Yair Mintzker

The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (Cambridge UP, 2012; paperback 2014) tells the story of the disappearance of city walls in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. Until 1700, practically all German cities were fortified. Since contemporaries defined a city as “a coherent [social] body in a protected place,” the urban environment had to be physically separate from the surrounding countryside. This separation was crucial to guaranteeing the city’s commercial, political, and legal privileges. Fortifications were consequently the sine qua non for a settlement to be termed a town or a city. “Without them no place could be called a town,” wrote the important eighteenth-century jurist Johann Justi, for instance, “however large and handsomely built it might be.”

Central European cities lost their walls between the late seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. Incorporating data about over a thousand cities, as well as a wealth of primary sources from close to thirty European archives, The Defortification of the German City follows the dramatic and often traumatic stories of the metamorphoses of early modern German cities from walled to open places. In seven chronologically-ordered chapters, the book demonstrates how most defortification cases were not the result of urban expansion, as is so often assumed, but of political disputes between princes, generals, bureaucrats, and burghers during Germany’s transition to the modern era. It is the first book of its kind: no book had ever been devoted to the general aspects of defortification either in Germany or elsewhere.

The dissertation on which Defortification was based won the Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfield Award from Stanford University in 2009 and the German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation on any topic in German history in 2010. The book itself was also given the Urban History Association’s best book prize for the years 2011 and 2012. Reviews of the book in academic journals have been enthusiastic. Defortification was called “bold and elegant” (Journal of Modern History), “an important book, not only for the urban history of Germany, but also for the social, political, and cultural history of Europe” (German Studies Review), and “very significant… written brilliantly, with a fresh approach and an admirably broad empirical basis” (German History). Indeed, Christopher Friedrichs, in the American Historical Review, called Defortification a worthy successor to Mack Walker’s German Home Towns (the 40-year old classic in the field), describing it as a book that provides “a set of strikingly original answers to questions most historians have not even thought to ask,” and “one of the most original works of German urban history in our generation.”