Brian Ladd is an independent historian who received his Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught history at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is a research associate in the history department at the University of Albany, State University of New York.
Ladd (Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914, Harvard Univ., 1990) approaches the new Germany and its handling of memory in an interesting manner. Memory, Ladd points out, also extends to the urban landscape. The leaders of the new Berlin have begun massive architectural projects to restore the capital to its former greatness. To build this future, however, they must see the past. Can a new Berlin be built on the ruins of Hitler's bunker, asks the author? Ladd covers a number of architectural features in Berlin and the many political controversies arising from its past. For example, what should be done about the Berlin Wall? Ladd makes the point that Berlin's buildings are indeed some of the ghosts haunting the city. A valuable addition to academic libraries.‘Dennis L. Noble, North Olympic Lib. Sys., Port Angeles, Wash.
Ladd (Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914) cites one estimate that puts the number of unexploded bombs in Berlin at 15,000. But they aren't the only explosives on the landscape. In Berlin, monuments, buildings, piles of rubble and even empty lots are primed with symbolism and memory. For example, while few would argue for either the subject or the aesthetic value of Nikolai Tomsky's 63-foot-tall monument to Lenin, its proposed demolition in 1991 provoked complaints from former East Germans ("Ossis") who felt the "victorious" West was trying to erase their history. Likewise, Berlin's Nazi past has become, if anything, more complicated. For many years, West Berlin memorialized victims and East Berlin, its anti-fascist heroes, while both either plowed under or assimilated remnants of the Reich. In the past decade, though, many Germans have argued that the country was not one of victims and resisters but of perpetrators, and that expunging the Nazi past is an attempt to forget a past that should serve as a lesson. In a book that weaves together German history, issues of public art and the nature of memory, Ladd makes a terribly complicated subject accessible. Not only is it comprehensibly written, but it is very well researched; Ladd flawlessly knits together primary and secondary sources, newspapers, interviews, and illuminating ephemera like jokes, T-shirt slogans and graffiti, which show the extent to which German guilt is still current and subject to, as Ladd says, "agonized self-examination." (May)
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