Word: hitler
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...wish I had been an architect!" Adolf Hitler often exclaimed to his Nazi master builder, Albert Speer. But he was indeed an architect of sorts. True, Hitler did not build much. His plans for the Third Reich's monuments, worked up into complete designs by Speer, stayed mostly on paper in rough sketches and scale models. The tens of billions of dollars needed to realize these halls, palaces, chancelleries and stadiums were dissipated in war. None of his biggest projects, like the Nuremberg stadium, were built, and most of the monuments of Nazi architecture were pulverized by Allied bombs...
...Enough. Hitler's designs are like his speeches: huge, hammeringly repetitious, banal, but filled with an inescapable, machine-like force. He had no perceptible sense of proportion, interval, space or even ornament. But he did know that very big buildings tend to make very big impressions on people. And that was enough...
...began in 1936 and whose last entry is dated October 1944, survived to be published in Germany two years after the war. Reck wrote it secretly and kept it hidden in the woods on his land not far from Munich. It is easy to see why. In the journal, Hitler appears as a "gypsy baron," 'a teetotaling Alexander," a "vegetarian Tamerlane," "an unclean essence." Mein Kampf is dismissed by Reck as "Machiavelli for chambermaids." Albert Speer's clean-cut expression is "the epitome of this whole, sickening, mechanical, little-boy-at-heart generation." Goring...
...Reck believed, was basically agricultural. This led to an erosion of pastoral values and encouraged the weedlike growth of indiscriminate commercialism and technology. The result was mass men who, in their confusion of broken values and deflated deutschmarks, accepted as real the fatal delusions of an irrational clown like Hitler...
...Reek's familiar and rather simplistic view of German history that compels the reader to keep turning the pages of his diary. It is his obsessive imagination of disaster, his specific visions of decay. Even in the mid-'30s, Reck saw Hitler as the culmination of an age of pseudorationalism that would destroy itself with its own greed, stupidity and madness. His pages are full of fleeting evidence: workers lined up in front of bordellos in broad daylight, language corrupted beyond nonsense, people bombed into insanity carrying their dead children in suitcases from city to city...