Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders

Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of post-war 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, choice local edifices were 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 that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged as simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where "redemptive reconstruction" had proven less vigorous, sometimes because citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized borders, three cities under three rival regimes shared a common history after Hitler--both in terms of top-down "redemptive reconstruction" and residents' efforts to make home in their city as it shifted around them.