European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire ISSN: 1350-7486 (Print) 1469-8293 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cerh20 ‘A true witness of transience’: Berlin's Kaiser- Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and the symbolic use of architectural fragments in modernity Rüdiger Zill To cite this article: Rüdiger Zill (2011) ‘A true witness of transience’: Berlin's Kaiser-Wilhelm- Gedächtniskirche and the symbolic use of architectural fragments in modernity, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 18:5-6, 811-827, DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2011.618332 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.618332 Published online: 04 Jan 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 231 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cerh20 Download by: [British Library] Date: 22 February 2017, At: 09:58 European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire Vol. 18, Nos. 5–6, October–December 2011, 811–827 ‘A true witness of transience’: Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm- Geda¨chtniskirche and the symbolic use of architectural fragments in modernity Ru¨diger Zill* Einstein Forum, Potsdam, Germany This paper considers the ruin in the context of three emblematic modern German sites, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Geda¨chtniskirche in Berlin, the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Reichstag, also in Berlin. Different sites, the author shows, format and present the relationship between past and present in different ways. The paper develops its argument using the views of German philosopher Gu¨nther Anders (Hannah Arendt’s first husband), and extracts from his diaries and travels in Germany after the Second World War. Anders’ views on the ruin are contrasted with those of Georg Simmel and others. The author considers the relationship between, on the one hand, the idea of the picturesque and, on the other, the ruin as a memorial to violent conflict and injustice, in which different modalities of memory can play their part. Keywords: ruins; memory I. Prologue: a return to ruins On 18 June 1953, more than eight years after the end of the Second World War, an aeroplane approaches the city of Berlin. Ten minutes before landing, the city is still not visible and the passengers face only a ‘grey wall on the horizon. Could be caused by the smoke from factories as well as by dust from the rubble’,1 as one of the passengers writes in his notebook, taking the invisibility of the present as a starting point for a flashback to the past. His memories bring him back to the same place at a different time. Twenty years previously a young writer by the name of Gu¨nther Stern was sitting in a train heading for Paris. Being both Jewish and a left-wing intellectual, the young man had been forced to flee Berlin. ‘From the station at Zoologischer Garten to Cologne, in the compartment’s corner, hidden behind the raincoat, pretending to sleep. For in the other seats seven S.A. men were sitting, bellowing almost ceaselessly’,2 and singing anti-Semitic songs. But his flashback is interrupted. Suddenly the first signs of the city become visible: the river Havel, the suburbs, all seemingly peaceful. Then the city itself, which the passenger describes as ‘rectangular organized ruins’, appears. What does the remigre´ feel? Nostalgia for the city as it once was or the satisfaction of revenge? Not one, nor the other. Although he has dreamt a thousand times about his return, his wishes are not fulfilled. The city to which he has come back appears strange, a ‘most foreign something’. Any unknown city would look familiar compared to this one. And retribution? No, because what happened exceeds every possibility of retribution – and every wish for it. *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1350-7486 print/ISSN 1469-8293 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.618332 http://www.tandfonline.com 812 R. Zill In later years this passenger will become well known in Germany as the philosopher Gu¨nther Anders. When he left Berlin in 1933, together with his then wife Hannah Arendt, the academic career of Gu¨nther Stern, who had recently taken the pseudonym Gu¨nther Anders, was more or less finished. By that date he had already been working as a journalist for the Berlin-based newspaper Bo¨rsen-Courier and was trying to survive as a freelance writer.3 In 1933, he fled, first to Paris, then to the United States. But he never really arrived in America, mentally or emotionally. Here it was even more difficult for Anders to find work as a writer. He published almost nothing during the 14 years he spent in the country. In 1950 he returned to Europe, moving to Vienna with his second wife Elisabeth Freundlich, an Austrian writer and translator. It was not until 1956, at the age of 54, that Anders published his major work Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen.4 He became famous as a critic of technological progress in general, and of inventions such as the television in particular. It was, however, his reflections on the atom bomb in the last chapter of the Antiquiertheit des Menschen that were by far the most influential part of his work. He was a prominent member of the nuclear disarmament movement. And his letters to Claude Eatherly, the pilot of the infamous Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, were translated into all major Western languages.5 Anders’ reputation is today in decline, even in Germany and Austria. His work covers a wide range of topics and deserves reading. But it is above all for his political commitment and for his criticism of technological civilisation that it is essential he remains known. In one of his lesser-known books, Die Schrift an der Wand (The Writing on the Wall), published in 1967 and based on material from diaries written between 1941 and 1966, Anders includes a chapter entitled ‘Ruins Today’.6 It incorporates his reflections while on a journey through Germany, stopping especially in Cologne, Frankfurt and Berlin. During the journey, Anders realises that he is now a stranger among strangers in his native land. His old friends are gone, and so is the place he once knew. Eight years after the war, he notes that he is walking through a ‘map’ of the city, not through the city itself. ‘So he keeps on walking,’ he writes in the diary, more like a stranger then he has ever been, even in the most remote country. As punishment for his refusal to accept the foreign land he used to live in [that is, the United States], his old home refuses to welcome him.7 And yet, what Anders finds are not only people who confront him with the old anti-Semitic remarks. He sees the country itself, its appearance, its atmosphere, its ruins. For him, these ruins carry new symbolic and emotional values. It is possible to discern a new kind of politics of ruins in his remarks. Indeed, Anders’s views signify a remarkable moment in the history of the symbolic use of ruins. It could be argued that the years immediately following the war were witness to a struggle for an appropriate and true concept of the ruin. II. Some common attitudes towards ruins The ruin embodies age, it carries the indexical sign of this ‘being old’ on itself. There are other instances of being old: ancient trees – oak trees or sequoias that live for many years – but they survive without obvious signs of ageing. They grow and reproduce and display little sign of decay. Ruins, in contrast, are aged artefacts. They display their decay, they visualise history. This could be natural history or political history. Ruins are either the result of a natural process of dilapidation or the outcome of an act of destruction. They may symbolise peace or vanity, just indignation or mere terror. Natural dilapidation marks the ravages of time. But in instances of intentional destruction we must distinguish between the driving forces of the destroyers. European Review of History—Revue europe´enne d’histoire 813 The ruin might simply be the side effect of action directed at a different purpose. Alternatively, destruction itself can be the goal of the action. In the first case ruins became the collateral damage of creating the new. In the second case the demolition is an intentional act of destroying a symbol: an act of iconoclasm. In the first case the old is appropriated as a quarry for the new, quite literally in architectural contexts. For example, in the wake of secularisation, devastated monasteries were taken apart, and their stones were used to build new houses. This form of intentional destruction signifies something close to a natural process. Yet once history begins to be seen as a process, the remnants of the past are regarded as something that must be protected. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, in the second edition of his Allgemeines Handwo¨rterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften (A Concise General Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences) of 1832–8, categorises ruins according to our interest in them: historical (as monuments to people or events); aesthetic (as objects that display traces of their former beauty); and religious (as reminders of the frailty of all things mortal and worldly and of the eternity of the divine). Krug writes: The preservation of ruins – when they do not hinder a higher purpose – might be considered as a kind of duty towards humanity. In any case, whoever demolishes ruins worthy of preservation so as to gain material for other buildings, reveals to all a mean, if not barbaric mind.8 Krug’s indignation reflects the spirit of the early nineteenth century, a period during which the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, among others, first raised the idea of systematic preservation of monuments and fought against the devastation, deliberate or by neglect, of 9 ruins.