Architecture and the Nazi Cultural Landscape: Blood, Soil, Building

This book traces cultural landscape as  the manifestation of the state and national community under the Nazi  regime, and how the Nazi era produced what could be referred to as a  totalitarian cultural landscape.

For the Nazi regime, cultural landscape was indeed a heritage resource, but it was much more than that: cultural landscape was the nation. The project of Nazi racial purification and cultural  renewal demanded the physical reshaping and reconceptualization of the  existing environment to create the so-called "new Nazi cultural  landscape." One of the most important components of this was a set of  monumental sites thought to embody blood and soil beliefs through the  harmonious synthesis of architecture and landscape. This special group  of "landscape-bound" architectural complexes was interconnected by the  new autobahn highway system, itself thought to be a monumental work  embedded in nature. Behind this intentionally aestheticized view of the  nation as cultural landscape lay the all-pervasive system of deception  and violence that characterized the emerging totalitarian state.

This is the first historical study to  consider the importance of these monumental sites together with the  autobahn as evidence of key Nazi cultural and geographic strategies  during the pre-war years. This book concludes by examining racial and  nationalistic themes underlying cultural landscape concepts today,  against this historic background.