The Cube House

When Sebastian Moll’s father built a home for his family in the 1960s, he had one great hope: to forget the past. Having served as a Flakhelfer during the war while still a child, he had been subject to Nazi indoctrination, was traumatised by his experiences of combat and mentally scarred by the fascist cult of masculinity. For him, building a suburban terrace house in the south of Frankfurt represented the architectural realisation of this new beginning. Meanwhile, as a town planner for a Frankfurt building society, he also played a major part in the reconstruction of his home town, promoting an architecture of repression that still characterises German cities to this day. But in the private sphere and in the life of the city alike, the repressed refused to stay buried.

The Cube House is an architectural excavation of postwar Germany. In recounting his own family history, Sebastian Moll skilfully and sensitively narrates the difficult and anguished attempt of his generation to overcome the legacy of National Socialism. A process that still casts a long shadow over contemporary German society.

»Sebastian Moll succeeds in vividly unearthing a familial black box, interrogating past and present conceptions of masculinity in the process. He does all this in a deeply personal and lucidly analytical way. An engagingly written work of remembrance culture that we need more than ever.« Shelly Kupferberg

»Sebastian Moll’s family, architecture and Frankfurt memoir is a heavily reflexive and emotionally moving contribution to improving our understanding the culture and history of West Germany.« Stephan Wackwitz

»The socialisation of his own father in the Nazi era and the attempt to start over after the war – all this can be read into the various levels of his family home, like analysing the strata of an archaeological dig. And Sebastian Moll also identifies these layers of repression in the architecture of our cities … He has written a fascinating book about all this.« Hessischer Rundfunk

»A compelling story of repression and return.« Thomas Gross, Deutschlandfunk Kultur