Before Frauenkirke. Delayed Reconstruction Work of Historic German Buildings Destroyed during World War II.

After World War II, Germany suffered from Allied occupation for several years. During this period, the diffi-cult operations of clearing the rubble and counting the damage to the buildings and infrastructural heritage of the cities began. At the same time, many architects started to investigate possible intervention strategies, giv-ing rise to an interesting debate in which the theme of the interpretation of the ruins played a central role. After 1949, the socio-political conditions changed: with the birth of two states, the priority was the physical reconstruction of the two new countries. A massive work of reorganization and reconstruction took its moves. This resulted in very diversified operational choices in each city, both in terms of restoration of historic build-ings and urban and territorial planning. After the 1970s, once this phase was over, German scholars in both the East and the West started to draw up preliminary critical-descriptive studies on partial achievements. In these studies, those of Niels Gutschow and Werner Durth, Josef Nipper and Manfred Nutz, and Hartwig Beseler and Niels Gutschow are particularly significant. In the early ‘90s of the twentieth century, before the reunification, the first reconstruction projects of the build-ings destroyed by the war were conceived as “where it was, how it was.” Some examples are those of the Knochenhaueramtshaus in Hildesheim and the Alte Waage in Braunschweig. This paper aims to illustrate and critically comment on the motivations that led to the reconstruction of these buildings, framing them in the wider debate that has developed in Germany after reunification following the notorious cases of the reconstruction of the Frauenkirke in Dresden and the Berlin Castle, and the well-known exhibition curated in 2010 by Winfried Nerdinger at the Architekturmuseum of the TU München entitled Geschichte der Rekonstruktion – Konstruktion der Geschichte.