Customer Reviews

Postcard scenes from a postwar world. - By: ricadus, 03 Nov 2001
This, the third bookin the series, is perhaps the most successful. The previous books (of British & American postcards) seemed little more than typical 1950s & 60s retro-kitsch because they lacked the particular historical context that this book has, with its depiction of postwar German societyin denial of its catastrophic Nazi past.

These postcard views have no grandiose classical architecture & few scenes that evoke a sentimentalized Germanic past. Instead what we are shown is a calm, clean world of (then) ultra-modern social housing & road networks, of safety & prosperity. All traces of the old pre-war Germany are absent, save for the occasional church spire peeping modestly over the tops of newly constructed facades.