mark_j
It's a mad mad world
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2008
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An interesting article on how Germany is dealing with this sort of thing..Which brings up an important question.
How would you deal with the darker past of a country's history?
How would you deal with the darker past of a country's history?
The country debates preserving Hitler's rallying grounds in Nuremberg and releasing an edition of 'Mein Kampf.' How do nations deal with memorials of a disowned past?
Christian Science Monitor
By Sara Miller Llana
February 28, 2016 12:13 PM
It doesn’t look like much. In fact, it’s easy to mistake the expansive parade grounds as a construction site, with all the fencing and warning signs, until you see the flashes from people taking pictures at the lectern. For it is here, at Zeppelin Field, where Adolf Hitler beguiled the masses in Nazi Party rallies held throughout the 1930s in this Bavarian city.
Nuremberg’s rallies, immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in her 1935 film “Triumph of the Will,” have seared this city in the public’s consciousness as National Socialism’s ideological heart. While the swastika atop the grandstand of Zeppelin Field was famously blown up by the US Army in 1945, today these grounds stand as the best physical proof of Hitler’s ambitions for a thousand-year Third Reich.
For decades, most in this city preferred that these buildings simply disintegrate into the dustbin of history. And it shows. Walking along the grandstand, the length of three football fields, visitors are warned in German and English: “Enter at your own risk.” The stands are chipped and decrepit. Chain-link fences encircle much of the arena. Graffiti mars the podium where Hitler stood in his jackboots, spewing fiery rhetoric and pumping the air with his fist.
Now the city is at a critical juncture as it debates the future of the Nazi Party rally grounds, raising questions as practical as they are philosophical. Nuremberg is in the midst of a pilot project to determine the final cost of refurbishing Zeppelin Field, the details of which will be made public by the middle of this year.
The city says that if nothing is done, the site will one day be too dangerous to visit. Ultimately, some historians argue, this gives Nazi architect Albert Speer exactly what he wanted: a mythical ruin. Others believe that old Nazi architecture merits not a single cent from the public purse. In their view, seeing it crumble is the boldest message that Germany could convey.