Since 1945, the work of confronting or coming to terms with the Nazi past in Germany has taken legal, political, literary, psychological, and other forms. In the last two decades it has also become a focus of building projects in many German cities. While the prominence of Berlin as the capital of reunified Germany and of Germany during the Nazi Dictatorship has led to a great number of monuments, restoration projects, and new commemorative exhibit spaces there, many important and contested sites also exist in other German cities. In response to the large amount of scholarship already devoted to Berlin's urban landscape, the present volume looks “beyond Berlin” to answer the question of whether the types of commemoration and memory work that have taken place in Berlin are unique to the capital city or are nationally representative. On a related note, the volume attests not only to diversity within Germany, but also to the wide range of disciplines participating in the study of urban landscapes to understand better the activity and processes of memory construction. Paul Jaskot and Gavriel Rosenfeld have assembled an excellent collection of twelve essays, an introduction, and an epilogue written by (including themselves) five historians, a Germanist/comparatist, a cultural anthropologist, a cultural studies scholar, four art or architectural historians, and one journalist/critic/architect. The collective product is indeed evidence of the benefits of crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The plan of the collection is well conceived, and the editors clearly worked hard to include an array of diverse essays that nonetheless complement each other well. The volume is divided into four sections, each focusing on a specific domain of commemoration: reconstruction, new construction, perpetrator sites, and Jewish sites. The essays include cities in the north and south, but more importantly in the west and east (from Munich and Dresden to Hamburg and Rostock). And they touch on a wide range of site types, including military (Bremen), industrial (Essen and Wolfsburg), religious (Potsdam and Cologne), and residential (Frankfurt). In addition to advancing unique and compelling insights, each essay also presents a clear narrative documenting the history of a given site and the varied acknowledgement and reception of that history in the last six decades.

At the risk of doing serious injustice to the contributors' thick description and rich conclusions in such a short space, I will mention each briefly in turn. Vees-Gulani shows the surprising continuity across the 1989/90 Wende in Dresden that focused on the victimization of Germans, a phenomenon exemplified not just by the rhetoric around the restoration of the Frauenkirche, but also by the slow move to build a new synagogue. Likewise, Diefendorf's essay on Cologne points out that even when official commemoration takes place, it can often fall short by implying that “anonymous forces” brought on the “great catastrophe” of National Socialism and the Holocaust (p. 55). He concludes that without ceremony and ritual, even well-intentioned sites can remain static and ineffectual (p. 62). In the case of Rostock, Mazur-Strommen shows how the post-Wende focus on the Stasi can amplify one type of Cold-War commemoration that emphasized “external actors” such as the Allies and their bombing of German cities. In writing about the Volkswagen town of Wolfsburg, Fischer points both to the amazing continuities in urban planning personnel and to the “ironic similarities” between the project of forging “a model community of workers” before and after 1945 (p. 97). James-Chakraborty's essay on an industrial site in Essen reveals how “the Third Reich permeated daily life” (p. 116) and how historical amnesia often continues to pervade urban planning decisions.

Jaskot's analysis of the Nuremberg Reich Party Rally Grounds outlines the power of economics (both during the Wirtschaftswunder and more recently) and the “ideological confrontation” between various factions in local and Länder politics, albeit sometimes in unexpected coalitions. In his examination of the Königsplatz in Munich, Rosenfeld reminds us that the pace of forgetting can be so rapid as to require a kind of urban archaeology to uncover events and uses that once predominated. In tracing the fate of various WW II bunkers in Bremen, Buggeln and Marszolek explain that such relics “do not become places on the maps of memory of their own accord” but rather require the historical contextualizing work of local residents (p. 204). Another unfamiliar story, the significant structural changes made by Himmler and the SS to the Church of St. Servatius in the Harz town of Quedlinburg, is the subject of Kellogg-Krieg's essay which also carefully documents the GDR's selective amnesia with regard to such “alterations” and “reconstructions.”

The final section on urban Jewish sites includes Meng's story of the complete absence of public protest in the GDR regarding the destruction of the Potsdam synagogue, which he reads as part of a “broader social desire to forget an uncomfortable past and remember a fictitious one of resistance and anti-fascism” (p. 247). It also includes Goldman's essay that compares the inadequate commemoration of Jewish sites in Hamburg by public authorities until spurred on by citizens' initiatives. And Schönborn's discussion of the new Börneplatz in Frankfurt recounts missed opportunities for Frankfurt city administrators to acknowledge and preserve important remnants of centuries of Jewish life.

As a whole this volume paints an evocative and detailed picture of the core dilemma facing Germans and their city developers: how to pursue the work of a democratically pluralist society while remaining alert to the haunting reminders of a racist and oppressive regime. While these essays present a sobering story of tardy and frequently incomplete official interest in commemorating historically important sites, they also record the initiatives of some residents to demand (albeit sometimes unsuccessfully) that commemoration take place. Indeed, two conclusions of the volume as a whole seem to be that the “making visible” of such sites will only be achieved as long as individuals are committed to such acts of remembering and that no one-size-fits-all approach to commemorating the Nazi period can or should take place in Germany.

With very few exceptions, the writing style is lucid and compelling (one essay needs copyediting and German words are often split in odd places in line-breaks). The inclusion of excellent illustrations, clear definitions, explanatory background history, and English translations of German terminology and names makes the volume also ideally suited for use by students and by scholars not familiar with the German case, generating one more way in which the editors reach beyond traditional academic divisions. But even highly knowledgeable scholars of Germany will discover many new historical details and a fascinating addition to previous works on memory and urban studies. Certainly, this volume will inspire additional work in this area (perhaps focusing on smaller towns, sites related to the victimization of other groups, or even examples from rural Germany). I highly recommend these essays and the volume as a whole for their thoughtful engagement with what Jaskot calls “the instrumentalization of former sites of perpetrators and victims [that] requires a closer look at the agency of individuals and institutions” (p. 160).