Warsaw was devastated after the WWII. It is estimated that about 85% of the buildings were destroyed, and only about one thousand people lived in the ruins, compared to more than one million before the war. The communist government that was installed by the Soviet Union after the war initially decided to build a new capital city, because it was calculated that it would be cheaper to build a new one than reconstruct the old one. Later, people started to move back, and Warsaw was reconstructed instead.
Similarly, Nuremberg was something like 95% destroyed. It's strange to see it. The vast majority of the city looks obviously new, and it's all a very similar architectural style. The bricks are a little too clean, a little too straight, on these buildings designed to look 300-500 years old, that are only 30 to 60 years old--at the most!
Last Fall I was in Minsk, Belarus. I was wondering why streets are so wide. It turned out that all (for all practical purposes) buildings were destroyed by Nazis about before their departure. On our way, the only building that survived (was older than 1944) was concentration camp building.
Minsk was rebuilt from ground up, really.
I don't know the real percentage of destroyed buildings in Minsk, but I guess it is about same or even bigger.
I believe the source is Miasto Ruin or City of Ruins [1], which is a CG visualization based on computer modeling of what an airplane would have seen near the end of the war. See also IMDB [2].
Last year I was on a train that went from Germany to Poland, when we were in Poland a girl sitted in the same cabin I was, and asked me something. I said "bitte?" and she was like "we don't like that language, speak in english since you are obviously not german". I said "yeah I'm not german" and we started talking, I was shocked that she, so young, didn't like german language after all these years.
I just discovered this video, showing Berlin in 1945, a few days ago: https://vimeo.com/126267047 - it's high quality and in color. Very impressive if you are only used to the black and white shots of that time.
It's a little sad seeing how most of the old ornate buildings have been replaced with much more generic looking buildings. That's one thing that struck me about Berlin--it looks a lot more like a "typical" American city than a "typical" European city.
I don't know what you mean by a typical American city. There is nothing remotely distinguishing enoughly similar to an American city in those pictures of boring and bland versions of the already insignificant Bauhaus architectural style.
This criticism has been around even before WW2. Berlin was called "the Chicago of Europe" even back then; the "old ornate buildings" you mention were nothing compared to other European cities.
Interesting how much public transit (in the form of streetcars and rails in the road) can be seen in the older photos, which is almost gone from the newer ones.
Yeah, the tram lines were mostly torn out of West Berlin in the 1950s to make more space for cars. They're still all over the east, and there's been some very recent construction including a tram line that goes to the main railway station.
You've still got pretty good buses in those areas, though. Our main public transit problem lately is construction and/or strikes that shut down large parts of the S-Bahn.
There is a movie about post-war Warsaw [1], based on Russian airplane photo shoots. The part of the city that looks almost perfectly flat is the former Jewish ghetto. Nowadays, this area has a completely different arrangement of streets, because in 1945 you could not tell very well a street from a building, so it was re-engineered.
I've always been hoping that we can learn from past mistakes, but recent inaction of western europe towards Putin's war with Ukraine has me deeply worried.
It's such a sad shame that Germany has wiped any and all architectural detail or character from their buildings. It's really kind of sad looking at those boring, boorish buildings.
I'm sure if they'd known this was going to personally disappoint you, the broke and broken people of occupied postwar Germany would have put a little more thought into aesthetics.
Snark aside: have a look at Dresden, which was completely destroyed in the war and is still being reconstructed with beautiful results.
Around 70 million people died in WWII, around 3% of the world population at that time. I find that absolutely horrifying, along with the terror inflicted on civilians on both sides. It's easy to forget just how destructive humans were less than 100 years ago...
There are so many things to say about this context, but maybe the most interesting story is the one of Potsdamer Platz. How it was before, how it was during the wall, how it was (horribly and wrongly) rebuilt...
There is a short movie based on a Russian airplane photo footage taken in 1945, the City of Ruins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aGiurRbQ
The general feeling is also quite well represented in "The Pianist (2002)", which I highly recommend.