German Luggage

Germany has so much baggage to deal with.  From barbarians running through the woods beyond the frontier of the Roman Empire... To the protestant reformation and the fight to have it accepted....  Then the princes, kings, and emperors....  And both the world wars with the horrific loss of life and vast devastation inflicted on others and suffered by this city and its people... The years of post war division and standing between the cold war super powers... And now this new unified Germany.  

To say that Germany has cultural, historical, social, political, and emotional baggage seems like such an understatement.  Our few-hundred year American history seems so much more straight forward, and the way we build buildings does not have to contend with nearly as many historical complexities.  German architecture has born witness to and stands to testify of all the triumphs and horrors of its people, and the way Germans plan their city, the way they design their buildings has to respond to the architectural heritage of Germany.  


The evidence of architecture's role as a witness to the past is even evident in the way that Germans rebuild monuments and buildings that have been destroyed.  They will go to the point of duplicating a destroyed building in order to preserve the impact that it had on their culture and city.

The last few days of class we have been focusing on older German architecture, German history, and the ways Germans have built, destroyed, or re-built throughout their history.

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