Authors on Architecture: Demshuk on Rebuilding Cities
SAH/SCC Zoom Program
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Join us for a fascinating look at three stories
of Post-World War II reconstruction of war-ravaged cities in a presentation by Andrew
Demshuk, author of Three Cities After Hitler:
Redemptive Reconstruction (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). The book recently
won an SAH International 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 original urban landscape that had survived the war.
All three cities thus emerged with simplified
architectural narratives; their historically layered complexities survived only
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 a home out of their cities as they shape-shifted around
them.
Demshuk is Associate Professor of History at American
University in Washington, DC. His previous books include Bowling for Communism:
Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2020), Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People’s State in
1968 (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Lost German East: Forced Migration
and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Demshuk on Rebuilding Cities—Sunday, August 20, 2023; 1-2:30 PM
PST; $5; pay
via PayPal or mail in order form with check. Click here to purchase.
CLICK BELOW TO ENLARGE THESE IMAGES
View More Past Events
|
