Fatal Attraction: Nazi Landscapes, Modernity and Holocaust Memory

Landscapes are in western culture considered as 'art', valuated by scenic qualities represeneted in landscape painting and reproduced in landscape architecture. Working under the fetish of authenticity by singling out aesthetic styles and iconic periods, connoisseurship is still a basic assumption of authorized heritage narratives. Although recent biographical approaches of historical landscapes have opposed this reductionism, the prevailing metaphor of an archaeological layering of time prevents of thorough understanding of the landscape/mindscape nexus. Building on Marvin Samuel's long neglected notion of authorship, this chapter offers a more dynamic perspective by drawing attention to the complex relationship of past motives and present meanings that are too often forgotten and neglected. This is illustrated by the remarkable contras between our attitude to Nazi Germany's 'traditionalist' landscape art and tot its 'modernist' spatial planning and landscaping. Thus, while Hitler's taste is banned from the public sphere and Himmler's Auschwitz has become Europe's iconc heart of darkness, Nazi highways, the VW Beetle car, and 'Nordic' landscapes have lost nothing of their original attraction. Yet the way we domesticate 'foreign' pasts and cultures by transforming them into 'our' common heritage as made us blind for some uneasy continuities of the Third Reich's Ordnungswahn, and its 'nationalization of nature' that confronts us with the uncomfortable possibility that Nazism still 'speaks' to present generations.