Schivelbusch In A Cold Crater

Immediately following World War II, Berlin was presented to the Allied victors as a cold crater, the ruins of both a modern city and Germany’s culture. Hitler’s time in power had placed German cultural and intellectual pursuits in stasis after 1933, leaving Berlin’s theaters, newspapers, and films among the war’s rubble. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948, touches briefly on the cultural activities of the Third Reich, but places most of its attention on Berlin and its efforts to rebuild in the period between 1945-1948. Schivelbusch discusses the reconstruction of Germany’s cultural organizations as a primarily German enterprise, but there are brief sections of In a Cold Crater where the author highlights the American and Soviet contributions to the city’s rebirth, as it was their occupied zones that held Berlin’s former cultural and intellectual institutions. The international presence in postwar Berlin, combined with the returning émigrés’ affinity for the 1920s and its avant-garde creativity balanced the past and present in Germany’s reconstruction period, and held the promise of new cultural endeavors; however, according to Schivelbusch, “nothing memorable came from that

Schivelbusch asserts that In a Cold Crater aims to understand why nothing particularly noteworthy developed from Berlin’s cultural efforts in the period from 1945 to 1948; however, with the amount of time each chapter devoted to individuals rather than established cultural creations, one could claim that the book’s true focus lies in Berlin’s intellectuals and international occupants and their postwar pursuits to revive Germany’s pre-1933