A Theory of Ruins
Evan Greer performing at Rage Against the Regime in Cambridge. Photo from a Mass 50501 volunteer.
The roaring guitars went silent as the final drum hit its last thundering beat. The crowd was silent—in awe of the moment, the music, and the skill of the performers. The storm of music had died and its exhausted omega bounced in a sharp echo off curious and imposing structures sharing that same field. As the stage lights dimmed, the austere ruin revealed itself—its glory spent but its existence undeniable. A hint of malice could be felt—the stone was cold but it was given a bit of color and a bit of softening in its dilapidation.
Then the crowd roared in approval, shattering the void of sound with a life-affirming cry of triumph. A feeling of history, energy, and love flowed through a mass of seventy thousand souls assembled on a soft summer night in June. The moment felt alive and powerful. Not a soul in that crowd would ever forget they were there.
The guitars began to sing again, not with the distortion bands like this are known for, but with tremolo, chorus, and reverb. Everyone knew the words and some began to sing them. A thousand points of light thrust into the sky as men and women lit their lighters and waved with the music in unison. The complex and layered structure of a famous metal ballad reverberated across the field. It was both assertive and solemn. Each note pulled on a different string on each and every human soul upon that green. It was June 4th, 1999. The band was Metallica.
Though it was a meaningful day to the participants, it was not an unusual performance for The Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, Germany. Many concerts and events are held here throughout the year and it is firmly integrated into the lives of locals and the adventures of tourists. Behind this humanizing and awe-inspiring demonstration of artistry and community sits a peculiar and commanding yet atrophied fossil built under the direction of Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer in the 1930s.
Speer had a theory of architectural expression called Ruinenwerttheorie. Ruin-Value-Theory: a Theory of Ruins. He believed that buildings should be built so that the vestiges of them would carry forth a message of inevitability and permanence. Inspired by the ruins of the Parthenon and the Colosseum, he was a Nazi architect committed to the cause of seeking immortality for the regime he served. He wanted a thousand-year Reich ensconced and encoded in eternal stone. His plans redesigned Zeppelin Field and to his credit its structures still stand. The Zeppelinhaupttribüne, or Main Zeppelin Tribune, outlived Speer and became the ominous and appropriate backdrop of Metallica’s concert.
Fascists have always had an obsession with architecture over other expressive disciplines. Hitler in particular had a love of classical Roman and Greek architecture. Speer was among his favorite acolytes for this reason. Hitler himself was a painter and his drawings were well constructed with correct proportions and majestic vistas. But something was always lacking in them. His work was always that of structures—without humanity at all. They were emotionless and stale, as if the sterile brought him solace.
If architecture is to be considered art, as both Speer and Hitler believed, then the work they commissioned on the backs of the German people to glorify their toxic enterprise is of the same timbre as the paintings without people. The chambers they commissioned were not meant for the huddled masses—they were meant for the state and by extension for themselves. Grand halls that serve no purpose other than to immortalize violence and mastery of enemies as the solitary principle. The Nazi’s planned many ‘great’ works. An olympic stadium built in 1936 was further remodeled to be even grander. A neoclassical temple called The House of German Art was built in Munich to showcase only ‘pure’ work approved by the party. A parallel Museum of Degenerate Art was also built, intended to denigrate. The Volkshalle was part of a Berlin based construction plan called Germania. It featured a domed hall so large that meteorologists calculated clouds would have formed from the crowds' breath. It was never constructed. Authoritarian doctrines often begin to rot the moment they are born.
The visual product of artwork that is refined through training, diligence, and skill is only part of the equation of great work. All creative crafts, when properly understood, are an attempt to move human beings in some way. The roar of Metallica’s guitars is meant to speak about longing, of fear, or of the busy energy of what it means to be human. Metal in particular is often expressed in cathartic forms. Rage is embraced not as a virtue, but as a scream into the void—against the void—as a mechanism for spiritual renewal against life's never ending challenges. It’s the musical equivalent of going a few rounds in the ring with a heavy bag full of sand. A painting should speak to some part of the human condition like sorrow or loss. The Avengers is a form of art as well, because it tells the story of the hero's journey that we have told innumerable times over millenia since we imagined Zeus and Shiva as vengeful animations of our spirit.
Architecture is also art—though at its best it’s meant to speak to some tragedy or triumph of history. The selection of each type of stone or the placement of a beam tells a story about some human experience. Buildings can be both functional and artistic, but when form overrides the aesthetic, it subtracts from its potential. A cathedral is grand even to those without religion because it tells a story about human aspirations. It is both majestic and larger than life but filled with meaning, symbolism, and depth. Every glass pane is a story about a congregation and a community. Every column, pew, and altar is geometrically aligned to service a human need for a connection with the divine.
The field itself took on almost a quasi-religious significance to Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Nuremberg was the home city of a renaissance artist and intellectual by the name of Albrecht Dürer, whom Hitler admired. The city was also the unofficial and cultural heart of the Holy Roman Empire for periods of time between the 13th and 17th century. The use of the field for rallies was meant as a kind of claim to a historical inheritance. Speer was savvy enough to notice that and ambitious enough to take risks to satisfy that indulgence.Before the construction of the Zeppelinhaupttribüne the field served as a ground where the Nazis would marshall all of their political strength to try and demonstrate the inevitability of their movement to all of Germany and to the world. In 1934 Speer conspired to build the Lichtdom or Cathedral of Light at this spot. The Lichtdom was an imperial tribute in the form of performance art. 152 search lights commandeered from the Luftwaffe over the objections of Hermann Göring were arranged in a wall of vertical columns surrounding the field for a single evening of a weeklong rally at the site. It was a truly gorgeous display. The wall stretched for 6 kilometers in the sky, enveloping the crowd and dissolving the sense of the individual. Speer sought to wrap the audience in pure columns of awe-inspiring power. The French Ambassador at the time noted that it was “a mystical ecstasy, a sort of holy illusion.” He was not a friend of the regime—but even he found himself moved by the spectacle.
Albery Speer’s Lichtdom or Cathedral of Light above the Zeppelintribüne (1936). From the Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1982-1130-502 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
It was a powerful and impressive salute, but absent an ideal beyond malevolence, it failed to capture anything at all. It was window dressing for something vulgar, a repurposing of military equipment in service to the consecration of something unholy and evil. It was a missile parade in the sky. It may be beautiful in a way but beauty absent a higher ideal is a vapid thing. It was precise, impressive, and hollow in equal parts.
Hitler, Speer, and others were obsessed with the mastery of culture through grandiose ceremony, pageantry, and gestures. They were driven not just by grievance against racial minorities, but also by a boundless hatred of the cultural elite of Germany they felt had betrayed the country. They would take cultural artifacts like Wagner or the Renaissance and try to own and redefine them. They used architecture, music, writing, and film to try to change the character of the German nation—slowly at first but always with a vision to subordinate creative works to political ends. Autocrats often have enough artistic instinct to recognize timeless work, even if they lack the capacity to create it themselves. They hate anything that doesn’t honor them or their black ideals.
We see the same trends today in our own anti-authoritarian struggle. Tyrannical movements like architecture because its products are permanent functional artifacts. If they can imbue it with the spirit of subordination and obedience to the state, it can slowly grind resistance and individuality away. A banner on the Department of Labor is like the Eye of Sauron, a baleful thing to be regarded as ugly by most but affirming to the faithful.
Trump doesn’t commission artwork. He buys a tower or a plane and then slaps his name on it. He bulldozed the East Wing of the White House, an American ancestral relic of monumental history, where every beam and board is dripping with American traditions and memory. He is now asking for a billion dollars to replace the wreck with a ballroom that we do not need. To authoritarians there is nothing but service to the immediate need. No ideal, no great work, no temple or shrine is beyond their rapacious capacity to pillage if they are permitted to.
He’s implementing a cruder version of Hitler and Speer’s design but it’s driven by the same sense of grievance and entitlement. He renames the Kennedy Center and slaps his face onto banners around Washington because he is trying to assert an ownership to a public good that should not be his to take. A golden statue to Trump is raised without irony at Mar-a-Lago as some “Florida man” influencers seek the crown's favor. Crudeness, stupidity, and sycophancy are features—not bugs of the totalitarian system. It represses through offense and vulgarness.
MAGA loves its AI memes as well and it’s no end of unfortunate that this new powerful and dangerous technology seems to go hand-in-glove with oppressive ideology. With AI it’s possible to seize the work of true creators, force it all into a kind of content slurry, and mass produce lifeless bleached content at scale to bombard our senses. It’s both a vector for cultural conquest and a way to stick it to those dirty libs. With careful tuning of inputs, it’s possible to produce reasonably unique work that is technically effective, but it’s lifeless and stale—somehow less than even Hitler’s arid contributions to the humanities.
Hitler and Speer ultimately succeeded at altering the fabric of German society. It took years of brutal conflict and millions of dead before the aspiration was reduced to ash through unfortunate but necessary violence. Now the rancid remains of that project are seeking again to assert themselves. Trump is just a useful idiot meant to bring about a conquest of American identity. Trump himself is useful to the totalitarian cause because he is a symbol of the crudest parts of our culture. Reality TV and performative cruelty as a kind of claim of “Real America” while his coterie of villains and minions exploit the space he creates to remake this country into something else.
Though Speer achieved his ruin, the ambition failed to achieve his ends. An enduring symbol it remained—but one of decay and benign neglect. It now stands as a blighted relic to remind the populace not of the glory of the Nazi regime—but that the Thousand Year Reich was as brittle as the stone itself beneath the gentle action of water. Neither cared for, nor destroyed—the carcass of this building became a symbol of renewal. With the malice subtracted it finally became enough of a craft for Metallica and dozens of other true artists to make it one of their favorite places for sharing catharsis. One could imagine Speer and Hitler turning over in their graves as the citizenry make merry on a broken memorial to their baleful and ignoble achievements.
We will sing songs on the ruins MAGA leaves behind as well.
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