Et spyd gennem myterne? Om at fortælle i arkitektur og udstilling om de nazistiske partidage i Nürnberg

“A ‘spear’ of glass and steel bores through the voluminous brick-walls and breaks the axiality” – this is the drastic description by the Austrian deconstructivist architect Günther Domenig of the main element of his eminent transformation of an unfinished Nazi congress hall to house a documentation centre and an exhibition about the huge Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg through the 1930s. The very exhibition, however – Faszination und Gewalt, which opened in 2001 – does not manage to fulfil its declared aim: “To throw a critical light onto the showcase of ‘The Third Reich’.” Why not? Maybe because the curators were so anxious that visitors might get seduced by seeing Nazi propaganda that they foregrounded the horrors that followed after the rallies (the Holocaust and the world war) instead of showing their downside while they were going on. And maybe because they were unable to free themselves from the image of the 1934 rally in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda “documentary” Triumph des Willens.