Key Take-Home Messages and Thematic Sections

Key Take-Home Messages

The overarching issue relates to the continuities and ruptures that took place after 1933 and 1945 in terms of personnel, institutional and conceptual approaches. As an authors’ collective, the Commission and the curatorial team formulated the following expectations as KEY TAKE-HOME MESSAGES from the presentation of the research findings. The exhibition aims to show:

that National Socialist planning and building permeated all areas of life and served not only to integrate “national comrades” (Volksgenossen), but also to implement the nationalist, racist agenda of excluding and exterminating “alien elements in the community” (Gemeinschaftsfremde);
that the radicalisation of planning and building under National Socialism and the dynamics that informed it had a distinctive outcome defined not so much by representational buildings (most of which were never realised) as by settlements, administrative buildings, armaments complexes, infrastructure systems, ruins, barracks, bunkers and, most significantly, untold numbers of forced labour camps and concentration and extermination camps;
that countless construction specialists and contractors in all areas of planning and building must bear part of the responsibility for the brutality and criminal acts committed during the National Socialist period. This goes beyond the handful of architects we all know about. Many of those responsible for these injustices were able to continue their career after 1945;
that even during the National Socialist period, planning and building had an international dimension and should be viewed accordingly – with an eye to rivalries, exertion of influence and demonstrations of perceived superiority;
that after 1945, politicies of remembrance centring on buildings have included acts of suppression, trivialisation and excision, and that adopting a conscious, congruous approach to the built legacy of the National Socialist era remains a challenging task.

Thematic Sections

In order to clearly structure the wide-ranging results of the research, the Commission identified seven THEMATIC SECTIONS, taking academic responsibility for the arrangement of their contents in close collaboration with the Akademie der Künste and curator Benedikt Goebel, with Harald Bodenschatz and Angelika Königseder as advisers.

Thematic section: Housing and Settlements

Thematic section: Party and State Architecture

Thematic section: Camps in the National Socialist Era: Life, Work, Education, Degradation, Murder

Thematic section: Infrastructure and Spatial Planning

Thematic section: Internationality

Thematic section: Continuities in Urban Planning and Architecture in the East and West after 1945

Thematic section: The Building Legacies of National Socialism

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