overview
Günther Domenig , architecture as mediation
The case of the Third Reich Congress Hall in Nuremberg
Dominique Trouche Assistant Professor in Communication and Information Sciences at University Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier . Author of Les Mises en scène de l ’ histoire , Approche communicationnelle des sites historiques des Guerres mondiales , L ’ Harmattan , 2010 .
The Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rallying Grounds in Nuremberg , designed by Austrian architect Günther Domenig , is located in the former Congress Hall built during the National Socialist regime . The centre comprises a permanent exhibition , an educational forum and a bookshop . The centre ’ s unique feature is a glass and steel footbridge that spans the north wing of the Congress Hall .
The role and function of this architecture , as conceived by Günther Domenig , is part of the issue of heritage and how it is passed on . The aim is to question the tension caused by the presence of two completely opposed architectures and how they are linked via the footbridge . What kind of mediation and transmission of memory and history does the footbridge offer ? In the words of Georges Didi-Hubermann , did it allow us “ to look at the images and see what they have survived . So that history , freed from the pure past ( that absolute , that abstraction ), helps us to open up the present of time ” ( 2003 , p . 226 )?
Nuremberg : from imperial city to Documentation Centre
Linking Nuremberg to the Holy Roman Empire ( Brockmann , 2006 , p . 13 ), National Socialism made it the “ ideological capital ” of the Third Reich . For Freddy Raphaël and Geneviève Herberich-Marx , the Nazi regime “ deliberately exalted the memory of the great craft and commercial city of the Middle Ages and obliterated the existence of the industrial metropolis ” ( 1988-1989 , p . 103 ). Nazism therefore used it to construct its mythology of a glorified past , a heterogeneous imagination marked by the “ annexation of antiquity ”
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Observing Memories Issue 7