Domesticating Hitler - Friday 8 March 2013, 5-6pm



Click here for a blog on this paper by Ruth Harriss, student on Birkbeck's MA History of Art.

The Architecture Space and Society Network is delighted to welcome Dr Despina Stratigakos, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.  

She will be giving a paper entitled:

Domesticating Hitler: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Führer's Private Spaces

Friday 8 March 2013
5-6pm
Birkbeck, Department of History of Art and Screen Media
School of Arts
43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Room 112

All Wellcome. The event is free but places are limited, so please book here 

Dr. Stratigakos will present research for a new book project, Hitler at Home (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2015), which examines the aesthetic and ideological construction of Hitler’s domesticity, focusing on the Berghof on the Obersalzberg and his Munich apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16.  Through the architectural and media creation of these places, the Nazi regime fostered the myth of the private Hitler as peaceable homebody and good neighbour, an image used strategically and effectively within Germany and abroad to distance the Führer from Europe’s violence.  The fabrication of Hitler’s private spaces reveals how the occupant imagined his interiority, how he positioned this self in relation to his public identity, and how intricately and expertly artists and propagandists of the regime interwove these facets into a seductive whole. 


Despina Stratigakos is an architectural historian and specialist in gender and modernity in European cities.  Her book A Women’s Berlin (University of Minnesota Press 2008), explores the conception of a city built by and for women, a place that was imagined and partially realized in the years before the First World War.  The book was awarded the DAAD Book Prize of the German Studies Association and the Milka Bliznakov Prize from Virginia Tech.