Three Cities after Hitler : Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders
Three Cities after Hitler : Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders
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Author(s): Demshuk, Andrew
ISBN No.: 9780822946977
Pages: 584
Year: 202112
Format: Trade Cloth (Hard Cover)
Price: $ 78.43
Dispatch delay: Dispatched between 7 to 15 days
Status: Available

Winner, 2023 SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award Three Cities a fter Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as "sacred sites" to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold "redemptive reconstruction" after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler--in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents' spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.


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