Legacy of a Nazi ideologue: Schultze-Naumburg is detoxified

WWhen he drives into the little village of Saaleck, all he sees, apart from the blinds drawn and the streets are deserted, is a large poster calling for protests against the construction of a new road bridge through the Saale valley. Concern about “environmental destruction and the disharmony of modernity” had also plagued the most famous citizen of the town, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, a hundred years ago: The triumph of technology shows “that the life that has been made so immensely easier on the disfigured earth is no longer worth living is that while we grabbed everything our planet had to give, in the process of digging, we destroyed it and with it ourselves.”

Calling Schultze-Naumburg the most radical architect of National Socialism, as is sometimes done, is both an understatement and an exaggeration. On the one hand, the artist from Naumburg was a drooling anti-Semite and propagandist of Nazi racial theory, on the other hand he rejected the imperious, exaggerated Nazi architecture and spent his life striving for a new vernacular architecture, which would have been called “völkisch” at the time and which today is under seems to fit the buzzword “regional building” back into the times. With more than a hundred essays and completed buildings at a time, Schultze-Naumburg was one of the most prolific architects of his time, both in theory and in practice.

Minimally invasive architecture

The interesting ambiguity in Schultze-Naumburg’s work is the legacy that the newly founded Design Academy Saaleck with the clever short name “dieDAS” has to deal with. The prerequisites for success are good and bad at the same time: on the one hand, the “Academy for Designers in Crafts, Designers, Architects and Entrepreneurs”, which is currently being set up, has a fantastic location in a “bucolic-perfect landscape”, like the head of the academy , the Hamburg cultural scientist and monument conservator Arne Wasmuth, calls it. Ten million euros in tax money for the renovation of the complex built by Schultze-Naumburg with a villa, workshops and other outbuildings were approved, and there is no longer a lack of a concept for a careful redesign since the Danish architect Dorte Mandrup submitted her sensitive plan to a selection prevailed. Your design will be implemented over the next few years in cooperation with Arc Architects from Magdeburg.

The foundation of the Berlin art collector and patron Egidio Marzona acquired the ensemble in 2018, but no foundation assets are available beyond that. Marzona was not afraid of the uncomfortable monument, which he wants to make “a place of freedom, alertness and boundlessness”. It is fitting that Mandrup sees its architecture as a “change agent”, i.e. as a carrier of change. In the case of the ensemble below Saaleck Castle in the farthest corner of Saxony-Anhalt, this is no small requirement given the history. The exhibition on the life and work of Schultze-Naumburg is being set up in the former chicken coop, which opens onto the garden with a glass and wood façade.