Dieter Bingen, Hans-Martin Hinz. Die Schleifung: Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau historischer Bauten in Deutschland und Polen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. 226 S. EUR 19.80 (paper), ISBN 978-3-447-05096-8.
Reviewed by Jeffry Diefendorf (Department of History, University of New Hampshire)
Published on H-German (February, 2008)
Dancing around the Stadtschloss
In many ways, this is an odd book in that it shares the unevenness common to most volumes based on conference presentations and for the most part, the presentations do not directly address the stated aims of the editors. Most of the papers seem to tiptoe over the issue of the decision to recreate the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss in the center of Berlin.
Hosted by the German Historical Museum in January 2002, the conference brought together scholars from Germany, Poland, as well as a few advocates for ongoing recreation of lost structures. The conference was open to other scholars and the public, since some of the papers are followed by transcripts of discussion that include remarks by presenters but also by non-presenters who are identified by name but with no further identification of their qualifications. With the exception of a concluding essay by Hans-Jörg Czech, everything in this book--the introduction, papers, discussions--appears to be transcriptions of oral remarks or reproductions of the papers as read, rather than revised pieces of work, though the editors surely tidied up some of the discussion paragraphs. Some papers have footnotes or lists of sources while others do not. The papers are also not numbered as chapters but presumably published in the order of their presentation, which is why I refer to them as papers rather than chapters. Several pages of discussion follow some of the papers while others have none. This makes me wonder whether the editors omitted discussion or whether some of the papers simply did not stimulate a response from the audience, which seems unlikely, considering the subject matter.
As stated in the brief preface by Dieter Bingen and Hans-Martin Hinz and in the "Begrüssungen und Einführung in das Thema" by Bingen and Hans Ottomeyer, the primary objective of the conference was the development of useful theory and vocabulary for analysis of instances of destruction and reconstruction of important architectural monuments (buildings as well as structures erected as memorials) and ensembles of buildings. The conference was to focus on the usefulness of the term "Schleifung," which translates to "raze" in English and "raser" in French. In other words, the goal was first to discuss torn down and razed structures, and then to consider whether such structures should or could be rebuilt and in what form.
In the first paper, Hans Wilderotter discussed a number of examples of "Schleifung," but spoke at length about Paris's Bastille prison, razed during the French Revolution, and the Heidelberg castle, which was badly damaged in the wars of Louis XIV and later partially repaired or rebuilt. These cases allowed Wilderotter to present a range of motives behind the choices made by different kinds of actors at the time of the destruction and after. This paper was followed by a presentation (given and printed in English) by Robert MacDonald about how authorities and historical museums planned to address the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York. Speaking just four months after September 11, MacDonald obviously could not know what would be decided about the site in New York, and, unfortunately, the presenters that followed made no effort to link their observations about German and Polish history to what they thought ought to happen in New York. MacDonald's paper thus appears as a polite but out-of-place gesture to the United States.
The next set of papers dealt with the rebuilding of German and Polish cities after World War II. Werner Durth, the leading German expert on postwar reconstruction, made one of the most provocative arguments at the conference. Durth contended that until the 1970s, rebuilding bombed cities was primarily guided by the desire on the part of officials, planners, and architects to treat the wartime damage as an opportunity to update and modernize urban housing and infrastructure, especially streets. This aim dated to the beginning of the twentieth century, and it was more important than any purely politically driven desire to demolish certain old structures. Durth's arguments raised the ire of several other participants, especially Wilhelm von Boddien, the prime mover behind the rebuilding of the Stadtschloss. On several occasions, including in his own presentation, von Boddien insisted that the razing of the ruins of the Stadtschloss by the East German communist regime and its replacement with the Palace of the Republic was entirely politically minded and bore no relationship to modernization of infrastructure.
Following Durth, Bogdana Kozinska presented an interesting, detailed survey of the multi-decade work to rebuild Stettin, including its palace and historic center. This effort was guided partly by the late wartime German plans of Hans Bernhard Reichow, partly by models of Polish planners moving between local concerns and national and Soviet bloc dictates on the presumed nature of "socialist" cities, and partly by economic conditions that resulted from the priority given the rebuilding of the capital city of Warsaw. Konstanty Kalinowski's paper on rebuilding Danzig, which was 90 percent destroyed, was likewise interesting. He argued that the large central area of Danzig was rebuilt, without those responsible really knowing it, as "a romanticized, historicized German version of a patrician Hanseatic city" (p. 94). In rebuilding, the authorities wanted to rebuild a Polish city, and they deliberately chose not to reconstruct buildings they felt were "Prussian." In fact, by retaining the prewar street pattern and rebuilding facades wherever possible with original or replicated sculptural elements (while modernizing building interiors) they built a typical nineteenth-century city. Its residents, Kalinowski contended, consider this romanticized copy of the past genuinely historic, even though it is not. A brief paper by Ulrich Höhns concludes this section. Like Durth, Höhns noted the broader trend toward rebuilding German cities in modern forms, but he also discussed the rebuilding of the small town of Freudenstadt and the resort island of Helgoland based on traditional, prewar architecture. In those places, the look of reconstruction suggests it was true to the prewar original, though in fact the buildings adapt to local styles rather than replicate what had been destroyed.
The next section of the book, entitled "Symbolpolitische Gesten," includes papers by Piotr Majewski on the rebuilding of the royal palace in Warsaw, Dethard von Winterfeld on the fate of several German residential palaces (including the Bruchsal palace of the archbishop of Speyer, palaces in Stuttgart, Mannheim, and Karlsruhe, and the Knochenhauer-Amtshaus in Hildesheim) and Wilhelm von Boddien on the Berlin Stadtschloss. The buildings discussed by Majewski and Winterfeld were rebuilt for various reasons--as historical documents of their era of origin; as regional, national, or urban symbols that shaped local identities; and as embodiments of Polish or German culture. In each case, some elements were close replicas of what had been destroyed, but other parts of the buildings were quite different from the prewar structures, and in all cases, rebuilding took place over many years.
Speaking in 2002, von Boddien advocated rebuilding the Berlin Stadtschloss. He argued that the main reasons to raze the GDR Palace of the Republic and replace it with a replica of the old palace were these: first, the demolition of the damaged building in 1950 was a political act by a despised communist regime, just as that regime demolished churches and the country homes of the Prussian nobility. That assault on history must be reversed. Second, its ensemble of historic buildings determined the character of central Berlin. The newly united Berlin requires the rebuilding of that ensemble to regain its identity, and von Boddien is quite sure that no modern buildings can do that. I am skeptical about these arguments, and the tenor of many of the papers in this volume makes me think that their presenters would have been as well. Thus, it is surprising that that no discussion whatsoever is included after von Boddien's paper, not even an exchange with Werner Durth.
The papers in the next section, which deals with identity formation, do not fit well together. Christian Wendland narrated the history of the Hof- und Garnisonskirche in Potsdam from its original eighteenth-century construction to its nineteenth-cnetury transformation as a place to honor the Prussian army to its 1945 destruction. He moved on to its piecemeal and final razing between 1949 and 1968, its replacement with a computer center, and to the movement in 2001 to rebuild the church. A longtime advocate of rebuilding, Wendland argued that the church was an essential part of the identity of Potsdam. Andrzej Tomanszewski is considerably more circumspect in his narrative of Warsaw's rebuilding. He argues that, even though the result has been much praised, as well as being recognized as a world cultural site by UNESCO, like Danzig, Warsaw is a romanticized construct. Even though a lot of documentation about prewar buildings survived the war, rebuilding meant eliminating many objects of historic value, superimposing "historic" facades on buildings that had never had them, and modernizing many streets and parts of the city. The idea was to create a city that matched the images found in paintings by Canaletto. Warsaw thus contains a great deal of "pseudohistorical architecture" which itself is worthy of historical study by future scholars (p. 170).
The last section of the book contains a paper by Hans-Ernst Mittag on the supposed reuse of the red marble from Albert Speer's Reichskanzlei and a paper by Janusz L. Dobesz on the persistence in Poland of many structures built by the Nazis. Poland, Dobesz noted, was much like the GDR in its need to make use of many Nazi-era structures. In addition, several Nazi memorial sites are still in existence, though some were demolished. Mittag's contribution is very interesting, since he argued that it is not true that the marble from the Reichskanzlei was used as the primary construction material for various Soviet memorials, including the Tiergarten memorial and the huge memorial in Treptow. It is a legend that the red marble was used as a kind of reverse symbol of Nazi domination. Even so, this information does not belie the value of examining instances where buildings, building sites, and building materials underwent a metamorphosis in terms of actual use and symbolic meaning.
The final essay in the volume is by Hans-Jörg Czech. It was written after the conference and is an effort to provide clear, overall meaning and structure to the papers. Czech thus returned to the conference goal of coming up with a useful theory and vocabulary to guide both historical study and contemporary practice. That theory starts with a typology of different categories of "Schleifung," including the sorts of objects razed, the motives of those razing something, the relative speed of demolition, the technologies of destruction, and the meaning of the act to participants, observers, subsequent generations, and historians. Similarly, the theory requires a typology of reconstruction--whether an object is recreated as a faithful copy, a partial copy, or an adaptation concealing modernization, the motives behind different forms of reconstruction, and so on. All of these considerations have been present in one degree or another in virtually every history of postwar rebuilding, and although I am not sure that they have elsewhere been brought together into a "theory," I am equally unsure whether Czech's typologies constitute one, either.
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Citation:
Jeffry Diefendorf. Review of Bingen, Dieter; Hinz, Hans-Martin, Die Schleifung: Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau historischer Bauten in Deutschland und Polen.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14243
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