[PDF] Rebuilding Germany eBook

Author : Jeffry M. Diefendorf
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 43,35 MB
Release : 1993-06-24
Category : History
ISBN : 0195361091

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In 1945 Germany's cities lay in ruins, destroyed by Allied bombers `hat left major architectural monuments badly damaged and much of the housing stock reduced to rubble. At the war's end, observers thought that it would take forty years to rebuild, but by the late 1950s West Germany's cities had risen anew. The housing crisis had been overcome and virtually all important monuments reconstructed, and the cities had reclaimed their characteristic identities. Everywhere there was a mixture of old and new: historic churches and town halls stood alongside new housing and department stores; ancient street layouts were crossed or encircled by wide arteries; old city centers were balanced by garden suburbs laid out according to modern planning principles. In this book, Diefendorf examines the questions raised by this remarkable feat of urban reconstruction. He explains who was primarily responsible, what accounted for the speed of rebuilding, and how priorities were set and decisions acted upon. He argues that in such crucial areas as architectural style, urban planning, historic preservation, and housing policy, the Germans drew upon personnel, ideas, institutions, and practical experiences from the Nazi and pre-Nazi periods. Diefendorf shows how the rebuilding of West Germany's cities after 1945 can only be understood in terms of long-term continuities in urban development.

Author : James C. Van Hook
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 18,49 MB
Release : 2007-08-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521039963

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In a nuanced and fresh account, James Van Hook evaluates the American role in West German recovery and the debates about economic policy within West Germany. He examines the 1948 West German economic reforms that dismantled the Nazi command economy and ushered in the fabled "economic miracle" of the 1950s. By abandoning Nazi era economic controls, the West Germans discarded a pre-1945 economic and industrial culture.

Author : Jeffry M. Diefendorf
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 29,63 MB
Release : 1993
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521431200

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This volume of essays by German and American historians discusses key issues of US policy toward Germany in the decade following World War II.

Author : James C. Van Hook
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 18,43 MB
Release : 2004-05-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1139452193

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The social market economy has served as a fundamental pillar of post-war Germany. Today, it is associated with the European welfare state. Initially, it meant the opposite. Rebuilding Germany examines the 1948 West German economic reforms that dismantled the Nazi command economy and ushered in the fabled 'European Miracle' of the 1950s. Van Hook evaluates the US role in German reconstruction, the problematic relationship of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, the West German 'economic miracle', and the extent to which the social market economy represented a departure from the German past. In a nuanced and fresh account, Van Hook evaluates the American role in West German recovery and the debates about economic policy within West Germany, to show that Germans themselves had surprising room to shape their economic and industrial system.

Author : Michael L. Hughes
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 46,62 MB
Release : 2014-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1469619539

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World War II and its aftermath brought devastating material losses to millions of West Germans. Military action destroyed homes, businesses, and personal possessions; East European governments expelled 15 million ethnic Germans from their ancestral homes; and currency reform virtually wiped out many Germans' hard-earned savings. These "war damaged" individuals, well over one-third of the West German population, vehemently demanded compensation at the expense of those who had not suffered losses, to be financed through capital levies on surviving private property. Michael Hughes offers the first comprehensive study of West Germany's efforts to redistribute the costs of war and defeat among its citizenry. The debate over a Lastenausgleich (a balancing out of burdens) generated thousands of documents in which West Germans articulated deeply held beliefs about social justice, economic rationality, and political legitimacy. Hughes uses these sources to trace important changes in German society since 1918, illuminating the process by which West Germans, who had rejected liberal democracy in favor of Nazi dictatorship in the 1930s, came to accept the social-market economy and parliamentary democracy of the 1950s.

Author : Michael Brenner
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 38,83 MB
Release : 1999-04-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691006796

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Including never-before-published eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, this is a comprehensive account of the lives of the Jews who remained in Germany immediately following the war.

Author : Mark E. Spicka
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 42,26 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 9781845452230

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Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 601 pages
File Size : 27,14 MB
Release : 2021-09-21
Category : History
ISBN : 0822988577

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Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

Author : Jay Howard Geller
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 32,67 MB
Release : 2020-02-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1978800711

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Featuring essays by scholars of history, literature, television, and sociology, Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany illuminates important aspects of Jewish life in Germany since 1949, including institution building, the internal dynamics and changing demographics of the Jewish community, and the central role of Jewish writers and public intellectuals.

Author : Luc Verpoest
Publisher : Leuven University Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 20,99 MB
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9462702500

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The challenges of post-war recovery from social and political reform to architectural design In the months and years immediately following the First World War, the many (European) countries that had formed its battleground were confronted with daunting challenges. These challenges varied according to the countries' earlier role and degree of involvement in the war but were without exception enormous. The contributors to this book analyse how this was not only a matter of rebuilding ravaged cities and destroyed infrastructure, but also of repairing people’s damaged bodies and upended daily lives, and rethinking and reforming societal, economic and political structures. These processes took place against the backdrop of mass mourning and remembrance, political violence and economic crisis. At the same time, the post-war tabula rasa offered many opportunities for innovation in various areas of society, from social and political reform to architectural design. The wide scope of post-war recovery and revival is reflected in the different sections of this book: rebuild, remember, repair, and reform. It offers insights into post-war revival in Western European countries such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, as well as into how their efforts were perceived outside of Europe, for instance in Argentina and the United States.