”
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