Architectural Interventions I: West and East German Postwar Debates

Abstract

In 1953 Baedeker published its first postwar Autoführer Deutschland (Drivers’ Guide to Germany), which covered the geographical area of the Federal Republic and West Berlin but not the GDR. The editors had faced considerable problems in the preparation of this publication, as they could not simply update the information in the two prewar editions. Destroyed cities, a displaced refugee population, reconstruction efforts and massive political changes marked the new postwar reality.¹ Writing a travel guide about Germany in 1953 was thus a challenging undertaking: not only was it a divided country and an increasingly hot zone of the Cold War, but all large cities had suffered major destruction, and many of the smaller towns had been partly or wholly destroyed. Accordingly, the Baedeker’s section ‘The Country and its Inhabitants’ opens with the rather forced attempt to marry the register of the traditional guidebook with the acknowledgement that the built environment, the political order and the cultural face of Germany had been radically altered by the war. Nevertheless, the opening passage introduces Germany in the register of the conventional guidebook as a country with a varied and beautiful landscape and a rich cultural heritage. However, the second paragraph departs from this convention, depicting the stark reality of the effects of the war in a decidedly sober tone:

During the Second World War many larger cities but also smaller towns suffered huge destruction through the Allied air attacks, which had dropped 1.5 million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying 3 million apartments, as well as through fighting on the ground and detonations by German forces. 400 million cubic metres of rubble covered the area of the old Reich, one seventh of this (55 million) alone in Berlin. Three quarters of this destruction was caused by fire. In March 1942 Lübeck fell victim to the first large-scale attack.