Building Nazi Germany

Reviews / Votes

Th is book will be a useful reference guide for teachers and students, and given the extensive bibliography and footnotes, a departure point for further research. While Nazism had its singular aspects, comprehensive syntheses like Building Nazi Germany are effective at showing important continuities and discontinuities through time and space. * Historical Geography * There is a substantial scholarly literature concerning architecture in the Third Reich, but Hagen and Ostergren break new ground. While dealing-as other scholars have-with the relationship between the construction of public buildings and Nazi aesthetics, Hagen and Ostergren go a step further by placing their study in a broad context. They approach their subject from the point of view of geographers, seeking to understand the relationship among aesthetics, ideology, utility, and urban planning during the Third Reich. Of particular interest is the chapter on the construction of concentration camps. In their epilogue, "The Building and Breaking of Nazi Germany," the authors provide a brief but valuable analysis of the destruction of Germany's urban landscape during the final days of WW II; there is also interesting discussion of the use of Nazi buildings during the postwar period. These are subjects usually ignored by other scholars. The numerous illustrations enhance the utility of this book. Building Nazi Germany makes an important contribution to understanding of National Socialism.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice Reviews * An indispensable work for anyone interested in urban planning and architecture under National Socialism. Erudite, captivating, and filled with fascinating photos and maps, the book leaves the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted and often contradictory imprint of Nazi ideology on the built landscape of Germany. -- Guntram H. Herb, Middlebury College Nazi Germany may be best remembered for the unparalleled, global destruction wrought by its toxic racism and war machinery. But, as Hagen and Ostergren demonstrate in this fascinating book, the regime's totalitarian ideology extended to the built world, too. Their valuable research shows the stunning and frightening extent of the Nazi regime's architectural megalomania. -- Steven Hoelscher, University of Texas at Austin The surfeit of "destructive creation" that shaped so many of the projects carried out in interwar Italy was also at play in the case of the other major fascist regime of the time, National Socialist Germany. Building Nazi Germany, a meticulously researched and admirably comprehensive monograph co-authored by Joshua Hagen and Robert C. Ostergren, extends the analytical focus in order to capture, beyond iconic architectural and planning projects, the production of the full range of spaces where the Third Reich would be forged, performed, experienced, and celebrated. Each chapter sheds light on a specific sphere of activity: capital cities (of the state, the party, the movement), urban settlements of diverse scales, housing settlements and units, athletic complexes, engineering projects and infrastructures, military complexes, in the end even labor and extermination camps. Destruction as an act of cleansing and regenerating cities, bodies, and the Volk as a whole is far from absent in the book's core narrative: the Nazi regime used demolition and invasive remodeling both as a technique of embellishing the heritage of the past and as a blunt instrument of healing "sick" cities and bodies. Yet Hagen and Ostergren's book begins and ends by underlining the constructive trope-the "imperative to build * Journal of Urban History * The book's cover displays a familiar image of the Nazi era: Adolf Hitler carefully inspects a grandiose architectural model. And yet, Building Nazi Germany contains much more than first meets the eye, for the book incorporates over 130 images of diverse government construction projects ranging from the monumental to the mundane. These photographs, maps, and illustrations reflect the book's broad coverage as well as its scholarly contribution. Joshua Hagen and Robert Ostergren explore the immediately recognizable elements of Nazi architecture, but they also disrupt this iconography by offering a more comprehensive visualization of the regime's building efforts. Ultimately, the authors show how projects differed in substance, scale, and level of completion yet were nevertheless connected in unexpected ways. * Central European History *