Troost, Gerdy (ed.)

Das Bauen im neuen Reich.

Bayreuth, Gauverlag 1942 (”38 bis 49 Tausend”), 1943 (”12 bis 22 Tausend”).

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Full Description

These handsome illustrated volumes, edited by Gerdy Troost, widow of Adolf Hitler’s favoured architect Paul Troost, provide good visual images both of the high spots of the National Socialist regime’s official architecture and of more ordinary recent domestic buildings built in traditional German styles that were likely to appeal to Hitler and his leading colleagues. As such, the volumes convey the overall character of the architecture favoured under the Third Reich more effectively than most other publications, and it is unsurprising that the first volume, originally published in 1938, had impressive sales until well into the 1939-45 war (our present copy is of the fifth edition, 1942). The second volume, published midway through the war, was also produced in substantial quantities, but is less common in the book trade today, maybe because some of the stock of it perished in the war’s later stages. It is worth observing that while the first volume starts off with impressive images of recent public buildings designed by Paul Troost, Albert Speer and other favoured regime architects, the second volume begins with rather more sombre images of as yet unexecuted designs for war memorials and for cemetery architecture by Wilhelm Kreis, a respected architect active from the pre-1914 period onwards who had somehow managed to swallow the National Socialist ideology.