This collection examines the urban spaces of Berlin and Washington and provides a comparative cultural history of two eminent nation-states in the modern era. Each of the cities has assumed, at times, a mythical quality and they have been seen as collective symbols, with ambitions and contradictions that mirror the nation-states they represent. Such issues such stand in the centre of this volume. The authors ask what these two capitals have meant for the nation and explore the relations between architecture, political ideas, and social reality. Topics range from Thomas Jefferson's ideas about the new capital of the United States to the creation of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, from nineteenth-century visitors to small-town Washington to the protesters of the 1968 student movement in West Berlin. This lively collection of essays speaks to audiences as diverse as historians, urban sociologists, architects and readers interested in cultural studies.
Notes
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
Contents
Capitals in modern history: Inventing urban spaces for the nation / Andreas W. Daum
Bundesdorf or Bundesstadt? The debates on the location of the American and German capitals / Kenneth R. Bowling and Ulrike Gerhard
Written capitals and capital topography: Berlin and Washington in travel literature / Walter Erhart
Prime meridians, national time, and the symbolic authority of capitals in the Nineteenth century / Martin H. Geyer
Washington and Berlin: national capitals in a networked world / Carl Abbott
Monumental architecture and national identity in Berlin: the case of National Socialism / Dietmar Schirmer
Monuments of catastrophe: Holocaust architecture in Washington and Berlin / Janet Ward
Capital gardens: the Mall and the Tiergarten / Christof Mauch
Socialism on display: East Berlin as a capital / Brian Ladd
Washington under Federal rule, 1871-1945 / Alan H. Lessoff
"Everyday" protest and the culture of conflict in Berlin, 1830-1980 / Belinda Davis
Marches on Washington and the creation of national public spaces, 1894 to the present / Lucy Barber.
Other title(s)
Cambridge University Press. History.
ISBN
9781139052412 (ebook)
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