This book comprehensively examines architecture, urban planning, and civic perception in three modern cities as they transform into national capitals through an entangled, transnational process that involves an imaginative geography based on embellished memories of classical Athens. Schinkel's classicist architecture in Berlin, especially the principle of tectonics at its core, came to be adopted effectively at faraway cities in East Asia, merging with the notion of national polity as Imperial Japan sought to reinvent Tokyo and mutating into an inevitable reflection of modern civilization upon reaching colonial Seoul, all of which give reason to ruminate over the phantasmagoria of modernity.

This book comprehensively examines architecture, urban planning, and civic perception in three modern cities as they transform into national capitals through an entangled, transnational process that involves an imaginative geography based on embellished memories of classical Athens. Schinkel's classicist architecture in Berlin, especially the principle of tectonics at its core, came to be adopted effectively at faraway cities in East Asia, merging with the notion of national polity as Imperial Japan sought to reinvent Tokyo and mutating into an inevitable reflection of modern civilization upon reaching colonial Seoul, all of which give reason to ruminate over the phantasmagoria of modernity.

Wie haben sich deutsche Historiker nach 1945 mit ihrer unmittelbaren Gegenwart und deren Vorgeschichte auseinandergesetzt? Ein brisantes und stark diskutiertes Thema. Dem Autor geht es nicht darum, die politische Vergangenheit von Historikern im "Dritten Reich" aufzudecken. Er will herausfinden, inwieweit die fuhrenden bundesdeutschen Vertreter einer Strukturgeschichte nach 1945 bereit waren, ihr Geschichtsbild und ihr Geschichtsdenken einer Revision zu unterziehen."