UC San Diego

This dissertation examines how Nazi officials, bureaucrats, city planners, architects, and ordinary Germans envisioned and redesigned space (from entire cityscapes down to specific neighborhoods, streets, and buildings) to fit their worldviews between 1933 and 1945. I term this process the “coordination of space” and draw from human geography and urban theory to write a cultural history of space and a social history of spatial practices in Nazi Germany. Nazi interactions with space were directly influenced by the belief that Jews had “infected” Germany in the modern era and that “Judeo-Bolshevism” represented an existential threat to the German nation. Therefore, the regime confiscated, destroyed, or repurposed sites associated with political bolshevism and cultural bolshevism. This destruction was followed by active construction which refashioned cityscapes to physically and symbolically align with Nazi ideology. In the public sphere, Nazi ideology proved unyielding. Authorities demanded visible conformity from “Volksgenossen” during public rituals and ceremonies.

Elsewhere, Nazi ideology was surprisingly flexible in practice. Instead of being physically altered, some spaces were rhetorically coordinated, or reexplained, to align with Nazi ideology. This was true in the case of modern architecture, which had a long afterlife in the Third Reich. Furthermore, the semipublic sphere evinced plasticity as well. “Racially fit” nonconformists (such as Communists, Socialists, and homosexuals) were able to maintain access to semipublic spaces, such as bars and cafes, if they outwardly conformed in the public sphere. The inclusion of these groups in the national community was increasingly predicated on the exclusion of German Jews. Indeed, only in the case of German Jews was Nazi ideology rigid at all times. In the end, Nazi efforts to coordinate and “Germanize” spaces could only be realized via the wholesale exclusion and eradication of Jews from Germany. In short, I maintain that Nazism should be understood as a spatial project that sought to make German judenrein (clean of Jews). These practiced methods of cleansing spaces were important antecedents to similar, more systematic measures, unleashed on Central and Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust.