Writing in a 2004 special issue of the architecture journal DISP devoted to Berlin, Brian Ladd concluded his tour of the “ghosts on display” by suggesting that:

It is striking that a plea for the “normalization” of the urban environment should come from the author of The Ghosts of Berlin, a book that articulated, for an international audience, an explicitly critical and self-reflexive mode of thinking and writing about the German urban environment's relationship to the past. Ladd's conclusion has the tone of a moral imperative, calling for the rejection of the abnormality of the ambitious architectural projects of modernity in favor of the inauthentic postmodernity of the twenty-first century, and demanding that there should be an end to the neurotic engagement with Berlin's urban environment and the German past. At the same time, his conclusion draws attention to the way in which a “western” norm is often the hidden element in discourses on German normalization in a manner reminiscent of older historical debates about a German Sonderweg, that is, a peculiarly German path to modernity compared to the “healthier trajectories of the societies of the West.”