The Communist state had inherited many of the least bombed German cities after 1945; forty years later, complete neglect had doomed many blocks of intact buildings in the centers of cities such as Halle, Erfurt, and Potsdam. Money and attention that might have saved them had instead gone to Berlin. For that matter, even in Berlin the so-called Fishermen’s Island, the southern tip of old Cölln, had survived fairly intact into the 1960s, when it was leveled to make way for high-rise apartment buildings. For somewhat different reasons, the Nikolai Quarter’s architecture was poorly received in the
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