Made for the façade of Haus Atlantis in Bremen, Germany, 1931. It depicts the "Savior of Atlantis," combining attributes of Jesus and Odin. Destroyed by bombing in 1944. Most of the rest of the house survived and after the war the façade was rebuilt to look as un-Nazi as they could imagine.
The Atlantis House (German: Haus Atlantis) on Böttcherstraße
The building was the second designed by Bernhardt Hoetger (1929–31) for Böttcherstrasse on the basis of ideas from Ludwig Roselius, the prosperous coffee entrepreneur, and Herman Wirth, the Nazi ethnographer specializing in German ancestral heritage. Roselius was impressed by Wirth's belief that Atlantis, now sunk in the North Sea, was originally inhabited by Germanics who took their culture and civilization to Egypt and Mesopotamia, making the Germans the oldest race on earth. Constructed as a demonstratively modern Art Deco building of glass, wood and ferro-concrete, it was therefore structured specifically to house an institute for the study of Atlantis with a lecture theatre, reading room, club rooms (for members of Roselius' Club zu Bremen) and exhibition space. The Atlantis building has been described as the "bizarre centre" of Roselius's architectural investment in Böttcherstraße.
The facade which was rebuilt after the war was originally rasterized right up to the roof with steel supports. The visible framework was accompanied by one of Hoetger's monumental carved wooden features above the entrance representing the Tree of Life (Lebensbaum). It formed an archaized image of the Wheel of the Year, a cross and the solar disc, symbolically representing the origin of life from the start of the year, in other words the beginnings of humanity. Hanging on the cross was the strange figure of the "Altlantis saviour", combining the image of the crucified Christ with the pagan Odin. Barbara Goette was the closest collaborator of Ludwig Roselius and she risked her life when she wrote a philosophical tract on Hoetger's Tree of Life which was attached to the façade of the Atlantis House. The Lebensbaum, which was violently criticized by the Nazis, was destroyed by fire during the war. In 1954, the feature was temporarily replaced by Max Säume and Günther Hafemann with a facade displaying an abstract representation of celestial bodies but this was subsequently hidden by a closed, concentrically ornamented brick wall completed by Ewald Mataré in 1965.
The Troubled History of Atlantis House in Bremen, Germany
Haus Atlantis
