Heretical Thoughts at the Edge of the Rubble Heaps

Abstract

Abstract This evocative, fictionalized dialogue by Otto Bartning sets out an agenda for rebuilding Germany after the moral horror and physical destruction of the Third Reich and World War II. The narrator, an architect, discusses rebuilding with a young soldier; the narrator’s fallen son is a third, invoked presence. Bartning calls for modest modern rebuilding that equates the transparency of buildings with an open, democratic society.