When audiences enter the Nuremberg State Theater in four years, they will find themselves in an 800-seat cubicle covered in green. To get there, they must walk through a huge horse-shaped building better known as the “Nazi Colosseum” – one of the largest structures still standing from the party’s gargantuan building spree in the 1930s, where millions gathering at open-air rallies laughing. Hitler’s plans for domination, and extermination.
This month, the city of Nuremberg announced that the opera’s temporary home from 2021 would be given a permanent £70 million home in the courtyard of the Congress Hall, in a major project funded mainly by the Bavarian state, the federal government and the Europeans. Union. The decision has sparked tension between those who believe damaged buildings can be replanted for good, and others who want them to be left as memorial sites, or demolished.
“Some would say that this is not something that should be done there, and that the place where the Nazis delivered their most barbaric speeches should not have high culture,” says Tobias Reichard, director of the Ben-Haim Research Center (BHRC ) at the University of Music and Theater Munich.
He has another idea. Working in the BHRC, located in the Führerbau (or “Führer’s building”, widely used by Hitler) Reichard knows firsthand what it is like to spend every day within “highly contaminated” walls. by his history. He sees the split over the new plans, which one conservative German newspaper called “cowardly”, leading to the question: “what do we do with the Nazi past and how relevant is it still today?”
Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, designed the Nuremberg Rally Facilities and Ludwig and Franz Ruff were responsible for the Congress Hall within. Inspired by the Roman Colosseum and originally planned to reach 230 feet, the structure was only built to about half that height before work was halted due to the war. It has remained largely unused since the mid-1940s.
According to state director Jens-Daniel Herzog, the opera house will stand as a “permanent testament” to what came before it – useful, according to Reichard, to ensure the building’s roots are never forgotten. Herzog called the decision “a great sign because it shows us that Nuremberg not only has ideas, but also that it has the courage to move into the future. This gives us great hope for future development potential.”
But others are less enthusiastic, calling the project “highly dubious” – including Michael Steinberg, a professor of music and German studies at Brown University. “There’s a huge shadow of a permanent opera house in that kind of context,” he says. That shadow will come into contact with both the art and the institution, according to him, with both who may suffer as a result.
“You have this extremely burdensome building… where its use was central to Nazi propaganda. So this is a very strong alchemy,” he says. “Either as a member of the audience, I’m asked to ignore and suppress the obvious reality around me, or I’m asked to have a very confusing experience.”
He also sees a wider problem with “re-establishing a space like that for pleasure, and in a way I can see that it’s a shameful problem when light Italian operas are made. That is to say, are they going to play The Barber of Seville in a place as exciting and as horrible to history as that place was?” The building being polluted – and staining – everything inside is “inevitable – and the question is, what good does that do for opera culture in general?”
That raises another problem. Although Germany has been included for many years with its old buildings – including Tacheles, a former prison, turned into a commercial art gallery; Prora, a Nazi holiday camp that would have been luxury apartments; and the Saalecker Workshops, the home of Paul Schultze-Naumburg, one of the party’s leading architects, into a design school – there are operas as well as pieces of the country’s history.
This is due – no doubt – to Hitler, a famous fan who described in Mein Kampf, his 1925 autobiography, seeing a life-changing performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the age of 12. He attended Hitler on opera almost daily during his four years in Vienna in his. early twenties; had Richard Wagner’s four-and-a-half-hour epic Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg performed by the Berlin State Opera to herald the founding of the Third Reich in 1933 (the ensemble chosen by Hitler himself); and the following year ordered the rebuilding of the Nuremberg Opera House, so important that he considered the art form. An autographed manuscript of Rienzi Wagner is reported to have found its way into the bunker where the Führer took his life.
In addition to its personal interest, opera was a useful political tool. “Of course, the Nazis were well aware of the power of music as a propaganda medium and they used it a lot,” Reichard, co-author of Hitler. Power. Opera: Propaganda and Musical Theater in Nuremberg, says – mainly through Wagner, who Hitler is forever lying to his own political aims. The composer, who died 50 years before the Third Reich was founded, made no secret of his anti-Semitism (including his essay On Judaism in Music, which applies a Jewish “origin” to the art form); it seemed to Hitler that his works, which aimed to preserve German culture, were staged. (In 1949, Thomas Mann, Hitler’s arch critic, wrote that all this is there, in the pride of Wagner, a constant lecturer, his desire to deliver monologues on every possible subject, an unspeakable dissatisfaction – anything that is a role model for Hitler – definitely there). there is plenty of ‘Hitler’ in Wagner”.)
Still, “the Nazis are not Wagner’s fault”, says Steinberg, who co-curated the Wagner exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin two years ago. “But the Nazis were very powerful manipulators of emotions, and they have that in common with Wagner.” Manuel Brug, opera critic for German broadsheet Die Welt, says Wagner is as popular as ever in Germany – and believes any opera should be judged on its merits, rather than colored by its surroundings. “It’s a theater world, and I hope there’s magic [in an opera] … So I don’t have dark feelings and I don’t see the shadows of the past” as he looks into a regenerated space, he says.
Part of the reason these kinds of debates keep resurfacing is that “Nazi buildings desperately need to be recreated, or they will deteriorate”, notes Reichard. It is no use letting them decay; it does not come free to destroy them completely, and that will not silence the cohort that denies Nazi atrocities took place at all. Can consensus ever be reached?
“How do we move forward? Do we always have to put it in context? What if we don’t put it in context?” Reichard says about the conundrums of “guilty” buildings. “It shows us that there are relevant and vital questions to be answered.”
Brug says there is value in a commemorative place that is different – lighter – than many of the others. “It is necessary to remember something, and not only in the dark places of the concentration camps.” He calls on Congress to restore a “win-win situation” – that is because the agreement will be in place for at least 25 years, providing continuity that could help overcome what has gone before. .
This will not be the last time such a debate will take place in Germany – Reichard welcomes the prospect. “Each generation has to decide anew what to do with this. It’s not so much about what’s wrong with us – do we feel guilty – but what can we learn from this from today’s perspective? If you ask me, I would try not to end this discussion because it is so insightful.”