Research

  • Hitler at Home
  • GRANTEE
    Despina Stratigakos
    GRANT YEAR
    2010

This book project examines the aesthetic and ideological construction of Hitler's domesticity, focusing on his two private residences, 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 neighbor, an image used strategically and effectively within Germany and abroad to distance the Führer from Europe's increasing violence. Moreover, this image helped to dispel any suspicions raised by the Führer's bachelor status that may have threatened the Nazi cult of domesticity. Largely ignored by historians as politically or architecturally insignificant, 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 with an overarching interest in gender and modernity in European cities. Her account of a forgotten female metropolis A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008), was awarded the German Studies Association Book Prize and the Milka Bliznakov Prize from Virginia Tech. Stratigakos has also published widely on issues of diversity in architecture and, in 2007 ,curated an exhibition on Architect Barbie that focused attention on gendered stereotypes within the architectural profession. Stratigakos is a director of the Society of Architectural Historians, a former advisor of the International Archive of Women in Architecture, and a founding member of the Architecture and Design Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to increase diversity in architecture. She received her PhD from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo.