PIETRO GUIDO - NUREMBERG - Then and Now_ENG (THE HISTORY "DESAPARECIDA" Vol. 4) (Italian Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Berlin was the capital of the Third Reich. But Nuremberg represented the moral capital. Why Hitler chose this beautiful medieval city for a performance of the strength of Nazism? Because Hitler did not like Berlin and, in particular, the Prussians displeased him. Hitler was Austrian, but, perhaps, as he was born and grown up at a stone's throw from the border with Germany, in his heart he was Bavarian. His city was Munich, his accent was Bavarian, the Bavarian dishes were the favorites, his disorderly culture grew in the context of the Bavarian habitat. In Italy it seems that Hitler was a 'terrone', emigrated in the cold and aristocratic Prussian capital: Berlin. Hitler built his vacation residence, the Berghof, on the Bavarian Alps where he spent a third of his life and where every day he could delighted in the view of the Untersberg, the mountain on which rests, according to legend, the Emperor Charles V waiting his awakening to declare the end of the world. In addition, in the clear days, Hitler could see Salzburg, in the loved Austria. In fact, before taking power, the first of his Nazi party rallies (the Reichsparteitag) were organized in Munich, in "his house". But when the party began to grow he noticed that Munich was too peripheral to be reached easily by participants, from all over Germany. It was necessary to secure the base of these propaganda events in a more central location and, consequently, better accessible. Berlin did not go well because it was too far North, in Prussia, but also for his antipathy toward this city, this region and its inhabitants. What prevented him from organizing his meetings in the large Tiergarten Park, or in the wooded and surrounded by greenery area where, in 1936, the Olympics were held? The available potential area was huge and, what the “architect” Hitler liked most, it was geometrically perfect: stadiums, congress buildings, arenas, communication roads, all could develop in a "symmetrical" scheme, where would dominate the right angles. It would be, also, easier to carry materials, benefiting from a railway and road network of primary importance. Well, nevertheless, Hitler rejected the capital as the venue for his annual oceanic rallies. It was a matter of "skin", and antipathy for the place and its inhabitants. When the rallies began to ascend northward, leaving Munich, his attention focused on Nuremberg, this beautiful medieval town still surrounded by powerful walls and raised faithful to its Gothic style. To begin, the city, despite being the district capital of Franconia, was always in Bavaria. It enjoyed a fascinating historical fame (the high symbolic and political meaning that directly connected it to the tradition of Imperial Diets, held therein during the Holy Roman Empire), was central enough in the German territory and had, in the green area to South East of the city, some structures that could represent a future broad-based development. Among other things, the Gauleiter of Franconia Julius Streicher, was one of the most fervent hierarchs of the rising Nazi party. Streicher was a guarantee that all desires and Hitler's orders would be fulfilled and realized, by acting too from his determination, on the Mayor of the city. That is why Hitler chose Nuremberg as his womb of the growing Nazi party and, after January 30, 1933, as a stenographic and propaganda reference of the Third Reich power. The only small gap that this choice involved was the fact that the graft on the existing structures of an architectural project of epochal dimensions would create a patchwork of not perfect urban realizations, non-homogeneous in its "orthogonality" and “holistic” meaning. Indeed, the effort and the contribution of the regime's architect, Albert Speer, was to harmonize and optimize a creature that had grown a little crooked. But we will see this in the next chapters. Nuremberg became the moral capital of the Third Reich not only for its annual ralli