Modernity and memory: The politics of architecture in Hungary and East Germany after the Second World War

The dissertation analyzes major architectural debates in Hungary and East Germany from the 1950s to year 2000. It treats architectural discourse as a lens into the changing relationship between the state and the architectural profession, which led to the periodic redefinition of the public role of the architect as well as the substantive focus of architecture. It traces how architecture in the 1950s served primarily as a tool of political representation, in the 1960s as a weapon of social reform, while in the 1980s it became a cultural medium through which these societies tried to regain their distinctive national identities and historical traditions, and in the 1990s it evolved into an important cultural strategy of urban development. In mapping these shifts in the social meaning of architecture the dissertation tries to identify the linkages between professional debates and broader societal discourses about social modernization, collective memory and globalization. The analysis also underscores that these professional discourses have to be interpreted in a larger international context, as the key architectural debates revolved around intellectual paradigms that were not specific to these two countries but exemplified widely diffused international architectural trends.; The dissertation thus examines four key episodes that shed light on the local reception of the most influential architectural paradigms of the post-Second World War period: socialist realism, architectural modernism, postmodernism and contemporary discussions about the characteristic architecture of global cities. It surveys debates that followed East German architects' study trip to Moscow aimed at importing the program of socialist realism, the heated discussions about modernist mass housing construction programs in 1960s Hungary, the so-called "Tulip Debate" that revived a deep-rooted controversy about the status of national identity in Hungarian architecture, and finally, it looks at the rebuilding of reunited Berlin after the fall of the Wall. Pairs of these case studies thematize, respectively, the notion of tradition and modernity in architecture. The dissertation argues that changing understandings of these two concepts have in fact remained at the center of defining the intellectual agenda of architecture, the cultural identity of the architectural profession and its relationship to broader society.