Andrew Demshuk’s Cities after Hitler won the 2023 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. It is an impressive work of scholarship, a lengthy and generously illustrated text well anchored in a rich array of primary and secondary sources. More importantly, it makes a significant and somewhat unusual argument, which is that the postwar reconstructions of three cities that were part of a united Germany from 1871 to 1945 but during the Cold War were located in three different nation-states—the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and Poland—merit being considered comparatively. Demshuk, a historian, has written previously about postwar expulsions of Germans from land recently acquired by Poland and about the destruction of historic architecture in postwar Leipzig. In this book, he casts what is for architectural historians a refreshingly original light on his subjects, Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig, and Wrocław...

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