Constructing the Cold War: Architecture, urbanism and the cultural division of Germany, 1945--1957

This dissertation examines the cold war's two antithetical ‘international styles’ of architecture as signifiers of broader globalization projects. Socialist Realism and International Modernism became stylistic signifiers of the ideological and epistemological partition of east and west: a process examined in this dissertation, using divided Germany as a case study.;Stratification of the German design profession into opposing cold war camps began in the spring of 1950, with the departure of two study tours, sent from West and East Germany, for reorientation in the US and the USSR, respectively. These exercises in knowledge transfer underscored the distinctive methods by which American and Soviet design were deployed to support contrasting political ideologies, both of which called themselves ‘democracy.’ As prescribed by Stalinist centralized management, architectural production in East Germany was consolidated and reformed, with party support, through organizations headed by participants in the Soviet study tour, who had been recruited from the state's relevant ministries and design institutes. The 1951 “Battle for a New German Architecture” condemned Modernist architecture as a betrayal of the proletariat and consummated the design profession's transformation. By contrast, US efforts to influence West German reconstruction practices used a ‘'bottom-up’ strategy which proved largely ineffective. The architecture-school graduates who comprised the American reorientation program had little impact on West Germany's architectural profession, elements of which had embarked upon a consensus building campaign of their own, however. In the postwar epilogue to a long-standing feud between German design factions, Modernists commandeered American cultural positions to advance their own professional causes. The outcome, a cult notion of the Bauhaus as democracy incarnate, failed to establish modernist hegemony over architectural design, which in West Germany remained a commodity shaped by market demand.;The fundamental trope of cold war architecture was that of binary opposition. In the mid-1950s this architectural epistemology was realized in two competing reconstruction projects. East Berlin's Stalinallee showcased the material and cultural rewards of a socialist good life slated for distribution among an ever-widening circle of citizens: a Socialist Realist narrative which proved to be a chimera. A revolution in socialist housing production, based on speeding up manual construction labor, was needed to fulfill the Stalinallee's promise of collective ‘workers' palaces.’ Exploited construction workers rebelled in the national strike of 17 June 1953. West Berlin's Interbau, a housing exposition built to repudiate the Stalinallee, celebrated Modernism's ‘free world’ values. But the project's bloated budget and propagandistic goals had much in common with the East's culture of spectacle. Both the Stalinallee and Interbau aimed to produce totalizing urban environments in which postwar identities associated with socialism or capitalism could be put on display. This similarity pointed to unacknowledged processes of cultural cross-fertilization, which were dissimulated by stylistic disparity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).