Nuremberg and the Nazi Party Rally Grounds

Zeppelinfeld with "dome of light"

If you've watched even a single documentary about Nazi Germany or the Second World War, you've been exposed to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl's record of the 1934 Nazi "Party Rally of Unity and Strength" in 1934 is almost two soul-deadening, sleep-inducing hours long. One long homage to mass politics and a love letter to Hitler and his fanatical base, the film shows us precisely how fascism replaces genuine participatory democracy with its superficially popular, granite-faced facade. The Leader stands stone-faced, watching as his paramilitary forces parade past the review stand. He greets the German Workers' Front. He meets with the Hitler Youth in a huge soccer stadium. He and his goon lieutenants give speech after speech. It goes on and on and on.

Leni shooting Triumph in 1935

I viewed Triumph in its entirety at some time during the 90s. It was probably for one of my graduate school classes. I had read about Riefenstahl's "genius" and the film's artistic merit; I thought that the film had been forbidden in postwar Germany; I knew that it possessed a dark mystique. Wasn't it possible that Riefenstahl's genius and Nazism's seductive message would pollute anyone who watched the film and make them more susceptible to fascism's power? I didn't think so, but I also had no interest in watching it--perhaps skinheads thought it was excellent. I don't know. In any case, I know I felt awkward renting it from the local Blockbuster. Almost nothing says "I'm creepy" quite like being the guy standing at the check-out counter with a VHS copy of Triumph of the Will.

In any event, I found it tedious and would never watch the whole thing again. The crowd scenes are certainly impressive and the staging is truly monumental, but there's not much to keep the viewer engaged. Marching and speeches fill the frame. Unless you're the kind of person who enjoys watching The State of the Union, you won't get much from Triumph of the Will.

Nonetheless, I finally visited Nuremberg and the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Reichs-Party-Day-Grounds). While I've always enjoyed visiting historical battlefields, I've never been much interested in touring the ruins of Nazi Party structures. So I thought it was really groovy touring the inside of one of Berlin's flak-towers and I loved standing in La Gleize with it's giant tank and looking out over the rolling hills of the Ardennes. But visiting the skeleton of former Gestapo detention cells in Berlin's Topography of Terror museum felt obligatory. I wanted to go. It was important to go. At the same time, the spaces simply recall how truly evil people can be to one another. I suppose it seems strange that I would differentiate between sites of battlefield violence and sites of terror. I don't pretend to have an explanation for that.

The incomplete Congress Hall was to ultimately house 50,000 party members

In many ways, this reminded me of my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I didn't "look forward" to the visit and approached it more as a duty. Nuremberg's Party-Grounds didn't evoke the swirl of feelings Birkenau did--I can't imagine another site that could evoke such powerful feelings of terror, pathos, and rage. However, while walking across the 60 meter-wide parking lot that used to be the "Great Street", the concrete reality of the regime's existence sank in. These massive structures--half-completed and crumbling, re-purposed, still--like the arid skeletal remains of Birkenau--have the capacity to shock us into recognition that the things we study from the safe distance of a library or inside a classroom are concrete, physical manifestations of the human capacity to embrace evil.

I walked the entire length of the grounds--from the incomplete Congress Hall (housing the documentation center) to the ruins of the Zeppelin Field and the Luitpold Arena.

Grand-standing...

My favorite memory is a brief conversation I had standing on Albert Speer's Zeppelin Field ramparts. A gaggle of German middle-schoolers were there for a student field trip. I watched them take turns at the grandstand (who can resist standing there and looking out over the field?). A gray-haired man addressed me while I watched. He grew up in Thuringia (East Germany) and it was his first trip to the Party Grounds as well. We chatted about my trip to the Runde Ecke in Leipzig and the "Youth in the Crosshairs of the Stasi" exhibition. That's when he shared with me that the Stasi had interrogated him in the 70s. In 1968, Rudi Dutschke, the most outspoken leader of the (West) German SDS (Socialist German Student Union), was shot in the head by a radical anti-communist; in 1979 he died due to complications from the wound. My new acquaintance had gathered with some of his friends to drink beers and "pour one out" in Dutschke's honor. Shortly afterwards, the Stasi picked him up, accusing him of leading the Thuringian branch of the SDS. You might think that the East Germans would welcome another socialist organization, but the New Left despised the Soviet-inspired socialism of the Warsaw Pact states.

I too stood on the grandstand. Then I returned to the Congress Hall and toured the museum. The permanent exhibition provides any visitor an excellent narrative overview of the entire rise and fall of German fascism. I strongly recommend it--it's very manageable and the audio tour is excellent. In the last room, there was a display on the Nuremberg Trials and punishment of the defendants. I admit to feeling a shameful, savage pleasure looking at images of the executed Nazis.

Then there's the famous footage of American G.I.s blowing the swastika off the top of the Zepplinfeld ramparts. Enjoy.



ALSO...
Steffen Suuck's film and online project, Controlled / Decay: Everyday Among Hitler's Ruins, provides an excellent overview of the grounds for those who can speak/read German. Even if you can't, the film shows how today's Germans interact with the remnants of the regime.