From Donald Trump’s gold-plated triumphal arch and Viktor Orbán’s National Hauszmann Program back to Adolf Hitler’s plans for Germania, authoritarian rulers have long attempted to reconstruct a glorious past to help sustain a grandiose future. Monumental architecture, infrastructures of control, and spatial practices such as drills and rallies help consolidate these visions, holding memory and myth-making in place, and cementing narratives of national greatness through time. In this talk, Katharyne Mitchell examines the spatial history of one particular site, Tempelhof Field in Berlin, to probe how these visions and practices both succeed and fail, and how they may be implicated in our present moment. The name “Tempelhof” derives from its use as the headquarters of the Knights Templar, a crusading medieval order. This military history reverberated in the Prussian era, when the site served as a military parade ground, prison, and barracks. It continued through the 1930s and 1940s, when the space served as a Nazi rally site, monumental airport, “gateway to Europe,” and forced labor camp. On this site, the spaces of the past have affected the present in every historical fold. Today, the airport hangars and field at Tempelhof accommodate thousands of asylum seekers in substandard conditions, the future development of the field is bitterly contested, and the far-right AfD is on the rise in the city, largely on an anti-immigrant platform. In the current conjuncture, can the spatial histories of authoritarian haunting grounds illuminate the present?