BBC_Robert Hughes Visions of Space_2of3_Albert Speer Size Matters
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00:40It's nearly a quarter of a century since I met Hitler's architect, Albert Speer.
00:46He died two years later, but I've always been fascinated by the man who was, for a time,
00:51not only the most powerful architect in the world,
00:54but perhaps the most powerful one who's ever lived.
01:00Architecture is the only art that moulds the world directly.
01:04Of all the arts, architecture is the supreme expression of politics and ideology.
01:14Hitler was an artist and an aspiring architect.
01:19He had a complete, encompassing vision of the world that he wanted to make.
01:26He needed a scribe, a scribe on a huge scale,
01:30writing the future of society in marble and steel and space.
01:38And that scribe was Albert Speer.
01:48So what kind of role did Speer, the architect, play in shaping the 20th century?
01:54And what would it have been if his scibe had won?
02:18All architects hope their buildings will outlast them.
02:22Some very daring or very egotistic hope that they will become the face of their age.
02:28But that supposes that the buildings will survive.
02:32This did not happen with Speer's buildings.
02:35Some were never built because Germany lost the war.
02:38Some were bombed flat because America and Britain and Russia won it.
02:44But after the war, by a sort of mutual agreement on both sides,
02:48Speer, the architect, was sublimated.
02:52What the Allies began in Germany, the Communists finished off.
02:58Today, Berlin is busy reinventing itself, demolishing the ruins,
03:03cleaning out the last traces of its intolerable memories.
03:10I didn't think that anything of my brief encounter with Speer remained either.
03:15I was told the interview tapes were gone for good.
03:18But as it turned out, they weren't.
03:23Well, it was only a few months ago that I was going through some drawers
03:26and throwing out old tapes of the sort that accumulate,
03:29and you know you're never going to listen to them again.
03:32And there was this one tape which had written on the outside of the cassette,
03:36oh, I don't know, Rolling Stones or Black Sabbath or something like that,
03:41you know, the kind of stuff I never listen to anymore.
03:45And so I just stuck it on the cassette player.
03:50And to my utter astonishment, out came Albert Speer's voice.
03:58I thought that's the chance of my lifetime to be the architect for a state
04:03who is making steps for world dominion,
04:08and my buildings will be for centuries the buildings which are proclaiming
04:16or testifying this time.
04:20Hearing that ghost voice, I started thinking of the questions I'd ask him now
04:24if only I could speak to him again.
04:27For instance, he insisted to me, as he did to the judges at Nuremberg,
04:32that he was the good Nazi, just an architect, never a killer,
04:36but a different kind of human being to the Himmlers and Streichers and Goebbels.
04:42His ambition was to follow the great classical architects of the German past.
04:47His sin was ambition but not mass murder.
04:51His mistake was not grasping the colossal evil of Hitler until it was too late.
04:57In other words, he did what almost any other architect would have done in his place.
05:04The third Reich was going to last 1,000 years, and so must its buildings.
05:11Its expression would be the immense new city that would rise on the site of old Berlin.
05:17It would be called Germania.
05:24Its axis would be a central boulevard 90 metres wide.
05:30At one end would be the railway station, far larger than Grand Central in New York.
05:39At its midpoint, a triumphal arch about four times the size of the Paris original,
05:45bearing the names of Germany's 1.8 million war dead.
05:50At the far end, the largest dome ever built.
05:59It would be the world's largest capital.
06:02Its dimensions would overwhelm everyone.
06:06For planning it, Speer was personally responsible to Hitler, with nobody else above him.
06:12He would be the dictator of building, as Hitler was of the state.
06:18Now you were saying that one of the reasons for the size of the Nazi projects in architecture, yours and Hitler's,
06:25was that they wanted the buildings to be symbols of world domination.
06:29What were the other reasons?
06:31Well, strangely enough, he already was planning and preparing the monuments
06:37which are glorifying the victories he hasn't had in his pocket yet.
06:42The pride to convince destiny that his victories have to be with Hitler.
06:49Thirty years later, when I hear those words again,
06:53I realise that Hitler told Speer things that he told no one else.
06:58He confided in him.
07:00He was a man essentially without friends,
07:03but his relation to Speer was probably as close to friendship as Hitler ever came.
07:11Now when you met Hitler and when you became his official architect,
07:15you were a boy, you were 28 years old.
07:18Yeah, for an architect it's very young.
07:21I had never had any client of importance,
07:25I just had built a few garages and small gardens and so,
07:29and the chance to be with Hitler and to get his architect
07:35was for me tremendous and overwhelming, of course.
07:40When such a man who seemed to be bringing Germany
07:43out of an immeasurable despair and disgrace
07:46offered his patronage to a young, inexperienced, patriotic
07:50and highly educated architect, how could a boy refuse?
07:56Everything about him seemed believable, credible, real.
08:10As a 15-year-old girl, my enthusiasm was limitless.
08:17It was almost like an idol.
08:20I don't know if I should say this,
08:23but I once shook his hand, and I'll never forget it.
08:26I don't know if I should say this.
08:29And I see a crowd of people and I say,
08:32what's going on?
08:34Yes, the Führer is to come.
08:38He came with his car and I jumped on the third platform
08:43and shook his hand.
08:46I was restlessly enthusiastic.
08:48I said, I'll never forget that day.
08:50No, I didn't forget it either.
08:56Hitler's relation to Speer has been described as a love affair,
09:00but it would be nearer the truth to call it an epic of narcissism,
09:04with young Speer cast as Hitler's unfulfilled other self.
09:09Hitler had wished to be an architect, but he'd failed to become one.
09:13He'd also been a painter, but of that he had no originality.
09:17His watercolours are technically semi-competent,
09:20but they're total kitsch.
09:22And in Speer, he found the man who would create in his name, on his terms.
09:29Hitler quite often told me,
09:32you are fulfilling my dream.
09:34I would have liked to be an architect and I can't.
09:37And now you are doing what I wanted to do.
09:41And you are young and even when I am dead you are going on
09:44and I give you all my authority,
09:47that after my death you can continue.
09:51The dream was about to come true,
09:53but little did the Berliners imagine what it was actually going to be.
10:02Hatten in den Adern heißes Blut
10:07Berlin is over because Berlin was...
10:11Contaminated, corrupt.
10:13That's it.
10:14And that was all what Nazis doesn't want, you know.
10:21Berlin was a really hated capital for the Nazis.
10:27It's so corrupt and also the thinking of the administration.
10:32It's so relativistic, the sense of humour is wrong.
10:35And so Hitler said, well, with this Berlin we can't do anything.
10:40He has a dream, together with Hitler, to erect a new capital
10:47and this capital has a name, Germania.
10:54Ich lehre den Grundstein zum Neubau des Hauses,
10:59des Fremdenverkehrs in Berlin
11:01und befehle damit zugleich der Beginn der Arbeit des Umbaus von Großberlin.
11:08This rebuilding involved moving Berlin's most famous monument,
11:12the Winged Victory,
11:13which commemorated Germany's victory over France in 1870.
11:20They dismantled it, lengthened it
11:22and rebuilt it in a new place,
11:24marking the new east-west axis
11:26that sliced through the heart of the city.
11:31Many architects worked on the designs
11:33for this expression of national socialist power and prestige,
11:37but the man in charge of them all,
11:39the minister of all building and construction,
11:42the Generalbauinspektor,
11:45was Hitler's right-hand man, Albert Speer, aged all of 32.
11:51The Nazis gave Berlin a new airport, Tempelhof,
11:57to show Germans their superiority in the skies
12:01and to woo them with the romance of travel.
12:09They built a huge new air ministry
12:11to house the bureaucrats who would administer the imagery of air.
12:16They built a bank to handle the gold
12:18that paid for the building programme.
12:24And all this was done in the peculiar, stripped-down,
12:27modernised classicism that was the hallmark of the Nazi style.
12:32Probably not all of it was as good as it was,
12:35but it was a bit of both,
12:37and it was a bit of both,
12:39and it was a bit of both,
12:42Probably not all of it was as bad as we tend to think,
12:45but its political associations still leave an unpleasant aftertaste,
12:50at least in my gullet.
12:53It's totally devoid of fantasy,
12:55except for fantasies of power,
12:58which in this case were realities,
13:01and its elegance soon became a sort of crushing orderliness.
13:07It was about architecture as ideology.
13:10Function, obedience, efficiency.
13:15As Dr Goebbels wrote when he ordered Speer to rip out the interior of a listed building,
13:20I can't function in these dark rooms. I need sunlight, clean, clear lines.
13:25I hate twilight. Our revolution will not be stopped either by old men,
13:30old files, or old stucco.
13:40The most ostentatious part of the public face of German architecture
13:45was in another part of Berlin.
13:50This is Hitler's stadium for the Olympics,
13:55built on the outskirts of Berlin in 1936.
14:00And far from being apolitical, it just rams the political message home,
14:05thump, thump, thump, with the repetition of those columns.
14:10This was a political bean feast.
14:22The original design for the stadium was done by the German architect Walter March.
14:27A concrete structure with glass partitioned walls,
14:32which pleased Hitler so much when he made a site visit
14:37that he issued an order for the games to be cancelled.
14:42He told Speer he would never set foot inside a modern glass box.
14:47Speer hastily added stone cladding and massive cornices,
14:52and the Olympic Games went ahead as planned.
14:57Speer marveled, but for Hitler himself the stadium held a special significance
15:02as he confided to Speer.
15:07Hitler had to tell me things he didn't tell possibly anybody else
15:12because I had to know for what those buildings are.
15:17So the Olympic Stadium was one more proof of his absolute confidence
15:22that he was going to own the world.
15:27Hitler told me that in this stadium
15:32there will be the Olympic Games every time from 1942 on,
15:37and such a statement, of course, was a normal statement.
15:42To build the new, you must destroy the old.
15:47And as the man Hitler talked to,
15:52Speer was well aware of the more sinister meanings
15:57behind the rebuilding programme in Berlin.
16:02People always talk about German thoroughness,
16:07and the Allies were really, really thorough.
16:12They decided they would record all the buildings that were going to vanish,
16:17not only just the buildings themselves, but the furniture, the dining rooms, everything.
16:22All the people, of course, are dead now.
16:27The places where they lived and worked were destroyed.
16:33All that remains are the photographs.
16:42To me, these are just inexpressibly poignant, even though I don't know Berlin
16:47and, of course, am not old enough to have ever seen these buildings.
16:54There's something that's, to me, peculiarly spooky about these images,
16:59and that is that there are so few of them in which there's any human presence
17:04and the people are simply not there.
17:06It's a city which is about to be destroyed,
17:09but which, while it's still living, has become a ghost city.
17:14Emptiness, emptiness, absence of society.
17:19Sperre always cast himself as the disinterested architect above ideology,
17:24but now we know that his hands were by no means as clean as he pretended.
17:29Architectural work is political work.
17:34It always has political implications.
17:39In September 1938, Sperre,
17:44In September 1938,
17:49Albert Sperre deliberately connected his project of reshaping Berlin
17:54with anti-Jewish policies.
17:59It was Sperre's personal idea
18:04to try to get Jewish homes
18:09as spare flats for those who were removed from the construction areas.
18:14as spare flats for those who were removed from the construction areas.
18:19What they in fact did was ruining the existence of Berlin Jews,
18:24but the motivation was the big architectural project,
18:29modernising the city.
18:3450,000 Berlin Jews were deported into the ghettos and concentration camps
18:39after October 1941, and the question has always been
18:44who decided who was going to be deported?
18:49And it was part of Sperre's interest as General Bauinspektor of Berlin.
18:54To decide who was going to live and who was going to die?
18:59Yes.
19:04Sperre went to his grave denying that he ever had anything to do
19:09with the crimes against humanity of the Nazis.
19:14He never admitted having any connection to the Final Solution
19:19or the organisation of slave labour.
19:24Yes.
19:54I asked, why? You'll see.
20:07I was in Auschwitz for four months.
20:12Then we looked for a job,
20:17and we went to Flossenbürg.
20:22We were happy to be able to leave Auschwitz.
20:27The post office said, you'll never be free.
20:32We said, you can't be any worse.
20:37We came to Flossenbürg at the train station.
20:42We walked for a few kilometres.
20:47There was a sign that said,
20:52work makes you free.
20:57Then we were sent to Steinbruck.
21:02The heat was terrible.
21:07A lot of people died.
21:12We had to work up to 20 degrees.
21:17Then we got sick of the cold.
21:22There were 30-40 days of dry homes.
21:27Dead people.
21:32First they made stairs for us.
21:37Then they built roads.
21:42Then the soldiers came.
21:47That was the Congress Hall.
21:52No, I don't know where the stones
21:57for the so-called Broad Street came from.
22:02It was huge.
22:07I only heard of Flossenbürg.
22:12I'm sorry, I didn't know anything else.
22:33For some, the cost was beyond imagination,
22:38measured in human lives and not in Reichmarks.
22:43But many Nurembergers were grateful for the work.
23:02Of course, in the background,
23:05money was being earned.
23:09The unemployed were out of the streets.
23:14There were practically no unemployed people left.
23:19So I didn't hear that KZ prisoners
23:24worked in the stone quarries.
23:29The stones were transported.
23:34Then they were taken out and moved.
23:39But I really didn't know that KZ prisoners worked there.
23:59The Nazis were, in some way, religious about history,
24:02which you couldn't say of cynical, relativistic, big-town Berlin.
24:06And so when the time came to make the big viewing platform,
24:10to make the big exhibition hall of Nazism, as it were,
24:14it was the best choice.
24:17People would march around here.
24:20They would demonstrate their German-ness.
24:23They would indulge themselves completely
24:26in what was, in fact, a new religion.
24:29On one party day, I was there.
24:32It was probably 1936 or 1937.
24:35Over there in the stadium,
24:38there was a march of Hitler's soldiers.
24:41And I was there.
24:44And I was there.
24:47And I was there.
24:50And I was there.
24:53And I was there.
24:56And I was there.
24:59And I was there.
25:02And I was there.
25:05And then we, of course,
25:08participated in the march with our fanfare.
25:11In front of the Führer.
25:17One thing you have to understand,
25:20we didn't have a high house in Nuremberg.
25:23Why was it that Hitler wanted his buildings to be so big?
25:38Hitler had his ideas of gaining control or dominate the whole world and all those buildings
25:48can only be seen in this perspective.
26:01Certainly I think to bring everything in order, in a right order, is something which is parallel
26:09to the totalitarian state.
26:14And one even said in this time that the order of the columns of the Zeppelin field are parallel
26:22to the marching of the troops.
26:27Architecture probably is the most powerful of the arts.
26:30Painting doesn't make people do things.
26:33Writing doesn't immediately translate into action, though it can certainly cause people
26:40to do things down the line.
26:42But architecture affects the way we stand in the world.
26:46It affects the way we conceive of space.
26:49It shoves us in directions.
26:52It puts us in places.
26:54And if it's intended to do that, and it does it successfully, then it also reinforces the
27:01power of the state.
27:03That is what the architecture of Speer particularly was about.
27:09He was extremely good at making people go in straight lines to predetermined positions.
27:17The message of his theatre was that human beings only make sense, only achieve use and
27:22beauty as parts of a greater and minutely disciplined whole.
27:39What does this kind of power do to a man's creativity?
27:50Some years later, Speer wrote that for a commission to create a great building, he would have
27:55sold his soul like Faust, and that in Hitler, he found his Mephistopheles.
28:01Es war dunkel, und plötzlich flammten um das ganze Areal die Scheinwerfer auf.
28:15Es war wie ein Dom, es war sagenhaft, für uns völlig neu, wir kannten so etwas ja nicht.
28:28Nothing conspired to surround Hitler with a sort of divine radiance.
28:35When Speer talked to me 30 years afterwards, he couldn't conceal his pride.
28:40I still consider this my best idea I had as an architect.
28:45The effect was, as I planned, this of a room.
28:49Ich weiß noch, ich war mit meiner Familie da, und dann haben wir uns, wie das hier aufgeflammt
28:56ist, wir waren so überrascht, da haben wir uns an den Händen genommen.
29:00From the outside it looks like a dark temple made of light.
29:04Yes, from outside it looks like columns, but from inside it looks like you're being in a
29:09cathedral.
29:11Das Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer irgendwie, und mit
29:20diesem Gefühl sind wir dann heimgekommen, es war also für uns ein ganz sagenhaftes
29:26Erlebnis damals gewesen.
29:40The parade grounds of Nuremberg are now public parks.
29:49The fate of the ruins is still a matter for debate.
29:52Warum muss man es abbrechen?
29:59Warum?
30:00Die Leute, die es sehen wollen, die kommen sowieso, und ob sie dann was Gutes sehen
30:08oder was Verschlammtes, das ist eine zweite Frage.
30:12Das, was ich damals empfunden habe, das ist vorbei, das ist einfach für mich überlebt,
30:20und jetzt empfinde ich dafür nichts mehr.
30:23Das ist vorbei.
30:24Das sind jetzt Sportstätten, und das sind die jungen Leute, die nun an sich anders verhalten,
30:32als wie es bei uns war.
30:34Aber bitte was, das ist eben so, das ist die Zeit, die weitergeht.
30:47So should Germany keep these and other places so redolent of Hitler?
30:52In my opinion, absolutely.
30:55Not as nostalgia, not as penance, but just as witnesses to their own history, a history
31:01which can never be buried, but must not be softened or censored.
31:08As a reward for all his hard work, Hitler gave Speer the commission to build him a new
31:15government headquarters, the Reich Chancellery.
31:19It was to be a massive complex of state rooms and offices with no expense spared.
31:26Nothing at all remains of the original building, except some chips and fragments.
31:34Instead, its site is occupied, probably rather more pleasantly and usefully, by a Chinese
31:40restaurant called the Pekin Duck.
31:43The Reich Chancellery was by far the largest of his completed buildings.
32:01Speer completed the job in record time.
32:04He was given a year and a blank cheque.
32:10It sprang from two motives, the desire to display and the parallel desire to intimidate.
32:17For that, no price was too great.
32:21In fact, great cost was essential.
32:24I never cared about money.
32:29Even Hitler forbade me to make calculations of the very big monuments we wanted to build
32:37because he thought the Minister of Finance would be too much shocked by it.
32:46By the time a visiting diplomat reached Hitler's office, after a long, long trek up the stairs,
32:51through the galleries and down high-ceilinged hallways, across acres of marble as slick
32:57as ice, he was awed and exhausted and quite literally unsure of his footing, just the
33:03effect that Hitler wanted.
33:08I proposed to him to make this marble not polished, so it's easier to walk, and then
33:14he said, no, no, that's for the diplomats to be coming for me, and they always are walking
33:19on slippery grounds.
33:21So it was highly, it was waxed and polished, and it was really difficult to walk on it.
33:33The Reich Chancellery was finished in 1938.
33:41By the end of that year, Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, and war was imminent.
33:55Speer was already part of the inner circle, and Hitler made him armaments minister in
33:591942.
34:02It may seem strange that a man devoted to putting up buildings should now be reassigned
34:07to the work of pulverizing them, but Hitler needed Speer's incomparable administrative
34:12skills to refit the German war machine, to expand it, to give it more power.
34:19Hitler saw the building program as symbolic of his glorious future, and he insisted that
34:24Speer continued with his architectural work as well.
34:28But with the country engulfed in an increasingly desperate war, it became harder and harder
34:34to find the resources and the manpower to keep the building projects going.
34:41The parade grounds lay empty or unfinished.
34:54By 1945, Albert Speer's career and the city he had sought to transform lay in ruins.
35:02In ten years, he had gone from the world's most powerful architect to a man without a
35:06power base, and he hoped to recover with the occupation armies as his new patron.
35:13But it was a vain hope.
35:16Of course I realized that I never have a chance to start again in such a scale as an architect,
35:25so my life was ruined too.
35:29The Reich Chancellery, Speer's biggest triumph, was now an empty shell.
35:34It had stood for only seven years.
35:40The building and all it stood for was erased, and yet the ruins, like Nazism itself, proved
35:46remarkably tenacious.
36:02You know, there's a lot of commuter traffic in and out of here every day, and probably
36:05only one person in a thousand has any faint idea of what kind of building the marble walls
36:13once ornamented.
36:20It's a very strange place, you know, it's kind of half haunted, like so much of the
36:25memory of Speer, and yet it's deeply ironical that the building, the materials of the building
36:35that was meant to be the center of power of the entire world, have now, once they had
36:42been bombed flat, migrated underground, like so much of the history of Nazism itself.
36:58Speer always claimed that all his thoughts went to blueprints, and that really he knew
37:03nothing of the mechanics of government.
37:05He was very convincing, and certainly when I met him, it was hard to believe that this
37:09refined old gent had known about the worst that was going on.
37:13But, of course, he did.
37:19I didn't know then what we know now, but neither did the judges at Nuremberg.
37:25The old Palace of Justice at Nuremberg stages what is without doubt the greatest trial in
37:30the annals of the human race.
37:32In the dock today are the men who for twelve years swaggered across the continent of Europe,
37:37ordering mass murder, slavery, and robbery on a scale which staggers a sane imagination.
37:44Will you state your full name, please?
37:50His patron was dead, and he found himself in the dock with the remaining Nazi ringleaders.
37:57You must plead guilty or not guilty.
38:02I plead not guilty.
38:05Goering pleads not guilty.
38:08Hess simply says no.
38:10Herbert Speer.
38:13Nicht schuldig.
38:16He always maintained his innocence of the worst atrocities.
38:20After all, he was only an architect.
38:25But he must have known that he was arguing for his love.
38:32Defendant Julius Streicher, the tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.
38:39Defendant Joachim von Ribbentrop, the tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.
38:48Defendant Albert Speer, the tribunal sentences you to twenty years in prison.
39:02For the next two decades, Speer was locked in Spandau prison.
39:08Germany, meanwhile, had become locked in a form of denial.
39:12All its energies went to reconstruction, to the development of the Wirtschaftswunder,
39:17the miracle economy of recovery.
39:22Only lately has the denial itself been denied by a younger generation of Germans,
39:28who are obsessed with the recovery of their ancestral history.
39:34The practical communists built blocks of flats on the site of the old chancellery.
39:40The ruins were excavated, but now they're inaccessible.
39:45Speer's labyrinth of underground bunkers, where Hitler killed himself, is sealed off from the world.
39:52It doesn't take long before architecture becomes archaeology.
39:58Where are we now, doctor?
40:01We are ten meters above the so-called Führerbunker,
40:07that means the part of the bunker where he did suicide.
40:11Could we go and stand on it?
40:13Yes, of course. It's in here, huh?
40:16It's under this grass ground and ten meters.
40:28Nothing, as you can see, nothing is here.
40:32Why?
40:34Because one wants to erase it, to forget it.
40:38Who, the government?
40:40I would say the government, yes.
40:43They, of course, said also, oh, there could be neo-Nazis who would make this a holy place and so on and so on,
40:50but this is ridiculous, this is the only reason to get away with it.
40:55Every castle of the medieval age, there were brigands and so on,
41:01and they had prisoners and they tortured them,
41:09and nobody would take a castle away today because there was a brigand in it and a torturer.
41:18I, as an archaeologist, I would excavate it and show it,
41:24but they fear it.
41:26In 20 or 50 years they will make it, they will excavate it.
41:30It will not be so radioactive then?
41:32No, no, no.
41:35It's even more dangerous.
41:38It's dangerous.
41:40I think the professor is right.
41:42I don't see how one can disagree with it.
41:45As long as the Führerbunker is buried, there will always be food for the Nazis.
41:50I think the professor is right.
41:52I don't see how one can disagree with it.
41:55As long as the Führerbunker is buried, there will always be food for the Nazis.
42:00I think the professor is right.
42:02I don't see how one can disagree with it.
42:05As long as the Führerbunker is buried,
42:08there will always be fools and fetishists who think it's buried treasure.
42:24For me this place represents one of those conjunctions
42:27that you can't really make sense of because there's no sense to be made of them.
42:32You know you think of sitting out on this little sidewalk terrace
42:37eating roast duck with a bit of scallions and plumsauce
42:44and you think that somewhere in there
42:47some of the worst men in the entire history of the world
42:49were figuring out how many Jews they were going to send down to Loa Silesia.
42:53It doesn't compute. They don't connect.
42:56They don't compute, they don't connect.
42:58I mean, there was one of the three worst tyrannies in the history of mankind.
43:04Hitler, Mao, Stalin.
43:07This was the epicentre for Hitler.
43:10And it's all vanished.
43:13Completely gone.
43:16It's just a Chinese restaurant now.
43:19It was once the most feared place in Europe.
43:26For 30 years, the Berlin Wall meant that the Nazi legacy,
43:30if you can call it that, was concealed from the world.
43:33The communists were pragmatic about recycling Nazi buildings.
43:37Several were left standing.
43:39But now, a reunited democratic Berlin has to decide
43:44what to do with the remains of Germania.
43:47Hitler's former Reich Bank is now the Foreign Ministry.
43:59What do the people think who work here?
44:01Do they know? Do they care what it was before?
44:05Are these walls contaminated, or is the past simply the past?
44:15The former Air Ministry, also wearing the colours of its communist past,
44:19is now the Finance Ministry.
44:26The Olympic Stadium will host the World Cup in 2006.
44:38The city continues to go about its business, unbothered, uninterested.
44:43The hedonistic spirit of the place which the Nazis tried so hard to crush
44:47has reasserted itself once again.
44:50This, for example, is Berlin's annual Gay Day,
44:54something which would not have been allowed under the previous management.
45:04The streetlights which Speer designed for Germania's east-west axis
45:09now shine on a very different world.
45:15And as for Speer's biggest dream, lurking in a leafy Berlin suburb
45:20is perhaps the strangest remnant of all.
45:26How many of the Berliners who pass by this concrete stump every day on their way to work
45:31would guess that it is all that remains of Hitler and Speer's greatest dream
45:36for the future of their city, the dome which was to stand at the heart of Germania.
45:52It would have been the biggest dome in the world,
45:55the gigantic nourishing breast of Nazi Germany.
45:59800 feet across, that's a sixth of a mile.
46:06It was supposed to hold 180,000 of the party faithful.
46:12And it was, of course, going to be by far the biggest dome that had ever been built.
46:18And it's rather difficult to imagine the future wanting to build one even larger.
46:31But as an example of the inherent rhetorical excess,
46:35the sheer fantasy of the ideas of Hitler that Speer was putting into terms of three-dimensional design,
46:41this was certainly the daddy of them all.
47:05Whenever I think about the dome or look at a picture of it,
47:08it still makes me intensely curious about the mind that thought it up
47:13because every view of this thing would have been a worm's eye view.
47:33Now what was the effect that you had in mind?
47:37What would that person be intended to feel?
47:40Nothing.
47:42It was not my aim that he feels anything.
47:45I had only the aim to impose the grandeur of this building to the people who are in this building.
47:59If people who have different minds are in such a surrounding pressed together,
48:05they all get unified to one mind.
48:08And I think this was the aim of those buildings
48:12and not what the small man will feel personally.
48:29The story goes that if this thing had actually been built,
48:52the exhalation of the thousands of assembled party faithful
48:56would have created a mini weather system inside the dome
49:01and that this condensed Nazi euphoria would have fallen like the gentle rain from heaven.
49:16There are times when one is just amazed by the noble impartiality of history.
49:23Twenty years away, even the heaviest pyramid.
49:26And in Berlin, the one surviving building that was designed by Albert Speer
49:31is a guardhouse near the Victory Column that is now a public laboratory.
49:42Speer himself survived much better than his buildings.
49:47Twenty years in prison is a difficult thing to survive.
49:51But I was occupying my mind quite often with a range of my guilt
49:57and I was thinking that I never shall get rid of it, that this burden will ever last with me.
50:05In 1966, he came out blinking into the media spotlight.
50:10He became a very public penitent, building the myth of the good Nazi.
50:18But I can tell you that I'm quite glad to be outside here.
50:23He became a familiar face on television, which is how I got to meet him all those years ago.
50:30Let me ask you something. You met Speer. So did I.
50:36What impression did you form of him?
50:41A nice old man.
50:45Cultivated? Cultivated.
50:49Scholarly? Well, intelligent, I would say.
50:55But my second impression was he was very cold, without really warm feelings, you know.
51:16Almost, not you.
51:19He wasn't really interested in working as an architect.
51:25Also in Spandau, he hasn't drawn visions or what else, nothing, you know.
51:33He hasn't been disappointed not to work anymore as an architect, you know.
51:39It was a chance to get power, you know, and it was a chance to become a great man.
51:51His thoughts have been very calculated.
51:55How can I hold and how can I develop my career?
51:59I was very struck by the huge disparity that one sensed between Speer then and Speer now, as it were.
52:14He'd been pulling out drawings of the esquisses that he'd made for the big buildings of Germania.
52:24And there were these drawings on the table.
52:27And suddenly it struck me, my God, you know, that is all that remains of the most pharaonic,
52:34the most colossal building enterprise that any government in the history of mankind has ever dreamed of.
52:42And that's all it comes down to, a few pieces of paper sitting on the table.
52:49And I was overcome with two contrary feelings, one of pathos and the other one of intense relief.
53:00And I just was unable to connect the feeling of pathos to the Speer that was.
53:08And I was unable to connect the feelings of relief to the old man, now evidently harmless,
53:14who was sitting across the table from me.
53:17And it was one of the most powerful emotional moments of my life.
53:24Would you like to be remembered as a modern architect?
53:27No, of course, I am not a modern architect. I am a very old-fashioned architect.
53:32But I hope I have a very small chance that one or other of those buildings will be kept in the history of arts,
53:39not only as something peculiar, but as something which stands within the other buildings of this time.
53:58You know, you sit here on a sunny June morning like a tourist in the Campania in Rome in the 18th century,
54:03wondering what the hell this place and then Germany and then the world would have looked like if they'd won.
54:13And one of the things you pretty soon realise about Speer and his way of building
54:17isn't that famous phrase of Hannah Arendt about the banality of evil.
54:22It's more to do with the evil of banality.
54:25And the man only knew one way, basically, to make a building.
54:30He only knew one way to turn a corner, one way to make a window frame, etc., etc., etc.
54:35He was a very unimaginative architect.
54:38And the idea of a world covered from end to end with Speerian, Hitlerian buildings
54:44in which you had your choice between this kind of squared-off pseudo-classicism for official events
54:51and gemütlich kind of chalet architecture to keep the people happy and contented where they're living
54:59is just, to me, a nightmare.
55:01And I was lucky, very lucky, that it didn't last.
55:07What do you feel when you see the Nuremberg Zeppelin field now? Do you ever visit it?
55:12I have seen it and I'm a little bit sad that there's not much left.
55:19You know, the whole columns have gone.
55:22And to my astonishment, the stone we used was of a bad quality.
55:29So I only can say, thank goodness that I'm no more together with Hitler.
55:35He would have been very mad with me about this bad stone quality.
55:52I don't want to sleep anymore.
55:54The weather is getting worse.
56:00People live there, I know, and it costs a lot.
56:06You can't imagine it anymore.
56:13I'm not haunted at all.
56:15I am normally quite serene.
56:18Now, this is absolutely past.
56:21It's also, to me, it's a part of almost history.
56:28Albert Speer...
56:41One of the things Hitler was fascinated, indeed obsessed by,
56:45was what he called the ruin value of buildings.
56:48How would they look in 2,000, in 4,000 years?
56:53In the end, he said, all that remained to remind men
56:57of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture.
57:01And that's what happened.
57:03The only things their relationship created were ruins.
57:09They don't testify to the greatness of a past civilisation,
57:13but to a common megalomania shared between an architect and his patron.
57:19Even as ruins, they're cold and tacky.
57:22You can't dream on them like Goethe on the ruins of Rome.
57:26The best they offer is a distant nightmare.
57:37I was thinking as a specialist and not thinking as a human being.
57:44I was so specialised in my job as architect
57:48that I forgot that humanity is the most important part of life.
58:13Less is more tomorrow as BBC4's Vision of Space
58:17continues here on BBC2 at 11.20.
58:43www.bbc4.org