Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People's State in 1968 by Andrew Demshuk (review)

Demolition on Karl Marx Square chronicles the extraordinary tensions generated by postwar reconstruction in Leipzig—the German Democratic Republic's second largest city—as the regime sought to transform the city into a paragon of socialist urbanism, effecting changes that frequently either ignored or explicitly opposed the interests and desires of the city's residents. In painstaking detail, Andrew Demshuk's book describes the result—if not the resolution—of this conflict: the dynamiting in May 1968 of Leipzig's University Church on Karl Marx Square, ostensibly to make way for a new and modern university campus. One of the oldest buildings in the city and one of the few historical structures left virtually untouched by the ravages of war, the church functioned both as a site of worship for the public and training location for the university's theology department, as well as serving as a repository of collective memory and a symbol for Leipzigers of a city that was familiar and stable.

Structured chronologically, the book dwells most extensively on the weeks and days leading up to the destruction itself, including the final, occasionally heroic attempts to save the church and the state's callous responses. However, Demshuk also pays careful attention to the planning history surrounding Karl Marx Square throughout the 1950s and 1960s, which included several other high-profile proposals and unpopular demolitions. The result is a tragic arc in which the loss of the church marked a dramatic turning point in the relationship between the East German regime and its subjects. East Germans' optimism and earnest commitment to creating a socialist city and future had yielded to the government's brutal methods of surveillance and control, but after May 1968, the last shreds of hope turned into bitterness and withdrawal, a new status quo that would persist until the revolutions of the late 1980s.

The foundation of this study is extensive and meticulous archival research. Demshuk draws on the records of government ministries and agencies, Stasi files, newspaper and periodical archives, university and church records, and the papers of preservationist, planning, and architectural associations. This accumulation of primary sources allows the author to recreate very precisely the specific roles played by individuals as different as anonymous Leipzig citizens and state party boss Paul Frölich in the twenty-year process that culminated in the demolition of a beloved landmark. Along the way, Demshuk gives voice to a previously silenced segment of the population, uncovering a wealth of unpublished letters to the editor, missives to government representatives, and visitor cards and guest books from local planning exhibitions, all of which indicate near unanimous resistance to the removal of the University Church.

The picture that emerges is as complex as it is persuasive. Impure motives and conflicts of interest of well-meaning people, good intentions exploited for questionable ends, impassioned resistance against all odds by citizens with much to lose, and professional negligence or incompetence all contributed to the appalling outcome on Karl Marx Square. Neither the fact that the history of the GDR involves as much gray as black and white, nor that the regime committed crimes against its own citizens are revelatory, but they deserve to be underscored. In the story of the University Church we see not only one more crime committed by the East German state, but also the state learning, through an iterative process of trial and error, how to commit such crimes, which crimes will prove most effective at cowing a population with least risk to the regime, and how to insinuate its power and control into the most capillary elements of society. Ultimately, the demolition of the church was an exercise in unaccountable power far more than one in responsible, or even socialist, urban planning.

In taking a narrowly defined subject and harnessing it to deep and thorough archival research, Demshuk's book...