Urfahr Bridgehead & Ars Electronica Center, the Unbuilt Gau Forum
The northern end of the Nibelungenbrücke, where Hitler's architects planned a Gau festival hall for 30,000, a parade ground for 100,000 and a 162 metre bell tower with a crypt for his parents. Today a glass museum of the future and the city's town hall stand on the ground reserved for that monument.
About this place
Cross the Nibelungenbrücke and you arrive on the Urfahr bank, the site that was to become the ceremonial heart of the Führerstadt. In 1942 Hitler entrusted this left bank of the Danube to the Munich architect Hermann Giesler, who planned a representative building for Gauleiter August Eigruber at the bridge, a 450 metre Gau complex with a festival hall for 30,000 people, a parade ground for 100,000 reached by a grand staircase lined with Nibelung figures, and a bell tower 162 metres high, deliberately taller than St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, whose vaults were to receive the remains of Hitler's parents. Old Urfahr would have been demolished for it. Nothing was built; the granite quarried for the Führerstadt came from the concentration camps at Mauthausen and Gusen, and in February 1945 Hitler was still staring at Giesler's plaster model in the cellars of the Reich Chancellery. The void was later filled by very different ideas: the New Town Hall by Rupert Falkner and Anton Fürtler opened here in 1985, and the Ars Electronica Center, founded in 1996 and rebuilt for the Capital of Culture year 2009, now glows with 38,500 LEDs on the plot once reserved for a Gauleiter's palace.
Key facts
- 162 metres — Planned height of the Gau bell tower, taller than St Stephen's in Vienna but one metre below Ulm Minster
- 100000 people — Capacity of the parade ground Giesler planned on this bank, in front of a festival hall for 30,000
- 38500 LEDs — Light the facade of the Ars Electronica Center, rebuilt for the Capital of Culture year 2009
📍 AEC-Platz, 4040, Linz