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Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past QUOTES

Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past QUOTES

1 " What was truly specific to Nazi architecture was its crushing monumentality, which aimed to herd the people and overwhelm or stun the subjected masses, as Speer later realized. The gigantism that characterized Nazi architecture seemed to aim to crush the individual and bear down upon the people through its disproportionate size, compressing them into a compact mass so that every interstitial space that distanced or differentiated one person from another disappeared into the greater whole of an organic totalitarian entity. The political space of the democratic agon, a space "paradoxically linked to division," was destroyed. Nazi architecture created sites for the fusion of the masses and for compressing them into a single, unified subject. It was stagecraft in granite, the physical orchestration of a new type of rapport between the individual and the state in terms of the mass, whether the compact mass of stone or the more malleable mass of humanity that, gathered into columns, made the pillars and lines of this architecture even more monumental. "

― Johann Chapoutot , Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past