The Day I Met Adolf Hitler

One of the most interesting days I've yet spent in Germany happened in Nuremberg in 1995. I had taken the train from Berlin to see an exhibition on one of my most favorite architects, the Belgian Henry van de Velde, at the German National Museum. Pooped when I got off the train from the long trip I chose the first hotel whose sign I saw outside the station, INTERCITY HOTEL: How serendipitous!

It was the first hotel in that now widely dispersed chain and they had the luminous idea of giving their guests a free pass to the city's mass transportation network. The first thing that crossed my mind was finding where Leni Riefenstahl had shot Triumph of the Will, that dramatic take on the theatricality of a Nuremberg Nazi powwow. The young ladies at the front desk looked at me blankly when I asked for directions to where a film they hadn't even heard of was made by filmmaker they never knew. Hmmm. So I turned to the hotel manager, in his 60s, and he was pissed that I asked him, implying he was a Nazi in the know. Yikes!

I decided to take a walk before crapping out for the night. Across the street I saw a hotel with a peculiar name, BAVARIAN/AMERICAN HOTEL: Strange, until I popped in to check it out, and saw battalions of American soldiers hanging out. I walked up to an info desk manned by a black sergeant, to whom I repeated my Leni Riefenstahl question. Easy, she replied, Just take the Number 6 bus. As simple as that. It ain't who you know, its clearly in some cases what you know that makes a difference.

I was up bright and early the next morning, drinking coffee and reading the local newspapers. (Make that trying to read them. My year of German at the University of Detroit in 1949 had disappeared into the thin air of my brain.) So after some more coffee, I was out in the street trying my pidgin German on people who looked like they would know how to lead a stranger to the Number 6 bus. Sure enough, a youngish man who turned out to be an English teacher (so much for my German!) not only walked me to the stop but reassured me that at the end of the line was really where Triumph of the Will had been shot.

He offered that he liked her films on the 1936 Olympics more, but what the hell. At the end of the line, it seemed liked the end of the world. The venue that in the movie is pulsing with semi-hysterical Nazis getting off on a cult ritual was absolutely empty. The contrast was breathtaking. Meanwhile, all that coffee was following the laws of gravity and seeking an outlet.

I poked around in the innards of what turned out to be the reviewing stand for the top Nazi brass. Everything that looked like a toilet was locked up tighter than a drum. So I squinched ma bladder and starting climbing the stairs of the reviewing stand. Eventually, I was in dead center, when it dawned on me that I was standing where Hitler had stood in the film. Just me and where Hitler had stood almost sixty years ago. My squinchy bladder was beginning to be more and more demanding. I looked around sneakily to see that I was really by myself. And unzipped, and let go. Right where old Adolf had taken salutes of a different caliber. Ahhh.

Relieved, I noted that the only Rally they now entertained here was a July Auto Rallye. Later I read that the city fathers were going to turn it into a proper Denkmal, German for historical monument. I hope they never christen it Pissenplatz. Around the corner was a pub where I went in and had a beer, ogling a passel of very ordinary looking working men, none of them the least bit aware that I had just had a very historical encounter.

But this serendipitous encounter with History was not why I had come to Nuremberg. So it was on to the Museum, where I first had a full encounter with that polymath designer van de Velde. He did everything--furniture, advertising, steamships, and of course architecture, of which he helped make Jugendstil the absolute peak of twentieth century art, in my eyes. Of course, some years later, when I started living in Weimar, I had three of his masterpieces as my daily experience, the main buildings of what is now called Bauhaus Uni on Geschwister Schollstrasse, and his luminous Villa Pappeln on the Belvedereallee.

I've always found it odd that except for George Muches Haus am Horn in Weimar proper, and Ernst Neufert's Wohnhaus in nearby Gelmeroda, there is no Bauhaus architecture in the city where the Bauhaus was founded. It's a Jugendstil town, from start to finish, esthetically speaking. The 1923 inflation killed Walter Gropius ambitious plans to create a Bauhaus Siedlung. Though what he managed to organize when petty politicians forced the school to relocate to Dessau is no great shakes to my eye.

Drabber than a second rate Levittown, with what my favorite hometown architect, Albert Kahn called shaved architecture. And even the UNESCO heritage Dessau Bauhaus, designed by Gropius and built by Ernst Neufert, is a merely sleek looking bomb! (He recapitulated the office part of his Fagus factory of 1909. Sadly the radiators set under the bold looking fenestration simply didn't cut it in Saxon winters. Students and staff had to shiver with woolen socks and hiking shoes to compensate.)

It's fun to speculate what would have happened to the Bauhaus (or its equivalent) if van de Velde didn't have to leave for Switzerland in 1915, as an enemy alien in wartime. You have to grant Gropius his noble ideal of melding art and the machine so that well designed living would be accessible to everyone. Jugendstil was a high bourgeois style. But it still thrills my eye while run of the mill Bauhaus is BORING!