{"id":3848,"date":"2022-11-23T20:44:46","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T20:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/?p=3848"},"modified":"2024-01-08T21:08:44","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T21:08:44","slug":"from-prussia-with-love-the-palace-that-got-to-live-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/from-prussia-with-love-the-palace-that-got-to-live-twice\/","title":{"rendered":"From Prussia With Love: The Palace That Got To Live Twice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are some odd places in Germany\u2019s Deep South that are strangely attractive to American tourists. For one, there is the Eagle\u2019s Nest<\/a>, Hitler\u2019s Alpine refuge, which, not too long ago, one of my university colleagues cheerfully described as the high point of his German sightseeing tour; on TripAdvisor<\/a> the Eagle\u2019s Nest gets just as many thumbs-up as Austria\u2019s Sound of Music tour. Growing up in 1970s Germany, I don\u2019t remember anyone using the term “Eagle\u2019s Nest” or Adlerhorst<\/em>, probably because political winds were steadily blowing left and pilgrimage to Nazi remnants wasn\u2019t a thing. Another southern tourist attraction\u2014less creepy but still weird enough\u2014is Bavaria\u2019s fairy tale castle Neuschwanstein<\/a>. A kitsch monster from the 19th<\/sup> century, it was designed by Mad King Ludwig who never, even in his wildest hallucinations, imagined that one day it would be lifted into the corporate logo of the Walt Disney company and become the go-to castle for Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was only recently that northern Germany came up with an answer to these architectural challenges from the south, which is no less Disneyesque than Neuschwanstein and historically at least as unappetizing as the Eagle\u2019s Nest. It\u2019s a replica of the Royal Prussian Palace<\/a> planted in the middle of Berlin, home to Germany\u2019s last kaiser whose madness was far more consequential for world politics than Ludwig\u2019s. Kaiser Wilhelm\u2019s passion was world domination, not building fairy tale castles, and WWI was a direct result of his imperial hubris. In the end the Kaiser\u2019s empire collapsed, but his palace didn\u2019t. It even remained more or less intact through the next world war and another failed attempt at world domination, this time by the owner of the Eagle\u2019s Nest. And yes, this all sounds like the typical plot for 007 movies: supervillains living in fancy hideouts trying to bring the planet under their control. Even the grand finale could have been taken from a James Bond novel: the Kaiser\u2019s palace was spectacularly blown to bits with dynamite like Auric Goldfinger\u2019s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice<\/em>. The palace\u2019s lucky streak was over when it ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in Berlin\u2019s Soviet Sector, where feudal architecture didn\u2019t have many fans. Later, the communists would proudly claim responsibility for the Big Bang that finished off Prussia\u2019s history and its most visible symbol. Once and for all, so they thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

You could argue that predicting history and getting it wrong is what Marxists do. But a sequel to the palace\u2019s story in which the German taxpayer is willing to pay half a billion euros for a tacky remake\u201470 years into the federal republic and with no monarch in sight\u2014would have been even beyond Ian Fleming\u2019s imagination. How did that come about? How could a group of wealthy ultraconservatives<\/a>, some with close ties to Germany\u2019s far right and antisemitic AfD, lead the entire country by the nose and make parliament agree to pay the bill for a palace look-alike that had virtually no artistic merit? With pockets as deep as their minds were shallow, these businessmen were running campaigns in Germany with Trumpian slogans at a time when Donald Trump was still running casinos into the ground. “Let\u2019s make Berlin beautiful again” was one of those slogans. And it caught on. Hard to believe this happened in the same country that, just a few years earlier and a few blocks away, had reserved prime real estate, bigger than three football fields, for its Holocaust Memorial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To top it all off, as a finishing touch the palace received its shiny dome again bearing the exact same inscription as in the 1850s. It\u2019s printed in flashy golden letters on a blue ribbon that runs around the dome\u2019s base and demands that “in the name of Jesus all of them that are in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bow down on their knees.” This made clear that Prussia was a Christian state with its king solely reporting to God and certainly not to his underlings. And to leave no doubt about which faith is the right faith, the dome was topped with a glittering giant cross that sat on a tiny orb and sent yet another message of world domination. This particular piece of roof decoration has been remade from scratch and reinstalled as well. For what? As a nod to American tourists from the Bible Belt? While the glaring resurrection of cross and orb may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists from all around the globe, it keeps sending chills down the spines of Berlin\u2019s Jewish community who, along with many other groups, protested<\/a> against the uncontextualized display of religious supremacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The palace is no longer called the palace. It\u2019s now a public building named the Humboldt Forum<\/a>, which at first didn\u2019t have a real function beyond pretending to be the palace. Then, in another breathtakingly callous move, it was decided that the Forum should house Berlin\u2019s Ethnological Museum. Many of its artifacts and treasures are from the heady days when the Kaiser\u2019s navy was roaming the seas, making landfalls in Africa and Asia, massacring the population and mopping up what other colonial powers had missed. Putting the stolen artwork back in the Kaiser\u2019s palace is like decorating the Eagle\u2019s Nest with Nazi plunder. As a result, curators at the Humboldt Forum have a lot of explaining to do<\/a> right now. There is a good chance that eventually, when claims are settled and things returned to their rightful owners, all that\u2019s left to curate is a Potemkin palace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, should you decide to invest your soaring US dollars into cheap euros during the next travel season, there is nothing wrong with spending them on a trip to Mad King Ludwig\u2019s and Walt Disney\u2019s Neuschwanstein. It is, after all, more than a hundred years old and a real castle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Christian nationalism made\u2014and remade\u2014in Germany: the original palace around 1900 and its doppelganger in 2021. (Top image via Album von Berlin; Globus Verlag, Berlin 1904\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>; bottom image via Dosseman\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is <\/em>schro601@umn.edu<\/em><\/a> and his Twitter handle is <\/em>@HenningSchroed1<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are some odd places in Germany\u2019s Deep South that are strangely attractive to American tourists. For one, there is the Eagle\u2019s Nest, Hitler\u2019s Alpine refuge, which, not too long ago, one of my university colleagues cheerfully described as the high point of his German sightseeing tour; on TripAdvisor the Eagle\u2019s Nest gets just as many thumbs-up as Austria\u2019s Sound […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2081,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96814],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3848"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3859,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3848\/revisions\/3859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/holocaust-genocide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}