Watched over by a yellow Easter chick, I have in recent days once again been reading Albert Speer’s Memoirs. Speer was Hitler’s long-serving Minister of Armaments. As an architect, he was also tasked with realizing Hitler’s grandiose building projects, such as the Reich Chancellery and the unreal domed hall in Berlin.
“The Führer loved everything colossal,” he writes. “A building was not merely to be a place to be in, but to convey ideas, visions, and the message of the Führer’s greatness.”
Speer was 25 years old when, in 1930, he had the opportunity to hear Hitler deliver a lecture on architecture. The experience made a deep impression on him, and shortly afterward he joined the Nazi Party. Their personal relationship developed later, especially after 1933, when Hitler seized power.
At first, Speer received several minor commissions, but over time they became dizzyingly large. His breakthrough came in Nuremberg, where he was given responsibility for designing the setting for the Nazis’ great party rallies. The massive stands and rigorously organized spaces gathered tens of thousands of people into a carefully choreographed community.
But it was above all the “cathedral of light” that made an impression. Hundreds of searchlights were aimed at the sky, forming a roofless space that enclosed the masses and lifted them into a quasi-religious mood. “Hitler was beside himself with joy,” Speer writes, and he now became the Führer’s favorite architect.
In 1938, Speer was commissioned to build the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, a center of power intended to mirror the regime’s self-image. The building was erected with astonishing speed. The result was a sequence of rooms carefully designed to influence visitors. Long corridors, heavy materials, and enormous dimensions were meant to make them feel small. Every step they took was to remind them who ruled. Hitler was especially delighted to see his brand-new desk: “Magnificent, magnificent, magnificent… When the diplomats sit before me at this table, they will learn to be afraid!”
But Hitler wanted more. Under the name Germania, Berlin was to be transformed into the capital of a thousand-year Reich. The crowning achievement would be the enormous People’s Hall, where up to 200,000 people could gather. “The circular interior had the almost inconceivable diameter of 250 meters. And at a height of 220 meters the gigantic dome would culminate,” Speer wrote. The interior space was to be seven times larger than that of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The plans were never realized, but they offer a disturbing insight into how the regime envisioned the future. The Führer’s broad-gauge railway (Breitspurbahn) also failed on the drawing board—rolling palaces with cinemas and lounges on three-meter-wide tracks. Everything was designed to impress, not merely to transport.
The close connection between megalomania and pompous architecture is well documented. While Hitler dreamed, Stalin and Mussolini cultivated their own visions. Stalin introduced “socialist classicism”—a style combining ancient columns with modern engineering. Its most extreme expression was the planned Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, to be crowned by a colossal statue of Lenin. Here, the state was literally to tower above the people.
For Mussolini, architecture was about staging Italy as a reborn great power. He sought to uncover the Roman Empire—not only historically, but physically: “We dream of a Roman Italy that is wise and strong, disciplined and imperial.”
Unlike Hitler, Donald Trump does not dare to look a thousand years ahead. Three years will suffice. Yet he displays some of the traits of past tyrants. He promises to make America great again, and as a symbolic expression of his ambitions he wants to erect the largest triumphal arch in history in Washington, D.C. If he gets his way, it will be 76 meters high—16 meters taller than the North Korean one.Since returning to power, Trump has shown an acute need to set records—and to be remembered. His skyscraper on Fifth Avenue is, of course, called Trump Tower. What now provokes attention and revulsion is that he continues this egocentric nonsense as president. He has turned the Oval Office into a tasteless mix of gold and gaudiness. The Kennedy Center has been renamed the Trump–Kennedy Center, and Palm Beach Airport is to be called Donald J. Trump International Airport.
In front of three federal buildings in Washington, D.C., enormous banners display the image of the new savior. His orange face also adorns the entrance passes to the national parks. Trump’s supporters have even proposed carving his likeness into the well-known Mount Rushmore. On Christmas Eve last year, he announced that the United States would build a series of warships in the new “Trump class”: “Each of these will be the largest battleship in history,” he boasted.
Last Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that Trump’s signature will appear on dollar bills alongside that of the Secretary of the Treasury. It remains unclear whether the signature will be printed on all denominations.
“This is a man drunk on power, with an already enormous ego that was further inflated by winning the presidency again,” says Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary. Matthews left the Trump circus after the storming of Congress in January 2021.
Trump’s political ego trip nevertheless differs significantly from those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Unlike them, he lacks a coherent state project. It is mostly patchwork here and there. And even if he had had a clear project, he would not have been able to carry it out. Therefore, the gaudy trappings with which he surrounds himself will most likely disappear with him.
Fortunately.
