Two Types
I'll Lock Up
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- 5,456
- Location
- London, UK
Idiocy. In West Germany they modernized the cities more extensively and at a much faster pace - thus destroying lots of old buildings that could have been restored. In East Germany they retained (until today) relatively more of the old building substance (though it now is again in decay in more rural and sparsely populated regions). Of course they had their countless concrete high-rise buildings, too. While it is true that war-damages and rubble heaps were more widely encountered in the East for many years after the war, the same was to be found in the West. On the outskirts of the prosperous West German city of Munich the giant rubble heap was converted after 30 years to the park for the Olympic games 1972...
I once interviewed a WW2 veteran who had been a prisoner of war in Leipzig. In late 1944/early 1945 he was sent to work on clearing up bomb damage. Forty years later he returned to Leipzig to show his wife the street where he had been working - he laughed when he discovered the rubble and ruins were still there unchanged since he'd last seen them.