GERMANIA'S IMPERIAL SYMBOLISM

From Hitler’s Germania and its hatred for the city as a Bolshevik and Jewish ghetto, to the legitimization projects of both the communist and capitalist regimes during the cold war, to the post-reunification neoliberal worldly developments, the city of Berlin has been a space of (re)presentation and reconstruction, of erasure and building ex-nuovo. And yet, the de-urbanist approach shared by these regimes meant that the development plans of the Cold War fit all too well on the voids made by Hitler, and their glass facades echoed too nicely those of the contemporary high-end developments of the riverside. What can we learn from comparing these different strata of the Berlin Palimpsest? Is it possible to trace the roots of current, neoliberal planning and architectonic strategies in fascist proposals from the 40s through either or both the Soviet and Liberal Cold War projects?