Word: hitler
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Showman or Shaman. In her last years, Aimee shrewdly retouched her public image by sending about 2,000,000 Bibles to servicemen and calling down biblical plagues on the Axis powers ("How many of you would like to see Hitler covered with boils from head to foot?") But her heart really wasn't in it any more, and on Sept. 27, 1944, she died of an overdose of barbiturates...
...Hitler's designs, form follows function as surely as in any Corbusier or Gropius. The function had nothing to do with human needs. It was simply to intimidate the people, and to assert the state-visual symbols as purposeful as Goebbels' radio broadcasts. No Berliner could look anywhere in his city, Hitler hoped, without seeing that overpowering dome, those relentless colonnades...
...fact, every building Hitler dreamed up could be read as pure metaphor. The outside form was always clear-as sharp and infantile as play blocks-sphere piled on cube piled on rectangle. But as inside space, the designs are illegible, and probably were meant to be. Imagine the buildings from the sketches: what rooms stare from those endlessly repeated window bays? Where do those interminable corridors go? Does anyone ever walk up that colossal staircase? They all reflect the processes of totalitarian politics-explicit in their demands, obscure in their workings...
Languages of Power. Unhappily, the New York Cultural Center has presented Hitler's architecture as if it were unique to Nazism-the swollen granite children of one mad brain. This is the stock liberal ploy of separating Hitler from history for fear of contaminating history itself. In fact, the grandiosity of his architectural fantasy belongs to a whole tradition of visionary architecture, which encompasses idealist architects like the 18th century Frenchmen Boullée and Ledoux as well as the great Italian engraver Piranesi, who saw grandeur in prisons, glory in ruins. (In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich...
...Hitler's uniqueness lay in the monstrous size and paranoid consistency of his dreams. By wedding neoclassicism to his Kampf, he killed the style for good. Dictators (and even democrats) of the future will need to find another...