A.D. My unchristian ancestors: for a lifetime they got along without God. Though something always happened that they had not foreseen. Two world wars, the downfall of their city, diseases, or what it is like to lose everything — freedom stripped from them, twice in a row. When unchristian beings (Hitler, Stalin) took this only world they had and turned it into a trap for millions, into hell. They survived, with a good deal of luck, though without religious persuasion. No word about the hurried prayers in the air-raid shelter, when under the sign of revenge, of justice, the one with the latest technology brought the empty skies crashing down. They (the ones who existed) never mentioned those fleeting moments in which fear dissolved and everyday life broke open like a fruit, a brittle fruit, that contained more than just seeds, tears, grief, and the ecstasies of the little people. Nazi Party Rally Grounds It was a grey February day in Nuremberg. I was due to give a reading that evening, and I could think of nothing better to do with the time until then than to take the tram out to the site where they used to hold Nazi Party rallies. At the reception desk of the Deutscher Kaiser hotel, the young woman who requested that I speak English with her was so put out when I asked how to get there that I withdrew and sheepishly looked for a map of the city so as not to have to consult my cell phone. Not only was I a stranger in this place, but my interest in a location that was rarely sought out by tourists to this medieval city, the city of Albrecht Dürer, seemed strange to her. She looked me up and down, as if I might turn out to be a troublesome guest. In terms of age, I was not unlike one of those Germans who, for obscure reasons, make pilgrimages to places that are taboo for most. And yes, I must admit, it was film images, scenes from the notorious propaganda film Triumph of the Will directed by Leni Riefenstahl, that brought me here. And also curiosity about what remained of this central forum of the Third Reich and its real historical dimensions: the Zeppelin Field, the Congress Hall, the Luitpold Hall, the Märzfeld, the Silbersee (Silver Lake, a name that evoked associations of the fantasy world of Karl May and his Winnetou novels that I grew up with). I wanted to see it all for myself, this massive site built around the Dutzendteich Lake, which still lay on the outskirts of the city at that time. How reassuring it was to arrive there at last and find a formula that absorbed everything and steered the inconceivable insanity of National Socialist projection and construction into the reassuring channels of a democratic culture of remembrance. After several stops, the tram halted at the Nazi Party Rally Documentation Center. First impression: you could easily get lost there, the signs lead into a vast area, only a drone could give you the desired overview. You pass through a large parking lot, and only then does it become apparent that the building before you is the huge rotunda of the Congress Hall, the back elevation of an arena that remained unfinished at the beginning of the war in 1939, like so many kilometres of the planned Reichsautobahn. Plus, a surprise for any resident or admirer of Rome: the building turns out to be a remake of the Colosseum in the style of a film set. Shades of Cinecittà, remnants of the set for a Nazi blockbuster mixed with those for a historic film about the fall of the Roman Empire. The inner courtyard doesn’t make much of an impression with its construction site fences and containers of rubble, a garbage-strewn antiquity of yesteryear that was never realized, a shell that is reminiscent of many things — prison yards, stormed fortresses, ruins forever left wanting. Somewhere in the jumble of mock theater boxes and empty rows, it was designed to give pride of place to the speaker’s pulpit for the “Führer.” The whole thing was intended as the theater for a pseudo-parliament — a foretaste of the gigantic meeting rooms planned by Albert Speer for Berlin after the final victory in the capital called Germania. Yet the relocation of the Nazi court to the Reich capital of Berlin was already so advanced at the time that the Nazi Party Rally Grounds only ever had a symbolic function. Ruins by design in every direction, a monumental building abandoned midway; and yet everything testified to the ambitions of the regime’s leaders, their bid to capture the imagination of a physically trained and mentally aligned population with a kind of National Socialist theme park. Modern stadium buildings came to mind, arenas of all kinds, from rock concert stages to the Super Bowl fields to be found in major American cities — and one wondered where the mass audience was supposed to go back then. A colosseum in Nuremberg, was this to be the venue for political gladiator fights? On the eve of the war, were the Germans really ready for such grandiose imperial showmanship? The total state remained an irresistible vision until its demise — at least for the Nazis. At the Sixth Reich Party Congress, the one filmed by Riefenstahl, hadn’t Hitler admitted that it was not the state that created the German people,but the other way around, that the people created the state for themselves? Wandering about, lost among the open spaces beyond the Great Dutzendteich, or Dozen Pond (nomen est omen!), one began to suspect what all this was conceived to do. The state that was so densely concentrated in the relatively small space of Berlin was here to be given a symbolic parade-ground along with the Zeppelin Field, the so-called March Field, a festival site outfitted with various halls and groves, laid out according to the model of
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