Review by Rob Spence
Decades ago, on holiday in the south of France, we came by chance across a beautiful baroque chateau in the countryside. We decided to get a closer look, and discovered that we were just in time for the guided tour, which we joined. Our guide, a member of the resident family, gathered us together to begin his talk. The first thing he told us was that the chateau had suffered a catastrophic fire some years earlier, which had almost completely destroyed the interior. Everything that we were about to see had been reconstructed. As we moved from room to room, admiring staircases, furniture, and tapestries, the phrase that was constantly on our guide’s lips was “une copie exacte.” Every item we saw was a modern copy of the eighteenth-century original. It was somewhat disconcerting, because to our eyes, it all looked absolutely authentic, but we were being constantly reminded that we were not, in fact, viewing historical treasures, but modern simulacra. What were we actually encountering that day? A realistic reproduction, or some kind of Disneyfied imitation?
Marek Kohn does not write about French chateaux in his fascinating book, but I was reminded of that long-ago holiday by the subject matter here: the rebuilding of cities in central Europe devastated by the Second World War. All of the cities treated in the book – among them Warsaw, Würzburg, Rothenburg and Lublin – were more or less completely destroyed during the war, and Kohn’s book charts the post-war reconstruction of the cities in as painstaking a manner as the original rebuilders.
Of course, the end of the war divided middle Europe between two opposing ideologies, and part of the fascination of the book is to discover how the cities went about not just restoring their historic quarters, but deciding on which version of their history the restoration would favour. In doing so, those charged with restoration would be obliged to settle on a narrative that might, at the very least, be a heavily contested one. Depending on the political stance of the ruling authorities, the approach to the rebuilding would reflect a particular interpretation of its past. In Warsaw, for example, Kohn points out that the old town had been given a makeover, a cultural gentrification, which included some significant demolition in the inter-war years. A museum of “Old Warsaw” was due to open in 1939, but of course the war intervened. What was left after the war was largely rubble, but the new state of Poland had now been restored to its old borders, and the communist authorities were keen to instil a new sense of national pride. Thus, the Germans who had occupied the western part of the country for centuries were driven out, as were the ethnic Ukrainians in the east. Of course, nearly all the Jews that had lived in Warsaw in 1939 had been murdered, and the ones that survived found themselves ostracised or worse in the new state. Part of the plan to establish an ethnically Polish country involved the reproduction of Warsaw as a historic centre. And so, a version of Warsaw emerged over the post-war years that glorified a Poland that had arguably never really existed. Kohn details the sometimes ludicrous compromises made by the planners and architects in charge: the demolition of hundreds of ancient buildings in the previously German territory to provide bricks for the rebuilding effort in Warsaw, for instance.
By contrast, Frankfurt am Main was rebuilt in a completely modern style after the war, reflecting the West German state’s desire to signify a new beginning. So, distinctively twentieth century edifices replaced the mixture of styles in the old town, which had developed over the centuries. But nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and a campaign to restore the old town to its pre-war condition took hold, eventually becoming policy in the new united Germany. So, a visit to Frankfurt today is not complete without a stroll around the picturesque alleyways of the “neue Altstadt,” which opened in 2018.
What distinguishes this book from a general history of post-war reconstruction is the attention to the people involved. Kohn’s extensive research has unearthed the stories of the architects, students, planners, workmen and citizens around whom these colossal changes were effected. It is a really original and at times disturbing account of the ways in which war, politics and personal ambition shaped the cities of central Europe in the years after the war. The book is replete with many references, showing the very broad range of Kohn’s scholarship, but the tone is not academic, even if the book’s apparatus is. The personal stories of individuals whose lives were shattered by war, and who then had to rebuild their lives as well as their cities, are rendered with empathy and insight. This is really a very impressive achievement, which will change the way you look at the cities at the heart of Europe.
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk
Marek Kohn, The Stories Old Towns Tell (Yale University Press, 2025). 978-0300281064. 329pp., paperback.
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