Aerial bombs had turned a good part of Germany's urban landscape into rubble by 1945, but just a few years later, the increasingly divided country was rebuilding itself with remarkable speed, a fact that caught the attention of early postwar commentators both inside and outside Germany. After traveling across West and East Germany in the early 1960s, Amos Elon wrote with astonishment: “The resurrected cities—brand new, clean, sober, infinitely monotonous—stand on the former ruins” (Journey through a Haunted Land: The New Germany [1967], 13). This rush to rebuild obviously reflected the need to satisfy basic but important requirements such as housing, but it was also propelled by the political rivalry of the Cold War. The two Germanies competed intensely with each other to reconstruct their cities better and more quickly. For architects, planners, and officials, nothing less than the identity and future legitimacy of their respective societies appeared to be at stake in urban reconstruction.

Both Germanies invested urban reconstruction, planning, and architecture with tremendous political importance. This point might seem obvious, but Emily Pugh develops it with extraordinary richness in her book on the physical, cultural, and discursive politics of urban space in Berlin from roughly the late 1940s to the late 1980s. Based on archival material, newspaper articles, films, and images, Pugh's work traces the architectural and political dimensions of Berlin's reconstruction in the central part of the city. Through this focus on central Berlin, she visits some of divided Berlin's most symbolic and politically important postwar architectural projects, providing highly detailed and thoughtful accounts of them. The book centers on an analysis of two prominent building projects: the construction of the State Library (Staatsbibliothek) in West Berlin and the Palace of Culture (Palast der Republik) in East Berlin.

Seeking to define itself as an open and free city at the height of the Cold War, the West Berlin government decided to build a “Cultural Forum” with a library as the focal point of the project, and in 1964, the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, or SPK) chose Hans Scharoun to be the architect for the library. Scharoun designed an expressionist building incorporating light and glass, which was meant to mark the movement of West Germany out of the darkness of Nazism into the light of liberal democracy, thus continuing the postwar tradition of linking modern architecture to liberal democracy. The library was intended to be “a modern-day temple for scholarship that transforms reading and learning into almost sacred acts and provides a stage for the ‘performance’ of democracy” (94)—a space of liberation through education and contemplation. As one critic commented on the occasion of the library's opening in 1978, the Staatsbibliothek was a “cultural sanctuary” (Kulturheiligtum) in which one felt “liberated, not intimidated” (99).

The regime in East Berlin struggled for some time to locate a central building that would express its political values. It grandly began in the early 1950s, of course, with the Stalinallee project, a wide boulevard with apartments built in historist, “German” style. This project attested to the spread of socialist realism across the Soviet bloc during the early establishment of Soviet-style communism in Central and Eastern Europe. Originating in early 1930s Moscow, socialist realist architecture sought to document the triumph of communism over capitalism by showcasing the historic movement away from the dark, cramped, and chaotic capitalist city toward the light, spacious, and orderly socialist city. Critiquing the austere and functional designs of modernism, socialist realist architecture emphasized the building of grand and ornamental façades such as the ones constructed on Stalinallee. After its completion, the East German leadership struggled to locate another grand and symbolic project to carry out, and it took years before the regime finally settled on the rebuilding of Berlin's historic city center. In 1950–1951, officials tore down the damaged Berlin City Palace, but then wavered for two decades before deciding on what kind of building ought to be erected in its place. It finally decided in the early 1970s to construct a modernist structure as the “central building” of the East German capital. The Palace of the Republic was to be a visible, open, and unifying space, with rooms for government meetings, cultural activities, scholarly conferences, and entertainment, including several restaurants, a theater, a discotheque, and a bowling alley. The palace was supposed to reflect the hopes and aspirations of the good life under Communist rule, of the erträumte DDR (dreamed-of GDR).

Pugh is at her best when discussing the Palace of the Republic and the State Library, but she also offers a number of other illuminating insights about divided Berlin's built environment. This includes a strong chapter on West Berlin as the “capital of counterculture” during the 1980s, when modernist urban renewal projects came under severe criticism from squatters who tried to or did take over 122 buildings in almost every district of West Berlin. With respect to East Berlin, Pugh discusses, among other projects, the redevelopment of the quarter around Saint Nicholas Church in Berlin's historical core. The project involved the construction of historicized residential and commercial buildings, as well as the restoration of historic buildings, such as the eighteenth-century Ephraim-Palais and Knoblauchhaus. The new quarter received mixed reviews from many architectural critics in the GDR, who dismissed it as a “pseudohistorical ‘Disneyland’” (322).

A book of this scope must, of course, leave out or discuss only very briefly many important topics. The Turkish migrant experience in West Berlin might have been analyzed more extensively, for example; the spatial, social, political, and cultural history of the Berlin Wall receives excellent but surprisingly brief coverage; and the post-1989 history of the Palace of the Republic also gets short shrift. Even so, Pugh has written a highly useful and detailed account of Berlin's architectural and political history that experts and students in a variety of disciplines will benefit from reading.