EXCURSION on July 7, 2023 to the Information Center Schwerbelastungskörper tour guided by Paul Kurek and the Dept. of Education, Culture and Social Affairs of Berlin’s District Tempelhof-Schöneberg.

On July 7th, Berlin Program Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-2023) Paul Kurek (Germanic Languages and Literatures, UCLA 2021) and two tour guides - Vincent and Dora - from the Museen Tempelhof-Schöneberg took the participants of the 2023 Summer Workshop: Crisis and Transformation to the research site of his book "Heavy Load-Bearing Modernity: A Cultural Geology of Albert Speer's Berlin/Germania", the so-called heavy load-bearing cylinder. The structure was a geotechnical test-load left behind by the National Socialist Regime in Berlin-Tempelhof in 1941. The massive ferroconcrete cylinder stands at 46 feet/14 meters tall, 59 feet/18 meters deep, has a diameter of 69 feet/21 meters, and weighs over 12,650 tons, which is more than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Statue of Liberty in New York, and the Christ the Redeemer Statue in Rio de Janeiro—combined. It even outweighs the heaviest structure ever built, the Cheops pyramid, in terms of soil pressure. Here, Hitler's favored architect, Albert Speer, tested how much weight Berlin's soil can take to prepare for the erection of history's largest Triumphal Arch in the context of his plans to transform Berlin into the neoclassical capital of the world, Germania. Speer’s supersized Germania plans capitalized on forced labor, appropriation, deportation, and large-scale demolition; and they were deeply tied into the network of concentration camps that were to provide the vast human and material resources necessary to build on such a superhistorical scale: enormous masses of laborers, bricks, concrete, steel, and natural stones. The participants of the excursion explored the site and engaged in a conversation about the proximity of technological progress and societal regression, the ties of fascist building megalomania and concentration camps, and how the heterogeneity of Berlin's soil contradicts fascist fantasies of blood and soil homogeneity.

Link Germania: https://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/en/myth-of-germania/permanent-exhibition.html  

Link Schwerbelastungskörper: https://www.schwerbelastungskoerper.de/the-information-center.html 

Report by Paul D Kurek, Ph.D. | Germanic Languages | University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) I Urban Humanities Initiative