I was reading the old "Lost Berlin" book, telling about pre-WW2 Berlin and showing many photographs. I did get to wonder if other major German cities looked the same way, or if they were significantly different. In building styles and such.

Dear Tom,

It realy depended on where you were.
The larger cities were 'further' on their path to modern times: due to industrial development, but also thanks to the rise of the middle class (as a result of this ndustrialisation) they became wealthier, more money was spent on modernisation. Thus newer houses were build, but also more social housing projects came up. In so far, cities like Frankfurt, München and Dresden started to look like a bit more the same. Though many of the large(r) German towns had a well kept historical heart, where daily life showed shops, workshops and housing facilties. Quite some complete or largely disappeared due to the bombing raids of the allied air forces. Most well known is Dresden.
The smaller towns weren't targeted that much, so their centers kept in tact: offering now-a-days splendid holiday destinations.
But also, even before the war the tendency to renew and tear down in order to replace it by modern (read 1930 onward) architecture was less common. Money wasn't always available, but also the need to do so was less. Both practically and 'between the ears'.
You may find beautiful places like Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Schwerin, Cochem amongst others.
Famous, so called'Fachwerkstädte' are Baden-Baden, Asschaffenburg, Schwäbisch Hall. But if you want to build a town during the last battles in Germany you could google for 'Bernkastel-Kues', an old wine town with splendid facades. Here, due to a more conservative attitude the 'old atmosphere' remained. But it also was the stage for many, sometimes desperate, battles where troops, mixed with the young boys from the Hilterjugend fought next to old men from the Volkssturm. So, may dio's possible!

I hope I helped you a bit!

Berlin has always been built vaster than other German cities beginning with Friedrich W I. Most roads and everything is much wider there than in most other places. Leipzig comes close to this to some extent, the city centre is really beautiful and rebuilt somewhat historically. Parade roads for the Prussian army had always an important role for Friedrich Wilhelm I aka the "Soldatenkönig".
Cable cars and drawn city cars were also slowly evolving in all bigger cities pre-war, there will be someone on here with special knowledge regarding this. But as far as I know, Berlin was far ahead with its vast infrastructure.

To the above-mentioned standard overcrowded cities (Rothenburg odT, Baden-Baden...), add Gernsbach and Schwabach (near Nuernberg, the leaf-gold and silver capital of Germany pre 16XX, amongst other due to the Fugger mines in the East to it and Huguenot and Jewish jewellers). The "Roemer" in Frankfurt is also a nice place to get a feeling for this in a big city.
GERNSBACH is by far the nicest, however fairly small.
For other, more rural areas around Cologne check out Hachenburg, it has their typical shale houses also, is smaller however.
https://www.google.de/search?q=Gernsbach&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCoJiar_LTAhXGiiwKHZmwDWoQ_AUIDCgD&biw=1366&bih=638#tbm=isch&q=hachenburg

Bear in mind that many Fachwerkhäuser were only "freed" by the NSDAP and HJ. My grandpa was in a children unit assigned to taking away the facades and "freeing" the Fachwerk to make it visible.

Fachwerk was seen as inferior and cheap in comparison to modern and "real" brick & mortar buildings pre 1933 and as such, if you could not afford a real new house and had to build cheaper Fachwerk, you covered the facade to hide your poverty. This applied to quite many buildings, as many people tried hiding their financial situation. As such, there were many more Fachwerkhäuser during the war than before the war. The wooden facades were liked by the regime as it was supposed to show "Northern heritage".

/Stefan

To get a good glimpse of prewar cityscapes use Google image search, "[city xy] vor dem Krieg" should yield plenty of photos.

Most cities were dominated by late 19th century "Gründerzeit" buildings in varying pseudo-historical styles. Your standard low-rent apartment block would have looked the same everywhere from Cologne to Königsberg. Official buildings were more subjected to individual taste: Bavaria was fond of neo-baroque styles, cities along the Rhine preferred neo-romanesque designs and the baltic regions stuck with brick gothic architecture.

Modern architecture as we know it today was invented in Germany during the 1920s, with entire suburbs being created in standardised patterns that still look modern today. Frankfurt was especially fond of this new style but other cities had remarkable examples as well.

Many city centres retained some of the older buildings in gothic or baroque styles, even Berlin had a small historical quarter near the old city castle. Frankfurt, despite the modernist building spree, had retained the world's largest completely preserved timber-framed gothic old town until the RAF air raids in early 1944 turned everything into a huge pile of charred rubble. Nuremberg's old town was equally famous but here red limestone was the preferred building material.

Your best start for further research would be to look for those German cities that weren't bombed or were rebuilt to their pre-war state (lord knows there aren't many...). Besides the already mentioned Rothenburg, there is Passau (baroque) and Regensburg (gothic). Görlitz is a perfectly preserved example of a late 19th century city, with Leipzig a close second. Wiesbaden has plenty of early 19th century classicism. There are also countless smaller cities and villages with preserved historical centres, but the architecture is usually much smaller and less elaborate than in the larger cities.

I hope these ramblings were of some help to you

Philipp