Double Restoration: Rebuilding Berlin after 1945

Abstract

As in any city recovering from disaster, Berlin, following World War II, had the opportunity to reconnect with its local traditions. The restoration of political, social, and cultural forms offered a kind of reconnection, and so did the tangible reconstruction of buildings, streets, and utility lines. Any revival of tradition was, however, enormously complicated by two problems of continuity, one temporal, one geographical—and both of them political and philosophical. First was the question of historical continuity. On the one hand, there was a desire to rebuild: to repair a damaged but extant city or, more broadly, to continue the best local traditions in architectural style, social policy, and economic development. On the other hand, everyone in charge was determined to break demonstratively with the immediate past, that is, with the Third Reich, but they did not agree about which cultural, architectural, or urbanistic traditions were the Nazi ones. The second complication arose from the fact that the city was soon divided between East and West, governed by two ideologically opposed regimes, each determined to claim the legacy of pre-Nazi Berlin, to display the clearer break with Hitler, and to prove its cultural and political superiority. Under these complicated circumstances, the rebuilding of Berlin became one of the most visibly contested venues of the early Cold War, even as it remained a matter of basic comfort and prosperity for ordinary Berliners. The fact of Berlin’s destruction in the Second World War is well known, but merely to ask the question of what caused that destruction is to plunge into contested territory. In the Soviet-occupied East, for example, the official line at first informed Germans that the destruction of their land was the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis. Later, as the Cold War heated up, they were more likely to hear blame cast upon the “Anglo-American terror bombers” (with no mention of the secondary role of Red Army artillery in the battle of Berlin). In theWestern zones of occupation, a version of the former story remained the official one, with perhaps more emphasis on the collective responsibility of the German people as a whole for the deeds of the Nazis.