Akin to Austria after WWI, in post-WWII Germany, discourses on reconstruction were infused by the hope that overhauling existing urban environs would contribute to a rejuvenation of society at large. This applied to West Germany no less than to East Germany. Since both ‘Germanies’ claimed Berlin as their respective capital, the city increasingly turned into a stage for two competing political rationales: state socialism and liberal capitalism. The questions of how to reconstruct the city in general and that of how to provide housing in particular were put center stage in this ideological battle. Building for the ‘new man’ and, to a lesser extent, for the ‘new woman’ became a site of Systemkonkurrenz [system competition], i.e. the Cold War. Human flourishing and progress was promised by both ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1980, p. 131). As will be shown in chapters 4 and 5, this promise was soon to be foiled by the ‘logic of urbanism’: a state-administered, technocratic rationality that affected urban reconstruction as much as the provision of mass housing. ‘Urbanism’, as Lefebvre explains, ‘claims to be a system [that] pretends to embrace, enclose, possess a new totality. It wants to be the modern philosophy of the city, justified by (liberal [or, as I would add, socialist]) humanism while justifying a (technocratic) utopia’ (2003, p. 153).