A Polish Approach for German Cities? Cement Old Towns and the Search for Rootedness in Postwar Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main

Abstract

This essay explores the consequences of a hunger for history amid the architectural desolation that had blighted most German cities by the 1970s. After sweeping demolitions had wrought a so-called ‘second destruction’ that eclipsed the scale of wartime losses, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain steadily identified Poland as a model for humane reconstruction. Not just historic preservation but even historic replicas long rejected by preservationists as inauthentic were demanded as a way out of modernist anonymity and ugliness to make ‘home’ in an invented history. It was a trend as thoroughly comprehensible as it was problematic – for which history would one privilege? If modernism had encouraged an escape from the past, preservation or reproduction of choice monuments threatened to instill selective forgetting, a reinvention of the past that could marginalize or twist the lessons of wartime destruction. To grapple with these quandaries, this essay begins with an exposition of the increasingly lauded Polish solution through close analysis of the old town in Wrocław, the very ‘capital’ of so-called ‘Recovered Territories’ acquired from Germany after the Second World War. Having reviewed the genesis, realization, and shortcomings of Poland’s nationalized reinscription of urban space, German disappointment with modernist erasure will be examined in Leipzig and Frankfurt, each leading cities in their respective Cold War successor states that roughly paralleled each other in their increasing interest in Polish methods. After timid attempts at preservation and replicas in each city before the mid-1960s failed to satisfy the public longing for hominess, debates intensified about whether to replicate a sweeping array of monuments lost to war and demolition. Alienated in ‘their own’ cities, residents in Frankfurt and Leipzig incited discourse with contemporary ramifications about how to appropriate one’s surroundings as home.

Keywords

architecture East Germany Frankfurt historic preservation Leipzig memory modernism Poland West Germany Wrocław

‘Danzig and Warsaw have shown how an historic cityscape can be remade with totally new interiors’, Frankfurt Mayor Rudi Arndt professed to his voting public in 1975.

Out there, behind the old façades, modern apartments with broad steps are found in place of what were constricted stairways and windowless hovels. The argument also does not stand that these houses are narrow, and thus that it is impossible to construct big clubhouses, exhibition halls, etc. behind them. Only the façades and gables are narrow: behind them, expansive rooms are not separated by internal walls, even though they stretch between multiple ‘houses’ (Figure 1).¹

Notorious as ‘Dynamite Rudi’ for his years of dogmatic support for modernist colossuses and the demolition of Frankfurt’s ruined Kaiser-era opera house, Arndt had spontaneously transformed into an advocate for gluing half-timbered façades over modern superstructures, most notably on Frankfurt’s storied Römerberg, whose reconstruction had flummoxed planners since its wartime devastation. Polish replication of pre-war façades, long derided as the laughable invention of backward communist misrule, was suddenly upheld as progress in a city that framed itself as the capital of Western capitalist democracy.

How could it be that ‘Dynamite Rudi’ had turned into ‘Half-Timbered Rudi’, art historian Heinrich Klotz wondered at a Frankfurt town forum in 1979 – what had prompted this change of mood across the populace, which had convinced Arndt that he had to invert his aesthetics to keep power? Although himself an early exponent of postmodernism, Klotz struggled to find an answer:

In fact, most of the population was initially in favor, wasn’t it, to clear away everything old and then, once the old was gone, they said: now we need something in place of it [Ersatz], now we need … well … no, not a surrogate, they didn’t say that, but rather: we want to have the old Frankfurt back. It was said just like that. And in the end, you’ve only got a surrogate. And that’s the question: whether that is what you want.²

In his confusion, the famed theorist’s halting attempt to blame fickle public opinion for the cement wasteland that yawned between Frankfurt’s cathedral and Römer sparked outrage from the audience. To applause, an engaged citizen protested that planning officials’ denunciation of façade replicas as ‘Disneyland’ should be ‘rejected as unqualified’, adding that the next architectural competition would surely render yet another collection of ‘cubist building blocks with flat roofs’ for the historic old town where once Holy Roman Emperors had processed to their coronations.

Yes, Frankfurt is criticized all the time: the city has no flair, it is kaput, it is on the brink of catastrophe [Niedergang]. And putting some counterbalance here at the Römerberg: that would offer the unique possibility to take action against all these assertions that are generally proclaimed across West Germany.³

Only through recreating an imagined past with old-looking façades over modern superstructures across from the Römer could the city ‘restore’ its identity and forge an aura of what I call historyness: a consoling, selective visual testimony of historical authenticity in place of alienating modern urban surroundings.

Debates about the ‘authenticity’ or ‘moral rectitude’ of rebuilding Frankfurt’s lost inner city had raged since its wartime destruction.⁴ Partially responsive to public entreaties for livable proportions, political and planning elites had at first compromised on moderate modernism for the old town: glass-and-steel gables occasionally interspersed with a reconstructed façade like the old town hall (Römer). But these early plans found only piecemeal implementation, and bombastic modernism executed regardless of concerns from the engaged public through the 1960s and 1970s spread an alien world across once-intimate inner-city spaces (Figure 2). Public expectations and elite impositions diverged exponentially, until anger at architectural ‘tyranny’ triggered Arndt’s performative conversion as a last-ditch effort to keep power. By inviting conversation on public terms, however, Arndt unwittingly unleashed a tide of protest obsessed with ‘historyness’ as an antidote for ‘historyless’ German planning outcomes. The unprecedented CDU majority that consequently toppled Arndt and his SPD regime in 1977 stole his transfigured platform and promised half-timbered gables for the old town.⁵

Although the realm for public expression was drastically smaller in East Germany, here too early consensus about renovation and a smaller building scale gave way to outrage at demolitions and the invasion of bland modernism into historic centers. In Leipzig, East Germany’s second-largest city, protest letters flowed to leaders at every level, and engaged citizens demonstrated on the city’s central square against the urban planning ‘tyranny’ that demolished key landmarks regardless of public wishes. In contrast to Frankfurt, where protest yielded political change, the wrecking ball proved that democracy was a farce in the German Democratic Republic (DDR), so that by the 1970s the populace had given up hope of participation. Nonetheless, like Rudi Arndt, some of the more reflective DDR political and planning elites had begun to wonder about the modernist desolation they and their predecessors had wrought in the old town which so alienated engaged locals. Though by then they lacked the resources to implement extensive change, the last decade of the Cold War saw especially younger politicians and architects seriously musing on the Polish ‘achievement’ as a solution for ubiquitous monotony, at the same time that Polish preservationists arrived in each German state to earn money saving German monuments.⁶

In sum, despite contrasting bipolar ideological justifications for high modernist building schemes in Germany’s democratic-capitalist and authoritarian-communist halves, this article shows that the resulting cement utopias, public dismay, and calls for planning reform were striking similar on each side of the Iron Curtain. At its heart, this parallel trajectory of growing aesthetic dissonance between a cast of headstrong elites and engaged citizens in East and West German cities developed out of a sense that high modernism had failed to offer a viable answer for urban aesthetics and life after Nazism. In their search for alternatives, Germans on both sides found particular admiration for their Polish neighbors’ capacity to rebuild a usable past for their present and future. In contrast to the classic Cold War narrative that the East had ‘fallen behind’, Germans were seeking out Polish expertise to learn a skill that the West did not have. In the late Cold War marketplace of ideas and exchange, Polish preservation methods were ‘winning’ considerable attention. Yet was the Polish solution – saturated with a victorious martyrological narrative – compatible with German discourse after Nazi defeat? Was it not problematic enough for local identity and memory in Poland? Or are humans so desperate to surround themselves with myths that, for a city to be truly livable, it simply must feature an assortment of architectural mementos?

Despite the manifold issues inherent in selective memory and historical replicas, the need for ‘historyness’ may well represent an essential aesthetic precondition for human beings to root themselves and find home in their disorienting modern environment. As Warsaw National Museum Director Stanisław Lorentz asserted to an international gathering of preservationists at Williamsburg, Virginia in 1963, an aesthetically modern approach after wartime destruction ‘would mean that the individuality of the town, its character, and its own historical appearance would be completely obliterated’. To sustain the ‘human need to feel the continuity of our general history’, Polish architects and planners had restored cities so that ‘not only the young people, but even the elders do not realize in their everyday life that this town, which appears old, is to a great extent new. And they do not feel it to be an artificial creation’.⁷

This manufacture of historyness – with its demolitions and selective reconstructions – is by its very nature part of the modern utopian urge to garden space. Modernist ideals such as light, air, and hygiene were already inherent in the ‘tidying up’ of old towns in the early twentieth century, such as the invention of ‘typical East Prussian’ architectural motifs for towns destroyed in 1914 or Nazi efforts to make old towns such as Frankfurt ‘healthy’ in the 1930s (here with a strong racial implication as well). Before 1945, conservative planners were already reinventing a homey past that merged modern conveniences with quaint ‘bygone’ motifs. Hence, although Bauhaus architects may have eschewed conservative ‘Heimatschütz’ gables, historical reconstructions and modernism have always been complementary trends, opposed only insofar that they apply contrasting aesthetic maxims. It is also a mistake to pigeonhole each aesthetic as fundamentally tied to an ideological trend, since modernists worked quite as willingly for fascists as they did for capitalists and communists.

Since 1945, the sheer profusion of historyness has also exhibited the modern trait of interchangeable replication. At the same time that the bland sameness of modernism made Polish-style historic replication an ideal for German planners by the end of the 1970s, Poland’s nationwide replication of methods (even façades) tested in Warsaw produced its own modern sameness of gingerbread houses with Polish attics on old town squares across the country.⁸ Finally, historic preservation is itself inherently selective – some landmarks earn protected status and win the deepest care and investment, while others vanish at a dictator’s whim or due to a speculator’s investment scheme. In this manner, preservation and replicas are both tied up in the very modern practice of heritage management.⁹

Accepting, then, that the search for historyness is a product of modernity, one must also examine it as an historical reaction against high modernism’s disdain for historical references and human proportions, said by postmodern theorists to have ordained its failure as a progressive vision for humanity.¹⁰ Thus, as Andreas Huyssen observes, the postmodern return to history and obsession with memory may represent ‘an expression of the basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality, however they may be organized’.¹¹ In no small part to unpack this broad human question, the coming pages investigate the consequences of a hunger, almost famine for hominess and history amid the architectural desolation that blighted most German cities by the 1970s.

Although the turn away from high modernism and the search for livable cities was a global phenomenon with significant roots in the United States, it had particular resonance in the bifurcated German rump territory, whose competing regimes had pursued a roughly parallel course in applying high modernist urban planning to overcome the traumas of Nazism. Through the first postwar decade, both halves of Germany had tended to favor smaller scale and stylized modern architecture in an attempt at synthesis between history and modernism that anticipated postmodern directions by the 1980s; but in contrast to Polish cases, in Germany this was short-lived and incomplete.¹² By the mid-1950s, Frankfurt’s central Römer square featured glass-and-steel gables that emulated pre-war scale and proportion, and Leipzig’s central Karl Marx Square had seen plans (few of them realized) wherein the Socialist Realist ‘Stalinist’ penchant for ‘national traditions’ in architecture would have largely recalled pre-war scale and aesthetics. Then the economic miracle put the wrecking ball in full swing in the West and expensive Socialist Realist showpieces gave way to high modernist blocks in the East. Under regular mantras in both German states about how modernism promised a better future, sweeping erasure and facelessness wrought a ‘second destruction’ that eclipsed the scale of wartime losses. Already in 1965 Frankfurt psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich famously attacked the ‘inhospitality’ [Unwirtlichkeit] of postwar reconstruction for wiping out the organic home space [Heimat] Germans had enjoyed before the war.¹³ Widespread public demands for preservation [Denkmalpflege] and even historic replicas (rejected by preservationists as inauthentic) reflected a yearning to steer the city out of modernist anonymity and ugliness to make ‘home’ in an invented history.¹⁴

It was a trend as thoroughly comprehensible as it was problematic: for which history would one privilege? Reacting to Lorentz’s credo in Williamsburg, George Mosse warned the preservationists: ‘what are the criteria for the history that is to be preserved and reconstructed? This is related, of course, to a didactic purpose, favoring the one past which, opposed to other pasts, the present feels worth preserving or re-creating anew’.¹⁵ In two sentences, Mosse had captured the crux of what was problematic in historic replicas. If modernism had encouraged an escape from the past, preservation or reproduction of choice monuments threatened to instill selective forgetting, a reinvention of the past that could marginalize or twist the lessons of wartime destruction. This need not imply a conscious rejection of the palimpsest of history. But in their weariness with top-down modernist annihilation, Germans paradoxically looked for a new path to urban appropriation in formerly German cities rebuilt by physically displaced Poles for whom every streetscape had been alien to their pre-war memories.

The comparative approach in this article seeks to engage with this irony and pinpoint how and why – although ideological significance was at times embedded in regime explanations for aesthetic choices – the decision to either embrace or reject an historical reconstruction aesthetic could resonate regardless of which ideology held sway. German obsessions with planning results in Poland merit particular scrutiny for two reasons. First, it was downright scathing for German preservation and reconstruction advocates to argue that postwar Polish occupiers had rebuilt formerly German cities better than Germans themselves might have. And second, Polish cases recurred with much greater frequency in both German states due to this shared history as well as geographic nearness. In like manner, although any number of German cities on both sides of the Iron Curtain evinced comparable reconstruction debates by the latter half of the Cold War, focus on Frankfurt and Leipzig as exemplars of this process facilitates a more detailed local approach in spaces with shared architectural traditions, as historic trading cities largely spared the execution of most Nazi-era architectural schemes. Nonetheless, one need only reference debates about reconstructing West German Braunschweig’s palace (dynamited in 1960, rebuilt as a shopping mall in 2007) or East Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel (remade as a new old town in the 1980s) to appreciate that concerns in Frankfurt and Leipzig were not isolated exceptions but tokens of a larger trend.¹⁶ In like manner, numerous East Bloc ‘models’ for monument preservation and reconstruction recurred in critiques against German planning failures, whether the survival of various churches on Moscow’s Red Square or the care taken to preserve Prague’s old town.

To showcase an example of Polish reconstruction efforts increasingly lauded in each Germany, this article begins by reviewing the genesis, realization, and shortcomings of Poland’s nationalized reinscription of urban space, with emphasis on Wrocław: the ‘capital’ of the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’ (Ziemie Odzyskane) acquired from Germany after World War II. Parallel German disappointment with modernist erasure will then be examined in Leipzig and Frankfurt. After timid attempts at preservation and replicas in each city before the mid-1960s failed to satisfy public longing for hominess, debates intensified about whether to replicate a sweeping array of monuments lost to war and demolition.¹⁷ In a glaring indictment of the ‘second destruction’ of German cities, engaged citizens and even some political and planning elites began looking for inspiration in Polish reconstruction of formerly German cities.

The Polish School of Conservation

Historical context makes it particularly ironic that the so-called ‘Polish School of Conservation’ recurred as a model for reconstruction in both German states. For it was due to the Nazis’ willful destruction of Polish historic centers during World War II that Polish General Conservator Jan Zachwatowicz had encouraged comprehensive reproduction ‘even if it is not authentic’.¹⁸ Although 1950s Socialist Realist confections instilled their own version of national historical traditions into Polish cities, and although by the 1960s Polish urban centers were also infused with high modernism as an escape to a better future, historical replication had featured in reconstruction efforts, not just in decimated pre-war Polish centers like Warsaw, but also in the damaged historical cores of cities which had once belonged to Germany. In compensation for the vast eastern borderlands Poland lost to the Soviet Union, Allied conferences had divvied out one-quarter of Germany’s pre-war territory to Polish administration.¹⁹ Millions of Germans were ethnically cleansed from regions where most of their ancestors had resided for centuries, including over six hundred thousand from Breslau. As Polish authorities renamed the city Wrocław, haggard settlers struggled to put down roots there. Most of the new residents arrived from central Poland, but a minority overrepresented in the city’s intellectual elite came from Poland’s lost eastern kresy, notably Lwów: a city that arose as an important memory space for situating Wrocław’s postwar identity.

Ethnically cleansed cities such as Wrocław may offer the ultimate test of Benedict Anderson’s much-cited claim that the modern nation remakes history in its own image. Not only does a homogenized national self-understanding by members of an ‘imagined community’ replace and efface complicated group identities that had formerly existed; after ethnic cleansing, the preceding populations themselves have been removed or purged of former identities inside borders redesigned to serve the nation-state.²⁰ In Wrocław, seven centuries of urban history were to be reconstructed as eternally Polish for a new population devoid of prior memories there.²¹ Recapping twenty years of myth-making he had ardently supported, communist party secretary Władysław Gomułka proclaimed to Wrocławians in 1965 that

[A]s a result of the victory over Nazi Germany, in accordance with the historical and factual reasons resulting from the defeat of German imperialism, Poland regained her ancient lands on the Odra, Nysa and Baltic, the lands conquered by the German partitioners centuries ago. This was the biggest victory that the Polish nation had won all through the thousand years’ history of its state.²²

Likewise underpinning this narrative of a seven-century German national ‘occupation’, Poland’s widely popular Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński preached that year in the Wrocław cathedral that the very stones were ‘relics’ that spoke to the structure’s ‘Polish soul’.²³ To transform the caesura of ethnic cleansing into national justice, communists funneled immense investment into restoring medieval brick churches as apparent evidence of a medieval Polish history (even though modern national identity is alien to preceding tribal, religious, feudal, imperial, and burgher identities in Breslau’s historically German-speaking milieu). Although virtually no current resident had any historical connection to Silesia, and no comparable, comprehensive forced migration of peoples had ever occurred here before, Poles had ‘returned’ to and ‘recovered’ their ancient national homeland.

Particular fantasy was needed on the old town square (Stary Rynek), which had been largely constructed in the high Middle Ages by a German-speaking migrant population whose identity had nothing to do with Polish language or culture. Proving the plasticity of national interpretations of architecture, in 1953 Warsaw formally approved using the interwar plans of German conservator Rudolf Stein to ‘restore’ the Rynek to its appearance at the dawn of the nineteenth century – an initiative by which Stein had actually hoped to wipe away over a century of capitalist modernity and reinvent early-modern Breslau as an inherently ‘German’ space. As Wrocław conservationist Olgierd Czerner recounted in 2008, lack of archival materials had necessitated reliance on Stein’s eternally German cityscape to produce an eternally Polish reinterpretation.²⁴ Already by 1951, portions of the devastated Rynek had been stabilized, the Gothic town hall had been restored, and post-1800 capitalist alterations to the square had been denounced as a uniquely German imposition. Modernization of surviving structures coincided with the creation of new buildings with façade replicas.²⁵ Courtyards were broken open to allow for light and air, eclectic decoration was stripped away from former department stores that were then pasted over with Renaissance façades, and sometimes even intact medieval interiors were cleared away to allow for modern conveniences. For instance, a Renaissance gable in Cracowian style was tacked onto the gutted superstructure of a 1910 department store that matched the new gable chiseled onto the opposing face of the town hall. As Czerner mused in 2008: ‘this house is a fantasy, because it was remade as if it were from the Renaissance, but on the skeleton of a department store’²⁶ (Figure 3). Regardless of its little-known German origins, the fabrication of a heroic Polish past for Wrocław’s Rynek evoked popular enthusiasm (Figure 4). In the 1957 questionnaire ‘Wrocławians [talk] about their city’, residents gave overwhelmingly positive appraisals of the restored old town, as when one new local argued that for him new façades were not ‘pseudo’ at all.²⁷ Although voices from an engaged public can be hard to trace under an authoritarian system, relative accord in existing sources and lack of unrest about architecture comparable to Frankfurt or Leipzig evinces that residents largely adopted and took part in the remaking of historical appearances and narratives for the foreign city. The heroic Polish narrative of national redemption and resurrection effectively dovetailed with the desire of Wrocław’s new population to combine modern amenities with a sense of history and hominess captured by nostalgic, idealized façades of an imagined more ‘humane’ and graspable past.

In a sign that this ‘Polish model’ could be flexible in the raw substance it appropriated, however, preservationists also infused ‘national meaning’ into pre-war German architecture. As Marta Rudnicka-Bogusz observes, preservationists sought to convince authorities that even recent structures were ‘ours’ and ‘not German’. To save the Hatzfeld palace, preservationist Marian Morelowski spread the notion that it had been somehow tied to the Polish crown, although it had served as a Prussian and later Nazi administration building; after ten years of tireless debate and intervention, he and his colleagues managed to retain and restore the neoclassical portal as part of a modern art museum (Figure 5).²⁸

Although German onlookers questioned Polish national mythologies, they were allured by the livability and prospect of appropriation in places like Wrocław or Gdańsk. Early on, the East German press propagated stories of successful reconstruction across Poland. In 1954, Neues Deutschland praised Wrocław’s Rynek, Salt Square, and Cathedral Island, lauding the synthesis of historically ornamented exteriors over ‘apartments with the most modern comforts’.²⁹ Numerous issues of DDR journals Jenseits der Oder and Blick nach Polen also featured miracle-era Wrocław, which was ‘restoring its historical appearance’ while satisfying ‘all of the modern demands of the present’.³⁰ West German newspapers were initially far less generous, depicting cities across the Lost German East as dilapidated, decaying, dangerous spaces mismanaged by racially inferior, Bolshevized overlords, while a phalanx of West German politicians and researchers ceaselessly attacked Polish national mythologies. Rumors that Polish modernism could threaten historic structures also elicited concern in a West German paper in 1953 that this would

extinguish the memory of centuries of strong influence from German architecture and sculpture in the East and introduce in Poland the Soviet building style, which is standard for all of the ‘People’s Democracies’. In place of glorious monuments, palaces, city halls, chapels, churches, and cathedrals, soulless mass construction [seelenlose Massenbauten] will now come into being.³¹

Yet already by the late 1950s, expellees from the lost German East were so wearied by modern anonymity in the West that when they crossed the Iron Curtain to indulge their nostalgia, they were struck by Polish restoration of façades that spoke to their own idealized memories.³² Although pained by a sense of foreignness, they extolled the new Cracow-style gable on Wrocław’s town hall as if it had always been there. In 1955, an expellee visitor spread word that ‘the town hall itself stands as before with its old arcades’, like much of the Rynek and Odra islands. He only missed the ‘joyous bustle’ he recalled on the city’s main avenues.³³

In the end, although German expellees and Polish settlers shared a common uprootedness due to forced migration, ‘native’ Germans in Frankfurt and Leipzig felt lost in ‘their own’ cities and incited a kindred, irresolvable discourse about how to appropriate their bombed, razed, and sterilized surroundings as home. Although part of a global trend against high modernism, both East and West German interest in pre-war postcard images and distaste with poured-cement monotony took on specific meaning given the burdened legacies of the Third Reich. Whereas Polish urban aesthetics embraced a transfigured national story, German politicians and planners had long eschewed history altogether in favor of a modern city of the future, in which highly symbolic early postwar reconstructions became an exception.

Debates about such immediate postwar exceptions in many ways prefigured later discussions about how to restore choice monuments in such a way that would project a usable local iconography for a transfigured national story. Through the late 1940s, Leipzig planning head Walter Beyer had restored or at least reinforced scores of damaged edifices and campaigned (fruitlessly in the end) for a grand mausoleum for Johann Sebastian Bach that would incorporate surviving Baroque fragments from the former Johanniskirche, beside which the esteemed composer had likely been buried.³⁴ Meanwhile, intense debate in Frankfurt had ended with a replica of the leveled Goethehaus in 1949 and reconstruction of the Paulskirche (site of the 1848 democratic parliament) with a modern interior and roof in 1948.³⁵ In both German cities, therefore, local patriotism for specific ‘sacred sites’ very often implied a greater national purpose. As reaction against modernism grew by the end of the 1960s, advocates increasingly wondered if these limited examples of local reconstruction (or more comprehensive attempts in German cities like Dresden or Nuremberg) had gone far enough to ‘bring back’ a sanitized national story, and Polish cases started to recur with striking frequency as a remedy for past planning mistakes.

Leipzig’s Market and Karl Marx Square

Leipzig Mayor Hans Erich Uhlich returned from an architectural tour of Polish cities in 1954 awed by ‘the indescribable beauty’ of Warsaw’s restored old town market. He asserted: ‘I feel like I’ve been taken centuries back in time; here I recognize the creative power of this constantly oppressed Volk, which seeks forms to give shape to its national folk art [Volkskunst]’. He wondered: ‘are there not also such traditions in Leipzig, in our area of influence, that have to be critically developed and creatively refined?’ Surely, if German architects ‘seriously carry out study of our national folk traditions’ (those considered heroic and usable) it must be possible to produce a similar result on Leipzig’s old town market, ‘to resurrect it in all its old beauty with its Renaissance and Baroque buildings’. Lamenting the capitalist speculation he felt had so blighted the city’s historical form before the war, Uhlich urged restoration of Leipzig’s old town trading passages and gables, including those cases where little substance remained (such as the Alte Waage, whose gable matched the neighboring old town hall restored after the war by Beyer).³⁶ In keeping with Uhlich’s elation, regional Bezirk authorities promulgated a 1955 building plan that anticipated reconstruction of leading monuments on the city’s central Karl Marx Square and market that took ‘into account the restoration of historic cultural buildings’.³⁷ Much like the later search for ‘historyness’, both Socialist Realism and Polish façade production sought to insert national and local traditions into modern structures – not to satisfy capitalist market forces, but to offer the public spatial appropriation in cityscapes made alien by fascist ideological and material devastation.

The turn from Socialist Realist ‘national traditions’ toward cheaper modern forms helped to ensure that, over Uhlich’s five remaining years as mayor, virtually nothing was achieved of the Polish-style reconstruction goals he had lauded in his report. Not unlike Frankfurt in the West, from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1970s Leipzig embraced high modernism as a firmly future-oriented answer to the city’s troubled past. As chief architect Horst Siegel declared in his culminating 1970 General Building Plan, highways and prefab blocks were the way of the future, while historical substance was ‘outdated, impractical, and no longer worthy of modernization’.³⁸ It was a glaring exception when, by 1964, the Alte Waage’s Renaissance gable reappeared on an otherwise modern structure; in effect to demonstrate the dialectical progression toward socialism, a glass behemoth called the Messeamt simultaneously took shape on the market’s other side, its towering glass panes reflecting back the cheery façades it had apparently overcome (Figures 6 and 7). That year the East German Bauakademie lauded this ‘completion’ of the market as ‘a coherent architectural ensemble’.³⁹

Meanwhile, although he claimed to champion historic preservation, longstanding Leipzig chief architect Walter Lucas was typically lukewarm after he led an architectural delegation to Poland in 1955. How could people really like living in the ‘loveless’ cold interiors behind imagined historical façades he found garish and too brightly colored?⁴⁰ As of 1960, Lucas professed in Architektur der DDR that henceforth old buildings that failed to complement new structures must be razed rather than renovated.⁴¹ This was in keeping with precepts handed down from the Politburo and Bezirk; by 1960 pressure from the university (which wanted a modern campus), support from leaders at the city, Bezirk, and national level, and enthusiasm from modern architects commanded the demolition of ruins across the city’s central Karl Marx Square that included the ruined historicist art museum and main university building (Augusteum) and fully intact medieval University Church.

Just as in Frankfurt, hostility to preservation and restoration ran against the current of prevailing public opinions in Leipzig. Already in the 1950s, popular interest in Polish reconstruction was strong. In a letter to the editor, Karl Wiegel advised the Leipziger Volkszeitung (LVZ) to restore the old town’s 1704 Romanushaus, since ‘many other cities would be happy to possess such a structure, and they would do everything possible to retain it’. Much as Polish planners had reconstructed Warsaw and Gdańsk, Leipzig should go beyond restoring ruins and even bring back Renaissance-era landmarks like the ‘golden fountain’, which had already disappeared from Leipzig’s market in 1826. Only in this way, Wiegel concluded, ‘would the market once more be what it once was: a treasure chest in the heart of our city’.⁴² Of course, like selective memory in Poland, it never dawned on Wiegel to restore unwelcome mementos like the Franco-Prussian war memorial which had once dominated the square and even survived the war intact before its symbolic immediate postwar demolition. By 1956, another local citizen was growing impatient with the obvious lack of historic preservation; his letter to the LVZ prompted a defensive response from Lucas, who framed himself as a paragon of historic preservation, informed by his ‘opportunity to study the comprehensive methods of historic preservation in the People’s Republic of Poland and Prague’. Repeated shortages, he insisted, inhibited visible action.⁴³

Lucas’s supposed convictions rang especially hollow, however, when a much-visited architectural exhibition in fall 1960 displayed a future vision of Karl Marx Square without any historical buildings, including the regularly used Gothic University Church. When two communist scholars from the university’s Art Historical Institute returned from a study trip in Poland and visited the exhibition, they lodged a protest that they ‘had been educated by the Party and the state and had the duty to struggle for the retention of artistic and historical buildings’. How could East German officials prove so callous, when in Poland and Czechoslovakia precious landmarks were painstakingly restored?⁴⁴ Similarly, ‘reactionary’ protest letters and entries in visitor books frequently named cases in Poland, Prague, and even Red Square in Moscow as examples for how to harmoniously integrate older structures with the needs of modernity. In keeping with this general mood of dismay, City Building Director Helmut Ober faced stiff opposition during a building conference he convened in March 1961 to discuss the future of Karl Marx Square (Figure 8); many architects grew distraught at lunch that their opinions had no bearing on outcomes.⁴⁵

Propaganda meanwhile extolled the stiffening regime outlook and offered the preposterous contention that Leipzig’s preservation achievements matched those in Poland and other East Bloc countries; somewhat incongruously, demolitions in the West were even said to delegitimize critique of demolitions in Leipzig. As LVZ editor Karlfried Glöckner argued to Bezirk boss Paul Fröhlich in 1964, it was absurd for Western countries to accuse them of cultural desecration (Kulturschänderei), since

wherever the working class takes power, it has felt responsible for retaining and caring for the national cultural heritage and proven through deeds that, contrary to capitalist societies, they truly revere national traditions. Just as in Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Dresden, they have preserved and cared for everything of cultural value that survived war and counterrevolution.⁴⁶

LVZ reporting continued to reveal, however, that very little apparently qualified as having cultural value. In a typical report by late 1967, the LVZ celebrated the ‘immediate concentrated demolition of old buildings in the center’ and concurrent completion of a new prefab cement panel (Plattenbau) factory six months ahead of schedule to allow for ‘block apartment complexes in the city center already in 1968’.⁴⁷ Weeks later, the paper promised that ‘further old buildings in our city will be demolished in the coming days’. In keeping with city council decisions, citizens were told: ‘urban ensembles will come into being across the city center. Each citizen will understand that within such ensembles, old buildings (even those that could still be used for decades) can no longer have any place’.⁴⁸ Political and planning offices at every level agreed that urban planning through 1975 demanded ‘summarily clearing the blight of old structures [Altsubstanz] to open the view toward new buildings and make space available to build new ensembles’.⁴⁹ On a visit to his native Leipzig on February 26, 1968, East Germany’s ruling SED party secretary Walter Ulbricht spoke of how

Leipzig’s architects formerly made their drafts for individual buildings and set up for themselves a so-called monument. But now it is necessary to plan the city as a whole, first of all the city center; it is necessary to fashion a system for how the city center is constructed. An ensemble’s architectural configuration must be attuned to itself. This is the essence of ‘Newness’ in socialist architecture.⁵⁰

In other words, the new city could only find harmony without the clutter of historic landmarks.

The East German regime’s plan to dynamite the intact University Church drew a larger wave of protest than any other disturbance between the 1953 uprising and 1989 revolution. In making cultural, historical, economic, and personal arguments for keeping the landmark, letters frequently identified Polish preservation as an alternative that East German communists should model. In a letter from Neuss/Rhine, a West German berated Leipzig’s university for considering such a demolition, when in Poland extensive work was being done on the Teutonic mother castle at Marienburg (Malbork), implicitly identified as part of the German heritage. ‘Your historical and art faculties really would have to hide their faces in shame if they were to allow this [demolition], while our neighbors to the East bring back the core of their capital in such a way, just as it once was, and also sacrifice such resources for the Marienburg’, he argued, adding the questionable assertion that it was well known that ‘in the Western part of our Fatherland something has been done for historic preservation’.⁵¹ Just as combative (but without accolades for West Germany), a Leipzig pediatrician urged Paul Fröhlich to desist from further demolitions and emulate Gdańsk, where his wife had lived before 1945. Thoughts of revenge are foreign to me’, he insisted, going on to state:

Although through the first postwar years I was sad about the loss of the eastern territories (just like my wife, a born Danziger), I have come to terms with it. I have respect for the Poles, who have suffered injustice so often in their history. And I marvel at what they have achieved in reconstructing their country.

Traveling back to Gdańsk, he observed, a former resident could actually orient herself along reconstructed streetscapes, an achievement that

deserves the highest praise and admiration. By contrast, in Leipzig we want to do the opposite. Really? Shouldn’t we follow the Polish example in this instance? I heard from a Polish delegation that was in Leipzig and saw the University Church. As the delegation participants learned that this church was to be razed, they said: ‘You want to tear down that? We would be happy if we had such a church!’⁵²

In his view, Poles had not only rebuilt their cities more humanely, they also pitied the Germans for perpetuating the devastation they had wrought in occupied Poland, now on their own cities in a time of peace, in essence leveling their ability to make ‘home’.

After backtracking for a few years, the authorities made public in the LVZ on May 24, 1968 that their new configuration for Karl Marx Square was going forward (meaning that the University Church and adjoining Augusteum were doomed). Protest letters flowed to leaders at all levels, and concerned citizens again identified their Eastern neighbors as an alternative to be followed. Filled ‘with deep shock’ from the newspaper report, a local professor reminded the mayor and university president that the people demanded retention of this artistically valuable landmark, just as ‘in Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague urban planning happens differently, with attention to history’. And if, as he suspected, such arguments failed to convince them, he still had to speak out ‘to free myself in this way from sharing guilt [Mitschuld] that I would have had through silence’.⁵³ Having traveled to Prague in 1968 and pondered the situation in Poland, a pastor in Jena wrote to the DDR Secretary for Religious Affairs just weeks before the demolition of the University Church, arguing that such an act would not only damage the DDR’s reputation:

I find it simply absurd to clear away a valuable cultural monument. It is barbarism! This strikes me even more, because I just came from Prague, where (just as in Poland too, by the way!) one strives to retain each old building. You can be certain that this action will stir up much bad blood!’⁵⁴

By May 28, SED party members were spying on professors and students across the university, urging them to accept the necessity of a new campus. ‘Amongst a relatively large portion of the university population’, their report concluded, official decrees were seen as ‘deactivating democracy’, and ‘the demolition of the University Church is said to be a cultural disgrace and violation of cultural values; in other countries (especially the People’s Republic of Poland), great resources have been devoted to retaining and reconstructing historically valuable buildings’.⁵⁵ Notwithstanding open protest in front of the church and across the city, the Gothic masterpiece was dynamited on May 30 (Figure 9), inaugurating twenty years of public disengagement with propaganda that they were ‘working with’ the SED regime to configure their city.⁵⁶

It was bad timing as usual when, parallel to public ‘deactivation’ from the supposedly democratic socialist system and rampant urban decay, the DDR regime masqueraded through the 1970s as a protector of historic monuments by creating preservation offices like Leipzig’s Office of Architectural Art (BfaK) and VEB Denkmalpflege. More history was suddenly needed in the city, preservation officials from both offices contended after a study trip in Gdańsk in 1978. Of course, the Polish model was selective, they observed:

[S]pecial value for retention is attributed to monuments and urban areas under historic protection that are slated to dominate appearance. For buildings that have repeatedly been altered over numerous architectural epochs, reconstruction strives for that which is best preserved. Other epochs are only implied through fragments.

The resulting ‘synthesis of historical tradition and contemporary needs’, they argued, had fostered an environment in which residents felt at home. Based on Poland’s success, they advised, historic preservation should be an ‘integrated component in the overall reconstruction of the city’.⁵⁷ By 1986, a guidebook assured visitors that two-thirds of Leipzig’s buildings stood under historic protection, and although description of Karl Marx Square avoided any mention of vanished architecture, it did praise renovation of the square’s historicist Mendebrunnen fountain and the sandstone portal by Schinkel which had been affixed to a rear entrance of the modernist administration building.⁵⁸

By the latter half of the 1980s, official interest in preservation even turned to replicas and postmodernism (the latter never described as such), often in endeavors spearheaded at the local level with limited input from increasingly aloof central authorities. Generally forgotten now, the sprawling, largely underground 1987 ‘Bowlingtreff’ recreational center was a postmodern extravaganza completed through a mass initiative undertaken by local leadership in opposition to the Republic’s economic and bureaucratic meltdown.⁵⁹

When Leipzig’s young new chief architect Dietmar Fischer took office in 1985, he sought to realize his generation’s ideal of integrating historic buildings into smaller-scale modern structures. In their 1987 city plan, Fischer’s team envisioned repairing dilapidated landmarks and even reconstructing monuments needlessly razed in the 1960s. For instance, the Renaissance patrician’s house Deutrich’s Hof, demolished without cause in January 1968, was to be resurrected so that its gable could complement the nearby old town hall and Alte Waage, itself a rare instance of total reconstruction in 1964.⁶⁰ Winning submissions in a subsequent 1988 local architectural competition anticipated filling holes across the city in ways that restored the pre-war scale and street plan, even razing modernist eyesores and replacing them with postmodern trade fair palaces of international quality that perpetuated the city tradition of publically accessible passages. Particularly audacious was a cameo appearance of the University Church in a disregarded submission that portrayed the pre-1968 Gothic gable affixed over the 1975 modernist university ensemble.⁶¹ As Fischer himself has since acknowledged, lack of financial and material support in East Germany’s dying ‘shortage economy’ (Mangelwirtschaft) consigned all of these ambitious plans to oblivion, lest they inspire false hopes.⁶² Intent toward preservation had seldom yielded results, and by then the historic city itself was decaying into oblivion. The exhibition of a more conservative 1987 plan prompted disenchantment from disaffected locals who failed to believe those in charge could produce anything of value.

Capturing local despair, a documentary produced just before the fall of the Wall wondered: ‘can Leipzig still be saved?’ One answer, a Leipzig cultural paper argued in fall 1989, was assistance from Polish preservation specialists. Whereas by the eve of Revolution Bezirk Leipzig counted only five such handworkers, its sister city Cracow enjoyed up-to-date repairs from over two hundred. In light of such obvious Polish abilities in an area where Leipzig so catastrophically failed, 15 independent Cracow craftsmen had already come to Leipzig for preservation workshops in June 1987 and summer 1988. Now, the cultural paper concluded, Polish specialists should train German counterparts and direct efforts to rescue leading monuments.⁶³

With the end of the Cold War, Leipzig’s population dramatically reinserted itself into discussions about how to appropriate urban space and make ‘home’. As the inner city was invaded with cranes and scaffolding to renovate (often gut and fancifully restore) surviving historical fragments, lobbies coalesced to demand Polish-style replication of pre-war landmarks, notably the University Church. Shortly after the ‘Paulinerverein’ was founded to advocate for reconstructing the University Church on former Karl Marx Square (restored to its pre-war name: Augustus Square), the initiative’s vice president Joachim Busse dismissed the ‘problem of historical authenticity, said to be lost through reconstructions of destroyed buildings’. Even if a replica comprised different substance from the original, he argued, ‘we cannot renounce valuable buildings from earlier times, because each loss means an impoverishment of our lives!’⁶⁴ Barely freed from communist censorship, Leipzig already buzzed with debates about building ‘home’ through historical replicas that easily paralleled those which had long raged over Frankfurt’s old town.

Frankfurt’s Inner Old Town

Demands for historic reconstruction in the old town had circulated across Frankfurt since wartime bombardment, and (in contrast to Leipzig) here the free press and free speech had allowed figures such as ‘Old Town Father’ Fried Lübbecke to actively propose alternatives to modernist devastation. Nonetheless, the dense maze of half-timbered houses between the cathedral and Römer – badly damaged in the war – had been replaced by the end of the 1950s with a muddy parking lot, around which only a few reconstructions had arisen from surviving fragments, notably the old city hall (Römer), Nikolaikirche, and cathedral (Figures 10 and 11). Like Leipzig’s Alte Waage, Frankfurt won a final gesture to history with the Steinernes Haus in 1962, which by 1973 faced off with a brutalist historical museum and office towers of a Technisches Rathaus, as well as the concrete expanse of a subterranean parking garage meant as a foundation for a pending cement-block cultural center. Consistent with years of official support for a modernist solution on this deeply historic center, in 1960 mayor Werner Bockelmann preached to the public that, although ‘obviously I share the mourning of all citizens for the Old Town’, this past was irretrievable. Assailing any emulation of Polish old town reconstructions as expensive and ‘a weak reflection of the past’, he professed: ‘the copy of a painting is simply not the original, no matter how masterful it was executed’.⁶⁵

Why was the Polish approach supposed to be anathema for Germans? For Frankfurt’s building committee chairman Alois Giefer, any further replicas like the Goethehaus embodied ‘the danger of lies and lack of recognizing the recent past’.⁶⁶ When a monument retained a critical mass of original substance, he favored cautious restoration, but he dismissed discussion of replicas, proclaiming: ‘Haven’t we already had enough of Freudenstadt, Münster, Würzburg, and the like? These cities could still be excused due to the foolishness of the first postwar years. But it is incomprehensible that one seriously discusses this in Frankfurt’.⁶⁷ So it was that, ignoring a flood of protest, the authorities finally dug out a parking garage under the former old town, tossed out most of the early-modern relics they discovered, and by 1973 completed a brutalist poured-cement Technisches Rathaus ensemble universally despised as a hideous incursion against history. Plans to fill in the remainder of the space on top of the parking garage with a matching brutalist cultural center only stalled due to funding shortfalls (Figures 12 and 13).

Pressured by public outrage, Arndt’s aforementioned conversion to replicas broke the last floodgates of criticism. The mayor’s own solicitation of public opinion in a 1975 questionnaire exposed overwhelming interest from engaged residents for an historical solution for the old town, especially on top of the parking garage substructure across from the Römer; and many who scrawled commentary on the back of their surveys were clearly informed by picture books, even travel experiences in communist Poland.⁶⁸ ‘Everything speaks in favor of an historical construction’, a typical respondent observed, adding: ‘God knows we have enough poured concrete in this city’. Praising every politician ‘who thinks modern but wants to build old’, he urged bringing in ‘a Polish building troop’ as ‘people with experience and talented craftsmen’.⁶⁹ Frankfurt’s own replicated Goethehaus ‘doesn’t disturb anyone’, another observed, arguing: ‘That’s just how it’ll be with the eastern side of the Römerberg. Whoever has seen the reconstructed Danzig and Warsaw [old towns] cannot doubt the value of a reconstruction at all. Just get the craftsmen from over there if need be’.⁷⁰ Some advocates for replicas were even weary of the constant praise for Poland, insisting: ‘plenty of examples prove that modern comfort and hygiene is possible in “historical packaging”. You don’t have to constantly refer back to the Polish examples of Danzig and Warsaw’, since select German cases already ‘demonstrate the successful combination of “old exterior, new interior”’.⁷¹ A 1975 proposal published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the headline ‘Dummy, Disneyland, or Nostalgia – but Gorgeous’ illustrated what this Polish solution might look like. In his imaginative sketch, Rudolf Krahwinkel resurrected the best hits of the lost old town in a row across from the Römer. Whereas the ‘Engel’ and ‘Schwarzer Stern’ had originally stood where Krahwinkel reimagined them, the ‘Goldene Waage’ and ‘Lichtenstein’ had featured at entirely different locations in the old town (Figure 14). A journalist commented that such an ahistorical medley of façade replicas was hardly worse than ‘contemporary architectural fashion’, which he found ‘just as short-lived as the cement itself’.⁷²

Against this tidal wave of support for medieval modernism, the architectural team which had devised the brutalist old town (and still intended to realize its concrete cultural center on top of the parking garage) insisted that Germany’s historical context forbade emulating Poland. Danzig and Warsaw were made of stone, they argued, whereas Frankfurt had been made of wood. Replicas in Danzig were never as detailed as the originals, and got worse the further one went from the center. And finally: ‘the reconstruction of Polish cities was fulfilled under fundamentally different prerequisites than those in West Germany’. Unwilling to expound on why, they figured that ‘to assess them in detail would exceed the bounds of this study’.⁷³

When Arndt’s SPD lost its hold on power in 1977, the brutalist plans lost all remaining support, however, and a new generation of architects started promoting a postmodern meld of small-scale replicated and contemporary façades – a fanciful arrangement that would have been at home, with a communist-nationalist ideological gloss, in 1950s Wrocław or Gdańsk. Already in 1978, architectural students visiting from Darmstadt condemned Frankfurt planning elites for failing over the course of three decades to build what the people wanted: rows of cozy gables. To the amazement of all present, even outspoken modernist Alois Giefer chimed in that ‘in the meantime he had traveled to Warsaw and Danzig and is enthused’ for a half-timbered solution across from the Römer.⁷⁴ Press observers joined the chorus, some explicit about why German planning elites had crafted such hideous inner cities. ‘A conquered Volk prescribed Zero Hour [Stunde Null] for itself, it was unclear if any traditions could still be adopted at all, distance from history set in’, Michael Schwarze narrated in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1979, continuing, ‘under such circumstances one can hardly expect respect for tradition, which is always an impetus toward remembering’. Outright ‘vandalism’ against surviving fragments had resulted in a ‘second destruction’, he concluded. Such elite disdain for obvious public desires could only be corrected by understanding why residents were demanding an historical urban aesthetic. ‘It is absurd to speak of a “Mickey Mouse Middle Ages”’, Schwarze argued,

if it concerns the desire of citizens to repossess their city again and identify themselves with it. It is easy to speak of a flight into the historical idyll, if you already live in a comfortable old apartment with antique furniture in your room. [Then you can] tirelessly demand an architecture that suits our time.

There were ‘understandable causes’ why cities in a ‘defeated and divided nation’ like Germany could not be rebuilt in a ‘national manifestation’ as in Warsaw or ‘to historically legitimate the result of the war’ as in Gdańsk or Wrocław. ‘The historical picture of West Germany lacks such firm contours’, he concluded, and meant that ‘care for tradition is an even greater task for the region and city, toward which Frankfurt am Main can offer a respectable contribution’.⁷⁵ After so many egregious aesthetic missteps, such critics noted, Frankfurt could become a stage for reevaluating urban planning in ways that selectively ‘remembered’ fragments from a usable past.

The aesthetic result of these conversations was a cutting-edge postmodern meld with replicas scorned by art historians and preservationists for pretentions of authenticity (Figure 15).⁷⁶ The Schirn art gallery, denigrated by local publicist Dieter Bartetzko as it approached completion in 1985 as ‘an historicizing colossus between the cathedral and the Römer’, was named after a medieval alley that had once occupied the same footprint. Even worse for him was the adjoining ‘ersatz-reality’ posed by ‘half-timbered boards tacked over a cement surface’ across from the Römer, which offered only a ‘parody of history’ to attract gullible tourists who roved about looking for ‘sights’ like Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein castle (which had inspired Disney).⁷⁷ It was, he later added, proof of ‘a long suppressed collective yearning for idylls, for transfigured and quaint history’, rather than acceptance of ‘authentic Frankfurter history’.⁷⁸ Yet not everyone was critical of the postmodern ensemble’s citation of every neighboring structure (including the Carolingian archeological garden, the Römer’s medieval gable, and the brutalist Technisches Rathaus). Postmodern theorist Heinrich Klotz, so bewildered back in 1977 by Arndt’s conversion, contended by 1984 that the Schirn succeeded because ‘the act of reconstruction did not lead to a forgery that suggests authenticity. The rift between past and present is intact’. History had been effectively staged to console onlookers without pretending to be original, and indeed public responses were generally favorable. ‘Visual representation sustains memory’ Klotz concluded, such that ‘old Frankfurt is pulled forth from the forgetfulness of fading memory and brought closer to reality, without being able to be reality itself’.⁷⁹

This was supposed to be the end of Frankfurt’s old town debate; as a 1981 pamphlet anticipated, the gables across from the Römer would join earlier reconstructions like the Goethehaus and Steinernes Haus, but other medieval landmarks would be forever lost to the past.⁸⁰ So it might have remained, had not three decades of ill repute and the purported expense of repairs prompted the demolition of the 1973 brutalist ensemble, notably the Technisches Rathaus, from 2010 to 2011 to make way for a reconstructed old town on a par with many of Poland’s early postwar creations (Figure 16). With ‘the city lives’ (die Stadt lebt!) as its slogan, the completed Dom-Römer Project combines best bits from the pre-war old town with postmodern creations. In a CGI virtual tour, blithe young Frankfurters and tourists gesture to sanitized façades and monuments none of them would remember from before the war, when this had in fact been a notorious poor quarter.⁸¹ In much the same way that recent Polish new old towns in smaller, long-neglected and formerly German centers like Głogów or Elbląg have imparted a fresh aura of historyness, new reconstructions in former East Germany have infused Dresden and Potsdam with an expanding façade paradise, and a dynamited palace in West German Braunschweig has returned to stage ‘history’ as a shopping mall. Hominess and pseudo-history are turning into a twenty-first-century building craze.

Conclusion

In his classic essay on space and memory, David Lowenthal observes that ‘our interest in the past causally connects with threats to its survival. The bulldozer of change enhances the scarcity value of antiquities’.⁸² In seeking to escape the problematic past by building a utopian future, prevailing German political and planning elites had effaced the war-torn remains of history; the past had been overcome, because the past was nowhere to be seen. However, decades of demolition and modernist facelessness had left Germans so anxious to recover some sense of history that they espoused Polish methods in formerly German cities as a model for restoring a sense of local and national rootedness. Poland had apparently rebuilt pre-war German cities better than the Germans had rebuilt those cities that were left to them.

Patrick Geary rightly labels the nationalist reinvention of the past in its own image as ‘toxic waste’ that corrupts an historical understanding in ‘popular consciousness’ of how peoples in the ‘foreign country’ of the past had seen themselves.⁸³ Humans seem to innately need myths around which to rally and group themselves; in our age of relentless nationalism, all the overlapping and messy pre-national grouping identities and myths (whether feudal, religious, local, imperial, or tribal) fade away before a systematized, sanitized, nationalized idyll of medieval and early-modern reflections of whatever story the modern nation projects backward. On the one hand, this may just be the contemporary human answer to an inherent need for myths exacerbated as the bulldozer of modernity tears over all the roots of continuity. For all its historical obfuscation and invention, Poland’s national victim and victor narrative gave more rootedness to Polish settlers in a ‘foreign city’ than Germans found in ‘their own’ cities once the modernist wrecking ball was through.

On the other hand, depending upon narrative and context, the ‘resurrection’ of choice pre-war streetscapes can go too far. As historian Georg Mosse commented in 1963 after long-serving Warsaw National Museum head Stanisław Lorenz had delivered his heroic treatise on Polish reconstruction methods, ‘I am not at all sure myself whether historical reconstruction is a valid substitute for modern architectural imagination nor am I sure that styles should vary by nations’. He concluded: ‘We should carefully consider the relationship between historical reconstruction and the search for individuality – historical reconstruction and the criticism implied of modern architectural endeavors’.⁸⁴ Over half a century later, the fraught consequences of replication are easily observed. Although sightseers at the Disney castle in California are likely aware it is a fairytale, tourists and even locals who visit Frankfurt’s Römerberg have generally ‘forgotten’ that they are looking at a poured-cement pastiche on a parking garage with half-timbered impressions of an eternalized German nation that never existed. Postmodern alleys directly behind the ensemble and an historic plaque on its southern edge about the 1980s reconstruction are overlooked, apparently irrelevant in the face of simple belief. If this were not enough, an entire quarter of the old town has now been resurrected beside the ever more besieged postmodern Schirn gallery, interspersed with a few postmodern façades at intervals to give the impression that this is a pristine medieval quarter which has grown up organically (with Wi-Fi and plumbing) into the twenty-first century, ready-made for marketing to investors and tourists (see Figures 17, 18 and 19).⁸⁵

As interviews after the May 2018 opening of the new old town evince, curious Frankfurters and visitors of all ages are generally happy with the fresh atmosphere of historyness and a cosier aesthetic reminiscent of ‘Münster’ rather than the Technisches Rathaus.⁸⁶ Architectural historian Stephan Trüby has hit the headlines with his extreme opinion that the new Frankfurt old town and reconstructions in general represent ‘a key medium for the authoritarian, völkisch, historical revisionist Right’. This has sparked an architectural debate that FAZ reporter Matthias Alexander keenly observes is not just overlooking strong SPD support for the project, but also simply retreading all the positions from the 1947 Goethehaus debate – albeit in a charged climate where the Right is on the rise across Europe. Numerous questionnaires had in fact confirmed that Frankfurters wanted an historical reconstruction in the old town, demonstrating that the result is democratic, rather than fascist.⁸⁷ At the other end of the political spectrum, the Right has relished the chance to pillory Trüby and uphold old town reconstructions for its own victim narrative about ‘the ubiquitous and routine modernist rape [Vergewaltigung] of traditional buildings and ensembles’, made possible by ‘modernist collective brainwashing through mass media and education’.⁸⁸

As this article has shown, rather than asking whether a reconstruction or a modern façade is inherently fascist or otherwise ideological (as if the stones can ‘speak’ to a certain ideology), it is more productive to explore the resulting ambiance, and what the people do with it. In the case of the new Frankfurt old town, onlookers have already found that the sweeping reconstruction amalgamates and standardizes whatever history he or she finds pleasing to imagine.⁸⁹ Such extreme architectural citation in historic centers may generate identity, Françoise Choay observes, but it also produces spectacle for mass tourism.⁹⁰ Taken to the dark conclusion of Jean Baudrillard in 1981, the ‘debility of this imaginary’ world can even distract people from realizing that ‘the real is no longer real’ in a consumer capitalist environment which merely simulates reality.⁹¹

This accumulation of consoling replication also conveys a vague sense of home whose selective meanings speak little to Nazism and the Holocaust – a collective result never intended by supporters of ‘iconic exceptions’ like the earlier Goethehaus or Römerberg ensemble. ‘The question of which part of the past one preserves or reconstructs is naturally political’, a 2018 Spiegel commentary tersely observed, and Frankfurt’s ‘historical amusement park’ was above all symptomatic of ‘weariness with the future’ and the embrace of an idealized past.⁹² The new old town is extremely well built and aesthetically pleasing (and it had better be with its extremely high price tag). But due to its prejudice toward an idealized past, it utterly fails to smash prevailing ‘frozen’ memory configurations with uncomfortable aesthetic reminders that exhibit the past as something to be critically discussed.⁹³ When the eternalized nation becomes self-evident, memory is impoverished of potentially didactic lessons from past traumas.

So, is it possible in the end to overcome the tension between an aesthetics that satisfies a human need for appropriation and a nostalgic fabrication that furthers erasure and forgetting? Frankfurt’s planning head Mike Josef contends that replicas combine with the postmodern Schirn, historic cathedral, and an earlier replica of the Steinernes Haus to form a ‘unique ensemble’ where ‘historical and contemporary architecture directly interact’.⁹⁴ Yet the erasure of most modernism and infusion of replicas on the small tract belies any easy answer, and will certainly fool visitors and future Frankfurters alike. Far more, Leipzig’s contemporary Augustus Square may offer an alternative to the bulldozers of both modernism and blithe simulations of a halcyon medieval past. The hodgepodge assembly of mildly historicized sandstone façades on a memorialized, formerly Jewish-owned department store and clock tower, a late-Stalinist opera house, a high-modernist (restored) glass-and-steel former post office, the 1980s proto-postmodern Gewandhaus, and a postmodern citation of the vanished University Church (beside a refurbished skyscraper left over from the 1970s university ensemble) (Figure 20) may contrast sharply with the homogenous historicism that marked the pre-war square. Yet this reality of change enriches urban configuration. Today’s Augustus Square presents a veritable architectural museum to the last hundred years of urban triumphs and traumas: an ‘organic’, ever metamorphosing stage for an unfolding history of every dimension. The resounding success of Leipzig’s refurbished historical medley was recently recognized in a poll by the Cologne Institute for Commercial Research (IFH), which ranked Leipzig as ‘the most attractive inner city’ in German centers with over 500,000 residents.⁹⁵ Although a replica of the University Church would have been ready-made for tourist photos and slippage into eternalized national and local meanings, this may well have made it less noteworthy than the postmodern citation that stands there today. Because while medieval modernism appears to be a spreading norm, a melded discourse of styles may soon be uncommon, even edgy. And as Leipzig proves – it can also be home.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This essay was completed through support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which funded research in Germany and Poland in 2014/2015. For their critical comments, I wish to thank Rebecca Mitchell, my colleagues and students at the department’s March 2017 AU history forum, and participants at a May 2017 workshop at CUNY. I also wish to thank the Frankfurt Institute for City History (ISG) and Leipzig City Archive (StadtAL) for their permission to use images. Finally, I am indebted to the editors and peer reviewers at European History Quarterly.

Notes

Author Biography

Andrew Demshuk (American University) researches post-1945 Central European history. Through generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, German Academic Exchange (DAAD), Humanities Center for East-Central Europe in Leipzig (GWZO), and American University, he has researched the forced migration, integration, and nostalgic memory culture of Germans expelled from postwar Poland, as well as the postwar politics of urban planning and demolitions in West Germany, East Germany, and western Poland. His forthcoming book, Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany, investigates how local officials and residents sought to combat urban decay and fashion a livable city before Leipzig’s Peaceful Revolution in 1989.