Ghosts of Glory: Postscripts to Power
It has been observed how empires rise and fall; how power grows and shrinks. It is also quite normal for declining empires to be reluctant to acknowledge their diminished status. Rulers refuse to accept that they have become lesser beings than their great forebears and this often produces desperate attempts to resist the inevitable, to fight against history and to retain a status that is no longer possible. Their ‘golden age’ has either passed or is passing, but such a situation is rarely acknowledged. This stage in an empire’s history is often accompanied by a spate of building to produce a tangible reminder of past glories and even to attempt to repeat them. The most impressive attempts to recreate past glories have been those which have had a transformational effect on capital cities. As a result of these, the capitals, or at least large parts of them, may be substantially altered and made grander than they ever were before. This has happened throughout history to many of the capitals of erstwhile great powers.
Portugal was the first European power to move onto the global scene. This it had done through the pioneering of sea routes and the protection of these by the construction of a large and powerful fleet. Following the discovery of the sea route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498, Portugal became for a time the leading maritime power in Europe and accrued untold wealth. This took place during the reign of King Manuel I, ‘the Fortunate’ (1495–1521), a period which came to be thought of as being Portugal’s golden age. This was reflected in the large number of magnificent buildings constructed in the highly ornamented Manueline style. The most important were religious buildings, many of which were in and around Lisbon itself. Notable among these were the Hieronymite monastery and the splendid Manueline Tower in Belém, the latter being a fitting symbol of the maritime power of Portugal. The numerous churches and monasteries, built with the country’s new-found wealth, also proclaimed the Christian nature of the whole Portuguese enterprise and the closeness of the country to the papacy.
Portugal was to remain a significant maritime power throughout most of the sixteenth century until Philip II of Spain claimed the Portuguese crown in 1580. Spain then added the Portuguese possessions to its own, creating a global empire of formidable dimensions. Portugal became an important contributor to the power exercised by Philip II and for a time the Spanish monarch even made Lisbon his own capital. However, he soon retreated back to the Escorial, his newly built seat of power deep in the heart of the Spanish Meseta.
In 1640 Portugal regained its independence from a weakening Spain but by this time it had long lost its pre-eminence in world trade. In response to this, Portugal looked westwards to the New World and there began to develop Brazil, its one overseas possession in the western hemisphere. While this produced a new source of wealth for the country, little new building took place as a result of it. By the middle of the following century the Brazilian trade was itself in decline and with it the fortunes of Portugal. New northern European powers, notably France and Great Britain, had arrived on the scene and were by then coming to dominate overseas expansion and world trade.
However, things were to change dramatically for Portugal in the middle of the eighteenth century as a result of a natural event which would have wide repercussions. In 1755 Lisbon was decimated by a massive earthquake followed by a tidal wave which together destroyed most of the centre of the city. For a time it looked as though the much weakened Portugal was on the verge of collapse. The destruction of one of Europe’s great cities shook the eighteenth-century European world to its foundations. Voltaire, one of the foremost philosophers of the age, became pessimistic for humanity as a result of the destruction, which he lamented in his novel Candide. However, for the chief minister of King José I, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, the lamentable state of Lisbon seemed less a catastrophe than an opportunity.
Pombal was the son of a country squire from central Portugal. At first, he had little influence at court, but a propitious marriage introduced him to those who did. In 1738 he became ambassador to London and this had an effect on him similar to that which the British capital had had on Peter the Great half a century earlier. He was determined to use the British model to revive his flagging country. In 1750 he was appointed foreign minister but his great interests were in economic affairs and, in particular, reviving the trade which had given Portugal its wealth in earlier centuries. He also wished to strengthen the state against the influence of the Church and even toyed with the idea of establishing an independent church in Portugal on the model of the Gallican church in France.
Pombal was chosen by the king to deal with the reconstruction of the capital after the earthquake. The development of the urban plan was entrusted to Eugénio dos Santos, Carlos Mardel and other, mostly Portuguese, architects. The architectural style chosen, while strongly influenced by the French, has come to be generally known as Pombaline. The Baixa, the centre of the city between the hills of the Castle of São Jorge on one side and the Bairro Alto and Chiado on the other, had been completely devastated and so Pombal proceeded to rebuild it in grand style. On the quayside, where the royal palace had formerly been, he laid out a great square, the Praça do Comércio, which was surrounded on three sides by royal apartments and government offices. In the centre of this is a massive equestrian statue of José I and on the northern side of the square is a triumphal arch. Above this is the figure of Glory crowning Genius and Valour, and below it are representations of the Douro and the Tagus rivers, together with figures of the great Portuguese heroes Viriatus, Nun’Alvares Pereira and Vasco da Gama. A statue of Pombal himself was also incorporated into the arch.
The arch leads on to the fine tree-lined avenue of the Rua Augusta which connects the Praça do Comércio with the Praça de Dom Pedro IV. In the centre of this square is the statue of the monarch who later became Emperor Pedro I of Brazil. The whole of this area is laid out on a strictly geometrical pattern which accords with the stern sense of order that pervades the Pombaline style. This square in turn leads to the Praça dos Restauradores, named to commemorate the revolt of the Portuguese against Spanish rule in 1640 and the restoration of the country’s independence. In the following century the magnificent tree-lined Avenida da Liberdade was laid out to the north of this with extensive gardens surrounding it. At the end of this avenue is a gigantic statue of Pombal himself, instigator of the whole massive project which he intended as a symbol of the revival of Portuguese power. The two great monuments to the Restoration and to Pombal at either end of the avenue are the twin foci of a geometrical urban landscape, intended as a magnificent demonstration of power. The building of what was virtually a new city in the midst of the ruins of the old could be seen, said Schneider, as an act of ‘delusion and narrow-mindedness’, but also, he conceded, as an act of ‘grandiose defiance’.1 However during this period the power of Portugal continued to wane and as building proceeded the new grandeur was already becoming an epitaph to past empire.
Statue of the Marquis of Pombal, Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon. Pombal was responsible for the transformation of the centre of the city after the devastating earthquake which destroyed much of it.
At the same time Pombal was also engaged in a host of other affairs of state. He attempted to assert the royal authority over the church and the independence of the Portuguese church from the Vatican. The Jesuit Order was outlawed in Portugal and in all Portuguese possessions overseas. Pombal did much to encourage non-religious education and he established state schools. He also encouraged the development of universities, in particular Coimbra which soon became acknowledged as one of the great universities of Europe. This was all part of Pombal’s aim of taking Portugal from its medieval associations and steering the country northwards to share in the Enlightenment which was taking place in northern Europe. He was also attempting to rebuild Portuguese commercial power with the futile aim of making it match that of Britain.
In 1777 King José I, Pombal’s patron, died and was succeeded by his daughter who reigned as Maria I until 1816. Maria was feeble-minded, and the government was run initially by her mother Marianna Victoria who dismissed Pombal, accusing him, among other things, of corruption. However, Marianna continued with the grand project of the new Lisbon, including the triumphal arch which was completed during her reign.
Despite this burst of architectural magnificence, the reality was that Portugal was now moving back into the position of being just a small country on the edge of Europe, much as it had been before the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth century had precipitated it into the front rank. Before the end of the reign of Maria in 1816 Portugal had degenerated into a battleground between France and Britain and the restoration of Portuguese liberty in 1815 was brought about largely by Britain and her allies following the defeat of Napoleonic France. By then ‘Lisboa Pombalina’ had without doubt become one of the more magnificent capitals in Europe, but the power it sought to symbolize had largely faded away. The eminent Portuguese novelist José Saramago actually considered that Pombal’s Lisbon represented ‘a huge cultural break from which the city has not recovered’.2 Even during the Manueline period the city had never enshrined such aspirations to imperial grandeur, aspirations being manifested and symbolized at just the time when the power behind them was fast disappearing. Richard Pattee saw Pombal having been much influenced by his time in London, capital of the most dynamic power of the age. This had been so with Peter the Great half a century earlier, who had dreamed of emulating Britain in his attempt to convert Russia into a modern world power. However, unlike Peter, who had been largely successful, it was impossible for such success to come to Pombal and his successors. He came from ‘an empire of the past’ and he was in no position to emulate an empire that was ‘on the threshold of the future’.3
At the same time as Portuguese world power was vanishing, the power of its great neighbour and rival, Spain, was also on the wane. By the middle of the eighteenth century the northern nations were taking over the world and this was having much the same effect on Spain as it had on Portugal. Spain still possessed its large empire in Latin America but this was becoming less profitable and more restive in its desire for independence. Madrid did not have either an earthquake or a Pombal and there was no great project to build a new imperial city on top of the old. However, as the reality of power drifted away, the desire for the display of imperial grandeur became ever greater. This actually took place in Madrid before it did in Lisbon. In 1734 a fire largely destroyed the old royal palace which had originally been a Moorish stronghold, and this gave Philip V the opportunity to build a palace in the style of Versailles. Work began in 1748 and went on for the best part of twenty years. The principal architect was Giovanni Battista Sacchetti and the scale of the project was enormous, the palace having literally thousands of rooms. It was designed to impress and this it was bound to do on account of its sheer size.
The royal quarters were in the heart of the palace. The grand entrance hall with its statue of Carlos III as a Roman emperor led into the Hall of Columns which was intended to be the setting for grand events and ceremonies. This in turn opened to the Throne Room which contained two magnificent royal thrones in gold and scarlet. This chamber was adorned with paintings by the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo, including an enormous painted ceiling entitled The Apotheosis of Spain. Such magnificence had never been aspired to by Philip II in the age during which Spain had really been a world power. Far from being built for grandeur, the stern Escorial was a statement of the severe aims of the Spanish monarchy at the time when there was a realistic chance of achieving them. On the other hand, Philip V’s imitation Versailles was an example of a building that was in reality just another epitaph to empire. The diminishing wealth of the country was lavished on memories in the hopeless belief that this would help recreate the golden age of the fast-disappearing empire.
On the outside the grand south-facing facade of the palace looks out onto the huge Plaza de la Armería, into which the old Plaza Mayor with all its buildings could easily have fitted. To the south of this is the cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Almudena. Despite the fact that this enormous building fits neatly into the whole complex, it was originally a smaller church. Work on the present building began in 1882 and the cathedral was finally consecrated in 1993. At the side of the royal palace are the Calle de Bailén and the Plaza de Oriente de Palacio which provide a suitable backdrop to the splendour of the palace.
As with Lisbon’s transformation by Pombal, the magnificence of eighteenth-century Royal Madrid had little effect in reviving the declining fortunes of Spain. The battles for the attainment of mastery of the maritime world were by then being played out elsewhere and by others. At the end of the century the Napoleonic armies invaded and occupied Spain and for a time the country was, like Portugal, reduced to a battleground between France and Britain.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars Madrid was left with the largest royal palace in Europe and Lisbon with one of its grandest squares and ceremonial avenues, but these were not matched by world significance either case. The transformation of Madrid by the Bourbon kings of Spain had not been on the scale of Pombal’s transformation of Lisbon but the objectives of both had been essentially the same. By the end of the century in which they were built they had both become magnificent memorials to a vanished glory.
As has been seen, it was France which had initially taken over the European role of Spain and, after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, had become the dominant Continental power. France actually reached the apogee of this power at the end of the following century, led briefly to glory by Napoleon. His military achievements created an empire stretching from the Atlantic across Europe into Russia. However, there, as with other would-be conquerors, the ferocity of the Russian winters finally brought about his defeat. With the end of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, France was never to attain such a powerful position again.
Napoleon himself had dreams of making his capital city reflect his glory and the glory of France and, in common with other imperial figures, he had ideas for grand architectural projects. However, Napoleon’s reign was too short – he was emperor for just a decade – and his military preoccupations too urgent for much time to be given to such matters. It would be left to his successors to commemorate the military brilliance which had resulted in the creation of the largest European empire since Charlemagne. For this purpose Paris had its own Pombal-in-waiting. This was Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who was appointed prefect of the Seine in 1853 and who was instrumental in that great transformation of the French capital that took place during the next two decades. This he did together with his master, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of the first emperor, who was president of the Second Republic from 1848 until he proclaimed the Second Empire in 1852, taking the title Napoleon III. Together with Haussmann, he then embarked on the imperial transformation of Paris. The first Napoleon had expressed his determination to make Paris ‘something fabulous, colossal and unprecedented’ and his nephew, having rather more time, declared, ‘Let us put all our efforts into embellishing this great city.’4
The centre of the whole grand project was the enormous processional way of the Champs-Elysées. The intention to create this grand avenue went back much earlier and had originally been envisaged by Colbert and laid out by Le Nôtre, who was responsible for the gardens at Versailles. However, it was not until after the Napoleonic wars that the impetus to complete it resumed. Further work proceeded during the reign of King Louis-Philippe and in the early 1830s the building of the great arch which was to dominate it was commenced. This Arc de Triomphe was intended to commemorate the victories of Napoleon and it was left to Napoleon III and his prefect Haussmann to complete the work. The Champs-Elysées was laid out and lined with trees and splendid new buildings rose on either side of it. The area around the Arc de Triomphe became the Place de l’Etoile, a round space from which twelve wide avenues radiated. The continuation from the Champs-Elysées on the other side of the arch was the Avenue de la Grande Armée, extending westwards towards the suburb of Neuilly. This commemorated the achievements of that army which had won so many great victories and conquered the greater part of Europe. Avenues leading from the Champs-Elysées present views of the striking Pont Alexandre III, constructed in the late nineteenth century to commemorate the Franco-Russian alliance, and, across the Seine, the Invalides, a magnificent hospital for wounded soldiers. It was here that the body of Napoleon I was re-interred after its ceremonial return from St Helena in 1843.
The Champs-Elysées extended eastwards for 1.5 km, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. From there the view continued eastwards through the Tuileries gardens to the smaller Arc du Carrousel, another arch commemorating the victories of Napoleon. This stood within the magnificent royal palace of the Louvre which, although largely dating from the seventeenth century, was incorporated successfully into the whole imperial scheme and soon became an integral part of it. Jan Morris clearly found this part of the scheme especially impressive when she wrote that, ‘Retreating through the Tuileries from the gorgeous severity of the Louvre is like retiring backwards … down the interminable audience chamber of some royal presence’.5
Around this triumphal core Haussmann had instructions from his master to raze many of the poorer areas of the inner city and to replace them with a line of great avenues. These were the Grands Boulevards and in size and splendour they often rivalled the Champs-Elysées itself. Around them official buildings, new apartments and splendid shops replaced the slums. The intention was that these boulevards should be in a series of straight lines like the Champs-Elysées, one of the supposed reasons for this being the easier management of the mob should there be civil disturbance. The Revolution, although it had eventually brought Napoleon to power, had previously destroyed a dynasty, and his nephew wanted to ensure that this did not happen to his own dynasty. Nevertheless, Schneider sees this as being first and foremost about the display of power. Such boulevards, he wrote, ‘imperiously and often brutally transecting a city, symbolize royal power – triumph of a masterful mind’.6 Like so many emperors before him, Napoleon III aimed to use architecture as an instrument of political power, assisting him to retain his grip on France.
While the whole great project was above all intended to commemorate the triumphant achievements of the first emperor and to keep the memory of him alive in the minds of the French people, it was also to be the backdrop for a resumption of the whole imperial process by Napoleon III. The great emperor’s nephew had his own schemes to assert once more the glory and grandeur of France. However, this was not to be. France was no longer the dominating power in Europe and, in this respect at least, the country had been in steady decline since the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Half a century later in 1871 the army of Napoleon III was defeated by the Prussians at Sedan. The Prussian army entered Paris and the victors were able to marvel at the magnificent axis of empire with its triumphal arches and grand palace. What had been intended as a new assertion of imperial might turned out to be yet another postscript to it. The proclamation of the King of Prussia as German Emperor took place in the Galerie des Glaces at the Palace of Versailles, that spectacular symbol of the rise of France under Louis XIV. It is ironic that the advent of the Second Reich, which was to become the successor to France as the dominant Continental power, was proclaimed in the very heart of the palace built two centuries earlier to celebrate the arrival of France as a great power. Power had moved eastwards across the Rhine and in future wars France would need to call on the support of other countries, most importantly Britain and the United States. From that time on the Champs-Elysées and the great imperial monuments were left as a magnificent memorial to the Napoleonic age and to that period of imperial glory which had in fact been so brief.
Germany now assumed a dominating position in both Continental Europe and over the other German lands. This represented a historical change of some magnitude. Over the centuries it had been the Habsburg dynasty of Austria which had held the prime position, first as Holy Roman Emperors and subsequently as presidents of the German Confederation. For centuries Austria had also been the dominant power in east-central Europe, balancing France’s position of dominance in the western part of the Continent. Austria had been defeated by Napoleon but this had also happened to Prussia. For the early part of the nineteenth century both were eclipsed by the overwhelming power of Britain and Russia and also by a resurrected France. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, it was clear that the Austrian Empire was in terminal decline. The revolutionary events of 1848 had shaken the Habsburg monarchy to its foundations and considerable restiveness continued among the non-German peoples within the enormous empire. This was nowhere more so than in Hungary which in 1867 secured a large measure of control over its own affairs in the ‘Compromise’ that gave it its own parliament. In many ways the Hungarians now became imperial partners, and from then until its fall the empire was known as Austro-Hungarian. A year earlier Prussia had defeated Austria in the brief Six Weeks War and begun to assume the role of dominant power in Germany. Five years later this position was to be consolidated by the proclamation of the German Empire in Versailles, with the Prussian king as its new emperor. The power of Austria was from then on marginalized.
In 1848 the throne of the Empire had passed to the young Franz Josef who saw it as his duty to stem the decline and reassert the power of Austria both over its empire and in Europe generally. As part of his plan, Franz Josef embarked on one of the most impressive transformations of an imperial capital ever to take place. This entailed no less than the enveloping of the crowded old centre of Vienna, the Altstadt, with a new imperial city of unsurpassed grandeur. Amazingly this was to consist of only one great avenue, the Ringstrasse, but it was a massive one some 3 km in length. However, this was no Champs-Elysées or Avenida da Liberdade but was intended to encircle the old city completely. In undertaking his massive project, Franz Josef became his own Haussmann and his version of the latter’s Grands Boulevards was designed to be the centrepiece of the whole project. While Franz Josef was certainly influenced by what Haussmann was doing in Paris, from the outset he made it clear that it was he who was in charge and would decide which particular public buildings were to be built along it. He used a number of architects who designed buildings in a variety of architectural styles. Nevertheless, it was always the emperor himself who was responsible for the final decisions.
The actual space designated for the project was the line of old walls surrounding Vienna. These, together with their accompanying dykes and earthworks, had to be demolished before the work could begin. What had been a circular barrier to keep enemies out of the city now became a circular line of communication linking together the centres of the major activities of the imperial capital. This line was in fact less a circle than a polygon consisting of five straight avenues joined together. The buildings around these avenues were then laid out on a gridiron plan. On the Ringstrasse itself, each had its own particular public buildings and architectural styles which imparted considerable variety to the whole project.
As befitted a capital noted for its great musical heritage, the first new building was the Opera House, built in the Renaissance Revival style and completed in 1869. This was followed by others including the Rathaus (city hall) built in a neo-Flemish style, the University in Tuscan Renaissance, the Börse (Stock Exchange) in neoclassical and the Reichsrat (parliament), also in classical style. Different architects were employed by the emperor for each building, important among them being Theophilus Hansen, a Danish architect whose work Franz Josef found particularly to his taste. This architect designed the music and fine arts academies, the Börse, a number of palaces and the Reichsrat. This latter building in the classical style recalls ancient Greece, and in front of it is a statue of Athena, protecting goddess of Athens. The junctions of the polygonal plan opened into squares laid out with gardens adorned with numerous statues, notable among which was the colossal statue of the eighteenth-century empress Maria Theresa. The Hofburg Palace of the emperor, although not actually on the Ring, was located in a square leading just off it and, like the Louvre in Paris, was close enough to have been incorporated successfully into the whole plan.
Although the Ringstrasse itself had a great variety of cultural, administrative and political buildings, they were all, in the words of de Waal, ‘Prachtbauten’ (buildings of splendour) and the whole project was ‘breathcatchingly imperial in scale’.7 One of the most significant things about the whole Ringstrasse project was that it had its back to the old city and looked outwards towards the wider world and, in particular, to Austria’s empire. There the diverse peoples with their different nationalities, languages and religions would encounter the Kaiserlich-Königlich – imperial and royal – civilization. Being a ring it faced out in all directions towards all parts of the massive and unwieldy empire. In this way, with its art, architecture, literature and, above all, music it was imparting a civilization, which Franz Josef saw as being the most potent binding force, the cement, to hold the whole edifice together. As de Waal put it, ‘The new street is not dominated by any one building; there is no crescendo towards a palace or cathedral; but there is this constant triumphant pull along from one great aspect of civilized life to another.’8 He might also have added that neither was there a great arch such as that which dominates the Champs-Elysées and proclaims its most important purpose. Franz Josef’s vision was altogether wider and more all-encompassing than that of Napoleon III. Rather than rely on military glory, which was in fact in short supply, he was using the arts in which Vienna had been supreme as the principal supports for his own imperial vision.
The fundamental purpose of all this diversity was to promote the empire and the imperial vision which lay behind it. ‘The buildings along the Ring were designed to dazzle’, said Barea in her survey of Viennese history, ‘and to convey the message that the imperial city was again secure in regained power and glory’.9 Yet the truth, she asserted, was that ‘Vienna expanded and was embellished … while the empire contracted; its social and cultural life was growing while the foundations of its importance as a multinational state were assaulted and undermined’.10 The truth was that all it signified was self-assertion and an illusion of permanence while the reality was that the massive multinational empire had already become the most fragile in Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century the clamour for greater autonomy and even independence by the subject nations had become impossible to ignore and not even the magnetic pull of the Ringstrasse, with its message of cultural imperialism, was strong enough to combat this.
The ultimate comment on the whole grand project was made by the young architect Adolf Loos. In an article entitled ‘Die Potemkinsche Stadt’, he compared the Ringstrasse to the Potemkin villages. These were facades of canvas and cardboard erected by Catherine the Great’s minister, Alexander Potemkin, in the newly acquired Ukraine in an attempt to deceive the empress on her grand tour as to how much progress was being made by his administration in the new province. As with Potemkin’s villages, Loos maintained, the Ringstrasse was all facade and behind it was wasteland.11 Franz Josef’s 1898 Golden Jubilee celebrations took place against this magnificent backdrop but it was as unreal in terms of representing the power of the Dual Monarchy as the Potemkin villages were in representing the economic progress of the Ukraine. It was, in fact, a magnificent stage set and its creators could but hope that nobody would notice it was all a fake.
Within a quarter of a century of the great celebrations of the Jubilee, in which the Ringstrasse was the stage, the empire was no more. The First World War began as a result of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by nationalist opponents of Austrian rule in the Balkans. It ended four years later with the fall of that empire, which was then split up into a number of independent nation-states. Austria was left as a small country with a grandiose and over-large capital. Like the Champs-Elysées, the Avenida da Liberdade and Madrid’s Palacio Real, the Ringstrasse was yet another postscript to a vanished empire.
But the story of the influence of Vienna as an imperial city, of which the Ringstrasse was the ultimate expression, was by no means over. In the years before the outbreak of war, a young Austrian painter and architectural student, Adolf Hitler, had lived in the city. During his time there he learned many things but the two to have the greatest influence on his subsequent career were architecture and anti-Semitism. The imperial architecture of the Ringstrasse greatly impressed the young man who saw it as an expression of the kind of power for which he yearned. Hitler wrote, ‘From morning until late at night I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings that held my primary interest. For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ringstrasse seemed to me like an enchantment out of The Thousand and One Nights.’12 Hitler painted all the great buildings on the ring. To him they expressed ‘eternal values’ and taught him how space and buildings could be used in the assertion of power. In this, Franz Josef was his teacher.
When both the Austrian and German empires collapsed in the ruins of defeat in 1918, Hitler was left in despair. Soon he was joining with those who sought to bring Germany back to the greatness which they believed it deserved and of which it had been deprived by inefficient and treacherous leadership. This was the myth of the ‘stab in the back’ which underlay much of what subsequently took place. Hitler wanted above all to resurrect a Greater Germany which would include his homeland Austria within it. This necessitated putting many of the ideas he had learned in pre-war Vienna into practice. Central to these was the belief, which originally came from Franz Josef’s grand scheme for Vienna, that the heart of any imperial plan must be its expression in buildings. During the turbulent decades that followed, this was something Hitler was never to forget.
The German historian Joachim Fest, discussing Vienna with his Austrian friends, observed that, ‘Unlike Paris, Berlin, or Washington, the city didn’t give itself airs with imperial majesty; even Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) had, for those who really looked, an attractive domesticity … and through the combination of [Austrian charm and splendour] created a metropolis which was both grand and human in scale.’13 Fest clearly saw a Vienna which was very different from the one that had enthused Hitler. Of course, all the great cities that evolved organically, and then had the grandeur of imperialism imposed upon them, display a variety of features which, unlike the purpose-built capitals, impress more with their variety than their uniformity.
All of those postscripts to power which have been looked at in this chapter were characteristic of the decline of states from their periods of great power. In this sense, they were all commemorations, reminders of what had once been. However, thanks to Hitler, Vienna proved to be rather different from this. The future German leader saw the Austrian capital as being a model for the kind of capital which he wished himself to create as the centre of a new German empire, rising from the ashes of both the old Austrian and German empires. The attempt to create this new empire resulted in massive destruction, loss of life and ultimate failure. But during it all Hitler maintained his desire to build a great capital which would symbolize both Germany’s greatness and that of the Führer himself.