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The Volkshalle (“People's Hall”), also called Große Halle (“Great Hall”) or Ruhmeshalle (“Hall of...

The Volkshalle (“People's Hall”), also called Große Halle (“Great Hall”) or Ruhmeshalle (“Hall of Fame”), was a huge monumental building planned, but never built, by Adolf Hitler and his architect Albert Speer. The word Volk had a particular resonance in Nazi thinking. The term völkisch movement, which has no exact English equivalent but can be translated into “the folkish movement”, derives from Volk but also implies an otherworldly and eternal essence. Before the First World War, völkisch thought had developed an attitude to the arts as the German Volk; that is, from an organically linked Aryan or Nordic community (Gemeinschaft), racially unpolluted and with its roots in the German soil. Just as Augustus's house on the Palatine was connected to the temple of Apollo, so Hitler's palace was to have been connected by a cryptoporticus to the Volkshalle, which filled the entire north side of the forum. This truly enormous building was, according to Albert Speer, inspired by Hadrian's Pantheon, which Hitler visited privately on May 7, 1938. But Hitler's interest in and admiration for the Pantheon predated this visit, since his sketch of the Volkshalle dates from about 1925. Hermann