Volkshalle

The Volkshalle ("People's Hall"), also called Große Halle ("Great Hall") or Ruhmeshalle ("Hall of Glory"), was a proposal for a monumental, domed building to be built in a reconstituted Berlin (renamed as Germania) in Nazi Germany. The project was conceived by Adolf Hitler and designed by his architect Albert Speer. No part of the building was ever constructed. The word Volk had a particular resonance in Nazi thinking. The term völkisch movement, which can be translated to English as "the people's movement" or "the folkish movement", derives from Volk but also implies a particularly racial undertone. Before the First World War, völkisch thought had developed an attitude to the arts as the German Volk; that is, from an organically linked Aryan or Nordic community (Volksgemeinschaft), racially unpolluted and with its roots in the German soil of the Heimat (homeland). Just as Augustus's Domus on the Palatine was connected to the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, so Hitler's palace was to have been connected by a cryptoporticus to the Volkshalle, which filled the entire north side of the forum. This truly enormous building was, according to Albert Speer, inspired by Hadrian's Pantheon, which Hitler visited privately on May 7, 1938. But Hitler's interest in and admiration for the Pantheon predated this visit, since his sketch of the Volkshalle dates from about 1925. Hermann Giesler records a conversation he had with Hitler in the winter of 1939–40, when Hitler was recalling his “Roman Impressions” (Römische Impressionen): From the time I experienced this building – no description, picture or photograph did it justice – I became interested in its history [...] For a short while I stood in this space (the rotunda) – what majesty! I gazed at the large open oculus and saw the universe and sensed what had given this space the name Pantheon – God and the world are one. Hitler's impressions of the Roman Pantheon were revived when on June 24, 1940, he made a tour of selected buildings in Paris, with the German architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler and sculptor Arno Breker, including the Paris Panthéon, which seems to have disappointed him, independently recorded by Giesler and Breker.