Beyond Berlin

Series

• Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany

Beyond Berlin breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to understand how memorials, buildings, and other spaces have figured in Germany's confrontation with its Nazi past. The contributors challenge reigning views of Germany's postwar memory work by examining how specific urban centers apart from the nation's capital have wrestled with their respective Nazi legacies. A wide range of West and East German cities is profiled in the volume: prominent metropolises like Hamburg, dynamic regional centers like Dresden, gritty industrial cities like Wolfsburg, and idyllic rural towns like Quedlinburg. In employing historical, art historical, anthropological, and geographical methodologies to examine these and other important urban centers, the volume's case studies shed new light upon the complex ways in which the confrontation with the Nazi past has directly shaped the German urban landscape since the end of the Second World War.

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University and author of The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism and Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich. Visit Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's website.

Paul B. Jaskot is Associate Professor of Modern Art and Architectural History at DePaul University and author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy.

Praise / Awards

• "This is a top-notch collection of essays that positions itself in the populated field of memory studies by bringing together original contributions representing the best of new scholarship on architecture, urban design, monuments, and memory in East and West Germany. Taken together, the essays remind readers that the Nazi past is always present when German architects, urban planners, and politicians make decisions to tear down, rebuild, restore, and memorialize."
  —S. Jonathan Wiesen, Department of History, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

• "Beyond Berlin is one of the most fascinating, deeply probing collections ever published on Germany's ongoing confrontation with its Nazi past. Its editors, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, have taken the exploration of Germany's urban memorial landscape to its highest level yet."
  —James E. Young, Professor and Chair, Department of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge

• "Rosenfeld and Jaskot have assembled a fine collection of reflective essays that demonstrate how each city dealt with its past architecturally through the distinctive lens of its history . . . An extremely useful volume for collections in history, art, and architecture."
  —M. Deshmukh, Choice

• "Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past is a groundbreaking study in comparative memory studies . . . Beyond Berlin is a lucidly written and argued study."
  —Deborah Ascher Barnstone, German Studies Review

• ". . . even highly knowledgeable scholars of Germany will discover many new historical details and a fascinating addition to previous works on memory and urban studies. "
  —Kirsten Belgum, University of Texas at Austin, Central European History

• "Historians of modern Germany seem obsessed with examining how Germans have dealt with the Nazi past. Gavriel Rosenfled and Paul Jaskot note in their introduction to this edited collection that such examinations have tended to focus on Berlin. The volume under review is an attempt to take the subject 'beyond Berlin,' to examine the ways in which Germans have regarded, commemorated, obscured, confronted, forgotten, and remembered the Nazi past in a variety of other cities."
  —Richard Bessel, American Historical Review

• "Here, finally, is a set of studies that gets away from the Berlin focus of postwar German commemoration debates. This attempt to examine 'the obvious fact that Germans have also confronted the legacy of the Nazy regime as the inhabitants of their respective localities' should be applauded."
  —Canadian Journal of History