Soon after the foundation, as part of the reconstruction programs, plans were developed for the construction of completely new cities from scratch (New Towns). The reasons for this were related to the huge housing requirements after the war, caused by the destruction of residential areas and the halt of housing production during the war. The New Towns were testimony to the construction of the shared Germany and formed a model for the State, society and politics. In several respects they were strongly connected to the development of the two contrasting German society systems and their propagated ideals.

The construction of the new cities coincided with the peak of the Cold War. In the West, the fear for communism was becoming popular and it became the general belief that the western democratic society was in danger. The New Towns in the BRD were supposed to remove this fear and contribute to the development of a democratic, Western lifestyle. The people had to be more rooted in the living environment. After the war, most architects had returned to Germany hopeful for the reconstruction of the damaged cities according to the modernist city model. In all the four occupation zones the modernist architecture was the premise and
the Stadtlandschaft formed a generally accepted planning concept, which was inherited from the Nazi past. The ‘democratic-capitalist New Towns’ in the BRD were characterized by an gegliedert und aufgelockert urban plan and mass produced rows of houses, with shopping streets with large display windows and a shopping mall as a symbol of Western consumer society. It assumed the adage of a ‘makeable’ society.

In the GDR there was yet another reason for the planning of New Towns. For the
development of a Socialist industrial society according to the example of the Soviet Union it was necessary to establish new industrial centers. The construction of new industrial centers was followed by the construction of residential towns for the workers. The New Towns were designed according to urban planning principles that were adapted from the Soviet Union and supposed to encourage people to adapt a socialist lifestyle. Since the political system of socialism was contrary to Western capitalist system, the New Towns in the GDR were supposed to differ from the cities in the BRD in stature, appearance, and materialization. The ’Socialist city’ was marked by a representative street scene, with broad avenues and public buildings, culminating in representative squares, public buildings with neoclassical architecture - a variation on the socialist-realist architecture in the Soviet Union. Urbanism and architecture In the GDR in this context had a political-programmatic function as the physical symbols of the dynamic construction and overall superiority of the Socialist system.

As the GDR began to change the course after 1955, the differences between the ’Socialist’ and the ’Western-democratic city’ decreased. At the first Building Conference (3-6 april 1955) in the GDR, under the motto ‘besser, billiger, schneller bauen’, the transition from traditional to industrial building was decided. With the transition of industrial construction methods, housing slabs and plattenbau replaced the neoclassical worker’s palaces. The newer residential areas no longer differed significantly from the Western examples. After the change of course the modernist aesthetics also took on a different meaning. It was no longer
associated with the despised West, as was the case in the 1950s. It became the symbol for the progressive GDR, which could compete with the west in the field of economy, consumer goods and mass production. On the other hand, an urban typology could also become a symbol for extremely opposite systems. The story of Stadt des KdF-Wagen, a New Town that was planned in the 1930s under Nazi regime for the employees of the volkswagen factory, is a very revealing example. After World War II, under the power of the British occupier the New Town became the wirtschaftswunder of Germany and was renamed Wolfsburg.

The paper examines the dialectic and the morphological differences and similarities between the East-and West-German new cities (New Towns) in the fields of urbanism and architecture. In the paper, a number of East-and West-German New Towns from the Cold War period are discussed. The comparisons show that besides the differences in urban design and architecture, many were based on similar urban planning concepts. The cold war politics could not conceal the fact that both the GDR and the BRD had their origin in the German Empire and that the New Towns arose under comparable circumstances. The New Towns in the GDR and BRD are connected by their origin and DNA. They are different interpretations of a set of urban planning principles and a limited number of urban architectural principles, not bounded by Communist and capitalist societies. The biographies of the first generation of architects also make clear that after World War II there was not only ’a new beginning’, but also a (human and idealistic) continuity in the urban development between the pre-war and postwar professional orientation.

However much the contrasting systems differed from each other, the New Towns did have something in common: they emerged from a political decision. This decision was so strongly linked to the new system and power that the New Towns were by definition an expression of the ideology of both German States.