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19 The myriad divisions established in Germany throughout the postwar years, from political to cultural to economic, followed to a large extent the fault lines of existing fissures within the country. Many of these divisions centered on Berlin, which, by the twentieth century, had gained a reputation as a city of extremes. It was famously populated with members of the Junker class of politically and socially conservative Prussian landowners, yet its Red City Hall (Rotes Rathaus) was so named both for the color of its bricks and the radical politics practiced within. It was well known as a center of both impressive wealth and technological innovation, as well as incredible poverty and miserable housing conditions. However, although viewed as an extreme case, Berlin was not so unlike other cities in Germany. Nonetheless, the city’s precipitous rise from provincial town to capital of the powerful Prussian Empire and then, from 1871, of a unified Germany helped make Berlin a lightning rod for the country’s fiercest debates about architecture, politics, urbanism, and “modernity.” Ultimately, Berlin became a symbol both of these debates and of “modernity ” itself, complicating its relationship to the already ambiguous notion of pan-German identity it was supposed to represent. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the instability of the Weimar period fueled the growth of parties of the far left and far right, opinions about Berlin became even more sharply divided and politicized. For some, the city’s association with leftist politics, industrial growth, and cultural experimentation was inspiring and invigorating. Others viewed Berlin with contempt and considered it a site and symbol of the decay of German culture. These aspects of Berlin’s pre–World War II history would have a particular influence on planning and architecture in the city after 1945. Postwar architects created plans for the city in response to specific architectural precedents, especially the building type known as the “rental barrack” (Mietskaserne), which proliferated in Berlin from the 1860s to the 1910s, as well as the projects produced in the 1920s under Chief City Planner Martin Wagner and in the 1930s and 1940s under Adolf Hitler. The roots of Cold War architecture and urban ONE MODERN CAPITAL, DIVIDED CAPITAL Berlin before the Wall 20 Modern Capital, Divided Capital planning in Berlin can therefore be traced to the city’s rapid growth from the nineteenth century, the establishment of its reputation as a center of the cultural and political avant-garde, and the architecture associated with both developments. Capital of Modernity Although for most of its history Berlin was a relatively unimportant regional capital, its development from the 1840s is characterized by incredibly rapid economic and physical growth, as well as its increasing political and cultural significance for Germany as a whole. As capital of the region, Berlin rose along with Prussia in the nineteenth century, benefiting from the Prussian Empire’s growing political dominance. After the German nation was declared in 1871, the political importance of Berlin was solidified , and the pace of the city’s economic and cultural development quickened . As the city’s economy grew, so did its population. In 1871, the city’s central district and outlying communities were home to 932,000. Only twenty-seven years later, the city’s inhabitants numbered 2.7 million; that figure had risen to 3.8 million by 1919.1 The city grew physically during this period as well, and surrounding districts were gradually incorporated until Greater Berlin was officially designated in 1920. The creation of Greater Berlin made it the third largest city in the world, raising Berlin’s total land area from 22.8 to 340 square miles and the total population to 4 million.2 Even before Berlin’s expansion, it was apparent that the municipal government needed to upgrade the city’s infrastructure and draft new maps and land surveys. In 1861, James Hobrecht, a young engineer who had only recently completed his studies, was chosen to draw up this plan. Influenced in part by Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s work in Paris, the Hobrecht Plan, completed in 1862, featured extremely broad boulevards interspersed with squares and laid out on a grid comprising very large blocks of forty-three hundred square feet. These large blocks were to have been subdivided into a smaller grid of streets, but the speculators who rushed to buy these plots were more interested in reaping profits than in adhering to Hobrecht’s plan.3 In the absence of any real city building regulations...

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