Histories of central Europe's urban spaces since 1945 have focused overwhelmingly on memory, particularly Holocaust memory. At first glance, Three Cities After Hitler might seem to follow this pattern. But the fate of Jewish synagogues and cemeteries is not Andrew Demshuk's main concern; in fact, the topic is shunted off to the book's conclusion. To Demshuk, “redemptive reconstruction” denotes selective rebuilding in the wake of the Third Reich—but also later attempts to “redeem” the excesses of modernism. In effect, this is a comparative study of urban planning spanning seven decades, with special emphasis on citizens’ involvement in (or exclusion from) decisions about the fate of historic city centers.
Like Michael Meng in Shattered Spaces (2011), Demshuk offers a comparison across West Germany, East Germany, and Poland. The research design is extremely compelling, featuring three cities with a good deal in common: Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, and Breslau/Wrocław were similar in size before 1939, and all functioned as significant market or trade fair hubs. From comparable starting conditions before the collapse of the Third Reich, the three cities would come to be governed by contrasting political regimes—yet they went on to make remarkably similar decisions regarding reconstruction. Demshuk identifies four main phases (postwar dreams, sober early reconstructions, high modernism, post-modernism) and documents how priorities shifted in a parallel fashion in each city. What explains the common trend toward erasure and brutalism? Demshuk acknowledges that each city was operating within a larger international context, but even as expansive a text as this (illustrated marvelously with 150 photographs) can only do so much to explain the elusive shifts in architectural fashion. For Demshuk, the key variable is unchecked power: planners operated without accountability for several decades in attempting to realize functionalist visions of a thinned-out urban core unburdened by history.
What Demshuk can demonstrate most convincingly is that public figures fought hard to preserve what they could of each city's past—and that the heedless course of demolition (erasing significantly more than the bombs of World War II) awakened a significant backlash. In Frankfurt, this led by 1977 to a change in political power, and the CDU-led administrations instituted a program of historical restoration (centered symbolically in the rebuilt 1866 opera house) featuring postmodern efforts to synthesize a more livable, attractive, and entirely fabricated “New Old Quarter.” In Leipzig, by contrast, Demshuk argues that the destruction of the University Church in 1968 significantly delegitimized political power in the city, creating a backdrop to the popular discontent that exploded there two decades later (a case he has explored previously in his Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and he People's State in 1968 [2017]). While postmodernism was officially reviled in the GDR, efforts to reconstruct Leipzig neighborhoods with interstitial and appropriately scaled Plattenbau commenced in the 1980s, and after the GDR's collapse the city wound up leveling some of the most offensive modernist towers—just as Frankfurt scuttled some of its own brutalist missteps.
Wrocław constitutes the most successful of the three postwar cases, and Demshuk's comparative angle gives him occasion to revisit the arguments in Gregor Thum's magisterial study Die fremde Stadt: Breslau nach 1945 (2003; Engl. transl. 2011). Demshuk finds that any period style could be rescued, given the right historical-ideological justification: the Polish regime favored fragmentary remnants of the ancient Piast dynasty, but also permitted Renaissance-era gables to be recast. At any rate, the city lacked the resources to destroy as much as their German counterparts, leaving significant portions of the historical core in place. Even the ugly, barren reconstruction of the New Market featured buildings of moderate height. German observers—including expellees on return visits—admired the proportions of Wrocław and began soliciting Polish expertise in their own belated efforts to recreate the feel of city streets in the old German empire. (One wonders what happened to this admiration in the early post-communist years.)
All told, Demshuk's book offers a masterful overview of an entangled German-Polish history that was both transnational and sub-national, where local choices determined a great deal about everyday life. It is also impressively up-to-date, showing how the course of “redemptive reconstruction” continues to mark these cities. For all the conversation about Dresden's reconstituted Frauenkirche, it may be Leipzig's reborn University Church (now called the Paulinum) that best epitomizes the ongoing quest to synthesize traditions for a historically minded present.
