Not since Berlin 1936 has the Olympic Games been so politicised. Nina Khrushcheva (yes, Nikita's grand-daughter, based in New York) writes about the People's Republic of China's "Triumph of the Will" in the Taipei Times (via the Marmot):
When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins in a few days, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch. Of course, images that recall Hitler’s goose-stepping storm troopers are the last thing that China’s leaders have in mind for their Olympics; after all, official Chinese nationalism proclaims the country’s “peaceful rise” within an idyll of “harmonious development.” But, both aesthetically and politically, the parallel is hardly far-fetched.
Indeed, by choosing Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing Games, China’s government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China’s leaders have sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible proof of their fitness and mandate to rule.
Speer’s commission was to lay out a master plan for the access to the Olympic complex in Beijing. His design centered on the construction of an imposing avenue to connect the Forbidden City and the National Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place. His father’s plan for “Germania,” the name Adolf Hitler selected for the Berlin that he planned to construct after World War II, also relied on such a mighty central axis.
China’s rulers see the Olympics as a stage for demonstrating to the world the exceptional vitality of the country they have built over the past three decades. And that demonstration serves an even more important domestic political objective: further legitimizing the regime’s continuing rule in the eyes of ordinary Chinese.
Given this imperative, an architectural language of bombast and gigantism was almost inevitable. [...]
Totalitarian regimes — the Nazis, the Soviets in 1980 and now the Chinese — desire to host the Olympics as a way to signal to the world their superiority. China believes that it has found its own model to develop and modernize, and its rulers regard the Games in the same way as the Nazis and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev did, as a means of “selling” their model to a global audience.
Obviously, the Chinese were politically tone-deaf in choosing an architect whose name carried such dark historical connotations. The name of Speer itself probably did not matter to the officials who chose him. They sought to stage an Olympics that made manifest their image of themselves, and Speer, looking back to his father’s mastery of the architecture of power, delivered the goods.
The realization of Speer’s Olympic vision, and that of his patrons, marks the end of a welcome interlude. For years following the end of the Cold War, politics had been removed from the Games. A gold medal signified the sporting abilities and dedication of individual athletes, not the supposed merits of the political system that produced them.
But now we have returned to an aesthetic of political mesmerization, reflected in the host government’s declared aim that China should win more gold medals than any country before.
As the Olympic torch relay — itself a creation of the Nazis, first employed in the Berlin Games — makes its way down Speer’s avenue of power, the world will once again be made to witness a triumph of the totalitarian will.
I wasn't aware of the Speer connection. Here's a Times article from last year on Speer Junior's role in the Beijing Olympic plans:
Beijing’s radical reconstruction has been described as totalitarian architecture, similar to Speer the elder’s grandiose but unfulfilled plans.
The most distinctive feature of Speer Jr’s blueprint has been a central five-mile strip, running from a new railway station in the south of the capital past Tianan-men Square and the Forbidden City to the new Olympic Green.
The strip is known as the “central north-south axis” and is still under construction by armies of migrant workers working around the clock.
Critics have suggested an uncanny parallel between Speer’s Beijing axis and the three-mile north-south axis, also flanked by train stations, that was planned by his father for Hitler’s new Berlin.
The central north-south axis in Beijing has existed for several hundred years and construction on it has to do with feng shui, not Nazism. As for Speer Jr., he is a well-regarded architect with many international works to his credit. He deserves better than to have his family background harped on by idiots who enjoy the "uncanny parallels" they construct.
Posted by: little sister | August 10, 2008 at 01:36 AM