Possibly the single most heavily bombed city on earth is somewhere you’ve very likely never heard of, unless you’re Vietnamese. Vinh, a town on the north side of the Cold War border between South and North Vietnam, was bombed so consistently by the United States air force between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s that by the end, there was almost nothing left — most of its built fabric had long since been destroyed and its residents evacuated, and so the bombs were raining down on nothing but rubble; the insane culmination of the air force’s declared aim to bomb North Vietnam “back into the stone age,” bombing for the sake of bombing, terror for the sake of terror.

But by the early 1980s, the center of Vinh had been completely rebuilt as a series of social housing blocks in parkland, designed by East German architects working on site. This is the story told by the American anthropologist Christina Schwenkel in her book Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam.

It is too often forgotten today how much the regularly ridiculed anti-imperialist movements in Europe and North America in the ’60s were motivated by disgust at what was being done to places like Vinh — what Kristin Ross in her book May ’68 and Its Afterlives describes as “the reality at the centre of third-worldism, a reality nowhere mentioned” by the United States’ polite liberal apologists: “the three thousand bombs dropped every minute on Vietnam by the United States for three years.”