Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

Hitler at Home is a very good book about a very evil man. Despina Stratigakos’s 383-page tome explores three dwellings renovated by German chancellor and leader of the Nazi party Adolf Hitler in the mid-1930s: the Old Chancellery in Berlin, an apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, a mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg in Bavaria. The argument of the book is that amid the international rise of celebrity culture and the house museum, domestic architecture served as a powerful tool of propaganda that shaped Hitler’s rise to power.

The book is divided in two major parts. The five chapters in part 1 look at Hitler’s domestic architecture and the career of his chief designer, Gerdy Troost; the six chapters in part 2 center on the reception and eventual fate of Hitler’s homes, focusing on Munich and Obersalzberg. While part 1 might be described as straight-up architectural history, part 2 explores the complicated, little-studied afterlife of buildings where horrific things have occurred, in this case the planning for the execution of millions of Jews and others, and the devastation wrought by World War II. Not surprisingly, the book elicits strong emotional responses.

A distinctive feature of Stratigakos’s book is the operation of gender. For Hitler a woman’s role was in the home, taking care of her husband and children, despite the fact that he was a bachelor most of his life (he married his longtime lover Eva Braun forty hours before they both committed suicide in 1945) and had no children. Hitler also did little to promote women within the Third Reich. Given his conservative view of women, it is thus both unexpected and delightful that the first book to look at Hitler’s home life is a feminist analysis.

Four specific feminist-inspired methodologies stand out. First, Stratigakos focuses on a woman: Hitler’s designer. Best known as a scholar of women architects, Stratigakos gets at Hitler’s trio of home-renovation projects through the archives of his interior designer, Gerdy Troost, who, following the death of her architect-husband Paul in early 1934, took over Atelier Troost. Second, Stratigakos relies heavily on floor plans and furniture arrangements as windows onto how Hitler saw himself. This emphasis on interiors, interior views, room use, adjacencies, and furniture arrangements, in my opinion, has been a technique used particularly effectively [End Page 130] by feminist historians to analyze women’s agency in shaping domestic space. Using it to look at a powerful man is brilliant. The third feminist methodology is the focus on renovation, which has long been associated with women’s roles in making the built environment. Before-and-after photographs of room interiors are masterfully analyzed by Stratigakos to show how Troost tweaked room sizes, orientation, views, and decoration to flatter her notorious client. The fourth feminist method is the wide array of nonbuilt sources Stratigakos engages to get at the reception of the houses, including financial invoices, memoirs of those who visited the houses, published photography books, popular magazines, and even political cartoons. These sources have been central to feminist analyses of buildings, which rely on reception to a larger extent than does traditional architectural history.

The houses are presented chronologically, starting with the Old Chancellery. Although the least significant of the three abodes, its “dramatic interior vista” (32), the hanging of large narrative tapestries, and a general decluttering of the arrangements set the tone for all three projects, according to Stratigakos. Hitler had originally considered the building, which was the official residence of the German chancellor since 1871, too shabby to inhabit. The juxtaposition in the renovation of grand public spaces and intimate, homey ones, Stratigakos argues, shows how Hitler’s ego held the place together: “The apparent disjointedness at the level of design may not have bothered a client like Hitler, who believed that he himself was the integrating factor” (35).

In his luxurious, strategically placed Munich apartment, the most private of the three homes, Troost opened up, refurnished, and reorganized the layout, which dated from the building’s construction in 1907–8. Hitler famously allowed the renovated apartment to be photographed for the visit of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 during a private meeting to negotiate the fateful Munich Accord. In one of my favorite parts of the book, Stratigakos shows how the most iconic of the published photographs framed the Führer—who performed poorly as a student—as “a man steeped in Europe’s highest cultural values” (66). Occupying the center of the image, Hitler sits below a nineteenth-century German painting; Chamberlain is shown with the backdrop of Hitler’s home library; and carefully chosen art objects, possibly including Richard Wagner’s death mask, are in the foreground. Hitler clearly staged the photograph, as he staged his architecture. The Munich apartment played another significant role in the political narrative: as the setting in which Nazi party officials suddenly became interested in Hitler’s private life. On September 18, 1931, Geli Raubal, Hitler’s twenty-three-year-old niece, committed suicide there. The sensational press coverage, including speculation on Hitler’s relationship with her, convinced the party to reverse its position and expose Hitler’s private life for the first time, broadcasting images of him at home as gentle and loving, surrounded by children and dogs.

The residence most closely associated with Nazi party planning was the infamous mountain house, on which Atelier Troost worked in 1935. The renovation’s signature feature was a monumental forty-two-foot-by- seventy-four-foot reception room with a walk-in fireplace, which was where Stratigakos claims Hitler “pioneered the work-from-home movement” (79). Hitler liked a good panorama, and this room held “the largest piece of glass ever made” (81), which could magically disappear into the floor (like a car window), providing an uninterrupted view of Mount Untersberg. Even where no panoramas were available, the Troost studio arranged furniture to simulate a broad, roaming view. This love of panoramas even determined the scale of furniture, including extra-long sofas and huge tables, on which Hitler would lay maps in order to gaze down on vast territories. Screens, canvases, projections, a famous globe, and the monstrous window were all part of his “reverential form of looking” (83).

Frankly, reading the first half of the book is a voyeuristic experience and brings with it all the complicated feelings one might expect. On the one hand, was I actually enjoying a book about Hitler? On the other, I felt sick as I absorbed the seemingly “normal” ways this terrible man lived. Then, everything changes in part 2, as the author documents the 180-degree turnabout in the meanings of Hitler’s houses as his true plans for Europe came to light. Here, Stratigakos charts a series of key magazine and newspaper pieces in Britain and the United States where the admiration for Hitler’s domestic spaces changed to gentle mocking and sarcasm and finally to complete disdain. I felt better.

On April 25, 1945, “Hitler’s lair” was bombed in a spectacular show of force. This was followed by epic looting, resulting in Hitler’s domestic artifacts being spread around the world. In an especially haunting part of the book, Stratigakos presents accounts and photographs of those who visited these ruined sites. Particularly compelling are the photographs taken by Lee Miller of Hitler’s Munich apartment published in British Vogue, including a shot of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub surrounded by his stuff. Miller also visited Braun’s nearby villa, where the photographer slept in Braun’s bed. By this point in the book, Stratigakos has completely flipped the meaning of these ordinary places for readers, echoing the ways the public eventually received media images of Hitler’s homes: “Before the war, Germans and non-German audiences alike had been drawn to the seeming similarity between their modest lives and that of the Führer, as depicted by his propagandists. Once he had been exposed as a mass murderer, the familiar became a threat rather than a comfort” (275). The final chapter, which I found psychologically draining to read, is about the “troublesome afterlife” of these buildings, the rise of Hitler tourism, and the continuing global dispersal of his things in private collections.

Hitler at Home belongs on your bookshelf of classic texts on politics and architecture, [End Page 131] especially studies on the relationship of power and space. Needless to say, the book takes on a very disturbing topic, and Stratigakos handles it masterfully. Despite the difficult emotions Hitler at Home arouses, it is a significant contribution to the study of ordinary buildings with regard to things we know that need reinforcing. It shows the power of architecture to seduce millions of people. It shows the capacity of architecture for multiple interpretations. It connects domestic architecture to masculine power. And finally, it uncovers architecture’s unmatched capacity to remember.