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Since its discovery by German romantics and nationalists, Rothenburg has been an established icon of the German nation and its medieval past. By tracing Rothenburg's historical development as a place of national importance, this book examines the cultural politics of historical preservation and tourism in general. In exploring the shifting practice and importance of tourism in Rothenburg and how this relates to broader debates about German culture and identity, Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism offers an important and original perspective on the changing dynamics of romanticized historical landscapes and how events are used to further national, cultural and political agendas. It also analyses the changing practices of historical preservation, and in particular, how historic preservation in Rothenburg reflects a desire to make it more historic and more German. With important insights into what it means to be German, how Germans relate to the past and how the answers to these questions have changed over time, this richly illustrated and detailed volume offers an important narrative of the rise, evolution and contestation of memory in German culture.
The urge for regional identity has not declined in the process of globalization. Rather, heritage is used to develop regional distinctiveness and to charge identities with a past. Particularly helpful for this aim are creation stories, Golden Ages or recent, shared traumas. Some themes such as the Roman era or the Second World War appear easier to appropriate than, for example, prehistory. This book assesses the role of heritage in the construction of regional identities in Western Europe. It contains case studies on early medieval heritage in Alsace and Euregio-Meuse Rhine, industrial heritage in the German Ruhr area and competing memories in the Arnhem-Nijmegen region in the Netherlands. It presents new insights into the process of heritage production on a regional level in relationship to processes of identity construction. The theoretical analysis of "heritage" and "regional identity" is innovative as these concepts were hardly analysed in relation to each other before. This book also offers insights into policy, tourism, spatial development and regional development to policymakers, politicians, designers and professionals in the heritage and tourism industries.
Windhoek, capital city of South West Africa or modern Namibia, represents an extraordinary showpiece for overlapping colonial planning regimes. For the first time, this book focuses on the decades between both World Wars when German and South African planning laws were amalgamated. It reveals the actions taken to implement a system of residential segregation from a transnational perspective. As the analysis demonstrates, Windhoek tended to replicate the colonial idea of a Dual City. But in fact the administration created a Hybrid City and there was no predetermined path to apartheid.
This richly illustrated book details the wide-ranging construction and urban planning projects launched across Germany after the Nazi Party seized power. Hagen and Ostergren show that it was far more than just an architectural and stylistic enterprise. Instead, it was a series of interrelated programs intended to thoroughly reorganize Germany’s economic, cultural, and political landscapes. The authors trace the specific roles of its component parts—the monumental redevelopment and cleansing of cities; the construction of new civic landscapes for educational, athletic, and leisure pursuits; the improvement of transportation, industrial, and military infrastructures; and the creation of networked landscapes of fear, slave labor, and genocide. Through distinctive examples, the book draws out the ways in which combinations of place, space, and architecture were utilized as a cumulative means of undergirding the regime and its ambitions. The authors consider how these reshaped spaces were actually experienced and perceived by ordinary Germans, and in some cases the world at large, as the regime intentionally built a new Nazi Germany.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings--from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation's history. Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Kos...
Urban Transformations is a theoretical and empirical account of the changing nature of urbanization in Germany. Where city planners and municipal administrations had emphasized free markets, the rule of law, and trade in 1871, by the 1930s they favoured a quite different integrative, corporate, and productivist vision. Urban Transformations explores the broad-based social transformation connected to these changes and the contemporaneous shifts in the cultural and social history of global capitalism. Dynamic features of modern capitalist life, such as rapid industrialization, working-class radicalism, dramatic population growth, poor quality housing, and regional administrative incoherence significantly influenced the Greater Berlin region. Examining materials on city planning, municipal administration, architecture, political economy, and jurisprudence, Urban Transformations recasts the history of German and European urbanization, as well as that of modernist architecture and city planning.
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 ...
A survey of urbanization and the making of modern Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the First World War.
In the urgently expanding field of environmental history, two trends are emerging. Research has internationalized, crossing political and historical borders. And urban spaces are increasingly seen as part of, not apart from, the global environment. In this book, Jeffry Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey have gathered much of the important work pushing the field in new directions. Eleven essays by prominent and regionally diverse scholars address how human and natural forces collaborate in the creation of cities, the countryside, and empires. The Cities section features essays that examine pollution and its aftermath in Pittsburgh, the Ruhr Valley (Germany), and Los Angeles. These urban areas are far...