Städte im Nationalsozialismus

This volume presents nine essays on urban spaces during the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. All of them stem from (mostly) recent research projects. One half of the essays is concerned with metropolitan areas and big cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Breslau/Wrocław, whilst the other half focuses on small and middle towns, for instance Gunzenhausen, Münster and the ‘city of the Kdf-car’ (Stadt des KdF-Wagens, as Wolfsburg, the production site of the Volkswagen, was called in 1938 until its renaming in 1945). The essays focus on a broad variety of topics, perspectives and approaches. They span from urban planning, mobility services and local pogroms against the Jewish population to fiscal policies, self-preservation capacities of persecuted minorities and urban perceptions and imaginaries. This richness is one of the strengths of this book. It also leads to the question of how these different strands can be bound together within an analytic framework. The editors seek to meet this need via the concepts of ‘urban space’ and ‘social order’. They identify cities as laboratories of industrial modernity and conclude that they are thus particularly useful as a mean of studying National Socialist planning and social engineering. Their starting point is that urban spaces are no mere backdrops for ‘real’ urban life. Rather, they claim that urban spaces are constructed by social practices, means of communication and symbolic representations. In this view, ‘urban spaces’ are highly dynamic and malleable configurations in which National Socialist society took place and took on form. The mutual influence of urban spaces and social orders is broken down in several key questions: how did National Socialist concepts of society penetrate urban spaces and vice versa? Which symbols and semantics marked urban places as being subjected under local Nazi authorities, or as fields of intervention in which a new social order still had to be brought about? In which way did local topographies and infrastructure frame practices of inclusion and exclusion?

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