in front of the staircase to see two Ionic temples following the golden ratio, and, coming through these temples, to enter a courtyard proportioned to the golden ratio. The well-known political and cultural antagonism between Pergamon and Alexandria, the city where Euclid was active and defined his geometrical proposition of the extreme and mean ratio, could have contributed to the rapid spread of this proposition to Pergamon, a city already open to new achievements in science, sculpture, architecture and politics. Reception The German Empire, which subsidized the excavation not least for reasons of prestige, quickly began to monopolize the altar and other archaeological relics. The "Jubilee Exhibition of the Berlin Academy of Arts" in May and June 1886 devoted a 13,000 square meter site to archaeological acquisitions from recent excavations in Olympia and Pergamon. But since the Greek government had not given permission to export art treasures, no finds from Greece could be shown there. Instead, a "Temple of Pergamon" was constructed. With a true-to-scale model of the western side of the altar base containing selected copies of the frieze—including the Zeus and Athena group from the eastern frieze—an entrance area for a building was erected which resembled the Zeus temple in Olympia. Part of the exhibit was a model of the city of Pergamon in the 2nd century AD reflecting the state of knowledge at that time. Possibly the most striking example of the reception of this work of art is the Berlin museum which has on view a reconstruction of the altar. The design of the Pergamon Museum was inspired by the gigantic form of the altar. For viewing the altar, indeed for studying this work of art in itself, the reconstruction in the Pergamon Museum came to be important. The partial reconstruction of the edifice does not however reflect what was the main side in antiquity, the eastern wall, but rather the opposite, western side with the stairway. Opinions about this reconstruction, including the installation of the rest of the frieze on the walls surrounding the central exhibition room, were not entirely favorable. Critics spoke of a frieze "turned inside out like a sleeve" and of "theatrics". In Nazi Germany this type of architecture later served as a model worthy of emulation. Wilhelm Kreis chose for his Soldiers' Hall at the Army High Command headquarters in Berlin (1937/38) and for a never realized warriors' monument at the