Albert Spear Jr. at the 2008 Olympics

[David Morris]

http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2413678&title=Imagine_the_Terror_of.html

Albert Speer was commissioned by the Chinese government to lay out a
masterplan for the access to the Olympic Green in Beijing. His design
consisted of one impressive avenue connecting the Forbidden City and
the National Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place.
Speer is indeed the son of the infamous Albert, chief architect to
Hitler and his minister of armaments. Speer Senior had also laid out
his signature axis within Hitler's megalomaniac city 'Welthaupstadt
Germania' which, thankfully, was never realised. So what the father
failed to do in Berlin, his son managed to achieve in Beijing, about
60 years later.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2008/08/04/2003419333

When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins in a few
days, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed
spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch. Of course, images that recall
Hitler's goose-stepping storm troopers are the last thing that China's
leaders have in mind for their Olympics; after all, official Chinese
nationalism proclaims the country's "peaceful rise" within an idyll of
"harmonious development." But, both aesthetically and politically, the
parallel is hardly far-fetched.

Indeed, by choosing Albert Speer, the son of Hitler's favorite
architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the
master plan for the Beijing Games, China's government has itself
alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a
hallmark of 20th-century totalitarianism.

Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China's leaders have
sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible
proof of their fitness and mandate to rule.

Speer's commission was to lay out a master plan for the access to the
Olympic complex in Beijing. His design centered on the construction of
an imposing avenue to connect the Forbidden City and the National
Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place. His father's
plan for "Germania," the name Adolf Hitler selected for the Berlin
that he planned to construct after World War II, also relied on such a
mighty central axis.

China's rulers see the Olympics as a stage for demonstrating to the
world the exceptional vitality of the country they have built over the
past three decades. And that demonstration serves an even more
important domestic political objective: further legitimizing the
regime's continuing rule in the eyes of ordinary Chinese.

Given this imperative, an architectural language of bombast and
gigantism was almost inevitable.

So it is no surprise that the Beijing Games may resemble the hubristic
Games that beguiled the Fuhrer and enthralled the German masses in
1936.

Like the Beijing Games, the Berlin Olympics were conceived as a
coming-out party. Josef Goebbels' Nazi propaganda machine was fully
deployed. Athletic imagery — used to brilliant effect in Leni
Riefenstahl's acclaimed documentary — appeared to create a link
between the Nazis and the ancient Greeks, and to confirm the Nazi myth
that Germans and German civilization were the true heirs to the
"Aryan" culture of classical antiquity.

While designing the master plan for the Beijing Games, Speer, an
acclaimed architect and town planner, also sought, like his father, to
create a futuristic global metropolis. Of course, the language that he
used to sell his scheme to the Chinese was very different from the
words his father used to present his plans to Hitler.

Instead of emphasizing his design's pomposity, the younger Speer
insisted on its environmental friendliness. The 2,000-year-old city of
Beijing should be transported into hyper-modernity, whereas his
father's 1936 Berlin design was, in his words, "simply megalomania."

Of course, the sins of the father should never be visited on the son.
But, in this case, when the son borrows essential elements of his
father's architectural principles and serves a regime that seeks to
use the Games for some of the same reasons that animated Hitler, is he
not willingly reflecting those sins?

Totalitarian regimes — the Nazis, the Soviets in 1980 and now the
Chinese — desire to host the Olympics as a way to signal to the world
their superiority. China believes that it has found its own model to
develop and modernize, and its rulers regard the Games in the same way
as the Nazis and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev did, as a means of
"selling" their model to a global audience.

Obviously, the Chinese were politically tone-deaf in choosing an
architect whose name carried such dark historical connotations. The
name of Speer itself probably did not matter to the officials who
chose him. They sought to stage an Olympics that made manifest their
image of themselves, and Speer, looking back to his father's mastery
of the architecture of power, delivered the goods.