The Nuremberg Rally Grounds

At the end of World War II, the city of Nuremberg faced a dilemma. The largest single monument to Nazism in Germany, the Rally Grounds, existed in their city resulting in a struggle between memorializing or ignoring this important sight of memory.

A monument celebrated at one time as a site of glorious memories may later become die erblast, an inherited burden. The Nuremberg Nazi Rally Grounds serves as a prime example of this twisted fate of a monument. Maurice Halbwachs wrote in 'On Collective Memory' that groups engrave their form in some way on the soil and then use that soil to retrieve collective remembrances. Thus according to this view of collective remembrances, the soil of the Nuremberg Rally Grounds contains the collective remembrances of the grandiosity of Nazi ideology, the adulation of Adolf Hitler, Nazi militarism, and the anti-Semitism of the Nuremberg Race Laws. Post-war, these remembrances might have called out for an interpretive reexamination of Nazi principles. But instead, MacDonald argues that the city of Nuremberg chose to ignore or deny these remembrances by a process they called profanierung or profanation. Nuremberg dismissed the Rally Grounds' historical significance and its troubling possible collective memories by filling it with banal and pragmatic everyday activities. The goal of profanation called for burying any memories of the Nazis under a slew of uses that would aid Nuremberg economically and deny this sight of memory any historical provenance. Only later, as circumstances changed, did the city choose to modify this view slightly.

In the 1930s, Nuremberg actively pursued Hitler to favor their site for the Rally Grounds and rejoiced when Hitler declared in 1938 that their completion in Nuremberg would assume primary importance from other building projects within the Reich, as noted by Jaskot. In addition to economic benefits, the Rally Grounds, at over four square miles, made Nuremberg a spectacular showcase, attractive for its citizens, the city, and all of Germany. Hitler and Albert Speer designed the Rally Grounds as an exhibition of the belief in the power of monumental buildings to visually exhilarate the masses, to create high drama, to hold people spellbound, and to facilitate the surrender of their individuality to the mass, according to Hagen.

Martin Beckstein, in his article in Nations and Nationalities, writes that the crucial question for post-war Germany was not "…whether Germany's memorial culture opposes the National Socialist past, but how it does it." After the war, Nuremberg chose to repress the memory of their identification with Nazism by allowing the Grounds to be a casual public place. Over the decades, the city permitted the Grounds to hold such activities as car and motorcycle races, the 2006 World Cup soccer championship, Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones concerts, and a Jehovah's Witness Rally. Part of the Grounds became a housing area, and people were encouraged to have picnics and barbecues, fix their cars, skateboard, play tennis, and jog there. Parts of the Great Way where large Nazi parades occurred now had grass, and their history of stones quarried by slave labor went unacknowledged. A few significant Nazi buildings still standing, like the Congress Hall and the Zeppelin Grandstand, were ignored and left to deteriorate.

Profanation did not always proceed in a smooth linear projection. Nuremberg did not exist in a bubble, and forces within Germany that spoke to the idea of an anti-fascist material culture of remembrance emerged over time, according to Beckstein. In 1973 the Bavarian state government declared the Rally Grounds as a Denkmalschutz (a Monument Preservation site), putting an end to the city's slow destruction of the Grounds. A 1987 proposal, initially approved by the Nuremberg City Council, called for turning the Congress Hall, the most prominent building on the Rally Grounds, into a luxury shopping center/condo project. A citizen's initiative formed in response called into question the use of a historic building in this manner as it spoke to the city's efforts to conceal and repress the past. The initiative charged that for forty years, Nuremberg had ignored the significance of the Rally Grounds as a site of remembrance, as noted by MacDonald. In a closely contested vote, the city council defeated the proposal by a vote of 39-31. This vote may have been a turning point in Nuremberg's treatment of the Rally Grounds as a sight of memory, as questions arose about its future usage.

Yet, in 2006 the same type of issue arose, and this time profanation succeeded over historical memory. The transformer station on the Grounds, constructed by the Nazis in their usual monumental style to provide extensive light shows for the Rallies, was sold to Burger King. One side of the building displays the prominent shadow of a Nazi eagle clutching what was likely a swastika which found protection for historic preservation reasons. Although the purpose of the sale was economic, a Burger King in a prominent Nazi building raised issues again regarding the use of memorial spaces. Over time it was mocked by locals as "Hitler King." Like the transformer station, the few Nazi buildings left standing seem to speak to Albert Speer's "Theory of Ruin Value," which, according to MacDonald, contends that buildings continue to speak in ways originally intended even after they had gone to ruin. Based on the history of Greek and Roman ruins, this theory proposed that the stones spoke. Hitler emphasized this when laying the foundation stone for the Nuremberg Rally Grounds when he stated that the stones would speak "as eternal witnesses."

Profanation possibly found partial roots in Nuremberger's belief that they were victims of the Nazi "others." The "others" were the people from the outside who had imposed their will on a defenseless Nuremberg and made it into the city of rallies. Gregor notes that a placed emphasis on the ordinariness of Nazi victims who were cast overwhelmingly as passive civilians suffering from an unspecified conflict for which they had not been responsible and over which they had had no control. Particular attention in Nuremberg focused on the 6,000+ victims of the Allied bombing of the city in January 1945. This perpetuation of the German as the victim, and the concomitant absence of any reference to the peculiar racial and ideological dimensions of the conflict or the nature of the perpetrating regime, manifested itself in Nuremberg's treatment of the Rally Grounds. It sought to co-opt the city's historical associations with the Nazi regime into a story that presented the city and its inhabitants as having been the terrorized victims of a peculiarly vicious totalitarian regime against which they had been powerless to resist.

As the decades progressed, generations who experienced the war firsthand began to disappear, and new generations seeking an understanding of the Nazi past emerged in Germany. Victimization began to be replaced by a sense of guilt for German perpetration. A reconciliation of what the Rally Grounds represented, and a proper representation of the memory of adulation and aggrandization inherent in the Grounds, began to appear. Jaskot notes that the city eventually reached a political consensus that would allow everyone to find what they needed at the Nuremberg Rally Grounds by relegating questions of the symbolic import and ideological significance of National Socialism to a secondary concern. Economic interests could concentrate on new modernistic buildings, such as the Convention Center on the Grounds, designed to bring money to the city. Recreational groups could continue using the grounds as a large park. Liberal interests could institutionalize their effort to confront the Nazi past through historical tours, informational kiosks, and museum displays. Within the past twenty years, there has been the opening of a museum and the two official digital tours as a first attempt to interpret the Grounds, but one that needs continued refinement. One architectural structure that made a significant attempt to shed meaning on the Nazi Rally Grounds came as an addition to Congress Hall. The architect designed a glass walking area shaped like a spear piercing through the building, known as a "spear into Speer." The connection with Hitler's architect Albert Speer finds acknowledgment in the tour, but one has to wonder if the allusion of the spear escapes most people.

Neil Gregor wrote in the conclusion of his article, "City with a Past," that the arbiters of the memory culture of the city "…were unable to acknowledge who, exactly, the fascists had originally been, not outsiders who came to Nuremberg, marched up and down and left, leaving awkward material residues for an innocent city to deal with after the war" but among those were many tens of thousands of complicit Nurembergers. Keith Lowe wrote in Prisoners of History that "There is no good way to commemorate the criminals of the Second World War….Our solution to the problem is, generally speaking, to avoid commemorating them at all." Nuremberg has consistently accepted the viewpoint that commemoration, with all its difficulties, should be avoided when discussing the usage of the Rally Grounds. Ignoring by profaning speaks better to Nurembergers' view of their Nazi history. Facing the implications for the history of the Rally Grounds challenges Nuremberg to this day.

(edited by Brad Poss & Laura Bailey)

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