q.essay&essay_id=178977
Bombing Away the Past
by Tom Lewis
The Destruction of Memory:
Architecture at War.
By Robert Bevan.
Reaktion Books.
240 pp. $29.95
Reviewed by Tom Lewis
In his great poem “Lapis Lazuli,” William Butler Yeats indirectly
foretold the events that would soon consume the world: “Aeroplane and
Zeppelin will come out,/Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in/Until the
town lie beaten flat.” Yeats died in 1939, a few months after
publishing his poem and shortly before the world began to realize his
words to a degree unimagined by earlier ages. The poem evokes the
constant destruction throughout history of art and architecture, and
the ceaseless human desire to build again in the face of an unending
parade of “old civilizations put to the sword.” It is this long
history of material and cultural destruction, brought to unprecedented
intensity in the 20th century, that Robert Bevan documents.
To be sure, armies have been destroying cities since the days of the
Old Testament and Homer. But as Bevan demonstrates, science and the
increasing mechanization of the last two centuries have given
combatants the ability to increase vastly the thoroughness (and the
precision) of the devastation. The Destruction of Memory presents a
dark account of how that devastation is brought about, along with a
cogent argument for why it deserves recognition as an atrocity
separate from the human carnage it so often accompanies.
Bevan argues that the destruction of buildings, be they historic,
symbolic, or merely utilitarian, “is often the result of political
imperatives rather than simply military necessity.” Architecture, he
contends, “is not just maimed in the crossfire; it is targeted for
assassination or mass murder.” Significant buildings may be destroyed
as an adjunct to genocide, as propaganda for a cause, as a way of
demoralizing an enemy, or out of simple personal vindictiveness on the
part of the attackers or the victors. Bevan offers a veritable
taxonomy of heritage destruction. He considers genocide and its
attendant “cultural cleansing” in cases from Armenia to Bosnia;
symbolic attacks upon buildings by terror groups, including, of
course, the attacks of 9/11; the carpet-bombing of densely packed
cities such as Hamburg and Dresden in World War II; wholesale cultural
annihilation, as in the attempted Germanification of Warsaw by its
Nazi occupiers in 1944; religiously motivated destruction, such as the
Taliban’s obliteration of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001;
and the brutally dividing walls erected in Berlin, Belfast, and
Israel’s occupied territories, where architecture serves as an
instrument of suppression or exclusion.
Bevan’s grim statistics force readers to confront yet another
dimension of the savagery of our age. In the fighting that accompanied
the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, “more than 1,386 historic
buildings in Sarajevo were destroyed or severely damaged. . . . Gazi
Husrev Beg, the central mosque dating from 1530, received 85 direct
hits from the Serbian big guns.” During the 1914-18 world war, the
Turks engaged in atrocities against the Armenians, and “Armenian
churches, monuments, quar – ters, and towns were destroyed in the
process.” The Armenian city of Van “was almost entirely flat – tened.”
After the fall of Warsaw in World War II, “of 957 historic monuments
. . . , 782 were completely demolished and another 141 were partly
destroyed.” The historian Max Hastings found that by the end of
Operation Gomorrah, the Allied air raids against Hamburg in 1943,
“40,385 houses, 275,000 flats, 580 factories, 2,632 shops, 277
schools, 24 hospitals, 58 churches, 83 banks, 12 bridges, 76 public
buildings, and a zoo had been obliterated.” In Stalin’s Russia in the
1930s, where secular iconoclasm ruled, “an estimated 20-30 million
painted icons were destroyed-used for fuel, chopping boards, linings
for mine workings, and crates for vegetables.”
Such numbers do more than just reveal the extent of these cultural
atrocities; they point to an essential aspect of their purpose. As
Bevan shows, “the link between erasing any physical reminder of a
people and its collective memory and the killing of the people
themselves is ineluctable.” Genocide must be thorough. In Sarajevo,
Serbs intended to obliterate the Bosnians’ cultural heritage by
destroying their national library. The national museum met a similar
fate.
Bevan’s account of what befell the Polish capital, Warsaw, in World
War II makes a similar point. After the Nazi occupation of 1939, which
included the mass murder of Polish nobility, clergy, and Jewish
intellectuals, among others, Nazi town planners meant to use the city
as the site of a German garrison. But the Warsaw Uprising against the
Nazis by the Polish underground in 1944 changed German
attitudes. Regarding the city as “one of the biggest abscesses on the
Eastern Front,” Heinrich Himmler set up special forces “to demolish
the city street by street” and ordered the death of all inhabitants,
declaring that “the brain, the intelligence of this Polish nation,
will have been obliterated.” In the end, a quarter of a million people
died and just a third of Warsaw’s buildings remained standing.
Nor did one side hold proprietary rights to wanton destruction in that
war. Bevan writes of the British discovery early in 1942 of “burnable
towns,” densely packed wooden buildings at the heart of the medieval
precincts in many German cities. With the consent of Winston
Churchill’s war cabinet, which after contentious discussion decided
that such attacks would demoralize the German people, the Royal Air
Force, led by their commander, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, leveled the
medieval port city of Lübeck with firebombs. The wooden houses ignited
“more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation,” the commander
recalled. The destruction of Rostock, a city of no strategic value,
followed. In just 17 minutes Harris dropped a thousand tons of bombs
on Würzburg, a cathedral city without industry or defense. Hitler
meanwhile was unleashing violence on Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York,
Canterbury, and Coventry, each a three-star Baedeker city with no
great industrial capacity. Three years later, in February 1945, when
Hitler was near defeat, Harris and the U.S. Army Air Force struck a
final and completely unnecessary blow, visiting a firestorm upon
Dresden, a cultural center.
Harris himself contended that indiscriminate bombing was essential to
winning the war. After all, he wrote later, “a Hun was a Hun.” But his
bombing had little effect upon Germany’s war effort, as the commander
chose to avoid oil depots that were heavily defended. The scale of
destruction produced qualms on the Allied side. “The moment has come,”
Churchill wrote after Dresden, to review the policy of bombing German
cities “simply for the sake of increasing terror.”
>From their own fierce reaction to the bombing of London, the British
should have understood that while such attacks from the air upon
cities might have symbolic value, they have little practical
effect. In what is surely the most famous photograph of wartime
London, the unyielding dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rises in stark
relief above the smoking ruins of the razed city. Taken during the
Blitz of 1940, it appeared in The Daily Mail above a caption that read
in part, “It symbolises the steadiness of London’s stand against the
enemy: the firmness of Right against Wrong.” It served to inspire
Londoners’ determination in their darkest days. Just last summer,
Bevan notes, a British tabloid published the picture “once again
. . . following terrorist bombings on the London Underground.”
Contemporary terrorists who use the destruction of architecture as a
powerful weapon of propaganda do not always travel with Baedeker
guidebooks. As Osama Bin Laden and his like-minded followers have
shown, modern buildings with little or no significant architectural
merit can make attractive targets because of their symbolic value. The
Twin Towers, the critic Paul Goldberger wrote after their destruction,
“were gargantuan and banal, blandness blown up to a gigantic size.”
Striking at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Bevan writes, was
intended to send a message to Islamic militants across the world that
the time to act had come. Americans and others in the Western world
received a different message: Banal as the towers might have been,
they had now become “unintentional monuments.”
Such unintentional monuments become intentional ones in their
rebuilding, for reconstruction must take into account
destruction. Memory must have a place in the new. “History moves
forward,” Bevan observes, “while looking over its shoulder.” But how
much to commemorate? And how? Such questions become the focus of the
final chapters of The Destruction of Memory. Amid the rubble, we
sometimes see lost opportunities to make buildings an affirmative
statement of the human spirit, while at other times we see their power
to restore that spirit. Gazi Husrev Beg, the great mosque in Sarajevo,
survived the Serbian onslaught only to have its interior suffer a 1996
whitewashing that obliterated its spectacular decorations; the
“restoration” funds came from Saudi sources that demanded that an
austere Wahhabi interior replace the richly decorated walls
characteristic of Balkan Islamic architecture. As early as 1945, Poles
began to reconstruct Warsaw. In producing an exact replica of what had
been razed, the builders rescued their old city, but they also created
an amnesia about their recent history. In the great crater that was
the World Trade Center, those who consider rebuilding an act of
resistance are in conflict with those who want to make the site a
permanent memorial to the thousands who died on September 11. The
tension between creation and memorial is all the greater because we
are so near to the horror of the event.
“All things fall and are built again,” Yeats wrote in “Lapis Lazuli,”
“And those that build them again are gay.” The poem suggests that
people will go forward and rebuild with undiminished hope despite the
ever-growing weight of cultural destruction. But we cannot shrug off
the terrible devastation that is so much a part of our contemporary
condition. Better to follow the words inscribed on a plaque attached
to the ruined wall of Sarajevo’s national library: “Remember and
Warn.”
Tom Lewis, a professor of English at Skidmore College, is the author
of The Hudson: A History.
Reprinted from Spring 2006 Wilson Quarterly
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