In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II
Jeffry M. Diefendorf
Language: English
Pages: 424
ISBN: 0195072197
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1945 Germany's cities lay in ruins, destroyed by Allied bombers `hat left major architectural monuments badly damaged and much of the housing stock reduced to rubble. At the war's end, observers thought that it would take forty years to rebuild, but by the late 1950s West Germany's cities had risen anew. The housing crisis had been overcome and virtually all important monuments reconstructed, and the cities had reclaimed their characteristic identities. Everywhere there was a mixture of old and new: historic churches and town halls stood alongside new housing and department stores; ancient street layouts were crossed or encircled by wide arteries; old city centers were balanced by garden suburbs laid out according to modern planning principles. In this book, Diefendorf examines the questions raised by this remarkable feat of urban reconstruction. He explains who was primarily responsible, what accounted for the speed of rebuilding, and how priorities were set and decisions acted upon. He argues that in such crucial areas as architectural style, urban planning, historic preservation, and housing policy, the Germans drew upon personnel, ideas, institutions, and practical experiences from the Nazi and pre-Nazi periods. Diefendorf shows how the rebuilding of West Germany's cities after 1945 can only be understood in terms of long-term continuities in urban development.
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Grotesqueness of the situation, and they testify both to despair and to a subtle optimism with which, in spite of everything, some Germans viewed their world. Hans Werner Richter wrote in 1947: The sign of our times is the ruins. They surround our lives. They line the streets of our cities. They are our reality. In their burned-out facades there blooms not the blue flower of romanticism but the daemonic spirit of destruction, decay, and the apocalypse. They are the outer symbol of the inner.
Media during the Third Reich. The editors' motivation in producing such a book was their fear that fascism and Hitler were becoming "fit for good company" (salonfdhig) again because of a tendency to treat German fascism in abstract, aesthetic terms that failed to criticize its content politically or morally.2 They titled the book Die Dekoration der Gewalt, which translates as the decoration of violence, force, or power. In an essay published in 1983, the architectural historian Joachim Petsch.
Growth of new architectural ideas really in tune with the modern age. Dissent, however, quickly appeared, especially in the debate about reconstructing the Frankfurt house in which Goethe had been born and spent part of his youth. A relatively undistinguished building, it had been modified already in the early nineteenth century and had contained period furniture, though not pieces owned by Goethe. Allied bombing had reduced the house to rubble, although the furnishings had been saved. The.
Designate a building, fountain, or the like, as worthy of preservation, but such a designation had only moral, not legal force. (A preservation law for Northrhine-Westphalia was not passed until 1980.) Nevertheless, the conservator enjoyed considerable prestige in a historic city like Cologne. The Role of Historic Preservation 95 Hans Vogts, conservator from the 1920s through the early postwar years, had long felt that fully one-third of the Altstadt was badly in need of renewal, and he had.
8,000 inhabitants, with mixed types of housing and appropriate social and cultural amenities.50 These settlements were really garden suburbs for the large city, rather than the small new cities proposed by Feder. Gutschow's idea could also be applied to already built-up areas that might be redeveloped at a later date. To guarantee that Hamburg's cooperative housing corporations built new housing in keeping with his ideas, Gutschow appointed consulting architects to work with each housing.