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Languages of Power. Unhappily, the New York Cultural Center has presented Hitler's architecture as if it were unique to Nazism—the swollen granite children of one mad brain. This is the stock liberal ploy of separating Hitler from history for fear of contaminating history itself. In fact, the grandiosity of his architectural fantasy belongs to a whole tradition of visionary architecture, which encompasses idealist architects like the 18th century Frenchmen Boullée and Ledoux as well as the great Italian engraver Piranesi, who saw grandeur in prisons, glory in ruins. (In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer notes that Hitler took into account how his edifices might look as ruins a thousand years later.) And a debased 18th century neoclassicism, in fact, has long been the universal language of political power from Leningrad to Paris—and even Washington.
Hitler's uniqueness lay in the monstrous size and paranoid consistency of his dreams. By wedding neoclassicism to his Kampf, he killed the style for good. Dictators (and even democrats) of the future will need to find another.