The Aesthetics of Nazi Architecture

Bryan Ferry has been castigated recently, for his comments regarding Nazi architecture.

According to press reports, the 61-year-old told the Welt Am Sonntag newspaper last month: “The way that the Nazis staged themselves and presented themselves, my Lord!

“I’m talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags. Just fantastic – really beautiful.”

Ferry has since apologised, but this hasn’t stopped campaigns for him to be dropped as the one of the public faces of Marks and Spencer. Nor has it stopped people who are unable to look at the past objectively from peddling their outrage in the press. Victoria Coren writes in today’s Observer:

A few days later, amid calls for him to lose his lucrative modelling contract with Marks & Spencer, the donkey-brained singer has apologised, explaining that his remarks were made ’solely from an art-history perspective’.

Why stop at art history, Bryan? If we’re going to praise the Nazis, let’s really praise them. Those guys were seriously high achievers. They weren’t just racists, they were incredible racists. They didn’t just kill a few Jews, gypsies, Russians, Poles and homosexuals, they killed millions of them. They weren’t just a bit sniffy about handicapped people, they actually conducted experiments on them. They built up their camps to an impressive pan-European chain – the Costa Coffee of torture! Credit where credit is due.

It should go without saying that any right-thinking person considers the Nazi regime abhorrent. It shouldn’t be necessary to have to enumerate the reasons why it is abhorrent, and why society should be alert to make sure that fascist movements don’t rise again. At the same time, however, that doesn’t mean that every single thing that the Nazis did was abhorrent and should never happen again. Nor does it mean that there aren’t aspects of the Nazi record in power that we can look at and think of as a genuine achievement – getting the German economy to experience such growth so soon after hyperinflation and the Wall Street Crash took some doing. There are all sorts of debates and arguments about the propriety of the means that they used to achieve those ends. But that doesn’t mean that the ends can’t be viewed objectively either.

I would have thought that the case was even easier as far as Nazi iconography goes. For however much art is reflective of the social principles of its creators, however much art reflects political attitudes of its time, our first reaction is always to appreciate the aesthetic quality of the piece of art before us. When I first saw Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, or Bill Reid’s The Raven and the First Men, my reaction had nothing to do with the hidden themes in the work (although in both cases there are many). They took my breath away simply because they were beautiful to behold. Both works of art convey in their images great craftsmanship, and invite further reflection on humanity in general. That is why I still cherish looking at them. Yet were it not for the “wow” factor, I wouldn’t have pondered further on them at all. And the same is perhaps even more true of architecture.

Is it possible to separate aesthetic beauty from political content? Coren asserts in her article that “In the case of Thirties German iconography, it is nearly impossible to divorce the two.” Yet I would be amazed if Coren thought it at all remarkable to question the artistic merit of the Colosseum. How does she think that was built, if not for the exploitation of labour on a massive scale? There are aspects of the Renaissance that weren’t all that pretty – religious conflict on a continental scale, for example – yet that doesn’t stop us hailing the artistic achievements of those who were a product of that ferment. It is perfectly possible to hail a work of art as brilliant while despising those who created it, or the political philosophies that they espoused.

Why is it wrong to admire Speer’s architectural plans for the capital of Germania as a model of grand town planning, yet acceptable to consider the Colosseum a wonder of the world? The answer must surely lie in the proximity of the Nazi regime to our modern age. While we are still in the presence of those who survived the Holocaust, while the international political projects of Europe still have as their key reference point World War Two, while those born in Germany after the war can still remember the national embarrassment of Hitler’s Reich, our emotional reactions to anything connected with Nazism are strong. That, in many ways, is a good thing, if it guards against the rise of any similar regime in the future.

But it is not a constructive way of looking at the past. We cannot hope to gain anything from a study of the past if we are too quick to categorise things as “good” or “evil”. It is possible to create things of real, lasting beauty through evil means. We should be proud to say that we reject the philosophy that led to many of the creations of the Third Reich. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognising that they are, in themselves, beautiful.