Evidence and Memory: Shells, Bullets and Buildings By Robert Proctor Not only do the paper residues of a society, stuffed into boxes and filed into systems in archives, provide documents of its past, but so too do the material objects that a society produces, and buildings, as more permanent than many such objects, can be scrutinised for this purpose. There is nothing original about such a thought: in 1836, Léonce Reynaud compared human monuments to the shells of molluscs, deposited by the animals around their flesh, thus leaving upon them the prints of their bodies. Seen this way, old buildings are the silicious or calciate excreta of past societies, washed up on the beach of the present by the tide of history. This concept suggests a direct relationship between people’s habits and their surroundings, as though all the spaces contained inside these shells were somehow filled with pulsing muscle, a relationship which is surely too convenient to be true. I am not, however, concerned with this: what I want to consider here is the ways in which the monument or the city can or cannot show on its surface the effects of human events. Berlin, shattered by war and political enmity, exhibits to its visitors the appearance of bomb damage and the phantom traces of its dividing wall, raising questions about how such signs of past events are created, stored and read. The relationship, again, is not a simple one: I wish to suggest that, far from being direct imprints of history on material, traces such as these are a part of present culture, sustained by authority (if we still believe Althusser), just as much as any archive or museum is a purposive creation, and the reserve and bulwark of an institution. On almost any walk around central Berlin, one encounters the signs of the Second World War as striking marks left on the remaining pre-war buildings. One building will have a scattering of large cup-shaped indentations all over its surface, perfectly rounded centres showing where shrapnel struck its walls at high velocity. Another will be peppered with small holes at body height, possible bullet marks or the result of flying glass. Elsewhere a pilaster or corner will have a large irregular chunk removed, and one
imagines a nearby explosion ripping across the fragile sandstone. Classical rustication takes on a new meaning: the deliberately textured surface receives an unintended new ruggedness, where, for example, a keystone has been taken out by force, and seems itself almost a symbol of war – indeed, one is tempted to think of a building’s pockmarks as a new form of rustication. These marks may, on the one hand, derive from Britain’s aerial bombardment of the city. Imagine the obsessive archaeologist who will catalogue the holes and trace each one to a particular explosion in a nearby place, the result of a particular man pulling the appropriate lever in a particular aeroplane on a particular night’s expedition. Other marks are more likely the result of Russian bombardment and street combat. Our archaeologist might assign a series of gashes on the side of an apartment building to the young German soldier who threw the grenade at a Russian tank appearing around the corner. The soft grey and red sandstones of Berlin have recorded such specific events apparently faithfully, yielding to the impact of harder matter on their surfaces without, however, sundering under the blow, while timber and glass and the insides of buildings disappeared under heat and pressure. The scarred shells have been reinhabited, while the external inscription of a historical moment remains. Undeniably, there is a direct relationship between the event and the form, thanks to the nature of the building material. A more attentive search for such traces requires us to qualify this assertion. There are buildings whose surfaces appear perfectly smooth when viewed obliquely against the light or from a distance, until on closer inspection the many hundreds of patchwork squares of lighter colours are noticed. Some buildings have a few larger lighter squares, others so many they almost dissolve in pixelation. Some squares, especially those on red stone, are more vivid than their background, while others are barely detectable. These are the scrupulous repairs: holes that have been cut out square and filled with new pieces of almost
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matching masonry, or smoothed over with coloured cement to disguise the damage underneath. The deceit is often thin, perhaps deliberately so: in the desire to restore dignity to a worn and haggard countenance, a building’s owner has nevertheless retained the terrible memory. There is no shame in having endured the horrors of war, but one must attempt a return to normality. In certain cases, especially for the most important symbolic monuments, the repairs have been so well made that no distinction between pre-war and post-war fabric is possible: the 19th-century Reichstag became a gutted ruin after it was burnt down by anti-Nazi protestors even before the war, but its stonework now appears oddly immaculate, sections of window embrasure or pediment having been perfectly recreated. Only Norman Foster’s shiny insertion reminds us that for decades there was nothing inside. Such repairs, whether visible or not, force us to another conclusion: they show that the marks of war on a building are not accidental survivors, but conscious preservations. That they exist at all is due to a deliberate decision to keep them. That this is true on a small scale is shown by the larger scale of carefully preserved ruins: the Kaiser-WilhelmGedächtniskirche, for example, is a monument in the form of a stump, violently severed from its body by bombing, elegantly decorated with mosaics barbarically ripped away along an edge, its tapering copper spire destroyed with a jagged cut. It has lost its status as a building of use, and has been turned into a symbol of the memory of war, or, for the cynical, a symbol of the symbolisation of the memory of war. This is the case with any unrestored, pockmarked building: it is a cultivated reminder, become a sign, an image made to convey a myth of harrowing trauma and dogged survival. In London, the Victoria and Albert Museum shows this eloquently. Walking down Exhibition Road, one sees the side of the building apparently disintegrating, a pillar on its entrance screen barely standing, so thin has it become after losing most of its body to the blitz, the distinctive marks of bomb damage exactly resembling those in Berlin. On a piece
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of rustication, wrapped around an indentation, are the following words in classical lettering: ‘The damage to these walls is the result of enemy bombing during the blitz of the Second World War 1939-1945 and is left as a memorial to the enduring values of this great museum in a time of conflict’. While the damaged building literally documents its past, it is at the same time rewritten, stored, or exhibited as a document. It then becomes the subject of an approved interpretation. Of the V&A, one is tempted to ask why, if its values are really so enduring, a memorial is required; but it is exactly this myth of the perseverance of an institution, unwittingly undermined here, which gives it its power and is reinforced and given an air of authenticity by the document. This is also clear in the case of the Berlin Wall. After its fall in 1989, it was rapidly demolished along most of its length, leaving very little trace of its former presence other than an empty gash in parts of the city. The visitor to Berlin naturally wishes to locate the border between the two halves of the city, but is hampered from doing so by the invisibility of the dividing line. The city authorities quickly realised this need to see the past, and sought for ways to reinscribe it into the city. Remaining parts of the Wall and its ancillary buildings were categorised as protected monuments by the Berlin Monument Authority as early as 1990. Meanwhile, the length of the wall was, where possible, marked out on the ground by a double row of cobbles and intermittent bronze plaques. At Potsdamer Platz, sections of the Wall’s prefabricated concrete panels have been collected and reassembled, stuck back together and labelled as a historical exhibit. It has accumulated a layer of recent vandalism over the original graffiti on its western side, and will no doubt require the future attentions of art conservators to scrape off the inauthentic additions and restore it to its original state. The Wall has not simply been left as a visual reminder of the city’s past, but it has been re-fashioned into a document of itself. It had to be, because otherwise it would not have existed at all. At the same time, it is re-framed within a discourse of social democracy and capitalism
(is it a coincidence that Potsdamer Platz is also a swaggering corporate nexus?), a warning of the evils of communism from which the East was freed, the obliteration of division symbolised by the deliberately recreated fragmentation of its form. The signs of the Wall’s destruction (its indicated absence, or, when visible, its protruding rusty reinforcing mesh and crumbling edges) communicate its obsolescence. This points to another effect of the ravages of traumatic historical events on the material of the city, that they tend by definition rather to destruction than to creation. The effect of the war on the city is not so much visible as remarkably invisible: vast tracts of city have vanished, first to bombs, and then to the bulldozers that carefully removed not only houses and monuments, but also street patterns and districts. A 19th-century geologist finding such a gaping hole in the fossil record would have ascribed it to a mysterious earthly convulsion, and in this case so must we. Unlike the battle-scarred monument, the city has not preserved a record of events within its form, but has been renovated beyond the possibility of comparison with, or excavation of, its former self. Here again is a conscious decision; unlike the shell or the limestone bed, the city is a product of human will exercised through political organisation. The decision to erase necessitates the decision to recreate the traces of the past. Both are facets of documentation and the control of the representation of history: just as an authorised text frames the document and colours its meaning, so the elimination of the traces of events recontextualises surviving fragments in a new system, promoting their reinterpretation. Memory itself is controlled through this activity, since memory, even personal memory, must be constantly recreated by revisiting its visual images if it is to survive at all. As oral historians and psychoanalysts now realise, memory is inherently unreliable, subject to fluctuation, to error, even to fantasy; the only points at which it anchors itself to history are physical things: photographs, places, smells. The city, therefore, in controlling its visual record of history, dictates the knowledge of the past that is available to its citizens, doing so through conscious, artificial means. Berlin has inspired a variety of architectural attempts at engaging with this culture of architectural documentation and erasure. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish
Museum (1988-2001) was born fully clothed with reams of description of its conception lent it by the architect, explicitly describing its apparent origin in a series of traces of the past. It is difficult to avoid discovering that it was supposedly planned by plotting the addresses of Jewish families onto a map of the city, and connecting them into a geometrical pattern. Wonderfully for the architect, a stretched Star of David appeared asymmetrically placed over the site of the planned museum. The building occupies a section of one of its radiating points. On the surface of the building, apparently random razor slashes through the metal cladding give the appearance that lines connecting co-ordinates on a three-dimensional grid pass through the building, so that we are meant to imagine the plotting of a historical, no longer existing, community within the city, made visible here (like the Wall, through its absence – since of course Libeskind has a smattering of Derrida). While much of the rest of the city is missing and erased from memory, Libeskind takes his cue from the function of the museum, which is to explain and memorialise a fact from the city’s past, and attempts to embody that fact within his monument. This then takes its place within the canon of city monuments, including the re-worked documents of the Wall or the War, and its approach is no different from any of these. Lacking any actual remaining document or physical evidence of the Jewish presence in Berlin, however, Libeskind has given his building a deliberate (and hardly endearing) vacuity, with its gleaming, unexpressive exterior and hollow, empty and dead-end interior spaces. Unlike the city’s other monuments, in this case the document is not simply reinterpreted, it is forged. It does not preserve, enshrine, or recreate the physical remains of events; it attempts to create them through imagination from scratch, through the architect’s private whim (rather than through an appeal to collective memory). At the same time, Libeskind’s building cannot help but frame its ostensible documenting of the past within a narrative. As any visitor to the museum discovers, thanks to helpful and detailed signs on the walls, the plan of the building contains two long, narrow skewed bars intersecting each other near one end, labelled the ‘axis of exile’ and ‘axis of the holocaust’, the latter ending in a bleak, empty and dark vertical room supposed to elicit some abstract feeling of what it was like to be Jewish during the
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war. It is difficult to summon up such an emotion when one is overwhelmed by its quality of cinematic kitsch and surrounded by giggling students, because while the architect laid claim to a phenomonological intention, the reality is rather more mundane and literal: presumably unwittingly, it looks like a prison cell or some other such concentration camp space of horror. Similarly, the end of the ‘axis of exile’ contains a garden made up of a grid of tall concrete boxes containing olive trees, all set at a jaunty angle, intended, as the sign again helpfully informs the visitor, to evoke the feeling of disorientation (or, more likely, sea-sickness). The memorialisation of the holocaust has been the subject of more contention than can possibly be mentioned here, but what is significant in the present context is that Libeskind’s building forces a reading of the whole of Jewish German history in its shadow. The chronological exhibition has not avoided the subject, but heroically (against the building’s insistence) attempts to emphasise the reality of Jewish life without burdening or distorting the past with a teleological knowledge of its future. The museum building, however, like all monuments, asserts its own individual version of historical memory as if it were fact. In doing so, it does not so much convey the memories of its subjects, but rather, at the scale of the city, establishes a symbol in a larger network of cultural memory. It is a document, not of the Jewish people, as its creator claims, but of the small, throbbing nugget of guilt that remains today in the city’s consciousness: in other words, it can only be a document of the present. In the manipulation and re-presentation of architecture and its surfaces, what is lost, perhaps always inevitably, is the simple immediacy of the
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physical reminder, which cities only preserve in their more neglected corners. The mind does not require official images to actuate its memory, and these are more likely to create an estrangement from the reliving of the past – indeed, that is often their purpose. Proust’s De côté de chez Swann shows how something as irrelevant as the taste of a cake dipped in tea can actuate an episode from the past, complete with the geography of its setting. In the passage where this memory awakes, Proust’s narrator compares its action to the Celtic belief that the dead go to inhabit animals, plants, or objects, and can be brought alive again by the contact of the living with these objects. ‘It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it’. The metaphor of the shell occurs in this passage, too. The madeleine cakes ‘look as though they have been moulded in the grooved valve of a scallop-shell’. As Proust reminds us, it is on the least suspected objects that the imprint of the past, which our experiences have placed there, can revive the knowledge of that past.