Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Dedication
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Making and Remaking of Ideologies through Space
- 2 Municipal Socialism and Housing in Red Vienna (1919–1934)
- 3 Short-Lived Great Berlin : Tabula Rasa and the Reinvention of Nature (1945–1949)
- 4 Divided City I: East Berlin and the Construction of Socialism (1949–1970)
- 5 Divided City II: West Berlin and the Reconstruction of Liberalism (1949–1970)
- 6 Conclusion and Postcards from the Past
- References
- Index
3 - Short-Lived Great Berlin : Tabula Rasa and the Reinvention of Nature (1945–1949)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2023
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Dedication
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Making and Remaking of Ideologies through Space
- 2 Municipal Socialism and Housing in Red Vienna (1919–1934)
- 3 Short-Lived Great Berlin : Tabula Rasa and the Reinvention of Nature (1945–1949)
- 4 Divided City I: East Berlin and the Construction of Socialism (1949–1970)
- 5 Divided City II: West Berlin and the Reconstruction of Liberalism (1949–1970)
- 6 Conclusion and Postcards from the Past
- References
- Index
Summary
Abstract
In post-WWII Berlin, utopias of nature dominated discourses on urban and societal renewal. Among architects and planners, the bombing of Berlin was widely perceived as ‘history’s auto-correction’. Plans were made for further destroying the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis to replace it with a decentralized city landscape [Stadtlandschaft]. What sounds politically innocent was in fact an ideological battleground. Conservatives turned towards nature to seek guidance for rebuilding natural hierarchies. Progressives conceived of nature as a source of inspiration for a more egalitarian, democratic society. With the onset of the Cold War, references to nature receded into the background. Yet, as an urban form, the decentralized city had an afterlife on both sides of the Wall – with different normative implications.
Keywords: post-WWII Berlin, anti-urbanism, utopias of nature, city landscape, conservatism, modernism
Akin to Austria after WWI, in post-WWII Germany, discourses on reconstruction were infused by the hope that overhauling existing urban environs would contribute to a rejuvenation of society at large. This applied to West Germany no less than to East Germany. Since both ‘Germanies’ claimed Berlin as their respective capital, the city increasingly turned into a stage for two competing political rationales: state socialism and liberal capitalism. The questions of how to reconstruct the city in general and that of how to provide housing in particular were put center stage in this ideological battle. Building for the ‘new man’ and, to a lesser extent, for the ‘new woman’ became a site of Systemkonkurrenz [system competition], i.e. the Cold War. Human flourishing and progress was promised by both ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1980, p. 131). As will be shown in chapters 4 and 5, this promise was soon to be foiled by the ‘logic of urbanism’: a state-administered, technocratic rationality that affected urban reconstruction as much as the provision of mass housing. ‘Urbanism’, as Lefebvre explains, ‘claims to be a system [that] pretends to embrace, enclose, possess a new totality. It wants to be the modern philosophy of the city, justified by (liberal [or, as I would add, socialist]) humanism while justifying a (technocratic) utopia’ (2003, p. 153).
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- Information
- Rebuilding Cities and CitizensMass Housing in Red Vienna and Cold War Berlin, pp. 73 - 86Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023