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Phantom heritage Thingstätten Third Reich Arch. Hereditas 10 2017
Louis Nebelsick“Phantom heritage”, that is the long-term impact of landscapes altered by manipulation and lies, is discussed using the example of Thingstätten, huge open-air theatres built in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1937. They hosted quasi-religious rituals and highly stylized theatre productions, called Thingspiele, using cutting edge mass theatre technology. At Goebbels behest and following a concept designe invented by the Nazi´s star architect Albert Speer, around 40 of these venues, which were based on a “Völkisch” concept developed by right wing ideologs at the end of the 19th century, were built and “consecrated” between 1934 and 1937. They hosted religiously charged mass events involving literally casts of thousands, including marching and singing actors, armatures and involved spectators. The architecture of these arenas, their “sacred” positions in a mystical “Germanic” landscapes, their coupling with war memorials and the spectacles shown in them were designed to heroize the “martyrs” of past wars and rally the population for the Nazi´s ideology and martial goals. Ambitious designs embedded them into vast “sacred” landscapes celebrating the Nazis’ concept of blood and soil. Although these vast venues only flourished for 3 years before Goebbels abandoned the somewhat anarchic Thingspiel concept for more easily managed propaganda events, most of them still exist and many are still in use, particularly to host pageants and rock concerts. In a few cases, there has been a clear continuity in their function as venues for political agitation and memorials to war heroes up to this day. This paper focusses on typical and spectacular examples which include the seminal „Reich´s Thanksgiving Site” on the Bückeberg in Lower Saxony, the spectacular Thingstätte on the Heiligenberg which towers over Heidelberg, the Wakldbühne embedded in the Olympic “Reichssportfeld” in Berlin and the Upper Silesian Thingstätte on the Góra Świętej Anny. As Thingstätten, which are now increasingly threatened by development and decay, are coming into the focus of heritage management, they are also being rediscovered and used as rallying points by radical right-wing movements. Once deserted and forgotten these phantoms are threatening to awake.
Related papers
Analysis of a Difficult Heritage from an Ideology of Violence, the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg
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This article explores the reassembly of the city of Nuremberg, Germany, through its heritage post- World War II. It does so primarily through consideration of two aspects of post-War heritage assembly and reassembly. First, it looks at the reconstruction of the city in the aftermath of bombing, with particular attention to the reassembling of historically significant architecture, though also in light of debates about reconstruction (of former buildings) versus construction (new build). Second, it investigates the making of Nazi architecture into heritage, initially through legislation and later through other accoutrements of heritage, such as information panels and guided tours. It is concerned, both for this specific case and also more widely, with what work the distinctive assemblage known as ’heritage’ can perform, including assembling and reassembling other entities, such as place, temporality, moralities and citizenship. In this way, the article seeks to explore the contribution that an assemblage perspective might make to the understanding of heritage as well as to consider some of its limitations.
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Monographs of the Insitute of Archaeology of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw
Volume published in cooperaion with the Insitute of Art History of the University of Warsaw
10
ARCHAEOLOGICA
HEREDITAS
Prevenive conservaion
of the human environment
Architecture as an element of the landscape
6.
edited by
Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch,
Zbigniew Kobyliński
and Louis Daniel Nebelsick
Warsaw 2017
Archaeologica Hereditas
Works of the Insitute of Archaeology of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński in Warsaw
Editorial Board:
Editor-in-chief: Zbigniew Kobyliński
Members of the Board: Tadeusz Gołgowski, Jacek Lech, Przemysław Urbańczyk
Secretary of the Board: Magdalena Żurek
Editorial Board’s address:
1/2 Wóycickiego St., Building 23, PL 01-938 Warsaw, Poland
tel. +48 22 569 68 17, e-mail: archeologia@uksw.edu.pl
www.archeologia.uksw.edu.pl
Technical ediing and proofreading: Zbigniew Kobyliński
Layout: Bartłomiej Gruszka
Cover design: Katja Niklas and Ula Zalejska-Smoleń
Linguisic consultaion: Louis Daniel Nebelsick and Wojciech Brzeziński
Cover picture: part of the imperial garden Summer Palace in Beijing, China;
photo by Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch
Publicaion recommended for print by Professors Marin Gojda and Andrzej Pieńkos
© Copyright by Fundacja Res Publica Muliethnica, Warszawa 2017 and Instytut Archeologii Uniwersytetu
Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, Warszawa 2017
ISBN 978-83-946496-4-7
ISBN 978-83-948352-2-4
ISSN 2451-0521
Publisher:
Res Publica Muliethnica Foundaion
44 Cypryjska St.
PL 02-761 Warsaw, Poland
htp://res-publica-muliethnica.pl/
CONTENTS
5
Preface
Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch,
Zbigniew Kobyliński
and Louis Daniel Nebelsick
*
7
Environmental prevenive
conservaion
Andrzej Tomaszewski
11 The idea of prevenive conservaion
of human environment
Zbigniew Kobyliński
and Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch
*
15 Prevenive conservaion
of the human environment:
architecture as an element
of the landscape
Lazare Eloundou Assomo
17 The role of the architecture
in the creaion, enhancement
and preservaion of cultural landscapes
Stefano De Caro
21 World Heritage SITES for DIALOGUE:
heritage for intercultural dialogue,
through travel, “Life Beyond Tourism”
Paolo Del Bianco
*
23 Role of cultural sustainability
of a tribe in developing a imeless
cultural landscape: a case study
of the Apatani tribe
Barsha Amarendra, Bishnu Tamuli
and Amarendra Kumar Das
ArchAeologicA
HEREDITAS 10
37 The corporate and cultural: honoring
the monumental in Kansas City,
Missouri
Cynthia M. Ammerman
47 Damaged landscape of ancient
Palmyra and its recovery
Marek Barański
57 The art of (architectural)
reconstrucion at archaeological
sites in situ within the context
of cultural landscapes
Ewa M. Charowska
73 Lessons from landscape,
landscape archetypes
Urszula Forczek-Brataniec,
Ana Luengo and Tony Williams
83 The city for people – the image
of post-industrial sites in modern
city
Joanna Gruszczyńska
95 Sustainability by management:
a comparaive policy study
of the World Heritage ciies
of Amsterdam, Edinburgh
and Querétaro
Eva Gutscoven, Ana Pereira Roders and Koen
Van Balen
105 Polychromy in architecture
as a manifestaion of the link
between man and environment
Teiana Kazantseva
119 Capturing architecture – the poeic
vision of cultural heritage
in the inter-war Polish pictorial
photography
Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch
127 Landscape with ruins:
preservaion and presentaion
of archaeological relics
of architecture
Zbigniew Kobyliński
153 Educaing architects: the problem
with agricultural buildings
Diederik de Koning
163 Historic gardens and climate change.
Conclusions and perspecives
Heiner Krellig
177 The monasic landscape – carrier
of memory and potenial catalyst
in conservaion and adapive reuse
processes of material and immaterial heritage
Karen Lens and Nikolaas Vande Keere
187 The missing landscape
of Yuanmingyuan: preservaion
and revitalisaion of a Chinese
imperial garden
Mingqian Liu
283 The meanings of ruins for the
history of the cultural landscape
on the example of the remains
of the castle complex at Wyszyna
Kamil Rabiega
303 Dissolving materiality: ruins and
plant relicts in the landscape parks
by Denis McClair in Volhynia
Petro Rychkov and Nataliya Lushnikova
323 Memory of the landscape: revela-
ion through architecture and built
environment at the Çamali Saltern
Işılay Tiarnagh Sheridan
333 Pre-Hispanic walkscapes
in Medellín, Colombia
Juan Alejandro Saldarriaga Sierra
345 The invisible and endangered landscape: the case of the margins
of the Cascavel Stream in Goiânia,
Brazil
Carinna Soares de Sousa
and Almir Francisco Reis
195 Seeking the traces of a former mon- 361 Diamond mines shaping
-asic landscape in the vicinity
of Samos Abbey (Galicia, Spain)
Estefanía López Salas
213 Landscape and naional idenity in
Portugal
Fernando Magalhães
225 The city that penetrates the sky
Romano Marini and Crisiano Luchei
the South African landscapes
Aleksandra Stępniewska
369 (Un)wanted heritage in the
cityscape – arguments for destrucion or reuse. The case of the city
of Kaunas
Ingrida Veliutė
379 The Nordic Pavilion projects
Wellington’s prison landscape
at the 2016 Venice Biennale.
Scandinavian approach
to architectural landscape
Chrisine McCarthy
Anna Wiśnicka
231 Siing penal heritage: a history of
243 Phantom heritage: Thingstäten
and “sacred” landscapes of the
Third Reich
Louis Daniel Nebelsick
265 21st Century Garden with exhibiion
pavilion in Royal Łazienki Museum
in Warsaw
Ewa Paszkiewicz
389 Architecture in the cultural land-scape of the Prądnik Valley
Dominik Ziarkowski
*
403 Notes on authors
Phantom heritage:
Thingstätten and “sacred” landscapes
of the Third Reich
Louis Daniel Nebelsick
An aspect of invisible and unwanted heritage, that
I would like to address in this paper, is “phantom heritage”, that is the long-term impact of landscapes altered
by manipulaion and lies. As an example, I would like to
discuss Thingstäten, huge open-air theatres built in Naional Socialist (henceforth Nazi) Germany between 1933
and 1937, which hosted quasi-religious rituals and highly
stylized theatre producions, called Thingspiele, literally
with casts of thousands, including marching and singing
actors, armatures and involved spectators. Moreover,
these vast venues purported to emulate occupy and/or
revive Germanic sacred sites. While clearly we are dealing
with a permutaion of the phenomenon of invented tradiions1, they cannot easily be dismissed as spurious. The
Nazis´s highly efecive use of cuing edge technological
means to achieve irraional ends have let all but indelible
traces of Thingstäten in the landscapes in which they
massively impacted the fabric of German society in the
mid-1930s and in some cases, coninue to do so today.
Before staring with my descripive interpretaion of
these remarkable structures I would like to explain words
that will be let in German throughout this paper. One
term Völkisch – literally “of the people” – while sounding
innocuous in translaion, denotes an inluenial ideology
which emerged in late 19th century Central Europe and
reached a fever pitch in the confused post First World
War years. Its heterogenous components include, among
others, neo paganism, naivism, chauvinism, xenophobia,
ani-urbanism and fanaical anisemiism.2 While it has
long been fashionable to belitle the Völkisch movement
as a lunatic fringe phenomenon preying on the fears
of a skiish peit bourgeoisie, modern research shows
that its popular resonance was enormous and stresses
its crucial contribuion to Nazism. The terms Thinglatz
(pl. Thingplätze), the larger Thingstäte (pl. Thingstätten) and Thingspiele will also be let untranslated.3 They
are derived from the Germanic root þing = assembly,
used in paricular to characterize legislaive and judicial
gatherings in Early Medieval Germany, Scandinavia and
England.4 The term was revived by 19th century German
romanics looking for the endemic roots of their rusic
democraic ideals. At that ime, tradiional Thingplätze
(village assembly places) were enclosed and marked with
stones illustraing their imagined aniquity. Ater the turn
of the 20th century, and paricularly ater the First World
War, gatherings bearing the name were implemented
by a variety of naionalist movements, including youth
groups whose Things mainly amounted to scouts’ jamborees held under the open sky. Among Völkisch ideologues
the term Thing gradually became a catchphrase for ritualized meeings, many of them mass events, with poliical, religious and increasingly performaive overtones.
The term Thingspiel itself emerged in let wing Roman
Catholic youth groups describing semireligious theatrical producions aimed at inluencing large audiences. As
these mass events could obviously not take place in the
cramped conines of village Thingplätze, they were convened in sport arenas, parade grounds and meadows.
At that ime paricularly, let-wing quasi-theatrical mass
events drew the atenion of theatre director’s eager to
break out of the stufy bourgeois corner and appeal to
mass audiences, leading to major innovaions, like Erwin
Piscator´s and Berthold Brecht’s “epic theatre”5, but also
to semi-theatrical embellishments of political events.
These involved choric performances, stylized dialogues
and declamaions, mannerized choreographies, starkly
schemaic backdrop architecture, if any at all, and solicited audience paricipaion. All of these elements were
plagiarized by the Nazis for their Thingspiele, many of
which were especially commissioned for the opening
ceremonies of their venues.6 The Third Reich’s foremost
dramaturge Rainer Schlösser, described the Thingspiele
as “a drama that intensiies historical events in order to
create a mythical, universal, unambiguous reality beyond
(exising) reality”. The speciic “mythical reality”, that was
intended, was interwoven with the culic veneraion of
the heroic (war) dead which features to a greater and
1
4
2
3
Hobsbawm 1993.
Puschner 2002; v. Schnurbein 2001.
Both terms were oten used synonymously; Rossol 2010: 108–138.
ArchAeologicA
HEREDITAS 10
243–264
5
6
Wenskus 1984.
McAlpine 1990; Schweiger 2004.
Gadberry 1980; Fischer-Lichte 2006, 2007; Niven 2000.
Louis Daniel Nebelsick
lesser degree in most of the Thingspiele7. The most explicit example is Richard Euringer´s Deutsche Passion
(German passion) which opened the Heidelberg´s Thingstäte in 1935. More an expressionist passion-play than
a classical theatre producion, it describes the anabasis
of a resurrected First World War soldier. This Christlike saviour with a barbed wire crown, experiences the
squalor of post-war Germany, he shoulders the peoples
sufering and inspires them to renounce both their individuality and the sophisicated and nefarious procliviies
of urban life and instead embrace unity, simplicity and
purity.8 Iniially the Nazis envisaged covering Germany
with a dense carpet of 400 to 600 Thingstäten, whose
construcion was funded in the framework of the job creaion programs sponsored by the central government.9
Between 1934 and 1936 some 40 Thingstätten were
7
8
9
Eichberg and Jones 1977.
For an English summary see Fischer-Lichte 2007: 122–128; for the
Nazi hero cult see Behrenbeck 1996 and Guardini 1946.
Stommer 1985.
244
inished, “consecrated” and used with varying intensity
as ceremonial sites for May Day celebraions, summer
solstice ceremonies, Heroes Commemoration Day”10,
etc, and of course Thingspiele (Fig. 1). In the words of
Ludwig Mooshammer, the architect of the irst example
to be completed in Halle (no. 18) the Thingstäte must
allow for the “best possible integraion into its natural
surroundings” and an “inimate seamless connecion between the audience and stage areas”, as well as cuingedge lighing and sound technology.11 Moreover, in order
to do jusice to their archaicizing Germanic name, they
were best located on “natural” sites away from the din of
modern towns and traic, on sites with sacred Germanic
pedigrees. Only two completed Thingstäten were built
to augment monumental townscapes, such as the Gauforen (regional capital complexes) at Koblenz (no. 26) and
Dresden (no. 12), and a few others were erected in builtup areas as adjuncts to Hitler youth hostels Bous (no.
10
11
Kaiser 2006.
Moshammer 1935.
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
10), Stuttgart-Rohr (no. 42) or Nazi elite schools, such
as the Ordensburg Vogelsang (no. 38), in the conines of
cloisters castles and forts such as Giebelstadt (no. 16),
Jülich (no. 24), Lamspringe (no. 28), Tecklenburg (no. 43)
or in city parks, such as those in Berlin-Rehberge (no. 7),
Bochum (no. 8), Mühlheim an der Ruhr (no. 30) and Tilsit
(now Sovetsk in Russia) (no. 41). In rare cases Thigstäten
fulilled a role of mass meeing venue embedded in larger Nazi ceremonial complexes, such as the Stedingsehre
(no. 15), which memorialized the batle of Altenesch in
which an uprising of yeomen farmers was crushed in
1234 by crusading knights12 or the Sachsenhain – a completely preserved SS ceremonial site near Verden an
der Aller (no. 44), which includes, among other things,
a vast parade ground and arrangements of 4500 boul-
ders memorializing that number of pagan Saxons who
Charlemagne was thought to have had executed there.13
The Dietrich-Eckart-Freilichtbühne (now Waldbühne) in
Berlin (no. 6; Fig. 13), named ater a vicious anisemiic
ideolog, which was built as the culic focus of the monumental Reichssporfeld realized for the Olympic Summer
Games in 1936, also belongs in this context.14 In order
to shield this metropolitain Thingstäte from its built-up
environs, it was tucked into a wooded ravine (Fig. 2e),
one of the few locaions in Berlin where you cannot see
a house. Other venues in built-up surroundings were
hidden in disused quarries, such as Bad Segeberg (no. 2,
Fig. 2c), Braunschweig (no. 11), St. Annaberg (now Góra
Świętej Anny in Poland) (no. 17), or Mühlheim an der
13
12
Finsterhölzl 1999.
14
Ulbricht 2011.
Kaule 2014.
Fig. 1. Distribution of the completed and consecrated Thingstätten in the 1930s against the political borders of Germany
in 1939. An aerial photo of the Heiligenberg Thingstätte is in the upper left-hand corner (created by L.D. Nebelsick); 1. Bad
Schmiedeberg, Saxony (Thingstätte Dübener Heide); abandoned, forest; 2. Bad Segeberg, Schleswig-Holstein (Thingstätte der
Nordmark); in use, open air theatre (Kalkbergstadion-Karl May Festpiele); 3. Bad Windsheim, Bavaria (Thingstätte am Weinturmhügel); in use, rock concerts (Weinturm Open Air); 4. Berchtesgaden-Strub, Bavaria (replaced 1936 by the Adolf Hitler
Jugendherberge); now youth hostel Berchtesgaden; 5. Bergen auf Rügen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Thingstätte Rugard); in
use; 6. Berlin-Charlottenburg (Dietrich-Eckart-Freilichtbühne); in use, rock concerts (Waldbühne); 7. Berlin-Wedding (Thingstätte
Rehberge); in use, outdoor cinema (Freiluftkino Rehberge); 8. Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia; in use (Freilichtbühne im Stadtpark Wattenscheid); 9. Borna, Saxony (Stätte der Volksgemeinschaft); in use, oudoor cinema (Volksplatz Borna); 10. Bous (Saar),
Saarland (Thingplatz and HJ Hostel); destroyed, now monastery (Kloster Heiligenborn); 11. Braunschweig/Brunswick, Lower
Saxony (Thingstätte am Nußberg); abandoned, park/forest; 12. Dresden, Saxony (Thingplatz am Gauforum); in use - open air
cinema; 13. Eichstätt, Bavaria (Thingstätte am Heiligen Berg); sporadically used as a theatre up to the 1980s now abandoned,
meadow; 14. Freyburg (Unstrut), Thuringia (Thingplatz auf dem Haineberg/Neuenburg); abandoned, meadow; 15. Ganderkesee,
Lower Saxony (Thingstätte Bookholzberg/Stedingsehre); abandoned, now being restored; 16. Giebelstadt, Bavaria (Thingplatz
Florian Geyer Schloss); in use, theatre; 17. Góra Świętej Anny, Upper Silesia (Thingstätte Annaberg); in use, rock concerts (Amiteatr na Górze Świętej Anny); 18. Halle, Saxony-Anhalt (Thingstätte Brandberge); abandoned, trashed; 19. Hameln, Lower Saxony (Reichsthingplatz) auf dem Bückeberg/Reichserntedankfest); abandoned, ield, recently protected; 20. Heidelberg, Baden
Württemberg (Thingstätte Heiligenberg); abandoned, Walpurgisnacht celebrations; 21. Herchen, North Rhine-Westphalia (Thingplatz); abandoned, forest; 22. Heringsdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Waldstadion Heringsdorf.); abandoned, forest; 23. Holzminden, Lower Saxony (Thingplatz im Stadtpark/ am Sylbecker Berg); abandoned ruins, children´s playground; 24. Jülich, North
Rhine-Westphalia (Thingstätte im Brückenkopf); abandoned ruins visible; 25. Kamenz, Saxony (Thingplatz auf dem Hutberg); in
use, rock concerts; 26. Koblenz, Rheinland Pfalz (Thingstätte Gauforum/Kürfürstenschloß); buried under rubble of the bombedout palace; 27. Krylowo, rajon Prawdinsk (Thingstätte Nordenburg); abandoned, forest; 28. Lamspringe, Lower Saxony (Thingstätte im Klostergarten); abandoned, park; 29. Leutkirch /Allgäu, Baden Württemberg (Thingplatz unterhalb der Wilhelmshöhe);
abandoned, forest; 30. Mülheim an der Ruhr, North Rhine-Westphalia; in use, theatre/concerts (Freilichtbühne); 31. Nordheim,
Lower Saxony (Weihestätte Nordheim/Freilichtbühne Niedersachen) in use, outdoor theatre (Waldbühne Northeim); 32. Ośno
Lubuskie, Lebus Land (Thingplatz Drossen „Stadt der Jugend“); sporadically used (Amiteatr nad jeziorem Reczynek); 33. Passau, Bavaria (Feierstätte Veste Oberhaus); abandoned, meadow; 34. Rathen, Saxony (Felsenbühne Rathen); in use, outdoor
theatre; 35. Rostock, Mecklemburg-Vorpommern (Thingstätte Barnstorfer Wald); partially demolished, playground (Platz der
Jugend); 36. Sankt Goarshausen, Rhineland-Palatinate (Loreley-Thingstätte); in use, mainly rock concerts; 37. Schildau bei Torgau, Saxony (Thingplatz Schildberg); abandoned, forest; 38. Schleiden (Eifel), North Rhine-Westphalia (Thingplatz Ordensburg
Vogelsang); partially buried, restored; 39. Schwarzenberg, Saxony (Thingstätte am Röckelmann, Grenzlandfeierstätte); in use
(Naturbühne Schwarzenberg); 40. Sovetsk, Oblast Kaliningrad. (Thingplatz Tilsit - Park Jakobsruh); until recently in use, dilapidated; 41. Stolzenau, Lower Saxony; preserved, meadow/sports stadium; 42. Stuttgart-Rohr, Baden-Württemberg (ThingplatzHitler Youth hostel); destroyed, school yard; 43. Tecklenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia (Thingstätte-Burg Tecklenburg); in use
(Musikteater); 44. Verden (Aller), Lower Saxony (Sachsenhain, SS ceremonial site); preserved: Protestant youth centre, pasture;
45. Werder (Havel), Brandenburg (Thingstätte am Stadtpark); abandoned, park/meadow.
PREvENtIvE CONsERvAtION Of tHE HumAN ENvIRONmENt 6 • Architecture as an element of the landscape
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Fig. 2. Thingstätte: a) Herchen, Thingplatz (no. 21) built on a narrow spur with a war memorial at its tip; b) Ośno Lubuskie,
“Thingplatz Drossen”(no. 32) built on the northern end of Lake Reczynek; c) Schwarzenberg, Thingstätte (no 39) built on the
pinnacle of the Röckelmann mountain; d) Bad Segenberg, Kalkbegstatium (no. 2), built in a gypsum quarry; e) Berlin, “DietrichEckart-Freilichtbühne”. (no. 6) built in a steep ravine; the empty box in the center was reserved for the “Führer”; f) Sankt Goarshausen, Thingstätte (no. 39) on the edge of on the Loreley massif during building (source: vintage postcards)
Ruhr (no. 30). The vast majority were built in more or less
natural seings, most on the slopes of hills or mountains
with the glaring excepion of the lakeside Thingstäte in
Drossen (now Ośno Lubuskie in Poland) (no. 32, Fig. 2b).
Truly spectacular locaions include the Thingstäten built
on, and disiguring, the world famous Loreley clif (no.
39, Fig. 2f) on the Rhine, perched on the rim of the Elbe
canyon near Rathen (no. 34) but also a small Thingstäte
built on a narrow spur overlooking the canyon of the Sieg
River in Herchen (no. 39, Fig. 2a). The inauguraions of
these sites, which almost always fell on the summer solsice, were grand events with mandated crowd atendance. Typically, the events had a closely choreographed
military character with symmetrically spaced formaions
246
of actors, singers, musicians and extras placed on the
various rungs of the stage´s graded backdrop (Fig. 3) and
part of the paricipants merging with the audience.
Despite the iniial enthusiasic surge that greeted this
new style of holisic drama, Thingspiele and Thingstäten
were not the success Goebbels hoped they would be.
The turgid, costly and frankly anachronisic producions
did not have the predicted audience pull. You saw one
you saw them all, and the logisics of geing the required
masses to what were in many cases remote “natural”
locations was daunting. By 1935 Goebbels began distancing himself from the project15 and in 1937 he cut of
15
Fröhlich 2005.
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
Fig. 3. Thingspiele - opening ceremonies in Thingstätten: a) Bad Segeberg, Thingstätte (no. 2) opening ceremony; b) Koblenz
(no. 26) ceremonial procession in the Thingstätte in the centre of the electoral palace; c-d) Opening ceremony and Thingspiel in
the Heidelberg/Heiligenberg Thingstätte (no. 20) (source: vintage postcards and Lurz 1975)
all funding and even acively discouraged the use of the
name. This led to an abrupt end not only to the performance of Thingspiele but it also stalled or stopped compleion of uninished venues. Goebbels was, of course,
reacing to the increasing eicacy of other forms of mass
indoctrinaion, such as the omnipresent Volksemphänger (People’s [Radio] Receiver) aka Goebbelsschnautze
(Goebbels’ Snout)16, and – above all – newsreels and cinema17 which insured that precisely encoded messages
were reaching mass audiences. But his rejecion of the
Thingspiele was also a result of acceleraing tensions between a growing fracion of the Nazi leadership that was
trying to consolidate mainstream support for the Third
Reich and the increasingly radical agendas of the divisive
neopagan Völkisch fringe who saw their ime as come.18
Goebbels could rely on Hitler supporing this course, as
the Führer despised homespun Germanomania, esoteric neopaganism, and saw Völkisch ideologs frustrating his aspiraions to convenional trappings of imperial
glory. These involved, among other things, embracing the
very Roman Imperial symbols and architecture that the
Völkisch believers so hated.19 In the 1940s crackdowns
against the Völkisch occult fringe even saw leaders of the
movement serving sentences in prisons or concentraion
camps.20
16
19
17
18
Mühlenfeld 2006.
Rentschler 1996.
Puschner and Vollnhals 2012; Bollmus 2006.
The “Witches´Dance Floor”
The major forerunners of the Thingstäten are the late
Wilheminian Völkisch “plain air” or “nature theatres”
above all the pioneering Bergtheater (mountain theatre) that the successful Völkisch theatre producer anisemiic agitator and neo-pagan prophet Ernst Wachler
(1871–1945) had perched on a the edge of a rugged
plateau on the southern edge of the Harz Mountains
in 1903 (Fig. 4). Known as the Hexenanzplatz (The
witches’ dance loor), this plateau rises above the steep
and scenic Bode River´s gorge and was then and is now
a successful tourist trap21. At the turn of the century the
rusic looking restaurants and hotels atracted middle
class city dwellers, in paricular Berliners escaping the
crowded polluted capital, with the promise of accessi-
20
21
Speer 2005: 108; Trommler 2009: 123; Scobie 1990.
Treitel 2004: 213–230.
Puschner 1996.
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Fig. 4. Hexentanzplatz near Thale; façade
of the Walpurgis Halle before the First World
War (a) and a view of the “Green (or Mountain)
Theatre” in the 1950s (b) (source: vintage
postcards)
ble, afordable, comfortable yet romanically authenic
mountain wilderness. Moreover, these atracions were
upgraded by the presence of ancient ruins (ramparts
of an Iron Age hillfort)22 and – mainly invented – tradiions involving Germanic gods and witches’ sabbaths,
saing the tourists’ romanic naionalist passions. Hermann Hendrich – a Silesian painter cum showman, and
Bernhard Sehring – a Saxon theatre architect, concocted
a Walpurgishalle – a massive wooden cabin incrusted
inside and out with crudely carved pseudo-Germanic
moifs in 1901 to cash in on the tourist boom, a function it fulfills to this day. Besides a bogus altar stone
purloined from the nearby Iron Age rampart, it contains
a gallery of dreadful painings showing agitated witches
and demons in rocky terrain. Two years later Wachler
built his outdoor theatre on the clif edge just across the
street from this Völkisch sanctum obviously seeing them
as a complementary pair which he ulimately wanted to
establish as a sanctuary focused on a neo-pagan “ire
temple”23. Although there are obvious parallels between
Wachler´s open air theatre and the later Thingstäten,
there are important diferences. Besides being rooless,
incrusted with Völkisch kitsch and ofering a splendid
view of “German wilderness” across the Bode´s chasm,
Wachler´s theatre was in other ways surprisingly convenional. It only seated 1300 spectators, it had sturdy boulder-built walls indented by Medieval-looking
towers, and depending on what was being shown, its
stage could be clutered with various props. Moreover,
besides the occasional Völkisch highlight, such as the
opening night with Wachler’s own semi-operaic Walpurgis based on the tradiional Walpurgis / or Witches´
Night (30th of April), its repertoire was mainly conservaive to stufy. Moreover, the players were professional
actors on loan from the nearby Weimar theater company. While this Green Theatre, as it was also called, maintained strong Völkisch ailiaions, in 1914 it even hosted
an Althing (universal assembly) of Germanic Communi-
22
23
Grimm 1958: 275.
248
Banghad 2016: 207–208.
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
ies which included Wachler’s own pagan „Wotan Congregaion”, this venue neither had the capaciies, nor
did its operators have the intenion, to host the type of
interacive mass events which would characterize the
later Thingstäten.
Bückeberg (no. 19),
the site of the Reichserntedankfest
It was the Nazi´s most talented architect, Albert Speer,
who managed to carry mass outdoor semi-theatrical
events into a natural setting, craftily using high-tech
soluions to simulate a return to bucolic simplicity. Expressed in his own words, he saw that “the primary material with which the mass event must be organized will
always have to be the crowd itself” and his goal was to
assure “that each individual among the hundred thousand strong assembled community is imprinted by the
feeling of an uncondiional togetherness”.24 Under the
fussy tutelage of the Reich´s propaganda minister Josef
Goebbels he was able to put his theory into pracice by
designing the venue and direcing the choreography of
the Reichserntedankfest (Reichs-Thanksgiving Day) on
the gentle spur of the Bückeberg – a wooded hill on the
edge of the Weser River near Hameln (Fig. 5).25 Originally
planned at another venue, this new site of the Thanksgiving ceremony was chosen hastily in August 19 by
funcionaries worried about infrastructure but ciing the
quintessenial German quality of the Weser River and its
surrounding landscape as jusiicaion. This gave Speer
less than three months to realize the event planned for
the irst Sunday in October. In a radical departure from
the all but mandated use of brutalized gargantuan neoclassical architecture to express Nazi ideology26, he suggested a simple and remarkably efecive soluion: with
the help of thousands of conscripted workers a 600 meter long and 300 meter wide site was leveled and a long
lightly raised corridor, the Führer Weg, was constructed
to connect two wooden podia – an upper stepped pyramid on which heaps of fruit and vegetables wreaths and
bushels of harvested grain were heaped, surmounted
by a grandstand for 3,000 VIPs, and a simple pyramidal
stage at the base of the hill which served as the speakers
pulpit. An eicient electrical grid provided microphones,
loudspeakers and spotlights with electricity. The outer
boundaries of the site were at the same ime ephemeral
and effective. A low horseshoe-shaped bank was surmounted by a loosely spaced stockade made of 20,000
10–12 m long ir tree lag posts surmounted by oversize
24
25
26
Speer 1933, ater Urban 2007: 423. For mid-20th century ideologically moivated mass psychological exploitaion see Moscovici
1985.
Brechtken 2017; Gelderbom 1998; Haßmann 2010; Livings 2013:
145–177, 242, pl. 208–231.
Scobie 1990; Taylor 1974.
Nazi lags forming a vibrant bright red band enclosing
the freneic masses as evening turned to night spotlights
illuminated the lutering lags turning them into a shimmering crimson cascade.
This use of light efects to delimit and deine quasisacred space was taken to its congenial extreme in Albert
Speer´s Lichtdom (cathedral of light) (Fig. 6) irst realized
at the annual Nürnberg party rally on September 11th,
1936 in order to upgrade a roll call of minor funcionaries, many to old and fat to be reliable performers in the
mass choreography which was the hallmark of the rally´s
day ime ceremonies.27 152 searchlights shot 8-kilometre-high columns of light into the sky. Inside this glowing
stockade the 20,000 party members could look up to see
the dazzling white pillars difuse into a sfumato vault and
the horizon crenelated by illuminated thickets of sharply
illuminated red Nazi lags between the searchlights and
the spectacle of spotlights raking across a roaring ocean
of 20,000 brown shirts. The upliting nature of this immaterial architecture and the ecstaic enthusiasm it insilled
in the adulaing masses can be illustrated by the fact that
ater the Nürnberg Party rally of 1936 some 900 BDM
(girls’ division of the Hitler Youth) scouts were reported
pregnant and many of them found it impossible to pinpoint the father to be.28
The Brückeberg venue began fulfilling its intended
purpose with the arrival of Hitler’s motorcade. He and
his entourage spent 45 minutes parading through the
500,000 strong ecstaic crowd whose repetend Nazi salutes had their arms swaying like a wind tossed ield of
grain and were more connected than separated from
the surrounding ields and woods by the levitated band
of Nazi flags. This anonymized mass at one with their
leader, was fused with the surrounding “quintessenially
German” rolling countryside, their blood coursing in its
soil. Hitler addressed his masses from the upper plaform
where he lorded over them and then ater a second perambulaion at the botom where was the sole focus of
the seething masses, spotlighted in the growing dusk.
A roaring rendition of Deutschland über alles and the
Horst Wessel Song sung by all and an impressive light
and ireworks show ended the ceremony.
The Bückeberg venue was not the only sanctuary the
Nazis were planning near Hameln. Immediately after
coming to power in 1933 the local Nazi leadership began planning a colossal monument to the Nazi´s pinnacle “martyr” Horst Wessel whose family originally came
from the area, on the Süntel, a prominent ridge 12.8 kilometers to the north and in full view of the Bückeberg29.
This crag had long been seen as a Germanic pagan hub
by Völkisch enthusiasts, and was the alleged site of “heroic” pagan Saxon resistance to the conquering Chrisian Carolingians. The original plan proposed by a local
27
28
29
Livings 2013: 238–292.
Kater 2004: 108.
Siemens 2010: 183–187.
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Fig. 5. Bückeberg „Reich´s Thanksgiving Site” (no. 19): a) Albert Speers only partially realized model of the projected assembly site 1934; b) View of the adulating masses from the upper tribune 1933; c) March of standard bearers hailed by exultant
farmers 1933; d) Hitler and his inner circle strolling down the “Führer Corridor” 1937 (source: vintage postcards)
Stormtrooper architect was to have a vast amphitheater
blasted out of the ridge´s 440 m high pinnacle on which
he planned to build a huge swasika-shaped sky scraping tower. Speer obviously worried that, if realized, this
monstrosity would overshadow his own. He demanded
a new design which would harmonize with, and thus be
conceptually integrated into the Bückeberg complex.
A commitee was established and, as so oten, squabbling among the various facions hamstrung the project’s
realizaion. Local party authoriies inally approved a radically downsized version and the Horst Wessel Memorial
which was unveiled in 1939 consisted of a 12-meter-high
rectangular sandstone column crowned by a 5 meter
high swasika forged of stainless steel (Fig. 7). It could be
clearly seen from the Bückeberg lashing the relected
evening sun. Yet this was all to no avail. The Thanksgiving
ceremony at the Bückeberg facility which was referred
as a Thingstäte ater 1934, had reached its zenith with
1.3 million paricipants in 1937. This was also to be the
inal celebraion on the site. Preparaions for war and
the war itself made transporing such masses impossible, moreover mass ceremonies were losing their novelty
value and purely military events increasingly replaced
Völkisch pageantry. The Thanksgiving party was over. In
the spring of 1945 American troops made short shrift
of Horst Wessels ofensive memorial and dynamited the
column whose broken chunks sill liter the ridge´s summit. Thus the imagined bonds binding the landscape between the freneic Bückeberg masses and the Süntel´s
250
gleaming martyrion were phantoms from the very start.
Yet despite its faulted realizaion the concept of pairing
Thingstäten with Nazi “martyr´s memorials” was to set
a patern for ideological landscape appropriaion. Examples include the Thingstätte in Passau (no. 23) whose
spectators faced a monumental cross-shaped monument
to the “martyred” right wing hitman Schlageter on the
summit of the Hammerberg hill on the opposite side of
the broad Danube valley.30
The Heiligenberg in Heidelberg31
The double-peaked Heiligenberg hill that dominates the
northern horizon of Heidelberg has been known as an
archaeological site since the 16th century and has produced setlement remains of almost all Prehistoric and
early historic epochs. In the more recent past it was
the site of a Celic hillfort, a Roman sanctuary and two
Medieval monasteries. It was this ancient heritage that
moivated the new Nazi authoriies in Germany’s most
famous university town to choose the Heiligenberg as
30
31
Rammer 1996: 122–124. Albert Leo Schlageter (1893–1923) who
was originally a Catholic theology student before going to War and
emerging a right wing paramilitary enforcer played an important
role in the Nazi atempt to broaden its narrow base among West
and South Germany´s Roman Catholic youth (Baird 1992).
For the Thingstäte: Lurz 1975; Stommer 1985: 231, no. B3/30; Moers-Messmer 1987; Ohr 1989; Ludwig and Marzolf 1999: 108–100.
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
Fig. 6 Nürnberg Lichtdom (Cathedral of Light) (source: vintage postcards)
the site of Germany´s most impressive surviving Thingstätte. In particular, they were motivated by a widely
believed misconcepion that this “Holy Mountain” had
once been a Germanic sanctuary to Wotan, thus fulilling
the ideal Thingstäte criterion of Germanic cult heritage.
Moreover, it was also a clear atempt to downgrade the
importance of Heidelberg´s world-famous castle ruin,
whose courtyard had been a local venue for open-air
theatre producions since 1926. Its rich humanist and
inclusive early romanic heritage was anathema to the
Nazis. Building the huge amphitheater, which involved
the destrucion of a third of the archaeological site, it
was purported to celebrate, began in 1934. The horse-
shoe-shaped theatre built in an ariicially deepened hollow between the hill´s two peaks included roughly hewn
sandstone slab benches for 20,000 spectators and was
set of from the surrounding plateau by loosely placed
flag poles (Fig. 8). It faced an unobtrusive multitiered
oval stage made of the same rusicated stone, crowned
by two tall lagpoles rigged with Nazi banners. In contrast
to this rugged archaicizing construcion, a pioneering integrated light and sound system was installed, involving
14 kilometers of electric wiring. On the opening night,
the summer solicits of 1925, the Thingstäte was illed
to the brim with jubilant masses A spectacular show was
opened by no one less than Josef Goebbels himself, who
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Fig. 7. Horst Wessel Column completed 1938 on the summit of the Süntel near Hameln (a), and the Süntel Massif seen from
the direction of the Bückeberg (b) (source: vintage postcards)
Fig. 8. Heidelberg-Heiligenberg (no. 20). Plan of the Heiligenberg hillfort, its monasteries and Thingstätte after Marzolf 1999,
and vintage postcards prospects of the site. The right-hand spur visible in the center photo bears the memorial cemetery on the
Ameisenbuckel
252
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
in an emoional diary entry called it “a miraculous creaion, Naional Socialism in stone”.32
One jarring, but thoroughly intended aspect of
Heidelberg´s Thingplatz, is that the deep Necker River
valley, that contains historic Heidelberg and its famous
castle, remained invisible to the viewers. Instead, the
spectators in the higher rungs looked, over the squat
stone backdrop and an adjacent hilltop grove, at the
wooded summits of the Odenwald Massif on the far
side of the town and valley, and the fields, meadows
and gallery forests of the broad Rhine River valley. This
is a clear relecion of the bucolic yearnings and atendant fierce antipathy to urbanity, that lie at the heart
of the Thingplatz (open-air theater) movement but also
leitmoiv of most aspects of Nazi art and literature. The
Nazis went to great lengths to transplant the consumers of their “sanctuaries” into their highly contradictory
vision of an ideal countryside made up of a mosaic of
untouched natural features embedded in a primordial
German agrarian landscape which had been heroically
wrested from merciless nature by generaions of sturdy
yeoman farmers.33 But there was more for the spectators to see than verdant retrograde landscapes. From the
upper summit of the Heiligenberg, which they crossed
when approaching the Thingstäte, they had a clear view
of vast memorial war cemetery which had been carved
out of the dense forest on the Ameisenbuckel – a steep
spur overlooking the Rhine valley 3 km to the south
(Fig. 9). The Nazis saw both complexed as an ideological unit and on the summer solsice in 1935 huge ires
were lit on both sites simultaneously, which could be
seen many kilometers away along the broad Rhine valley. Like the Heiligenberg, esoteric circles had granted
a pseudo-pagan heritage to the Ameisenbuckel, where
they imagined the locaion a primeval mother-goddess´
temple.34 As in a Thingstäte, the architecture engaged
the visitors in a para-theatrical choreography. Exactly
drawn lines of uniform crosses of re-interred fallen German troops from the First World War flanked a broad
avenue accompanied by massive stone blocks inscribed
with the names of Heidelberg´s over two thousand fallen
soldiers. During memorial events precisely ordered rows
of marchers fused with this sepulchral army, as they
faced a huge ive and a half meter long burly dark red
sandstone “altar” on the promontory clif´s point capped
by a roughhewn overhanging monolith and emblazoned
with a monumental swasika. While the stone-lined avenue clearly imitates Stone Age megalithic alignments,
the “altar” is a coarse emulaion of Late Roman Imperial
porphyry sarcophagi, an apt relecion the hybrid nature
of Nazi ceremonial architecture.35 Remarkably, the site
of this remarkable Nazi Danse Macabre and its bizarre
“altar” (now with chiseled-of Swasika) is sill operaive,
and hosts annual American/German war memorial ceremonies.
As in the case of the Bückeberg, the Heidelberg Thingstäte, and its satellite, are atempts to establish bogus
coninuiies to a pagan past, and bond them to posthumously heroized cannon fodder of Flanders’s trenches
and the rural landscapes in which their graves had been
secondarily imbedded. They thus sought to imprint the
western outskirts of Heidelberg with a monumentalized
icional heritage espousing the Nazi´s bogus blood and
soil ideology by creaing a phantom landscape which is
sill comprehensible today.
32
36
33
34
35
Göbbels diary, 24. June 1935; Fröhlich 2005: 252.
Williams 1996; Fischer 2003.
Dutzi 2000; Binder and Meier 2016. For interwar and Nazi cemetery architecture see Mosse 1980.
Vasiliev 1948.
1938 Thingstätte Sankt Annaberg (no. 17)
on the Góra Świętej Anny in Upper Silesia
in Poland36
In 1934 the Naional Socialists decided to manifest the
legiimacy of German rule in contested Upper Silesia in
general, and speciically their own rise to poliical power,
by building a Thingsstäte on the Sankt Annaberg (Góra
Świętej Anny) – a dominaing hilltop in the Upper Silesian basin which had been occupied by an important
cloister and pilgrimage center since the Middle Ages.
Moreover, it had been the site of a pitched battle between German Freikorps irregulars and Polish insurgents
during the Third Silesian Uprising in 1921, which right
wing Germans saw as the irst German victory since the
end of the First World War. Finally, the Nazis hoped to
at least weaken the church’s dominaion of this crucial
symbolic religious and poliical focus of the region and
overshadow the pious processions which coninued to
atract the faithful of both linguisic communiies to the
cloister´s basilica and its miraculous statue of St. Anne.
The amphitheater, which was projected to hold 7,000
spectators, was built in the conines of a steep quarry,
which housed the amphitheater itself, a terraced stage
rising against the gaunt clif face and an impressive circular podium ited with a huge lagpole (Fig. 10). A primary
reason for the Thingstäte´s locaion in the quarry´s cavity was that, for its audience, the picturesque relief of
the cloister´s towers was completely invisible. Instead,
the dark cloven limestone clif provided a somber backdrop which was heightened by the presence of a spectacular Totenburg (literally fortress for the dead, i.e.,
castle-shaped mausoleum) commissioned in 1935 to be
perched on the its pinnacle. This structure was built to
commemorate the dead of the Freikorps miliias who terStommer 1985: 205, no. B1/1; Haubold-Stolle 2005, 2006; Dobesz
2005: 191–193, 195; Lurz 2010. For the divisive interpretaions of
the signiicance of the Góra Świętej Anny see: Bjork and Gerwarth
2007. For the wider context of Polish policy towards German heritage in the immediate post-war period see: Mazur 2000.
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Fig. 9. Heidelberg Memorial Cemetery (Ehrenfriedhof) on the Ameisenbuckel. Views of the ceremonial way and assembly
square and its terminating altar. The image on the lower right shows the cemetery (right) and the Heidelberg Thingstätte (left)
as seen from the Rhine valley with Heidelberg in the deep Neckar valley in the middle (source: vintage postcards)
Fig. 10. Góra Świętej Anny (Thingstätte Stankt Annaberg) (no. 17): a) Aerial photo of the freshly built Thingstätte; b) View of
the Thingstätte and the mausoleum at the quarry´s edge; c) View from the Thingstätte’s stage on the quarry loor; d) Remains
of the Silesian German “heroes” being escorted into the mausoleum; e) Megalithic entrance and ire bowl; f) partially realized
design of the interior (source: vintage postcards and Böck 2017)
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ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
Fig. 11.
War memorials cemeteries and Bismark-monuments designed by Wilhelm Kreis: a) 1906 sketch of a Bismark or ire
tower Dresden Räcknitz; b) 1930, proposal for a cenotaph near Bad Berka; c) 1912, sketch of a proposed Bismark National Monument on a clif overlooking the Rhine near Bingen; d) 1940 project sketch for a cemetery and temple/castle-like mausoleum in
Drontheim (source: vintage postcards)
rorized non-German inhabitants on the eastern German
boarders in the post-World War I period. More speciically, it was to contain the bodily remains of 17 “martyrs”
who had fallen during the bloody skirmish to dislodge
Polish ighters from St. Anne´s monastery in May of 1921.
Robert Tischler´s design of what was to be Germany´s
most ambiious naional funerary monument constructed
during the late 1930s, combines heterogeneous elements
borrowed from Wilhelm Kreis’ funerary architecture, paricularly the Tannenberg monument, Fredrick the Second’s 13th century Apulian defensive masterpiece Castel
del Monte and Theodoric the Great’s 6th century mausoleum in Ravenna37 (Fig. 11). While this is an impressive monument when seen from the Thingstäte itself,
paricularly when the two classicizing ire bowls at its entrance were ablaze, like most theatrical props seen from
the back, i.e. the plateau, it was disappoiningly small and
squat. While the leitmoifs of this architectural collage
send an aggressive military imperial message underscoring the Nazi´s vision of the Annaberg as a bulwark against
the Slavic east, it also incorporated “Germanic”/esoteric
elements in its design more in keeping with its original
Thingstäten seing. These included the building’s wildly
incongruous megalithic porch and bizarre details, such as
the fact that mortar used in its construcion was mixed
with cloted creme, goat hair and animal blood.
This programmatic integration of Thingstätte and
Nazi martyrion did not stand alone. Another examples
of Thingstätten sites with integrated martyrs memorials include for instance the Rugard Thingstätte (no. 5,
Fig. 12) which lies between a First World War memorial
and a monumental “megalithic” style mausoleum of Hans
Mellon, the Island of Rügen´s Hitler Youth “martyr”.38
A third was never completed, Braunschweig´s Nußberg
Thingstätte (no. 11), which was projected to face an
80-meter high tower ited with 16 niches harboring iridescent “light columns” which would rake the sky, commemoraing Nazi acivists “martyred” in the farcical Beer
Hall Putsch of 1933.39 The most impressive example is the
Thingstäte atached to Berlin´s Olympic complex on the
Reichssporfeld (no. 6, Fig. 13). It was built next to the
38
37
Brands 1995.
39
Wickert 2007.
Bein 1997.
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Fig. 12. Bergen auf Rügen / Rugard (no. 5): 1 - The memorial to the fallen soldiers of the First World War built in 192; 2 - The
Thingstätte “consecrated” in 1934; 3 - The Hans Mellon mausoleum built to imitate a Neolithic megalithic tomb, dedicated with
the reburial of he “martyr” in 1937; 4 - The northern rampart of the Medieval Slavic stronghold ”Rugrad” then also thought to be
the capital of Germanic Rügen (after Wichert 2010)
Langemarckhalle, memorializing and containing physical
remains of, as well as lags and soil “soaked with blood”
from the tens of thousands of teenage recruits “martyred” in the Battle of Ypres in 1915.40 This sepulchral
hall which also functioned as Hitler´s Olympic podium
was crowned by a 77-m high “Führer Tower” whose bell
rang as an “eternal admonisher of the sacriicial death of
our heroes”.41
Yet no other Thingstäte came so close to successfully visualizing the mysical union between the martyred
heroes and the resurrected Volk as the St. Annaberg
Thingstätte. In one’s mind’s eye one can imagine the
Thingstäte by twilight illed to the brim with adulaing
masses whipped to passionate ecstasy by the chaning
players on the stark stage. With their eyes focused on
the fortress of the martyrs looming above them on its
loty crag highlighted by lashing lames signalizing their
apotheosis by belching clots of smoke into the evening
sky. Their union with the martyred dead was thus mysically consumed. Obviously and onerously this Thingstäte
was nothing less than a monumentalized paraphrase of
a Chrisian Church, with the congregaion facing and ritu-
40
41
Weinrich 2009.
Dümling 2012: 70; interestingly both the hall and tower were
blown up by Briish sappers in 1946 only to be faithfully reconstructed by the same Nazi architect that designed the originals
Werner March in 1960.
256
ally interacing with an altar containing holy relics.42 Yet
despite all this carefully crated pathos the Sankt Annaberg Thingstäte was in fact a remarkable failure from
the start. It took too long to build and opened with a lack
luster show in 1938 ater the Thing Movement had run
its course. Moreover, the pious Upper Silesians largely
remained true to their cloister and, paricularly when the
war started, the frightened faithful atended pilgrimages
with ever increasing intensity and ferver ignoring the
Thingstäte altogether. Moreover, although there are reports of the ampliied roar of Nazi ceremonies intenionally disturbing the cloister´s services, in fact only sporadic
events, mainly minor Hitler Youth rallies, are known to
have taken place in the Thingstätte before the end of
the war.43
The Thingstätten´s phantom
heritage today
Thingstäten are of course simply just another relex of
the Nazi´s cult of the dead which Saul Friedländer so accurately dissected as cheap if persuasive kitsch.44 They
it the bill perfectly using all its sleight of hand symbolism, such as the sot ammonized spectator masses pit42
43
44
For Nazi „religion“ see: Vondung 1971; Marchal 1993; Bärsch 2002.
Böck 2017.
Friedländer 1984; see also Brunote 2008.
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
Fig. 13. Berlin Reichssportfeld (no. 6): a) “Pharus” plan of the Olympic complex in 1936. The Langemarkhalle lies under the
bell tower/ “Glockenturm” and the Tribune at the western terminus of a triumphal avenue stretching over the Olympic stadium
to the Brandenburg Gate; b) Aerial view of the Thingstätte, Dietrich-Eckart-Freilichtbühne, the Langemarkhalle and bell tower;
c) Closeups of the Thingstätte and mortuary hall; d) Consecration of the Langemarkhalle with remains of “martyred” young
soldiers (source: vintage postcards)
ted against the hard martyrs towers, the luid interface
between Volk, Nature and Soil rejuvenated by martyr´s
blood, etc. Thus, one would have expected that after
Goebbels renunciaion of the Thingplatz concept these
ephemeral phantoms would simply disappear. Sadly,
nothing could be further from the truth. Save for a handful that were purposely destroyed or buried in the postwar period, almost all the ca 40 completed Thingstäten
have survived in various degrees of preservaion45 and
of these 22 are sill in use today and many eerily fulilled
sub-culic funcions long ater 1945.
Obviously, in the post-war period Thingstäten, which
were located in the Soviet Occupied Zone of Germany and
later German Democraic Republic, were predisposed to
a seamless coninuity of mass performances, as Stalinism
also employed mass events as powerful tools for ideological reinforcement. These included the Grenzlandfeier-
stäte Schwarzenberg (no. 39) which was renamed Wilhelm Piek Feierstäte in honour of East Germany´s irst
Communist president and was the site of Communist ceremonies46, as was the Stäte der Volksgemeinschat (Sanctuary of the Volk community) in Borna (no. 9) which was
rebranded as Voksplatz Borna, and like the Rostock Thingstäte (35), termed Platz der Jugend, served as a focus for
mass events of the Communist Free German Youth.
In the case of the Hutberg Thingstäte near Kamenz
in Upper Lusaia (no. 25) this type of coninuity is compounded by a cultic component. Five 15-meter-high
granite plinths, unusually located back of the spectators
on the highest rung of the Thingstäte once towered over
the amphitheater (Fig. 14). They were built in 1934 and
fitted out with appropriate paraphernalia, fire bowls,
bronze wreaths, etc., to memorialize the town´s fallen
World War heroes. These plinths were demolished on
45
46
Stommer 1985.
Schmeizer and Weil 2014: 37–40.
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Fig. 14. Kamenz Hutberg (no. 25): a-b) Drawing and photo of the Hutberg Thingstätte with ive towers commemorating fallen
World War One “heroes”; c) View from the war memorial terrace over the Thingstätte and upper Lusatian landscape; d) Memorial
obelisks erected after the demolition of the towers to commemorate Soviet “heroes” at the current entrance to the amphitheater (source: vintage postcards; Archive of the Museum in Kamenz)
order of the Soviet authoriies in 1948 who were using
the amphitheater together with the Polish army for military ceremonies and mass propaganda events. At the
same ime a porphyry monument crowned by an obelisk
marking the mass grave of at least 18 Red Army soldiers
was built at the beginning of the road leading to the amphitheater, thus clearly rededicaing the Thingstäte, to
the “eternal fame of the heroes who died fighting for
the honor and independence of their Soviet homeland”.47
Remarkably, a site in Poland, the Thingstäte on the
Góra Świętej Anny mentioned above, represents the
most cogent case of cult coninuity. The Nazi Totenburg
was razed soon after the war, either dramatically dynamited by Polish troops as oicial records suggest or
simply quarried away by locals, and the incorporated
“martyrs`” bones dispersed. Its foundaions now bear
a totally new monolithic four cornered monumental
granite slab structure, planned and executed by Poland´s
foremost sculpture and Auschwitz survivor Xawery
Dunikowski, which like its predecessor, owes much to
Wilhelm Kreis’ Totenburgen (Fig. 15). Due to inancial
strictures and ideological conlicts about the itle and
message of the memorial it was not until 1955 that
47
a drastically downsized version of the “monument of
the (Polish) insurgency” commemoraing a wide range
of Polish-German conlicts in Silesia but also the victory
of Socialism could be dedicated. In a remarkable state
of mirror image coninuity, the Thingstäte itself, now
known and the Amphitheater on Saint Anna’s Mount,
continued to be used for ideologically charged mass
events. These also involved commemorations of the
Polish fallen during the long history of conlict in Upper
Silesia struggle, paricularly during the Stalinist period.
The amphitheater was largely deserted thereater but
has recently reemerged as a venue for rock concerts. Interesingly, rock concerts and fesivals have been a lifeline for most of the intact Thingstäten and it is worth
noing that they in many ways fulill the funcions that
the Thingspiele were intended to do. These include the
ragged interface and intensive interaction between
performers and the audience, the use and exchange of
highly stylized movements and ritualized acions, the
mass responses and emoions expressed by the spectators, the general lack of props and heavy dependency
on light and sound efects as well as almost messianic
adulaion accorded to stars. These mass psychological
overlaps of what are, however, ideologically completely
Herrmann 2014.
258
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
Fig. 15. Góra Świętej Anny (no. 17): a) Aerial photo of the Saint Anne´s Mountain Amphitheatre as it is today; b) Closeup of
the Xawery Dunikowski’s Monument to the Uprising with frieze commemorating events from 950 AD up to the then current victory of socialism in 1955; c) View of the monument from the amphitheater: d) The monument seen from its eastern approach
(source: Internet)
something, which brings this narrative back full circle
to the Thingstäte´s origins on the Witches Dance Floor
near Thale.
unrelated phenomena are a tribute to the eicacy of the
Thingstäte design.48
In a less emotional case of continuity, the Thingstäte which was destrucively inserted into the ruins
of Giebelstadt castle in Franconia (no. 16) to host a play
featuring the knight Florian Geyer, who once owned the
castle and was a tragic leader of a failed 16th century
peasant’s rebellion. It was shown between 1933 and
1939. Nikolaus Fey, who had penned the play in 1925,
went so far as to claim that Geyer had been reborn as
Adolf Hitler. A tamed-down version of his play was revived in 1980 and entertains summer tourists who lock
to the Thingstäte to this day.
Finally, an eerie coincidence must be mentioned.
These are the annual Walpurgis Nacht (Witches Night)
fesiviies on the Heidelberg Thingstäte every April 30th
which have emerged anarchically in the last decades as
a mass torchlit student party featuring iery spectacles,
Ater decades during which Thingstäten, like so many
buildings of the Nazi Period in Germany, were forgoten
or willfully ignored, they have gradually become an issue
for those involved in monument protecion.49 This is all
the more so, as the deterioraion of their architectural
substance, but also dangers posed by the threats of development of these once remote sites, raise the quesion whether their protecion or even restoraion is considered appropriate or desirable.50 Obviously the most
efecive form disenchaning these sites involves razing
48
49
For the emoional pull of mass events sill, see Elias 1960; the strong
sense of connectedness insilled during rock fesivals, see: Tjora 2015.
Postscript,
the phantoms awake
50
Koschar 2000; Niven 2003.
Puppe and Teufer 2014.
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Louis Daniel Nebelsick
them completely51, but while this process already began
in the Nazi Period with the Thingplatz in BerchtesgadenStrub (no. 4), being replaced by a youth hostel, and the
Thingstäte in downtown Koblenz (no. 26), bombed and
buried under rubble, this clearly cannot now be considered a responsible opion. Nor can the ignoble fate of
the moldering foundaions of the Halle Brandberg Thingstäte (no. 18) which lie in a rubbish illed vacant lot in
the midst of a dreary council housing scheme be seen as
a desirable alternaive.
A subtler form of disenchantment involves recasing
them in the public mind through their post-war histories. In the case of the Bad Segeberg “Thingstäte der
Nordmark”, which, Goebbels opened in streaming rain
in 1937, enormously popular performances of Karl May´s
wild west dramas have indelibly associated the site with
the noble Apache Winnetou and his friend the trapper Old Shaterhand who have been scrambling up and
down the Thingstäte’s quarry face backdrop, hollering
and shooing since 195252; or Berlin’s Waldbühne (no. 6)
which popular memory sill links to its almost total dismantlement during rioting by fans enraged by a lack
luster performance by the Rolling Stones in 1965, which
took 12 years to repair.
But obviously this kind of thing cannot be mandated. The question of what to do was recently raised in
the case of the seminal Bückeberg Thingstäte (no. 19)
whose ephemeral remains were slated to be engulfed
by a housing development. It has now, ater much soul
searching, been put under monument protection and
a didactic center is projected to explain and decry its
role in the Nazi Period.53 Yet there is a ine line between
preserving and re-awakening these monuments in imes
when there is a palpable resurgence of neo-Nazi interest
in reclaiming these ceremonial sites as their own. This
renewed interest has been fueled by their increasing
visibility and accessibility through websites dedicated
to systemaically “discover” and catalogue physical re-
mains of the Third Reich.54 The results are as worrying as
they are predictable. Heidelberg´s impressive and easily
accessible Heiligenberg Thingstäte (no. 20) which was
placed under monument protection and didactically
contextualized in Nazi history in the 1980s55, has repeatedly atracted neo-Nazi torch lit processions in the last
years.56 Atempts to explain and expunge a Thingstäte’s
Nazi message by using didacic plaques and signs which
have been implemented in the vast Nazi Sachsenhain
ceremonial complex near Verden (no. 44) has gone hand
in glove with the advent of Nazi pilgrimages to the once
forgoten site.57
This has, not surprisingly, also impacted the perfectly
preserved SS elite school Ordensburg Vogelsang in the
Eifel (no. 30) which was long hidden in an allied military
training ground and includes a monumental, if crude,
sculptural program. It has only recently been decommissioned and become accessible to civilians including
monument protecion oicers. This unique ensemble has
obviously been placed under monument protecion, and
restoraion measures have included archaeological excavaions revealing the atendant Thingplatz which was intenionally buried by resident Belgian troops.58 The publicity generated by these measures has made it a magnet
for Neo-Fascist youth groups.59 Militant rightwing ambiions to reclaim their bogus sanctuaries have even pinnacled in violence. Ater a successful producion of the
obeat camp musical Rocky Horror Show in Wachler´s
amphiteatre on the Hexentanzplatz in 2007, for instance,
neo-Nazis enraged by the desecraion of their sanctum,
atacked and seriously beat up the actors.60
There are clearly no easy answers to this dilemma
making it highly likely, that these phantom landscapes
will continue to haunt those charged with conserving
Europe’s recent past.
54
55
56
51
52
53
In fact this was mandated for all buildings and objects which were
thought to keep German militarisic tradiions alive or venerate
Nazism by the Allied occupaion forces from 1945 to 1947; Hammer 1995: 282–293.
Schmid 1999; Sparr 2000.
Winghart 2010.
260
57
58
59
60
Internet: www.thirdreichruins.com/thingplatz.htm, or: htps://
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thingplatz.
Moers-Messmer 1987.
Internet: htp://www.autonomes-zentrum.org/ai/texte/nazichronik.html.
Kröger (ed.) 2005
Heinen 2010.
Internet: https://www.rundschau-online.de/region/kreis-euskirchen/schleiden/-faehnlein--vogelsang-bereitet-sich-auf-einegruppe-mit-rechter-gesinnung-vor-26738096.
Banghard 2016: 207.
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
Thingstäten and “sacred” landscapes of the third Reich
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Acknowledgements:
It is a pleasure for me to thank Zbigniew Kobyliński for
his help, encouragement and as ever ediing skills, and
Kathrin Legler for her proofreading.
264
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Notes on authors
Barsha Amarendra – BA, architect; Visvesvaraya Naional
Insitute of Technology, Nagpur, India.
Cynthia Ammerman – historian and preservaion strategist; director of the Polis: Cultural Planning, LLC in Kansas
City, Missouri, and of the Cass County Historical Society
in Harrisonville, Missouri, USA.
Lazare Eloundou Assomo – Deputy Director of UNESCO’s
World Heritage Center, Paris, France.
Marek Barański – Dr eng., architect, conservator of historic monuments; Kielce University of Technology, Faculty
of Building Engineering and Architecture, Kielce, Poland.
Ewa M. Charowska – Dr eng., architect, historian and
historic preservaionist; independent scholar working in
Toronto, Canada.
Paolo Del Bianco – President of the Romualdo Del Bianco Foundaion, Florence, Italy.
Stefano De Caro – Dr, archaeologist; Director-General
of ICCROM, former Director-General of Aniquiies with
the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Aciviies,
Rome, Italy.
Urszula Forczek-Brataniec – Dr; lecturer at Cracow University of Technology, Cracow, Poland. Secretary General
of the European Region of the Internaional Federaion
of Landscape Architects.
Joanna Gruszczyńska – MSc. Eng. Arch., architect; doctoral student at the Warsaw University of Technology,
Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw, Poland.
Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch – MA, art historian; doctoral student at the Insitute of Art History, University of
Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
Zbigniew Kobyliński – Professor Dr habil., archaeologist
and manager of cultural heritage; director of the Insitute of Archaeology of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland.
Diederik de Koning – MA, architect and environmental
and infractructural planner; PhD candidate at the Delt
University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and the
Built Environment, Borders and Territories Research Group, Delt, the Netherlands.
Heiner Krellig – Dr, art historian, independent scholar,
working in Berlin, Germany and Venice, Italy.
Amarendra Kumar Das – Professor; Department of Design, Indian Insitute of Technology Guwahai, India.
Karen Lens – MA, architect; doctoral student at Hasselt
University, Belgium.
Mingqian Liu – MA, historian of art and architecture;
PhD student at the Department of Architecture, Texas
A&M University, USA.
Estefanía López Salas – Dr, architect and restorator;
Professor at the School of Architecture, University of
A Coruña, Spain.
Crisiano Luchei – Assistant Professor; American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Eva Gutscoven – MSc; architect and conservator working
in Belgium.
Ana Luengo – MA, MSc, PhD, landscape architect; former
President of the European Region of the Internaional
Federaion of Landscape Architects –IFLA EUROPE.
Teiana Kazantseva – Dr, Associate Professor; Department of Design and Architecture Basics, Institute of
Architecture, Lviv Polytechnic Naional University, Lviv,
Ukraine.
Nataliya Lushnikova – Dr Eng., Associate Professor; Naional University of Water and Environmental Engineering,
Insitute of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Department
of Architecture and Environmental Design, Rivne, Ukraine.
ArchAeologicA
HEREDITAS 10
403–404
Notes on authors
Fernando Magalhães – PhD, anthropologist; Interdisciplinary Venter of Social Sciences (CICS.NOVA), Polytechnic Institute of Leiria’s School of Education and Social
Sciences, Leiria, Portugal.
Romano Marini – PhD, theoreician of law and poliics;
Adjunct Professor at Niccolo Cusano University, Rome,
Italy.
Chrisine McCarthy – PhD, architect and art historian;
senior lecturer at the Victoria University, Wellington,
New Zealand.
Louis Daniel Nebelsick – Dr habil., archaeologist; Professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland.
Carinna Soares de Sousa – BA, architect and urban designer; MA student in urban planning at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.
Aleksandra Stępniewska – MA student of architecture
at the University of Social Sciences in Warsaw, Poland.
Bishnu Tamuli – Doctoral student at the Department of
Design, Indian Insitute of Technology Guwahai, India.
Işılay Tiarnagh Sheridan – BA, MSc, architect; research
assistant at the İzmir Insitute of Technology in Faculty of
Architecture, Izmir, Turkey.
Ewa Paszkiewicz – MA; main scenographer at The Royal
Łazienki Museum in Warsaw.
Andrzej Tomaszewski (1934-2010) – Professor dr habil.,
historian of art and culture, architect, urban planner, invesigator of Medieval architecture and art; director of
ICCROM (1988-1992), General Conservator of Poland
(1995-1999).
Ana Pereira Roders – Dr, architect and urban planner;
Associate Professor in Heritage and Sustainability at the
Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
Koen Van Balen – Professor at the Catholic University of
Leuven and director of the Raymond Lemaire Internaional Centre for Conservaion, Belgium.
Kamil Rabiega – MA, archaeologist; PhD student in the
Insitute of Archaeology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland.
Nikolaas Vande Keere – MA, civil engineer architect;
Professor in charge of the design studio of the Internaional Master of Interior Architecture on Adapive Reuse
at the Hasselt University, Belgium.
Almir Francisco Reis – Dr, urban planner; Professor at
the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis,
Brazil.
Petro Rychkov – Dr, architect; Professor at the Lublin
University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering
and Architecture, Department of Conservaion of Built
Heritage, Lublin, Poland.
Juan Alejandro Saldarriaga Sierra – Dr, cultural geographer; teacher at the Faculty of Architecture of the Naional University of Colombia in Medellin, Colombia.
Ingrida Veliutė – Dr; lecturer at the Vytautas Magnus
University Faculty of Arts and member of ICOMOS Lithuania.
Tony Williams – former President of the Irish Landscape
Insitute and President of The European Region of the
Internaional Federaion of Landscape Architects.
Anna Wiśnicka – Dr, design historian; teacher at the Insitute of Art History of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński
University in Warsaw, Poland.
Dominik Ziarkowski – Dr, art historian; Cracow University of Economics. Chair of Tourism, Cracow, Poland.
404
ARcHAEologIcA HEREDITAS • 10
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