Category Archives: quotes

Architecture of War and History

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The uses and abuses of architecture, that subject that interests me but which I barely dabble in, got my attention again recently through an article by George Packer in the Feb 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. In his “Letter from Dresden: Embers,” Packer writes that the German city “has the unstable character of a place with a romantic self-image and a past that it would rather not discuss.” But we will discuss Dresden’s past, and ask also, if its latest building project in present time is vandalism, or an enlightening statement.

Before reading Packer’s piece I was fairly ignorant about this city, but as is often the case with New Yorker articles, this one led me on several tangents. The gist of Packer’s thesis is that Dresden is well served by having a gutsy architect like Daniel Libeskind to design its new national military museum, because the artistic violence of his plan is exactly what Dresdeners need to shake them out of their nostalgia and set their view of history straight.

Since reading that article I’ve gone on to learn a little more about the architect, the city, and what took place there toward the end of World War II. I also happened to read a novel that ties in to the reluctance of Germans to talk about the war and come to grips with that painful history. Of course, I haven’t taken my own photos. But if I do get to Germany I’ll be sure to visit these buildings and write another more personal blog post. For now, I want to set down what little I learned–I should say, the questions that have been raised–and if I put it here it’s available for anyone else who might like to know.

It was on February 13, 1945 that the Allies bombed Dresden, an event that some say resembled the horror of Hiroshima, and that the Neo-Nazis brand as equal to the Holocaust. What troubles people about the Dresden of today is the city’s selective reporting of its history, the portrayal of its wartime past as only victimization.

Matthias Neutzner is a local historian interviewed for the New Yorker article: “Neutzner said that Dresdeners remained unusually resistant to the past: ‘The city was erased in one night, and it was very easy for German propaganda to transform this city of art into a city of innocence which had nothing to do with the crimes of war.’

“In Dresden, Neutzner said, the story of the war has effectively been reduced to just one day: ‘It started and it ended on February 13, 1945.’ Neutzner’s aim is to get the city’s residents to remember ‘that this was the sixth year of a huge war, that there were twelve years of Nazi crimes, there were eight small concentration camps in Dresden with three thousand prisoners. All this is completely unknown in Dresden.'”

The diaries of Victor Klemperer are held up as an essential source text for those who want the whole story. He was one of the fewer than 200 Jews who remained in the city on that day of destruction in 1945, out of more than six thousand prewar. Published in the 1990’s, the three volumes in English are I Will Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. Packer writes that they tell “in mundane and relentless detail how the humanistic city of his youth turned into a place of terror that ostracized, humiliated, warehoused, tortured, and, finally, annihilated its Jews.”

Since the war the city has been busy rebuilding, trying to restore architectural Dresden as much as possible to its lovely pre-war state by recreating buildings like the Frauenkirche cathedral. This activity contrasts with the attitude of another war-torn city, Berlin, where the “new architecture often has the quality of what Bertolt Brecht called Verfremdung, or the V-effect–estrangement, distancing. Berlin makes little attempt to hide the worst decades in German history. After 1989, the city placed its vanished Jews near the center of its collective consciousness, understanding that this was part of the price of reclaiming its international status.”

It was the Jewish Museum in Berlin, shaped, as one person said, “like a deconstructed Star of David,” that in 2001 made a name for Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, the one chosen to design the Military History Museum in Dresden, a renovation of the former military arsenal building that has been serving as a museum since 1897.

Not everyone likes this architect’s style. Back in 2003 Deroy Murdock cautioned against Libeskind and his art in a National Review article quoting heavily from the architect’s own words, poetic and otherwise, calling his poetry grotesque and his Berlin museum ghoulish. Murdock was lobbying against Libeskind as a contestant in the running to design the new World Trade Center in New York, and in fact, he did end up designing the overall site plan.

I must admit that Libeskind’s poetry strikes me as twisted and broken, not lovely. But history shows mankind to be perverse as well, and Libeskind thinks it’s healthy to face one’s past and its ugliness, so that you can get a more balanced and true understanding of reality from which to make progress. The arrow-shaped addition to the old museum, cutting through the building just as the Holocaust made a gash through the 20th Century and human history, nonetheless rises to a higher elevation where visitors will get a broad and fresh perspective on the whole city, a view that wasn’t possible from the former museum.

Spiegel Online quotes Libeskind as saying, “…sentimentality is not a foundation on which you can build a new city.” To make a sure foundation, it would be necessary to know where the bedrock is, and where the sand. The architect has built in a degree of disorienting experience a step above the mere visual. Packer writes, “The effect of these [oddly angled] inclinations, Libeskind said, should be above all physical: ‘It’s like a collapse, isn’t it? You feel it in your knees….You can’t be neutral in these spaces.'”

He goes on to say, “The triangular structure on the front of the arsenal points to the direction from which Dresden was bombed. It also interrupts the smooth flow of that big arsenal. It creates a question mark about the continuity of history and what it means. It gives people a point of reflection.”

It’s these philosophical question marks that get my mind’s wheels turning. I can see how trying to recreate the city as it was in the 1930’s would convey that you want to go back to that better time. But was it any better, the society and people who participated in the extermination of their fellow humans? Even if it were, going back is not an option. We need to live where we are now, and go forward, trying to learn from the past, even though it speaks to us of our failings.

The new military history museum is scheduled to be completed this year and to open in 2013. Studio Daniel Libeskind’s statement about the project explains: “The central theme of the Military History Museum is the human being: those who went into the war and those who have remained at home; people of different eras and people of different generations.”

As the facade of the old building “represents the severity of the authoritarian past in which it was built, the other [new “arrow” facade] reflects the openness of a democratic society and the changed role of its military. In the new elevation of the Museum both are visible at the same time and one through the other.”

Packer concludes: “…though the museum is crude architecture, its bluntness should give it power as a civic institution: nothing more subtle than this could offer Dresden the possibility to break from its self-delusions.”

Update: Comments generated a Part II to this discussion, here: Architecture of War and History, Part II

God is constantly willing.

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Weeds grew thick and tall in my recent and repeated absences, threatening to hide and destroy the beauty of the garden I’d planted. This morning I spent an hour tidying things up and giving space to the cucumbers and peppers so that they could grow unhindered. I’d hired a girl to irrigate enough to keep everything alive, but I didn’t ask her to pull weeds.

(Unripe grape tomatoes above, nasturtium in arugula below. All pictures taken just this evening.)

While hauling several baskets full to the trash I remembered my own advice to another young friend who was just falling in love with gardening. She asked me whether I thought she should do a little bit of garden work every day, or spend a couple of hours one or two days a week. I told her that the best way is to tend it a little bit every day. There is always a weed to pull, a tomato branch to be tied up, or a dead flower to be clipped off. The plants need water, and food, perhaps even a little shade from time to time.

One year our Baby was raising a pumpkin she hoped would be a huge one she could enter in the local Giant Pumpkin Contest. We were told it was advisable to put the growing pumpkin on a pallet when it was still small so that it could stay dry and be easily moved no matter how large it grew. When I got around to helping my daughter with that part of the project the fruit wasn’t very large yet, but the stem, having lain on the moist ground, had already sent out roots into the soil. This situation was hidden by a canopy of leaves, and when we hoisted the pumpkin on to the pallet, the vine stayed anchored by those roots, and the pumpkin broke off at the stem.

That was a hard lesson. I thought sadly of how a farmer, even a novice homeschooling pumpkin-grower, can’t afford to procrastinate. Any job involving a living thing has to be paced according to that creature’s rate of growth. And agriculture usually involves many living things all in relationship to one another: the plant, the soil, pests with their own life cycle, and probably others I’m not thinking of, not being a very good farmer still.

This morning’s brief mediation on how I really ought to tend more constantly to my garden continued when I later sat down at the computer to read the transcript of an interview with the Orthodox theologian and writer Vigen Guroian in which the topic of conversation turned, as is usually the case with him, to gardening, and he said “…were not God constantly willing His creation, loving His creation into existence, it would disappear.”

From my perspective as a lazy, distracted, and time-constrained gardener, I appreciate the steadfastness of our Lord in continuing His creative work moment-by-moment.  Colossians 1:17 says that he “holds all creation together.” I am one of His creatures, whom so far He has seen fit to give life and breath to every morning, making it possible for me to tend my own mini-garden, which also couldn’t live without His blessing and daily upholding.

Something G.K. Chesterton said on the subject often flits through my mind, when musing on this subject. He said, that in contrast to children, who through excess of vitality want things repeated, “…grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again,’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again,’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

So far, the garden hasn’t seemed monotonous to me. Every day is different there. Of course, The Creator is making the daisies, and I get to discover them, along with the roses and budding fruits and spreading spinach. I do love my garden, and will try to be more constantly willing to keep it going, imitating my Lord.

Censure or Repentance – Father Moses

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 From Father Moses of the Holy Mount of Athos:

An offspring of [the sin of] pride is censure, which is unfortunately also a habit of many Christians, who tend to concern themselves more with others than themselves. This is a phenomenon of our time and of a society that pushes people into a continuous observation of others, and not of the self. 

Modern man’s myriad occupations and activities do not want him to ever remain alone to study, to contemplate, to pray, to attain self-awareness, self critique, self-control and to be reminded of death. The so-called Mass Media are incessantly preoccupied with scandal-seeking, persistently and at length, with human passions, with sins, with others’ misdemeanors. These kinds of things provoke, impress, and, even if they do not scandalize, they nevertheless burden the soul and the mind with filth and ugliness and they actually reassure us, by making us believe that “we are better” than those advertised.

Thus, a person becomes accustomed to the mediocrity, the tepidity and the transience of superficial day-to-day life, never comparing himself to saints and heroes. This is how censure prevails in our time – by giving man the impression that he is justly imposing a kind of cleansing, by mud-slinging at others, albeit contaminating himself by generating malice, hatred, hostility, resentfulness, envy and frigidity. Saint Maximos the Confessor in fact states that the one who constantly scrutinizes others’ sins, or judges his brothers based on suspicion only, has not even begun to repent, nor has he begun any research into discovering his own sins.

Thanks to the rector of our parish for posting this passage in the church bulletin.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Chesterton!

history, philosophy, quotes

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite thinkers and writers, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, born in 1874. Not having time for a long exposition on what I love about him, this year at least I will have to be content with posting five of the many, many clever and telling quotes for which he is justly famous and very useful, too. At least four of them are from four different publications. Thank you, GKC, and I pray you are enjoying rest with the blessed.

Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks. (1902)

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.  (1933)

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.