EARLY SUMMER, 1939
The light was positioned to simulate ten in the morning. The urban canyons of the capital of the German Empire shimmered blindingly white. But nothing moved, everything seemed suspended, frozen solid in an eternal winter.
It would be a while until the daily chaos of Berlin reached those corners. At this moment, the streets still radiated symmetry and order in their abandonment. There were no vehicles parked on the curb, nobody strolling along the tree-lined streets. The only disruption of this orderly impression was the remnants of dried glue that, despite the architect’s diligence, had welled out onto the street from under the building blocks.
The wide road axis ran straight as a die toward a mighty dome that would be visible on the horizon from several kilometers at some point in the distant future. What now dominated the horizon in white splendor was one day to outshine the entire city in its green gown of copper patina. The Große Volkshalle, a hall providing seats for 180,000 people, was a site for unprecedented victory celebrations.
A whisper sounded high above the roofs: “Magnificent, Speer.”
The voice was not the distant rasp with the rolling R that every member of the German nation knew from the radio or the newsreel, nor was it the hoarse bark the dictator called forth from his repertoire when he needed to whip up the crowds. In front of the thirty-meter-long model of what would soon be the street of glory, the voice, utterly private in its natural baritone, seemed lost in thought, almost gentle. His backside poking out, a pose he usually avoided, the dictator bent forward to assume a near-ground perspective.
It could not be denied that in Albert Speer he had found an architect who occasionally managed to surpass even his principal’s bold ideas in size and scale. Paradestraße, a road running at a length of more than five kilometers; the triumphal arch with its shady colonnades, which would be almost fifty times as large as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; the vast Große Volkshalle, planned as the world’s largest building, whose dome arched to a height of more than 220 meters on the inside. The entire city planned to compete with other metropolises, a display set in stone of deeply hurt national pride that now wanted to show its superiority with all its might.
The center of the Reich’s capital would be transformed into a huge stage for military deployments and parades. The question of whether anyone could actually live in this city only rarely occurred to the dictator. The surrounding housing blocks were little more than uniform quadrangles that could easily be divided up yet again if traffic planning required this.
There was no room in this monumental vision for the old Berlin with its contradictions, for the brash, sometimes deeply provincial metropolis. For some time now, the dictator had been thinking about making this quite clear from the start. Berlin sounded too disdainful in his ears. A new name was required, one worthy of a capital of world renown. A name like Germania, perhaps.
Time and again, the dictator’s gaze was drawn to the dome of the Große Volkshalle. Eventually, he cast a critical gaze across the structure on its spire, where the imperial eagle was enthroned on the swastika. Then, gripped by a sudden realization, he shook his head. “We have to change that, Speer. It’s better if the eagle doesn’t preside over the swastika anymore. The crowning glory of this building must be the eagle atop the globe.”
When Hitler had left, Chief Architect Speer turned back in the doorway once more. Only the arrangement of lamps, which enabled him to give a realistic simulation of daylight atmosphere, lit up the academy’s exhibition room. The model of the city rested in the otherwise dark room, a bright mark in the black infinity, a promise for the future. A lot remained to be done until then. Speer switched off the light.
Night descended upon Germania.