The New Reich Chancellery in Representation. The Intermedial Architecture & Archive of Hitler's Space of Power.

Abstract

This dissertation constructs an intermedial genealogy of the New Reich Chancellery, a key architectural symbol and frame of Führertum, Nazism’s political order, centered on Hitler’s ideological position in the regime. Constructed over 1935-9, as the Third Reich mobilized for war, incessantly reproduced in propaganda until 1945, occupied by the Allied forces, demolished by the Soviets over 1949-51 and buried beneath the Wall in 1961, this notorious destroyed building remains marginal within Berlin’s contemporary memorial landscape and Nazism’s historical representation. However, as I show, the New Chancellery’s mediation in representation was crucial to the construction of the Hitler-Mythos during the NS regime and offers a point of orientation for analyzing the development of Germany’s memory discourse, the continued confrontation with and critical reception of National Socialism over the lengthy process of ‘coming to terms’ with the past. Critically engaging with the NS architectural archive—the NS building industry’s material history and the propaganda in which its planned, constructed, and destroyed buildings circulated and were preserved following Hitler’s defeat—I investigate how modern aesthetic strategies and technologies were repeatedly deployed to transform the New Chancellery’s physical spaces into a visual narrative and topos, imbued with often contradictory, politicized and historical meanings, intertwined with the mythology and memory of Führertum. The introduction and first chapter analyze the New Chancellery’s construction and use as the Hitler-State’s administrative and symbolic center and its reproduction in exhibitions, models, Kulturfilm, newsreels, and photographs. My analysis shows how the building’s mediation metaphorically framed Hitler as the ‘embodiment’ of state, people, and future, and the state’s transformation of Germany’s socio-political order and urban landscape, while obscuring significant information about the physical architecture, its function, the violence intrinsic to NS building, and the improvisational, self-destructive nature of NS policy. The second chapter retraces the appropriation of its ruin as an emblem of Allied victory after 1945, its representation within Berlin’s rubble landscape, the documentation of its demolition, and the suppression of its images. The site of Hitler’s death, captured in photographs, newsreels, and reportage, the New Chancellery’s ruin and attached Führerbunker initially served as a hegemonic assertion the victors’ power and a site of reflection on national history. As I show, its destruction marked a turning point facilitating the temporary repression of its image—but the building did not disappear. Beginning with its ruin’s posthumous appearance in Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero, the final three chapters analyze the remediation and reception of this building’s archival images in representations of NS history produced by the New German Cinema and mainstream filmmakers. I interrogate its use in Alexander Kluge’s Brutalität in Stein, Joachim Fest’s Hitler - eine Karriere, and Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland as a site for confronting and criticizing Nazism’s legacy and mythology, historicized in relation to the NS trials, West Germany’s memory discourse, and NS iconography’s popular revival amid the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Each film reconstructs and deconstructs this architectural frame of Hitler’s power and redefines its meaning, using intermedial-architectural strategies of radical montage, populist critical documentary, the symbolic narrative of divestiture, and psychoanalytic concepts of ‘mourning.’ None, however, fully dismantles or neutralizes its fascination. Thus, my conclusion explores the New Chancellery’s present absence in Berlin, considering it in relation to Germany’s multi-layered histories and their architectural mediation in the reunified capital.