Free When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C. Rosbottom

capital.
    Hitler had not spent much time in Berlin before his appointment as chancellor; the two major Germanic cities he knew best were Munich and Vienna. The latter held a complexly nostalgic place in the Führer’s mind. He had spent his formative years there as an aspiring artist, but poverty and rejection had left less pleasant memories. His fraught relationship with the capital city of his native Austria can give us another window into his general attitude toward cities. On March 18, 1938, two years before he would sneak into Paris, Hitler arrived in a motorcade before rapturous Viennese: “Many hundreds of thousands were on their way to hear him. Streets are dipped in a frenzy of color. The Heldenplatz could not hold the masses.… Sieg Heil shouts storm across the square, many thousands of arms are raised in the German salute.” 35
    Vienna was the best-known metropolis swallowed by the Third Reich before Paris, to which it was often compared, and in his oration to the crowd, Hitler referred to it as the Reich’s second city. The Austrians, for the most part and at first, were ecstatic, and showed their enthusiasm about the Anschluss (the political union of Germany and Austria in 1938, forming the greater Reich) through many violent acts against Jews, Socialists, and Communists both preceding and duringthe union. However, what followed after the annexation was a transparent, brutal Aryanization (the ejection of Jewish business owners and their removal from teaching and other professions) of Hitler’s “pearl” city, an attempt to make it into a cultural beacon for the entire Third Reich. Not long after, these two goals—making Vienna a free-spirited sister to Paris as well as a stepsister of the Reich’s capital—came into conflict, and, sooner rather than later, Vienna increasingly became a problem for the Berlin government, a site of tough and tenacious resistance to the Nazi regime. It began to promote itself as the “first” cultural city of the Reich, and the previously delirious Viennese Nazis were soon impatient with rule from Berlin. “I can’t afford to have a mutinous large city at the southeast corner of the Reich,” Hitler supposedly told Baldur von Schirach, his choice for
gauleiter
and
reichsstatthalter
(boss) of Vienna. 36 The Austrian capital would remain a problem, so Hitler’s attention focused on the much smaller Linz, his Austrian birthplace, as a “counter-Vienna,” one he would rebuild along the lines of Berlin and Paris. Indeed, Hitler’s reaction to the Occupation of Paris, both his joy and his anxiety, may well have been influenced by his frustrations with a persistently querulous Vienna.
    In general, the Germans sought to appropriate and then to fix Paris in a time that was embedded in the collective memory of the cosmopolitan world. In so doing, they hoped to slow down the unpredictable energy that defines metropolises and thus to provide more security for themselves and their motives. Cities were too porous, too difficult to control. The author of
Mein Kampf
wrote in the mid-1920s that “the meaning and purpose of revolutions is not to tear down the whole building, but to remove what is bad or unsuitable and to continue building on the same spot that has been laid bare.” 37 Using an architectural metaphor, he is speaking of ideas; but the Nazi anxiety would translate into a desire to “cleanse” cities as well as minds, just as they were “cleansing” through ethnic removal. Continued Hitler:
    How truly deplorable the relation between state buildings and private buildings has become today! If the fate of [imperial] Rome should strike Berlin, future generations would some day admirethe department stores of a few Jews as the mightiest works of our era and [the large buildings] of a few corporations as the characteristic expression of the culture of our times. Just compare the miserable discrepancy prevailing in [even a city like Berlin] between the structures of Reich