Enacting the Mythical through Architecture: Nazi Assembly Architecture as Performative Practice

Abstract

The beginning of the Third Reich saw the construction of large architectural structures to host and aesthetically frame Nazi mass events. The significance of these buildings cannot be understood without the propaganda and mass performances that constituted their contemporary frame of reception. This article discusses the Gauforum project in Weimar, constructed from 1937 until 1944. Combining an analysis of common architecture-related propaganda tropes with an examination of architectural design and a reading of the ceremony of laying the first foundation stone, it shows how these elements performed the longed-for Volksgemeinschaft. By framing construction works as the expression of national achievement and an ongoing revolutionary renewal of the nation, Nazi-era architecture propaganda discursively primed the ground for interplay between the material arrangements of architecture and events that afforded an experience of the mythical spatiotemporality of the Volksgemeinschaft. In this way, Nazi architectural propaganda played an efficacious part in the politics of mass events.