9 ms·

Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (2017)

108 points by tintinnabula 6y ago

severak_cz 6y ago
HBO's movie Fatherland (1994) was filmed in post-communist Prague. They used both matte paintings and real locations (of Prague) to depicts never-built nazi city of Germania. This use of real-life locations leads to some (for locals) hilarious moments like scene where gestapo tries to catch some man who is running away from them by train. The chase goes from station A to B where the man is killed. But funny thing is that they used just one real station to shoot both locations of A and B and they are actually just some 100m away. See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109779/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109779/
- tomcam 6y ago
  You’ve just described virtually all mainstream moviemaking, at least in the US. Even on location shoots there is almost never a case, for example, where an establishing shot of the exterior of a house or other building takes place within 100m or even 100 miles of where the interior set is.
  - carabiner 6y ago
    Behold the California filmmaking map. The whole world, in one state. https://mk0brilliantmaptxoqs.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Cali-film-locations.jpg https://mk0brilliantmaptxoqs.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
    - zxcvbn4038 6y ago
      - In Stargate SG-1 pretty much every planet in the universe looks like either a Canadian forest or a closeup of a sand dune. - If you watch classic Dr Who episodes the entire universe is either a rock query or a plywood hallway that nobody dare lean against.
      - contingencies 6y ago
        I get the sense that Kafka would have been proud of Dr. Who. More so, discussing it on the internet decades later in the context of fallen grand architectures.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
    The building used for Paddy's Pub in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, is in Los Angeles.
    - tomcam 6y ago
      ...and every damn Seattle exterior shot is in Vancouver unless B roll of the Space Needle is needed
- pndy 6y ago
  If someone liked MitHC then it's a must-see, and must-read since HBO movie is based on Robert Harris novel from 1992. Of course movie differs from book original just like Dick's novel does from the tv series. I think the production people did a great job for a scale of tv movie of portraying 60s Nazi-owned Germany seen shortly on the screen - in both real locations and models.
- pezezin 6y ago
  I have seen that first hand. Some scenes of season 7 of Game of Thrones were recorded in my city. I can clearly remember the scene after Euron captures Ellaria and Tyene and takes them to King's Landing, and a couple of episodes later when Samwell leaves the Citadel. In GoT's world both places are supposed to be hundred of km away, in reality they are 200 m away. Also some massive towers in the background that don't exist in real life.
  - Veen 6y ago
    I recently binged Netflix's Last Kingdom. Many of the "Saxon" towns appeared to be the same place shot from a slightly different angle. It turns out that may be the case: much of the series was shot in Hungary at Korda Studios, which has a Medieval Village Set on their backlot, as well as a New York/Brooklyn Set and Renaissance Set.
- starky 6y ago
  I clicked on the article expecting to make the joke that alt-Berlin looks a lot like Vancouver since they did a lot of the shooting here. I was out at the university when they were filming the first season and they had done the main mall up in Nazi flags, it was really weird. Living in a city where they do a lot of filming is weird from the standpoint of recognizing the backgrounds of areas. One that sticks out in my mind is the ending of Tron:Legacy. They have multiple shots that are supposed to be the characters driving, but consecutive shots are all out of order including switching between driving north and south multiple times.
jvanderbot 6y ago
This was a great article for learning some of the details of the architecture and its designer. I have no idea why it got so anti-architecture / anti-40s, just because Seer employed similar techniques. It tried to _implicate_ the architecture as a tool of facism, which is a bananas theory to me. > "Even more problematically, the techniques of fascist architecture (or music or film or graphic design) may in fact be so powerful that they transcend history and even geo-politics: this is not just a “Nazi problem” we can relegate to the past. These tools work for fascists, but non-fascists are tempted to use them as well." But it was a style of the times that a facist adopted. That, oh god, may have come from america! > "Further complicating the story, the influence actually runs in multiple directions: in addition to admiring Haussmann’s Paris and classical Rome, Speer was a big fan of L’Enfant’s monumental plan for Washington, DC — so where are the roots of the problem?." > "As Dietmar Schirmer has noted, much of the best architecture from the period — whether in Berlin, Paris, or Washington, DC — employs the “Stripped Classicism” favored by Speer." > "But perhaps we need to feel the shock and try to push back on the awe: even if these structures are glorious, do we endorse the beliefs they embody?" Well thanks for trying to cancel 1940s architecture, and warn me away from admiring the very art you brought to me in this article.
- whakim 6y ago
  To me, the author's point seems more complicated than that. No, fascists didn't come up with certain techniques, like military parades. But those same techniques seem to be particularly effective when employed as tools of the fascist state in service of the fascist agenda. Can you separate the cultural relevance those techniques have for us from the work they have done in a fascist context? I don't know, but I don't think anyone is trying to "cancel" anything.
  - throwaway316943 6y ago
    > Can you separate the cultural relevance those techniques have for us from the work they have done in a fascist context? I think you must be aware of them and learn from history but we shouldn’t abandon everything that was misused for evil purposes or we’d have nothing left. Worse than that we’d inevitably forget it and reinvent it and make the same mistakes being ignorant of the past. The wisest thing to do is to take those things and correct their flaws and turn them into something that can benefits everyone.
FlyingSnake 6y ago
It’s funny that the article uses the term “Alt-Berlin” to denote a new Berlin, whereas ’alt-Berlin’ in Deutsch means “old-Berlin”.
- domano 6y ago
  As a german-speaker this confused me a lot :)
- zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  Here “alt” is being used as an abbreviation of “alternate” - I am pretty sure it’s not proper English, just flows better if your going to have to use the word a lot. I really like how the TV show Fringe named some of the alternate versions of the main characters - Walter and Walternate (short for Alternate Walter), Olivia and Bolivia (short for Olivia-B), etc. though many of the characters didn’t lend themselves to that naming or their alternate counterparts weren’t remarkably different. Then Rick and Morty came along and there were so many alternate universes they just gave them all numbers - and added the twist that you never know which Rick from which universe your watching in any given episode which also conveniently explains away any continuity errors (sorry nit-pickers) and creative license needed for a given storyline.
  - thisone 6y ago
    I've always heard it as Faux-livia.
  - FlyingSnake 6y ago
    > Here “alt” is being used as an abbreviation of “alternate” This is one of the (many) instances where reducing everything to pop-culture English falls flat. Berliners have been using 'Alt-Berlin' for the mitte district since ages, and it doesn't make sense for them.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      How does it "fall flat"? Berliners are not the target audience of this article, or just a tiny fraction of it.
FabHK 6y ago
A friend once took the train from Beijing to Pyongyang, changing trains in Dandong, where the Yalu River Broken Bridge (half of an old bridge damaged during the Korean war, next to the new "Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge" [1,2]) serves as a reminder of that war. On the train, they met some North Koreans and talked to them (in North Korea it is pretty impossible to talk to people, thanks to the government minders. So, this was still in China, and they were guarded and circumspect, but talked.). They said that they had just come from a work assignment in Uganda, doing construction. The friend asked, what sort of construction, residential or commercial? The reply: "Museums and monuments!" Yep, that's one thing authoritarian regimes are good at, monumental architecture... (For example, the Arch of Triumph [3], which, it was pointed out, is 10 m higher than the one in Paris...) [1] https://goo.gl/maps/MZkFVC7v4sBTisqS7 https://goo.gl/maps/MZkFVC7v4sBTisqS7 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalu_River_Broken_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalu_River_Broken_Bridge [3] https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/north-korea-guide-arch-of-triumph https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/north-korea-guide-arch-o... More examples: https://thespaces.com/mapping-pyongyangs-monumental-landmarks/ https://thespaces.com/mapping-pyongyangs-monumental-landmark...
- knolax 6y ago
  Classic German deflection. "Let's look at the North Koreans and ignore the article about Nazi Germany."
- RegnisGnaw 6y ago
  There is a BBC article on this topic: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35569277 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35569277 The DPRK has a huge business making and exporting giant statues for tin pot dictators.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Animats 6y ago
Impressive monumental structures like that have been built. The Albany Mall, New York,[1] Nelson Rockefeller's monument to brutalism, probably comes closest. The Raj Path in New Delhi is similar, built huge on purpose to intimidate the populace. Sheer size to impress has gone out of fashion, since building very large structures isn't a big deal any more. Huge convention centers, air terminals, malls, and stadiums are normal now, and don't impress people much. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@42.6489482,-73.7611536,51.20615875a,0d,60.39003113y,31.55121449h,101.83203331t,0r https://earth.google.com/web/@42.6489482,-73.7611536,51.2061...
- trianglem 6y ago
  I don’t think sheer size to impress can truly go out of fashion since that sense of awe transcends topical sensibilities. It’s probably just not cost effective so no one does it. Huge buildings now are built out of light, transparent materials and part of being awed by scale requires the large building to be built out of solid, impenetrable feeling material like stone.
  - Ancapistani 6y ago
    Exactly. We build lots of big buildings now, but “big” is not the same as “massive”.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    For this kind of thing, the cost is part of the point made.
- trgn 6y ago
  Rather than comparing it to the authoritarian architecture of the postwar period (which was horrible), I think it's more fair to point out the actual inspiration for Speer. It was the City Beautiful movement and the existing examples of grand boulevards in imperial capitals. That main boulevard he envisioned lined by monuments and institutions of great importance was a German equivalent of basically Philadelphia's Franklin parkway or Paris' Champs-Elysees. Philadelphia razed entire city neighborhoods only decades earlier to build it. In fact, an almost identical vision to Speer's Berlin already existed. It was Washington DC. On a smaller scale, dozens of other cities had already embarqued on similar projects, Brussels Parc du Cinquantenaire is another on, or Budapest's parliament building and Heroes' Square. Germany was playing catch-up to what was fairly mundane practice. The only thing that gives pause is perhaps the Volkshalle, which has a little too much of a mine-is-bigger vibe when putting it next to DC's congress building.
paulific 6y ago
Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city to achieve a suitably scenic and impressive vista.
coldtea 6y ago
>Architects and urban planners who have analysed [Speer’s planned] city in recent years claim it would probably have been nightmarish to live in: hostile to pedestrians, who would regularly have be sent underground to cross streets, and with a chaotic road system, So sorta like the Las Vegas strip?
- zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  More like Boston. Though of all the places I’ve driven it’s D.C. that really leaves me wondering WTF people were thinking when they designed some of the intersections - multiple u-turn lanes connecting to different streets in the opposite direction, reversing the traffic flow through the intersections, lanes turning across other lanes, bisected roundabouts, roundabouts with traffic lights every 22 degrees, etc.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    The street plan mirrors the government?
microtherion 6y ago
The article hints that Berlin's soil might have been unsuitable for some of the more monstrously monumental buildings conceived, and in fact, one of the surviving pieces of Speer's plans is the Schwerbelastungskörper, a massive block of concrete built to study just how much such a building would sink over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerbelastungskörper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerbelastungskörper After the war, it first seemed too massive to demolish with reasonable effort, and now it is protected as some kind of ozymandian monument.
- tticvs 6y ago
  I live close to this. And while I can say it is a interesting historical curiosity, it is very obscure as a monument. The main legacy of the Nazis grandiose architecture is just down the street at the site of the former Tempelhof airport which is no longer in service but at the time of construction was one of the largest structures in the world. It is a truly gigantic swept wing eagle shaped building that even when it was the main city airport was only partially occupied. It's now falling into disrepair, but the guided tours are well worth it for the history and architecture.
ricardobeat 6y ago
The mood and scenes in the series are impressive, really enjoyed the show. It's good enough that you ignore the flaws: the renderings are never quite realistic, the scale of the Volkshalle especially is so odd that I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing, the first time it showed up on screen. There are like a million people at ground level [1] but then the POV shifts and the distance is 2x shorter. The lack of the eagle statue also makes it less recognizable [3]. Kung Fury, with it's terrible effects and all, did a better job in setting the mood. [1] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,g_center,pg_1,q_60,w_965/hig5bhdmlygvxl3u8pkt.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_au... [2] https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/agArdO6_700bwp.webp https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/agArdO6_700bwp.webp [3] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/pyffinavar7bketbhdix.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/pyffinavar...
academi 6y ago
The art for the show makes sense, but celebrating the art and discussing it as if you’re ascribing awe and respect to the terrible men that created it is wrong. Hitler was a monster and the Germans that supported him were monsters. I used to think their inventions were neat, but now that I know more about what happened there, it sickens me.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  You'd probably really hate "The Wind Rises" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2013293/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2013293/
crooked-v 6y ago
The video game Wolfenstein: The New Order uses some similar ideas, but in a more sneakily satirical way: one of the recurring plot elements centers around the game's super-Berlin being such an overbuilt concrete labyrinth that it's nigh-impossible for the Reich to reliably secure anything from infiltration, and a background plot point is that the slave-labor-produced concrete mixtures have been sabotaged the whole time, so that the entire city is literally slowly falling apart.
- trissylegs 6y ago
  Nazi's being literally undermined by their own hubris is a pretty good plot point.
sgt101 6y ago
So many modern architects follow the same philosophy as Speer - create statements and spectacle that intimidate and inflict misery on the ordinary inhabitants of the cityscapes they abuse.
publicola1990 6y ago
Say what you may, but there was the famous Lenin Monument in Berlin, that was demolished post reunification, but it had certain majestic qualities, it should perhaps have been preserved.
amai 6y ago
If you want to compare to modern visions of Berlin have a look here (articles in German): https://unvollendete-metropole.de/wettbewerb-berlin-brandenburg-2070/ https://unvollendete-metropole.de/wettbewerb-berlin-brandenb... https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article229533354/Visionen-fuer-Berlin-im-Jahr-2070.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article229533354/Visionen-f... https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article230886508/Berlin-im-Jahr-2050-Wie-wir-in-Zukunft-wohnen.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article230886508/Berlin-im-...

108 points by tintinnabula 6y ago

HBO's movie Fatherland (1994) was filmed in post-communist Prague. They used both matte paintings and real locations (of Prague) to depicts never-built nazi city of Germania. This use of real-life locations leads to some (for locals) hilarious moments like scene where gestapo tries to catch some man who is running away from them by train. The chase goes from station A to B where the man is killed. But funny thing is that they used just one real station to shoot both locations of A and B and they are actually just some 100m away. See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109779/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109779/

tomcam 6y ago
You’ve just described virtually all mainstream moviemaking, at least in the US. Even on location shoots there is almost never a case, for example, where an establishing shot of the exterior of a house or other building takes place within 100m or even 100 miles of where the interior set is.
- carabiner 6y ago
  Behold the California filmmaking map. The whole world, in one state. https://mk0brilliantmaptxoqs.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Cali-film-locations.jpg https://mk0brilliantmaptxoqs.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
  - zxcvbn4038 6y ago
    - In Stargate SG-1 pretty much every planet in the universe looks like either a Canadian forest or a closeup of a sand dune. - If you watch classic Dr Who episodes the entire universe is either a rock query or a plywood hallway that nobody dare lean against.
    - contingencies 6y ago
      I get the sense that Kafka would have been proud of Dr. Who. More so, discussing it on the internet decades later in the context of fallen grand architectures.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  The building used for Paddy's Pub in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, is in Los Angeles.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    ...and every damn Seattle exterior shot is in Vancouver unless B roll of the Space Needle is needed
pndy 6y ago
If someone liked MitHC then it's a must-see, and must-read since HBO movie is based on Robert Harris novel from 1992. Of course movie differs from book original just like Dick's novel does from the tv series. I think the production people did a great job for a scale of tv movie of portraying 60s Nazi-owned Germany seen shortly on the screen - in both real locations and models.
pezezin 6y ago
I have seen that first hand. Some scenes of season 7 of Game of Thrones were recorded in my city. I can clearly remember the scene after Euron captures Ellaria and Tyene and takes them to King's Landing, and a couple of episodes later when Samwell leaves the Citadel. In GoT's world both places are supposed to be hundred of km away, in reality they are 200 m away. Also some massive towers in the background that don't exist in real life.
- Veen 6y ago
  I recently binged Netflix's Last Kingdom. Many of the "Saxon" towns appeared to be the same place shot from a slightly different angle. It turns out that may be the case: much of the series was shot in Hungary at Korda Studios, which has a Medieval Village Set on their backlot, as well as a New York/Brooklyn Set and Renaissance Set.
starky 6y ago
I clicked on the article expecting to make the joke that alt-Berlin looks a lot like Vancouver since they did a lot of the shooting here. I was out at the university when they were filming the first season and they had done the main mall up in Nazi flags, it was really weird. Living in a city where they do a lot of filming is weird from the standpoint of recognizing the backgrounds of areas. One that sticks out in my mind is the ending of Tron:Legacy. They have multiple shots that are supposed to be the characters driving, but consecutive shots are all out of order including switching between driving north and south multiple times.

jvanderbot 6y ago

This was a great article for learning some of the details of the architecture and its designer. I have no idea why it got so anti-architecture / anti-40s, just because Seer employed similar techniques. It tried to _implicate_ the architecture as a tool of facism, which is a bananas theory to me. > "Even more problematically, the techniques of fascist architecture (or music or film or graphic design) may in fact be so powerful that they transcend history and even geo-politics: this is not just a “Nazi problem” we can relegate to the past. These tools work for fascists, but non-fascists are tempted to use them as well." But it was a style of the times that a facist adopted. That, oh god, may have come from america! > "Further complicating the story, the influence actually runs in multiple directions: in addition to admiring Haussmann’s Paris and classical Rome, Speer was a big fan of L’Enfant’s monumental plan for Washington, DC — so where are the roots of the problem?." > "As Dietmar Schirmer has noted, much of the best architecture from the period — whether in Berlin, Paris, or Washington, DC — employs the “Stripped Classicism” favored by Speer." > "But perhaps we need to feel the shock and try to push back on the awe: even if these structures are glorious, do we endorse the beliefs they embody?" Well thanks for trying to cancel 1940s architecture, and warn me away from admiring the very art you brought to me in this article.

whakim 6y ago
To me, the author's point seems more complicated than that. No, fascists didn't come up with certain techniques, like military parades. But those same techniques seem to be particularly effective when employed as tools of the fascist state in service of the fascist agenda. Can you separate the cultural relevance those techniques have for us from the work they have done in a fascist context? I don't know, but I don't think anyone is trying to "cancel" anything.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  > Can you separate the cultural relevance those techniques have for us from the work they have done in a fascist context? I think you must be aware of them and learn from history but we shouldn’t abandon everything that was misused for evil purposes or we’d have nothing left. Worse than that we’d inevitably forget it and reinvent it and make the same mistakes being ignorant of the past. The wisest thing to do is to take those things and correct their flaws and turn them into something that can benefits everyone.

FlyingSnake 6y ago

It’s funny that the article uses the term “Alt-Berlin” to denote a new Berlin, whereas ’alt-Berlin’ in Deutsch means “old-Berlin”.

domano 6y ago
As a german-speaker this confused me a lot :)
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
Here “alt” is being used as an abbreviation of “alternate” - I am pretty sure it’s not proper English, just flows better if your going to have to use the word a lot. I really like how the TV show Fringe named some of the alternate versions of the main characters - Walter and Walternate (short for Alternate Walter), Olivia and Bolivia (short for Olivia-B), etc. though many of the characters didn’t lend themselves to that naming or their alternate counterparts weren’t remarkably different. Then Rick and Morty came along and there were so many alternate universes they just gave them all numbers - and added the twist that you never know which Rick from which universe your watching in any given episode which also conveniently explains away any continuity errors (sorry nit-pickers) and creative license needed for a given storyline.
- thisone 6y ago
  I've always heard it as Faux-livia.
- FlyingSnake 6y ago
  > Here “alt” is being used as an abbreviation of “alternate” This is one of the (many) instances where reducing everything to pop-culture English falls flat. Berliners have been using 'Alt-Berlin' for the mitte district since ages, and it doesn't make sense for them.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    How does it "fall flat"? Berliners are not the target audience of this article, or just a tiny fraction of it.

FabHK 6y ago

A friend once took the train from Beijing to Pyongyang, changing trains in Dandong, where the Yalu River Broken Bridge (half of an old bridge damaged during the Korean war, next to the new "Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge" [1,2]) serves as a reminder of that war. On the train, they met some North Koreans and talked to them (in North Korea it is pretty impossible to talk to people, thanks to the government minders. So, this was still in China, and they were guarded and circumspect, but talked.). They said that they had just come from a work assignment in Uganda, doing construction. The friend asked, what sort of construction, residential or commercial? The reply: "Museums and monuments!" Yep, that's one thing authoritarian regimes are good at, monumental architecture... (For example, the Arch of Triumph [3], which, it was pointed out, is 10 m higher than the one in Paris...) [1] https://goo.gl/maps/MZkFVC7v4sBTisqS7 https://goo.gl/maps/MZkFVC7v4sBTisqS7 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalu_River_Broken_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalu_River_Broken_Bridge [3] https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/north-korea-guide-arch-of-triumph https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/north-korea-guide-arch-o... More examples: https://thespaces.com/mapping-pyongyangs-monumental-landmarks/ https://thespaces.com/mapping-pyongyangs-monumental-landmark...

knolax 6y ago
Classic German deflection. "Let's look at the North Koreans and ignore the article about Nazi Germany."
RegnisGnaw 6y ago
There is a BBC article on this topic: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35569277 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35569277 The DPRK has a huge business making and exporting giant statues for tin pot dictators.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Animats 6y ago

Impressive monumental structures like that have been built. The Albany Mall, New York,[1] Nelson Rockefeller's monument to brutalism, probably comes closest. The Raj Path in New Delhi is similar, built huge on purpose to intimidate the populace. Sheer size to impress has gone out of fashion, since building very large structures isn't a big deal any more. Huge convention centers, air terminals, malls, and stadiums are normal now, and don't impress people much. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@42.6489482,-73.7611536,51.20615875a,0d,60.39003113y,31.55121449h,101.83203331t,0r https://earth.google.com/web/@42.6489482,-73.7611536,51.2061...

trianglem 6y ago
I don’t think sheer size to impress can truly go out of fashion since that sense of awe transcends topical sensibilities. It’s probably just not cost effective so no one does it. Huge buildings now are built out of light, transparent materials and part of being awed by scale requires the large building to be built out of solid, impenetrable feeling material like stone.
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  Exactly. We build lots of big buildings now, but “big” is not the same as “massive”.
- pjc50 6y ago
  For this kind of thing, the cost is part of the point made.
trgn 6y ago
Rather than comparing it to the authoritarian architecture of the postwar period (which was horrible), I think it's more fair to point out the actual inspiration for Speer. It was the City Beautiful movement and the existing examples of grand boulevards in imperial capitals. That main boulevard he envisioned lined by monuments and institutions of great importance was a German equivalent of basically Philadelphia's Franklin parkway or Paris' Champs-Elysees. Philadelphia razed entire city neighborhoods only decades earlier to build it. In fact, an almost identical vision to Speer's Berlin already existed. It was Washington DC. On a smaller scale, dozens of other cities had already embarqued on similar projects, Brussels Parc du Cinquantenaire is another on, or Budapest's parliament building and Heroes' Square. Germany was playing catch-up to what was fairly mundane practice. The only thing that gives pause is perhaps the Volkshalle, which has a little too much of a mine-is-bigger vibe when putting it next to DC's congress building.

paulific 6y ago

Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city to achieve a suitably scenic and impressive vista.

coldtea 6y ago

>Architects and urban planners who have analysed [Speer’s planned] city in recent years claim it would probably have been nightmarish to live in: hostile to pedestrians, who would regularly have be sent underground to cross streets, and with a chaotic road system, So sorta like the Las Vegas strip?

zxcvbn4038 6y ago
More like Boston. Though of all the places I’ve driven it’s D.C. that really leaves me wondering WTF people were thinking when they designed some of the intersections - multiple u-turn lanes connecting to different streets in the opposite direction, reversing the traffic flow through the intersections, lanes turning across other lanes, bisected roundabouts, roundabouts with traffic lights every 22 degrees, etc.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  The street plan mirrors the government?

microtherion 6y ago

The article hints that Berlin's soil might have been unsuitable for some of the more monstrously monumental buildings conceived, and in fact, one of the surviving pieces of Speer's plans is the Schwerbelastungskörper, a massive block of concrete built to study just how much such a building would sink over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerbelastungskörper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerbelastungskörper After the war, it first seemed too massive to demolish with reasonable effort, and now it is protected as some kind of ozymandian monument.

tticvs 6y ago
I live close to this. And while I can say it is a interesting historical curiosity, it is very obscure as a monument. The main legacy of the Nazis grandiose architecture is just down the street at the site of the former Tempelhof airport which is no longer in service but at the time of construction was one of the largest structures in the world. It is a truly gigantic swept wing eagle shaped building that even when it was the main city airport was only partially occupied. It's now falling into disrepair, but the guided tours are well worth it for the history and architecture.

ricardobeat 6y ago

The mood and scenes in the series are impressive, really enjoyed the show. It's good enough that you ignore the flaws: the renderings are never quite realistic, the scale of the Volkshalle especially is so odd that I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing, the first time it showed up on screen. There are like a million people at ground level [1] but then the POV shifts and the distance is 2x shorter. The lack of the eagle statue also makes it less recognizable [3]. Kung Fury, with it's terrible effects and all, did a better job in setting the mood. [1] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,g_center,pg_1,q_60,w_965/hig5bhdmlygvxl3u8pkt.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_au... [2] https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/agArdO6_700bwp.webp https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/agArdO6_700bwp.webp [3] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/pyffinavar7bketbhdix.jpg https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/pyffinavar...

academi 6y ago

The art for the show makes sense, but celebrating the art and discussing it as if you’re ascribing awe and respect to the terrible men that created it is wrong. Hitler was a monster and the Germans that supported him were monsters. I used to think their inventions were neat, but now that I know more about what happened there, it sickens me.

gfxgirl 6y ago
You'd probably really hate "The Wind Rises" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2013293/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2013293/

crooked-v 6y ago

The video game Wolfenstein: The New Order uses some similar ideas, but in a more sneakily satirical way: one of the recurring plot elements centers around the game's super-Berlin being such an overbuilt concrete labyrinth that it's nigh-impossible for the Reich to reliably secure anything from infiltration, and a background plot point is that the slave-labor-produced concrete mixtures have been sabotaged the whole time, so that the entire city is literally slowly falling apart.

trissylegs 6y ago
Nazi's being literally undermined by their own hubris is a pretty good plot point.

sgt101 6y ago

So many modern architects follow the same philosophy as Speer - create statements and spectacle that intimidate and inflict misery on the ordinary inhabitants of the cityscapes they abuse.

publicola1990 6y ago

Say what you may, but there was the famous Lenin Monument in Berlin, that was demolished post reunification, but it had certain majestic qualities, it should perhaps have been preserved.

amai 6y ago

If you want to compare to modern visions of Berlin have a look here (articles in German): https://unvollendete-metropole.de/wettbewerb-berlin-brandenburg-2070/ https://unvollendete-metropole.de/wettbewerb-berlin-brandenb... https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article229533354/Visionen-fuer-Berlin-im-Jahr-2070.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article229533354/Visionen-f... https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article230886508/Berlin-im-Jahr-2050-Wie-wir-in-Zukunft-wohnen.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article230886508/Berlin-im-...