Sacred Sites in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Wrocław, 1945–1949

Chapter 8 Rebuilding after the Reich: Sacred Sites in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Wrocław, 1945–1949

Andrew Demshuk

The curse of Hitler ripped asunder the historic interconnectedness of urban spaces that had previously been part of Germany, and imbued their reconstruction with seemingly insurmountable ideological differences. Out of the ashes of the Third Reich, West German Frankfurt am Main was rebuilt as a showpiece of democratic transparency, capitalism, and humanism; East German Leipzig was refashioned along the ideals of socialist utopianism and anti-fascism; and, after the flight and expulsion of Breslau’s over 600,000 German residents, Polish Wrocław was reinvented through a nationalist mythology that somehow the city had always been Polish despite a 700-year German “occupation.” With such divergent destinies, it can be hard to believe that each of these historic trading cities had been part of the same country before 1945, much less that they could have had anything in common as they were rebuilt under rival re- gimes. Nonetheless, each city was reconstructed through local discourses that paralleled each other in their need to reinvent a usable past and forge a usable future out of the ruins of the Nazi German catastrophe. Regardless of which city is discussed, political and planning elites encouraged a selective and ideo- logically inflected memory of the unsavory past through architecture. Where once a Kaiser-era war monument may have stood before a grand historicist Wilhelmine edifice, a sleek modern façade could foretell a better tomorrow; or where bombs had wiped out a Renaissance gable that spoke to local civic pride, a replica might “come back” into being. Through investigating distinc- tive commonalities that stemmed from this shared quandary, the following analysis weaves all three cities back together into a common narrative across Cold War borders and highlights a corresponding pursuit by civic leaders who firmly believed that, with the right architectural language, they could redeem their society.

* Research for this essay was supported by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I also wish to thank Rebecca Mitchell for her critical comments, as well as col- leagues at talks I gave at CUNY, the Universities of Halle, Wrocław, Amsterdam, and Bremen, the GHI in Washington, and annual GSA and ASEEES conferences.

After the traumatic ruptures and ignominies of Nazism, the immediate postwar era saw particular obsession with “sacred sites” that might rescue the city and nation.1 As the first section shows, immediate postwar political and planning elites in all three successor regions expended considerable energy debating and executing the reconstruction of symbolic locations at a time when most residents lacked basic shelter and services, because they believed that the invention of a usable local contribution to a transfigured national story would inculcate a viable worldview for each traumatized populace. The second section furthers this contextualization by surveying how each region’s planners and politicians exploited loosened property relations and embraced iconoclastic aesthetics to somehow “master” the moral and material ruins left by Nazism. The successive core sections then expound on how in each city a “sacred site” provoked passionate attention – Frankfurt’s Goethehaus, Leipzig’s resting place for Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wrocław’s “medieval” cathedral island – as a means of fashioning a usable past that could redefine the city’s local place in a crystalizing postwar national story. Regardless of how the mon- umental site was aesthetically realized, the ardent debates that arose around these architectural lynchpins for postwar identity evince three societies equal- ly fixated on reimagining an historic architectural iconography to shape a usable narrative for the city’s present and future.2 As the essay’s end gestures, early postwar sacred sites set the stage for each city’s parallel urban planning experience through the coming decades.

Sacred Sites in Local and National Mythologies

The urgency with which leaders sought to enthrone their city in a transfigured national narrative was evinced by the considerable energy, resources,

1 For a broader canvas which juxtaposes urban planning quandaries, justifications, solutions, and reactions as they evolved in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Wrocław throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, see Andrew Demshuk, Three Cities after Hitler: Urban Reconstruction across Cold War Borders (forthcoming). 2 My research represents a first major attempt to apply archival and other primary materi- als to compare urban reconstruction across the trifold division of post-1945 areas of former Weimar Germany. Building on earlier German-German comparisons, in 1987 Klaus von Beyme juxtaposed West and East German cities with some pages on urban spaces in the lost eastern territories. See his Der Wiederaufbau. Architektur und Städtebaupolitik in beiden deutschen Staaten (Munich: R. Piper, 1987). Michael Meng has since offered insightful analysis of how in West Germany, East Germany, and Poland synagogues emerged as an abject past few wanted in their new urban future. See his Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).