Today, with our good friends Hary and Christina, we took a sightseeing tour to Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s Eagle Next. We’ve avoided sightseeing tours for obvious reasons, but for this trip I was looking as much for the tourists as the site. Who goes to the Eagle’s Nest, and why? I didn’t find what I thought I would find.
First, there were a lot more German speaking tourists on the bus—which was billed as an English language tour—than I expected. Maybe also more than the tour guide expected, because when he asked if there were German speakers aboard and many people raised their hands, his first response was “why?” Second, there were only a few people at the site—and none on our bus—sporting the thinly veiled iconography I’ve come to associate with people who want to be associated with, but not brought up on legal charges for identifying as, a Nazi in the German speaking world. Mostly, people were just touristing.
And mostly, they ignored the building in favor of the mountains and the beer garden.
The thing is, the building itself isn’t that impressive except as an architectural feat. In spite of its name (Eagle’s Nest is just its nickname), Kehlsteinhaus, it isn’t a house, but a kind of conference center at which Hitler very occasionally held meetings. (He was only there fourteen times; apparently, he had a fear of heights.) Here is the layout as it currently stands:
Only about half is accessible to the public (the kitchen is a working kitchen, for instance, so you can’t go in there), and it takes maybe 15 minutes to walk through if you’re looking around carefully. As the saying goes, there isn’t much there there.
And it seemed as if most of the other tourists were, in fact, there for the access to the mountain peak, at least during our visit. (We’ve been told that there is a brisk “Hitler Tourism” trade, but that we’re too early to have encountered it, and also nobody is sure if it will recover from Covid, when tourist numbers fell by 75% when the Eagle’s Nest reopened.)
Maybe it’s an amazing public park, with fairly easy access to an Alpine mountain peak at a significant altitude that just happens to also house the very-occasional conference center of one of histories most evil men? And maybe that’s terrible, or maybe it’s wonderful. I honestly don’t know, and I can convince myself of either (as I have in the hours since we’ve returned.) Unlike Mauthausen, it’s not the site of a great crime, just the site of the planning of great crimes. And it’s a little silly, in all it’s ostentatiousness. So maybe it’s good that it’s been largely relegated to being the entrance to, and bathroom for, a park with a large beer garden? I think this is true if, like most of the tourists we saw today, people seem to be genuinely coming for the mountains. I mean, “pubic restroom at a tourist destination” seems like a pretty good fate for it, if I’m honest.
But what if we’d arrived during the height of the Hitler Tourism season? What if instead of only a few, we’d been surrounded by people wearing Nazi-adjacent symbols and getting drunk on the patio? Then, obviously, it would be horrifying.
I suspect whether or not you find, when you visit, a mountain park or a place of Nazi fetishism has a lot to do with when you go. In the end, I’m glad we got there during a park moment.
"The banality of evil" is something that vexes humans to no end. We need "evil" to be larger than life, as well as grotesque, in order to get our heads around the horrors human beings afflict on each other. The serial killer often goes unnoticed because he isn't running around the neighborhood in a hockey mask carrying a machete. Instead, he is seen as "a quiet young man who kept to himself." In other words, "Move along folks, there's nothing of interest here." The same was largely true with the Third Reich and the Nazis. While there were a number of freak-show worthy people, the vast majority were "normal" (read, banal).
When confronted with the evil's banality, our minds short-circuit. We need Kehlsteinhaus to be high Gothic, with thunder and lightning and organ music in the background, filled with the grotesque. But it's not. It's not. Instead we see a conference room, not unlike any other conference room in any other part of the word, and we then wonder about what they are planning in these "normal" conference rooms.
Thanks for the photos and report. What is Hitler Tourism season? Do the Nazis only come out at certain times?