»Vienna. The Pearl of the Reich« - Planning for Hitler

At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, revolutions in Europe brought about a new way of understanding politics where the mobilization of the masses was essential. Separating religion and politics paradoxically generated a kind of secular religion where politics played a crucial role, due to its myths and symbols.

A century later, this was increased to an extreme by the Third Reich, for example with the revival of the sun worship. The aestheticization of politics as described by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction blended with a sacralisation of political action that would mutate into a permanent dramatic staging.

The enormous responsibility of architecture in comparison to other art forms stemmed from the importance that totalitarianism gave to space as a container for the masses subjected to charisma, the masses themselves being transformed into an architectonical element. In the sense of the exalted ideological world view of totalitarianism, architecture was considered one of the strongest weapons among the art forms.

As is evident from the example of Vienna under the Nazi regime, architecture was exploited as an instrument of power for the aggressive population policies of the Third Reich.

The exhibition »Vienna. The Pearl of the Reich« Planning for Hitler at Architekturzentrum Wien, curated by Ingrid Holzschuh and Minika Platzer, is divided into nine chapters (like Race and Space, Power and Symbols, the Total War…) the broad variety of the city and urban space planning of the era is displayed with numerous photos, drawings and plans of projects that were never put into effect. They come almost exclusively from the collection of the Klaus Steiner archive and are supplemented with other documents from various donations. Besides there are amateur and propaganda films as well as an interview with Klaus Steiner himself. Thanks to his research over decades original material from an era could be collected that it was usually erased from archives and biographies after the war.

The visions and projects that are on display here for the first time, show disruptions and continuities in Vienna’s urban planning. Interesting examples are the projects for infrastructure, like the one for a subway, showing that the subway network designed at the time is very similar to the existing one of our days. Vienna as the provincial capital should have played a special role in the Third Reich, as a hub for southeast Europe and also as a cultural capital and centre of “Aryan” culture. Plans like the monumental boulevards across the Danube with a gigantic dome at the end, including the restructuring and ethnic cleansing of the 2^nd and 20^th district were never implemented, just like the project of the global airport Aspern or city planning projects for Prague, Cracow or Bratislava. After the war most of the projects disappeared in the drawers of the responsible planners or were discarded and forgotten. Projects that have their effect until today, like the air raid shelters (in the chapter about total war), and also the town hall garage prove how important further research on this neglected subject would be. (written by Cem Angeli)

https://www.azw.at/

Interviewee: Klaus Steiner, Ingrid Holzschuh, Monika Platzer,

Copyright info: The audio and video recording has been made with personal permission of the artist.
Licensing: 0
Language(s): German, English
Subtitles: German, English
Producer: KA21 GmbH / CastYourArt
Production crew: Wolfgang Haas, Helmut Feier, Ewa Stern
Production country: Austria, Vienna