Heretical Thoughts at the Edge of the Rubble Heaps

Abstract

This evocative, fictionalized dialogue by Otto Bartning sets out an agenda for rebuilding Germany after the moral horror and physical destruction of the Third Reich and World War II. The narrator, an architect, discusses rebuilding with a young soldier; the narrator’s fallen son is a third, invoked presence. Bartning calls for modest modern rebuilding that equates the transparency of buildings with an open, democratic society.

Keywords:

• Otto Bartning
• rebuilding
• reconstruction
• World War II
• democracy
• postwar
• ruins

Notes

1 Translator’s note: Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who walked with a limp.

2 Translator’s note: The Deutscher Werkbund—German Werkbund—was an interest group established by artists, architects, designers, publicists, and industrialists in 1907 with the intention of improving the standard of German design and production.

2 Translator’s note: The Wandervogel youth movement, flourished in Germany from the mid-1890s until it was banned in 1933 as an unwanted rival to the Hitler Youth. As the name, literally translated as “wandering bird” indicates, the goals of the movement were to offer the nation’s youth an alternative to the industrial city by returning to nature and the forests and to revisionist and nationalist “Teutonic” values.

4 Translator’s note: The Ottheinrich Wing at Heidelberg Castle had a history of misfortune; it was damaged in 1693 by French soldiers and hit by lightning in 1764. The ground floor was restored and reroofed in the twentieth century, while only the external walls of the two upper stories survive, open to the sky.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Otto Bartning

Translated from German by Iain Boyd Whyte

Originally published as “Ketzerische Gedanken am Rande der Trümmerhaufen,” in Frankfurter Hefte, 1 (1 April 1946): 63–72.