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Authors: Ronald C. Rosbottom
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her beloved France better.
The Führer’s Urbanophobia
The memoranda of Hitler’s private (recorded) conversations are replete with offhand and direct references to Paris. Sometimes he implies that Paris is simply an architectural congeries of beautiful buildings and monuments; at other moments, he muses that it is the model for all cities, or he might compare it unfavorably to Rome. He never mentions its vibrancy or the exhilarating confusion of daily life; instead, he reduces the image of Paris to that of an open-air museum, the result of centuries of good taste.
The First World War had given a new dimension to the fascination Germany and France have historically had for each other: Were they now to be brothers in peace, standing in opposition to Bolshevik Russia and imperial Great Britain, or were they forever to be locked in an embrace of scorpions, at any moment ready to sting the fraternal other? After that devastating war, books and essays had been published in Germany, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, that had a great effect on how the Germans would consider and treat France once they had her in their thrall. For the most part, these works depicted France as a once-great country that had lost its way. It had degenerated, had become an empty plaster cast of its former greatness. By far the most widely read of these books, including by Hitler, was the journalist Friedrich Sieburg’s
Gott in Frankreich?
(To Live Like God in France; 1929). * Writtenfrom the perspective of someone who purportedly loves France, it is patronizing and vigorously pro-German. The Vichy government republished it, for it outlined their own conviction that France had lost much of its former claim to glory through moral decay, leftist politics, and unfounded arrogance. A typical description of the Parisian cityscape follows:
Will the fixed forms of this city’s life ever be shaken? Certainly not, as long as the house-fronts retain their precious silver-grey, as long as the domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides force their way up through the heavy mist, as long as the Place de la Concorde has the sky for a roof, as long as the gentle crumbling of the stone softens even the most glaring new buildings, as long as the Champs-Elysées take one in a straight line through the Arc of Triomphe into the middle of the dream of Glory, as long as the tangled paths offer a green refuge to the despairing and the idle, as long as the river Seine gives the citizen his Sunday dram of fish, as long as there is red wine and white bread to be had. But a lover’s anxious eye can already detect cracks in the everlasting structure. 34
The passage not only outlines the tour itinerary that the future Führer would take a decade later, during his only visit to the city, but also insinuates that the glory that was Paris was passing. It was time for a new capital of Europe.
Great urban sites attracted Hitler but intimidated him as well; many of his recorded conversations about cities reveal a need to criticize as well as to exalt the human achievement that cities represent. In
Mein Kampf,
he describes them as sites of teeming apartment buildings and restive populations. When he remarks favorably about them, he analyzes their structures and their built environments. For him, the mostinteresting metropolis would be empty of its innumerable, often churlish citizens. Coincidentally, the Paris he visited that early Friday morning, while most of its inhabitants were either asleep or fleeing southward, would come close to that ideal. *
Mein Kampf
sparingly mentions the massive urban resurgence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but a close reading shows a general distrust of cities and of the masses that congregated in them. It is common knowledge that the early National Socialist electoral successes came from the rural areas and small towns of Germany. Hitler always appeared a bit befuddled by large cities, including the German
The Führer’s Urbanophobia
The memoranda of Hitler’s private (recorded) conversations are replete with offhand and direct references to Paris. Sometimes he implies that Paris is simply an architectural congeries of beautiful buildings and monuments; at other moments, he muses that it is the model for all cities, or he might compare it unfavorably to Rome. He never mentions its vibrancy or the exhilarating confusion of daily life; instead, he reduces the image of Paris to that of an open-air museum, the result of centuries of good taste.
The First World War had given a new dimension to the fascination Germany and France have historically had for each other: Were they now to be brothers in peace, standing in opposition to Bolshevik Russia and imperial Great Britain, or were they forever to be locked in an embrace of scorpions, at any moment ready to sting the fraternal other? After that devastating war, books and essays had been published in Germany, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, that had a great effect on how the Germans would consider and treat France once they had her in their thrall. For the most part, these works depicted France as a once-great country that had lost its way. It had degenerated, had become an empty plaster cast of its former greatness. By far the most widely read of these books, including by Hitler, was the journalist Friedrich Sieburg’s
Gott in Frankreich?
(To Live Like God in France; 1929). * Writtenfrom the perspective of someone who purportedly loves France, it is patronizing and vigorously pro-German. The Vichy government republished it, for it outlined their own conviction that France had lost much of its former claim to glory through moral decay, leftist politics, and unfounded arrogance. A typical description of the Parisian cityscape follows:
Will the fixed forms of this city’s life ever be shaken? Certainly not, as long as the house-fronts retain their precious silver-grey, as long as the domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides force their way up through the heavy mist, as long as the Place de la Concorde has the sky for a roof, as long as the gentle crumbling of the stone softens even the most glaring new buildings, as long as the Champs-Elysées take one in a straight line through the Arc of Triomphe into the middle of the dream of Glory, as long as the tangled paths offer a green refuge to the despairing and the idle, as long as the river Seine gives the citizen his Sunday dram of fish, as long as there is red wine and white bread to be had. But a lover’s anxious eye can already detect cracks in the everlasting structure. 34
The passage not only outlines the tour itinerary that the future Führer would take a decade later, during his only visit to the city, but also insinuates that the glory that was Paris was passing. It was time for a new capital of Europe.
Great urban sites attracted Hitler but intimidated him as well; many of his recorded conversations about cities reveal a need to criticize as well as to exalt the human achievement that cities represent. In
Mein Kampf,
he describes them as sites of teeming apartment buildings and restive populations. When he remarks favorably about them, he analyzes their structures and their built environments. For him, the mostinteresting metropolis would be empty of its innumerable, often churlish citizens. Coincidentally, the Paris he visited that early Friday morning, while most of its inhabitants were either asleep or fleeing southward, would come close to that ideal. *
Mein Kampf
sparingly mentions the massive urban resurgence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but a close reading shows a general distrust of cities and of the masses that congregated in them. It is common knowledge that the early National Socialist electoral successes came from the rural areas and small towns of Germany. Hitler always appeared a bit befuddled by large cities, including the German
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