The Atlantis House () on Böttcherstraße in the old town of Bremen in the north of Germany is an interesting example of German architecture in the interwar period. Designed by Bernhard Hoetger, it was completed in 1931. After suffering serious war damage, it was rebuilt in 1965 with a new facade designed by Ewald Mataré. History and architecture 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. Interior Inside the house today there is designer lighting that shows off the choice of bold colours