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Constructing a 'Monument of National History and Culture

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Constructing a 'Monument of National History and Culture International Journal of Heritage Studies ISSN: 1352-7258 (Print) 1470-3610 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20 Constructing a ‘monument of national history and culture' in Poland: the case of the Royal Castle in Warsaw Ewa Klekot To cite this article: Ewa Klekot (2012) Constructing a ‘monument of national history and culture' in Poland: the case of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 18:5, 459-478, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2011.637944 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2011.637944 Published online: 01 Mar 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 399 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjhs20 Download by: [University of Gothenburg] Date: 25 April 2016, At: 02:14 International Journal of Heritage Studies Vol. 18, No. 5, September 2012, 459–478 Constructing a ‘monument of national history and culture’ in Poland: the case of the Royal Castle in Warsaw Ewa Klekot* Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Warsaw University, Żurawia 4, Warsaw, 00-503, Poland (Received 23 February 2011; final version received 1 November 2011) The substantial destruction of Warsaw during World War II led to important reconstruction works, which from the beginning were involved in an interplay of various political agendas and various conservation ideologies. The architec- tonic shape of the reconstructed Royal Castle, as well as the design of its interi- ors, were shaped through power struggles that were informed by two main sets of values: one referred to the legitimising (or questioning) of the present politi- cal order by the reconstructed monument of the past; the other to the legitimis- ing of the monument in question as a ‘monument of national history and culture’ by creating its historic and artistic value. The present article takes the Royal Castle in Warsaw as an example of the way in which a heritage monu- ment is involved in politics at two levels: a ‘macro-scale’ and a ‘micro-scale’. The attitudes of subsequent governments and states that decided the fate of the castle, and the institutional and material solutions resulting from these attitudes, are its macro-scale political involvement. The micro-scale political involvement of a heritage monument results from expert discourse and practices; it could be grasped by an analysis of conservators’ discourse and practices in the particular context of the castle’s reconstruction. Keywords: conservation discourse; heritage value; conservation politics; recon- struction; Warsaw Introduction The substantial destruction of the city of Warsaw, Poland, and its historic monuments during World War II led to important reconstruction works, or ‘restitu- Downloaded by [University of Gothenburg] at 02:14 25 April 2016 tion’ (to use the word preferred by conservators engaged in the work), of entire buildings and even entire blocks in Warsaw’s Old Town and Royal Route. From its beginning, this reconstruction had been the result of an interplay of various political agendas and conservation ideologies (Martyn 2001). The main works took place between 1945 and 1956; however, for complex political reasons reconstruction of the Royal Castle (Figure 1) did not begin until 1971 (Majewski 2003a,b, Pleskaczyńska 2003a). Upon completion of the works, the Royal Castle was declared a ‘Monument of National History and Culture’–a political decision that converted it into a flagship of national heritage (along with Wawel Castle in Cracow, which had not suffered substantial damage in World War II and which *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1352-7258 print/ISSN 1470-3610 online Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2011.637944 http://www.tandfonline.com 460 E. Klekot Figure 1. Royal Castle in Warsaw, 2010. seems to embody ‘the original’ of national heritage for a contemporary Polish audience) (Klekot 2007, 2010). However, the construction of a monument does not end with the completion of its material form, nor with the furnishing of its interiors. The construction of a monument is a continuous process carried out via: (1) its access policy, which comprises visiting practices and other activities hosted by the place; (2) the uses of its visual (and other) representations; and (3) its maintenance. The institution in charge of this access policy – in the case of the Royal Castle in Warsaw this is a museum – becomes an authorised and institutionalised guardian of heritage value. The process of acknowledgement of the value of particular material objects-as-heritage (heritagisation) can be very informative for a student of heritage- Downloaded by [University of Gothenburg] at 02:14 25 April 2016 embedded power relations. Reconstruction as conservation practice If history, as Brett (1996, p. 4) notes, is ‘not a fixed entity but an activity’,1 then conservation can be understood to be the politics of history: it organises the past around ‘its material vestiges’ deemed important for their ‘historical value’.To undergo conservation or restoration, an ancient vestige has to be acknowledged as ‘historically, or artistically valuable’; that is, it must get heritagised. Conservation as a field of expertise has its own complicated history that has already been told many times in different places and languages, and following those narratives can be a fas- cinating exercise in understanding different modes of localised modernity and their discontents. However, it also inevitably leads to the conclusion that heritage International Journal of Heritage Studies 461 conservation is ‘a selective process by which places which represent the nation are collected and displayed for education and integration of citizens into a particular notion of society and national identity’ (Harrison 2008, p. 180). Ever since historic monuments were invented, their preservation has been under- taken and reflected upon; gradually, conservation practices developed so as to become evaluated and widely discussed, while conservation itself emerged as an independent field of academic expertise (Choay 2001). Reconstruction as conserva- tion practice, widely applied in the nineteenth century, was criticised both by John Ruskin, on philosophical grounds, and by Camillo Boito, on grounds arising from his expertise as a conservation practitioner. Ruskin claimed that the value of an his- toric monument resides precisely in the visible marks of its past, meaning the pas- sage of time which has worn it out, as well as traces left by its constructors’ hands. Boito, on the other hand, seeing the main value of historic monuments as residing in their condition of bearing witness to the past, argued that interventions should be restricted to only the most necessary conservation works, with additions always clearly distinguishable from the original; what counted for him was the present state of a monument, and for him there was no particular ‘when’ to which the monument should be restored or reconstructed. Critics of reconstruction included the most prominent conservation experts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – among them Alois Riegl and Georg Dehio. Following the Athens Charter of 1931, conservation experts have pronounced themselves against reconstruction in toto, and in spite of the destruction caused by World War II the Venice Charter of 1964 was also clear about what could be acknowledged as legitimate conservation practices, stating in Article 9 that restoration: ...is based on respect for original material and authentic documents. It must stop at the point where conjecture begins, and in this case moreover any extra work which is indispensable must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a con- temporary stamp. http://www.international.icomos.org/venicecharter2004/index.html However, conservation practice, even that of Charter signatories, has not always respected the Charter’s tenants.2 Only in 1982 did the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) issue the Dresden Declaration on Reconstruction of Monuments Destroyed by War, a document legitimising the large post-World War II reconstructions in toto.3 What all this clearly shows is the ambiguous place of reconstruction within conservation practice itself: it becomes a solution to which Downloaded by [University of Gothenburg] at 02:14 25 April 2016 the conservators resort when the collection of ‘places which represent the nation’ cannot be displayed anymore. There has been significant variation in the ‘notions of society’ (Harrison 2008, p. 180) transmitted by different conservation practices since their beginning in the nineteenth century. This is particularly obvious if we consider the practice of recon- struction. When reconstructing material vestiges of historic monuments, restorers invariably adjusted them to their own concepts of history and their own values, utopias and tastes, trying to have the latter legitimised by the past itself. When constructing the past they actually made statements about the present. Because conservators select which notion of society a place under heritagisation should bear witness to, the preservation of heritage is a selective process that can be legitimised within very different ideological and political agendas (Samuel 2008). For example, the reconstructed Notre-Dame gargoyles, restored in the nineteenth century, were 462 E. Klekot supposed to introduce the modern
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