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The Volkshalle (, "People's Hall"), also called Große Halle (, "Great Hall") or Ruhmeshalle (, "Hall of Glory"), was a proposal for a monumental, 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 Volk 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 race community ( Volksgemeinschaft), racially unpolluted and with its roots in the German soil of the Heimat (homeland).
Hitler's impressions of the Roman Pantheon were revived when on June 24, 1940, he made a tour of selected buildings in Paris, with German architects Speer and Giesler and sculptor Arno Breker, including the Paris Panthéon, which seems to have disappointed him, independently recorded by GieslerGiesler 391. and Breker.Breker 106.
The sketch of the Volkshalle given by Hitler to Speer shows a traditional gabled Portico supported by ten columns, a shallow rectangular intermediate block and behind it the domed main building.Scobie 110. Giesler notes that the pronaos of the temple in Hitler's sketch is reminiscent of Hadrian's Pantheon and of the style of Friedrich Gilly or Karl Friedrich Schinkel.Giesler 326. However, there was little about Speer's elaboration of the sketch that might be termed Doric order, except perhaps for the triglyphs in the entablature,Larsson 79. supported by the geminated red granite columns with their Egyptian Arabic palm-leaf capitals, previously employed by Speer in the portico outside Hitler's study on the garden side of the new Chancellery.
Speer's Monster-Building () was to be the capital's most important and impressive building in terms of its size and symbolism. Visually it was to have been the architectural centrepiece of Berlin as the world capital ( Welthauptstadt). Its dimensions were so large that it would have dwarfed every other structure in Berlin, including those on the north-south axis itself. The oculus of the building's dome, in diameter, would have accommodated the entire rotunda of Hadrian's Pantheon and the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. The dome of the Volkshalle was to rise from a massive granite podium and high, to a total inclusive height of . The diameter of the dome, , was to be exceeded, much to Speer's annoyance, by the diameter of Giesler's new domed railway station at the east end of Munich's east-west axis. It was to be greater in diameter than Speer's Volkshalle.Giesler 177.
The resemblance of the Volkshalle to the Pantheon is far more obvious when their interiors are compared. The large niche at the north end of the Volkshalle was to be surfaced with gold mosaic and to enclose an eagle high, beneath which was situated Hitler's tribunal. From here he would address 180,000 listeners, some standing in the central round arena, others seated in three concentric tiers of seats crowned by one hundred marble pillars, high, which rose to meet the base of the coffer suspended from steel girders sheathed on the exterior with copper.Speer, Erinnerungen, 168.
The three concentric tiers of seats enclosing a circular arena in diameter owe nothing to the Pantheon but resemble the seating arrangements in Ludwig Ruff's Congress Hall at Nuremberg, which was modeled on the Colosseum.Scobie 80. Other features of the Volkshalle
The temple-like nature of the domed building was noted by Speer, who surmised that the building was ultimately intended for public worship of Hitler, his successors and the German Reich, that is, it was to be a dynastic temple/palace complex of the kind Augustus built on the Palatine Hill, where his modest house was connected to the temple of Apollo.Speer, Erinnerungen, 56.
Hitler's aspirations to hegemony over Europe and the establishment of the New Order, already evident from architectural and decorative features of the new Chancellery, are even more clearly expressed here. External symbols suggest that the domed hall was where Hitler as (Herr der Welt) would appear before his : On top of the dome's lantern was the German heraldic eagle clutching the globe of the Earth ( Erdball). This symbolism was well known in imperial Roman iconography, for example, the restored statue of Claudius holding a ball and eagle in his right hand. The vast dome, on which it rested, as with Hadrian's Pantheon, symbolically represented the vault of the sky spanning Germany's empire. The globe on the dome's lantern was enhanced and emphasised by two monumental sculptures by Breker, each 15 metres high, which flanked the north façade of the building: at its west end Atlas supporting the heavens, at its east end Tellus supporting the Earth. Both mythological figures were chosen by Hitler himself. Giesler says that Speer was wrong to represent the Volkshalle as a symbol of World Domination ( Weltherrschaft). Speer in his Playboy magazine interview states:
Nevertheless, Giesler remarked that Hitler never made plans for world domination and that to suggest as much is not only nonsense ( Unsinn) but 'Speer Rubbish' ( Speerlicher Quatsch).
The Volkshalle appears in the alternate history novel In the Presence of Mine Enemies by Harry Turtledove, being used for the lying in state for the deceased Führer, Kurt Haldweim.
The Volkshalle
Computer-generated imagery is used to depict the Volkshalle in an alternate history Berlin in the TV production of The Man in the High Castle. Multiple scenes in seasons two to four take place inside various parts of the Volkshalle. Unlike most other depictions of the Volkshalle, it was shown to have housed the Führer
In the final scene of the video work Malka Germania by Yael Bartana, a computer generated model of the Volkshalle emerges from Lake Wannsee.
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