Three Cities After Hitler

Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders

Andrew Demshuk

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780822988571
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Winner, 2023 SAH Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award

Three Cities after 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 Wroc?aw (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.

1

CITIES OF THE REICH

LÜBECK, THE STORIED CAPITAL OF THE MEDIEVAL HANSEATIC League, was the first German city ravaged by large-scale aerial bombardment—on March 28, 1942, as British retaliation for unprovoked Luftwaffe attacks that included the decimation of Coventry in 1940. Yet already through the preceding seventy years, about 40 percent of Lübeck’s brick-Gothic old town had been torn down, rebuilt, or redone. In the heady enthusiasm after the founding of the empire in 1871 and amid a transnational fad for historicist ornamentation, grand appearances had to prevail: in place of a row of intact early modern houses, a gargantuan neo-Gothic post office had arisen to dwarf its medieval neighbors on the main market square, and landmarks like the Holstein gate had been dressed up with fanciful embellishments. In 1975, art historian Michael Brix looked back with favor on this frenzy of modernization behind historicist façades that had swept the Kaiserreich. By contrast with the postwar modernism he felt had wrecked all aesthetic balance in the Hanseatic city, Brix saw a “harmonization of ruptures” in Kaiser-era planning incursions, in which “a rich and traditional variety of forms usually took their lead directly from the monuments of the city.”¹ Whereas the severe leveling of the war and modernist makeover that followed were aesthetic traumas, historicist modernization was suddenly art.

Although the catastrophe of Nazism gave redemptive reconstruction particular urgency and political charge, new approaches to urban planning had been remaking cities across the Reich through preceding decades, generating a toolbox of approaches reimagined, contested, and executed after 1945. After sketching out preceding European conceptions of architectural nationalism and their interaction with historic preservation, this chapter explores the development of modernism and historicism as competing trends equally applied during the Third Reich. From this broader contextual picture, the chapter will then telescope in to introduce key urban developments in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Breslau—both before and during their coordination with Nazism. Having examined these aesthetic continuities, the chapter concludes by exploring how leading architects and planners operated seamlessly under Weimar, Nazi, and postwar ideologies. This adaptability of architects and architecture, as well as the continuities in outlook, objectives, and aesthetics they brought with them, deeply influenced postwar developments.

The Invention of National Architecture

Goethe overcame his dislike for Gothic architecture when he first caught sight of the Strasbourg Cathedral in 1772. With stanzas cresting to the point of hyperbole, the pathbreaking poet professed that Germans should thank God that this was “German architecture [Baukunst], the likes of which no Italian can boast, much less a Frenchman. And if you will not admit this advantage yourself, it is nonetheless manifest for us that the Goths have long built in such a way.”² Of course, Gothic churches had dominated virtually every French city (not to mention the splendid Gothic cathedral in Milan) as part of a pan-European, utterly nonnational trend throughout the Middle Ages, and modern Strasbourg itself was a stage for hybridized identities amid German-French national contestation. But Goethe’s Gothic reveries in Strasbourg prefigured a nationalist architectural imaginary that enraptured all of Europe, as nationalists invested historical architectural styles with apparently endemic, exclusive, eternally national meanings. In concert with the contemporary musings of Herder, Goethe’s outlook on Gothic as an indubitably German architectural form inspired planners and architects a century later to embed neo-Gothic variations into towns across the newly unified Reich to substantiate their Germanness. Nationalist euphoria combined with historicist creativity to transfigure Leipzig’s University Church and the city halls in Frankfurt and Breslau with neo-Gothic façades. The completion of Cologne’s cathedral became the ultimate statement of Gothic as a unifying German style.³ Poland exemplified the sheer flexibility of this nationalist architectural fantasy: although Baroque and Renaissance forms were praised throughout the partition era as emblems of a Jagiellonian golden age in Poland’s “national” history, after 1945 the Gothic style was cherished for its association with the ancient roots of Poland’s Piast dynasty, to the point that neo-Gothic façades crafted across Breslau by patriotic German architects could sometimes become evidence of Wrocław’s timeless Polish history. In short, the “national style” was just as invented as nationalism itself.

The search for the ancient nation in architecture was intensifying as modernity annihilated centuries of urban history. While industrialization and mass migration from the countryside radically altered each city’s appearance and demographics, modern approaches to building and planning swept in to save the city with hygiene, infrastructure, and order. Amid this upheaval, empires and emerging nation-states embraced historicist façade making, monumental construction, and the preservation of choice historic landmarks as a means to highlight their power and legitimacy: a trend inaugurated with the 1860s–1880s urban reconfigurations of the pulsing industrial capitals of Vienna and Paris, where the preservation (and embellishment) of a church or palace along a new boulevard could justify the demolition of half a historical neighborhood.

In this pioneering era when modern trends were already decreeing an end to the old city, the classification of historical structures was hardly clear. The influential historicist aesthete Camillo Sitte (usually considered a Romantic traditionalist) pursued a distinctly modern agenda to reorder space to highlight historical monuments. As he prescribed in his 1889 treatise Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, historical structures in front of iconic churches should be cleared into a square to enhance the view; a medieval ramshackle should be replaced with an elegant neo-Baroque edifice that cited a neighboring palace; a pleasing historical and aesthetic quality must replace the chaotic squalor of modernizing city centers.⁴ So it was that cathedrals in Paris, Milan, Cologne, and Ulm were “disencumbered” of surrounding structures at the same time that they were fancifully embellished, all in the name of proportion and beauty. Meanwhile, Düsseldorf’s 1894 inventory of historical monuments featured medieval buildings at the expense of the city’s more recent Neoclassical edifices.⁵ In keeping with the ideas of Sitte, planners even proposed removing the ruins of Cologne’s Roman gate on the grounds that it blocked the view of the cathedral. Although no one had lamented the destruction of city walls earlier in the century, preservationists now intervened to save choice remnants. Such selection—to simplify the city around reenvisioned centerpieces—prevailed after 1945 across the former Reich.

The establishment of historic preservation as a professional discipline was in many ways an answer to the ongoing devastation involved in selecting “history” for modern cities. As Brian Ladd observes, “Sitte’s emphasis on the spatial and pictorial relationships of buildings, monuments, streets, and squares reinforced the growing support for notions of historic preservation that sought to increase the number and kind of buildings recognized as worthy of protection and attention.”⁶ In response to tensions over urban beautification, art historian Georg Dehio formulated his famous 1901 maxim that monument preservation (Denkmalpflege) was tasked with the “preservation, not restoration” of objects central to the national story. Alois Riegl gave an alternate appraisal in 1903: historical objects should be prioritized according to their age. These ideas quickly spread into Eastern Europe through preservation theorists such as Max Dvorák and Kazimierz Skórewicz, such that by 1918 Polish preservation laws were based on the Prussian law of 1908.⁷ With supposed universality, preservation dogma denounced physically reconstructing any historical monument when no traces remained.

Nonetheless, nineteenth-century Romantic and national projects had a flexible relationship with preservation precepts—not unlike twenty-first century debates about Stadtbildpflege (caring for urban beauty) through the reproduction of vanished historical landmarks.⁸ Fundamental to the question of reconstruction is the fact that the substance of the copy differs from what had come before, as well as the political motives that are usually behind the choice to reconstruct. As Arnold Bartetzky observes, “reconstructions are always based on selective and usually idealized visions of the past that follow contemporary aesthetic preferences and serve the interests of the present. They are inescapably an act of staging history that implies their claim to primacy of meaning.”⁹ With the sudden appearance of a German nation-state in 1871, national patriots and political opportunists rushed to sacralize landmarks as tokens to an eternalized imagined community. Already at the start of the nineteenth century, the Heidelberg castle ruin emerged as an emblem of the nascent German national struggle against Napoleon, and Romantic nationalists opposed both proposals for its demolition and then the architectural plans to reconstruct it. Nationalists also reencoded the Rhineland’s Drachenfels castle as a German treasure in 1827, ensuring its protected status. Against preservation ideals, however, nationalist enthusiasm also increasingly reconstructed ruins into modern structures with historical façades, such as the enormous fairy-tale castle reinvented out of the dilapidated Teutonic Marienburg. Nationalist selectivity was also prevalent after the devastation of war. For example, Flemish cities ravaged by World War I were often rebuilt with historicized façades to make them appear older than before, favoring medieval and traditional styles over prevalent Neoclassical features now despised as “foreign.” As Wim Denslagen observes, “this correction and distortion of the old cityscapes may be regretted, because what has been rebuilt does not even remotely resemble their former appearance, but the result does reflect a deep-seated wish of the local population to regain a simulacrum of their own mental picture of their historical environment.”¹⁰ Such debates about aesthetics and authenticity were but a foretaste of those that followed 1945.

Modernism, Historicism, and the Nazi City

Modernists despised what they saw as the spiritually and physically unhealthy state of Europe’s urban landscape in the midst of industrialization. Their prescription was to strip away all historicist forms as falsehoods covering up the raw beauty of modern aesthetics and impeding the far greater structural potential of modern construction technology and planning. Better hygiene through light, air, and green would coincide with hygienic forms. Of course, modernism was a disparate phenomenon, whose ever-evolving iterations ranged from Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 concept of the garden city, to the chauvinist revolutionary fervor of Italian Futurists, to the prewar fusion of modern materials with historical forms by architects like Alfred Messel and Peter Behrens, to Walter Gropius’s founding of the Bauhaus in 1919, to Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow in 1929, to the highly influential 1933 Charter of Athens.¹¹ Within Germany itself, centers like Frankfurt and Breslau offered valuable iterations of modernism at times forgotten due to overemphasis on Berlin or the Bauhaus.¹² By the era of high modernism (1950s–1970s), diverse architects and planners pursued ever greater totalizing practices and drifted from the lightness of glass-and-steel boxes to the brutalist fetish for cement.¹³

Above all, modernists shared a fervent belief that they could overcome both ideological and planning mistakes. They could challenge warmongering autocratic regimes by demolishing and rationalizing claustrophobic medieval-industrial cities. They would bring in air and light for a sickly humanity and give modern people the modern cities, structures, and conveniences their needs and outlook required. By the 1920s, the “international style” and “new objectivity” championed by the Bauhaus and its diverse competitors were expressions of hope that a new aesthetic form could lift Germany out of the defeated rubbish of the Kaiser era into the lofty possibilities of social democracy. Small wonder that Gropius soon feared that his aesthetic style was losing its social and political purity amid the din of propaganda from extreme ideologies anxious to hijack modernism for their own political utopias. “The layman really cannot know that it is all the same movement, whether it is called ‘architectural Bolshevism’ in Germany, ‘Western bourgeois style’ in Russia, or ‘official fascist style’ in Italy,” he fretted. Incensed by the sheer adaptability of architectural style for any platform, he vented that “precisely this madhouse of bewildering and contradictory conceptions is proof that the new architecture has absolutely nothing to do with this or that political structure.”¹⁴

In practice, however, even Gropius little desired to cleanse modernism of ideology, and extremist regimes proved its adaptability. Although both Gropius and Mies van der Rohe abhorred Nazism, Kathleen James-Chakraborty observes, “they each worked on government-sponsored propaganda exhibitions and sought official commissions before emigrating” in the mid-1930s, just as many other Bauhäusler actively sported the Third Reich.¹⁵ By the same token, Barbara Miller Lane reveals, party patronage proved more decisive than any supposed “national socialist” style, so that Nazi architecture included “buildings which closely resembled the work of the radical architects whom the Nazis had opposed.”¹⁶ Unlike the fine arts, Paul Betts adds, “industrial design was never ‘coordinated’ in the same way and even enjoyed surprising independence throughout the Nazi years.”¹⁷ This meant that, notwithstanding Nazi attacks on “degenerate” modernism (which gave it moral capital after 1945), modernists prevailed in dominating architectural production regardless of the reigning ideology from the 1920s through at least the 1960s. This was no less true outside of Germany, where the modernist icon Le Corbusier enjoyed support from the Vichy government from 1941 to 1942 before presenting himself and his aesthetics as a prophetic way forward after the physical and ideological devastation of Nazi occupation.¹⁸ Adaptable to any ideology, postwar modernism signified “healthy” cities after Hitler: freed from the corruptions of Nazism and built for the people.

By contrast, the countermodern Heimatschutz movement emerged from Nazism ideologically tarnished. Key here was the concept of “Heimat”: a cozy home space, usually the local environment of one’s birth. Literally translated as “in defense of Heimat,” Heimatschutz reacted through the early twentieth century against the perceived loss of national and local tradition in prevailing modernist trends. Rather than looking to increasingly international, mass-produced Neoclassical or Gothic historicism, Heimatschutz historicism adorned modern structures with often invented traditional forms made by local craftsmen with local materials (rather than mass production) in order to sustain a sense of local difference.¹⁹ Right behind the city hall in Schwäbisch Hall, Heim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Maps
• Introduction: Redemptive Reconstruction
• 1. Cities of the Reich
• 2. Cities of Dreams
• 3. Miracle Cities
• 4. Cities of the Future
• 5. Cities Without Past
• 6. Synthetic Cities
• Conclusion: Selective Cities
• Glossary of Names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index