In Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin, Jennifer V. Evans explores how Berliners imagined and experienced themselves and their city at the crossroads between war and peace. Focusing on the period from war's end through the 1950s, Evans paints a picture of a city and its inhabitants navigating among present-day ruins, memories of a vibrant past, and plans for the future.

The book develops as a series of images or snapshots organized into segments devoted to particular features of the city: cellar and bunker, street, train station, bar, cafe and cabaret, home. Within each segment, the author examines themes such as survival and everyday life in a war-torn landscape, sexuality, and the complex intermingling of soldiers and civilians, occupiers and occupied populations. The city's physical features are central to the story, as Evans explores what the loss of a familiar cityscape signified for its inhabitants, and how they reconstructed themselves and their habits within the urban landscape, itself being rebuilt at the same time.

Framing her inquiry broadly, Evans reaches back into Berlin's prewar history, especially the Weimar era, to fill in Berliners' picture of themselves and their city. She argues that memories of the 1920s, especially, played a crucial role in Berliners' postwar encounters with the city. At the same time, Evans notes that “While both Berliners and foreign visitors to the city recalled with pleasure the excesses of Weimar, curiously they did not subject the National Socialist reaction to this period to rigorous analysis” (p. 221). As a result, in the face of what seemed a rising tide of licentious behavior at war's end, it became relatively easy for the authorities in each of the city's four occupation sectors to reach back to National Socialist policies and disciplinary procedures to punish deviants, despite the occupiers' public disavowals of the defunct regime.

Evans's work is part of a growing historiography of the aftermath of war, not only as it relates to memory and recovery from wartime traumas, but also as it relates to the reconstruction, or perhaps better, the reconfiguration of morality and sexuality in the wake of conflict. Where Jörg Arnold's The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) is primarily concerned with memory and the loss of the material city itself (in this case, Kassel), Evans's main focus is on the loss of the sexual city and the reconfiguration of Berlin's sexual life and notions of morality in the aftermath of war. Within the literature on war's aftermath and reconstruction, the most original aspect of Evans's work is the way it weaves together diffuse ideas about gender and relationships with the concrete physical substance of the city, in East Berlin as well as in West Berlin. Not only were Berlin's physical destruction and its occupied status constant reminders of the lost glory of Berlin's nightlife, but both also created new opportunities for unusual and illicit encounters. Moreover, the many occupying soldiers in the city represented “sexual excitement and adventure when it came to fraternization and dating, but also . . . the ever-present potential for sexual violence” (p. 78). The authorities, for their part, were painfully aware of these transgressions and saw urban reconstruction as a preliminary to moral reconstruction, itself a key to Germany's rebirth.

Following Georg Simmel's ideas about the Imperial German city as a shaper of identity, Evans takes as a given that “city spaces, even broken ones, play a constitutive part in shaping social identity and the operation of power” (p. 19). But how big is their reach? Are Evans's conclusions applicable only to Berlin, or can they tell us something more broadly about postwar Germany? Evans justifies her focus on Berlin by citing its “iconic status” (p. 20), and it is clear that the situation in the German metropolis had considerable resonance both within and outside Germany. Still, one wonders about other cases—Hamburg, for instance, or the badly bombed cities of the Ruhr, not to mention rural Germany, where sexuality might have been mapped out and imagined entirely differently.

Echoing Berlin's own cacophony, Evans's work functions by amassing and juxtaposing images, scents, and sounds. Overall, this technique works well, resulting in a lively and vivid portrait of the city. At times, however, the sheer range of the book becomes a little bewildering. We move from weeds (and an emerging cross-border Cold-War botany of the ruins) to widowhood and juvenile delinquency within a few pages, unsure at times what to make of the multitude of impressions. Particularly in a work of cultural history, distinctions between perception and reality, officials' fears and the resulting policies may be blurred, but the reader is sometimes left to seek his or her argumentative bearings. Evans's impressionistic technique reveals clearly the gendering and sexualization of Berlin's cityscape; it is perhaps less well suited to exposing the policy implications of the links contemporaries drew between “national identity, citizenship, and the perceived naturalness of marriage-based heterosexuality” (p. 223), all of which were seen to be imperiled by ongoing prostitution, homosexuality, and other transgressions. Fortunately, a clearer connection between these impressions of degeneration and specific reconstructive practices emerges in the book's final content chapter, “Home,” which analyzes insightfully the institutions that developed in the east and west to rehabilitate wayward youth.

Evans mines a tremendous range of primary sources throughout this fascinating work, which shows clearly that Berliners themselves were key actors in their city's reconstruction. Some residents shared official fears about postwar families on the defensive, while others took advantage of their city's disorder to resurrect not only Weimar memories, but also transgressive practices from that era. In a process that paralleled the city's physical reconstruction, Berliners navigated between past, present, and future to shape and rebuild the sexual city.