Neue Staedte fuer einen neuen Staat: Die staedtebauliche Erfindung des modernen Israel und der Wiederaufbau in der BRD

摘要

The content of this collection of essays, which has its origins in a symposium held in Berlin in 2011, extends well beyond the areas of architecture and town planning referred to in the title and sub-title, even extending into the field of literature. Admittedly, the chapter by Martin Peschken does ask how far the post-war rebuilding of West German towns was neglected by writers, concluding that it plays little part in the literature of the time, with the limited exceptions of Martin Walser's Ehen in Philippsburg and Wolfgang Koeppen's Das Treibhaus. More significantly, much space is devoted to the person of Edgar Salin, whose profession was neither architecture nor town planning. Before becoming a professor of Economics at Basel University in 1927, he had produced a thesis on 'Plato and the Greek Utopia' and was a member of the George-Kreis, a group of conservative young men close to the poet Stefan George and his idea of giving power to a select intellectual aristocracy. After the war, although not a Zionist, he was the initiator of the Israel Economic and Sociological Research Project, whilst also taking an interest in the rebuilding of the cities of the Federal Republic. In his keynote speech to the gathering of municipal dignitaries (Stadtetag) in 1960, starting with Thucydides and Plato, he pleaded for more quality in urban life (Urbanitat), his aspirations falling on somewhat deaf ears given planners' concerns with quantity rather than quality at this time. This and much more emerges in the two sections of the book, in the titles of which Salin's name appears.