Author / omniagallia

by omniagallia

Cologne Cathedral Towers, Twilit:

These colossal spires, more than 500 feet tall, were in the original plans for the cathedral. As noted in prior reposts, part of those were rediscovered some 300 years after construction had been halted, leaving the church obviously, and clumsily, curtailed.

Whether it is a trick of the light or a variation in the type of stone, the towers almost seem luminescent in this picture, with the same evocative glow that appeared in my previous repost (July 16, 2022) of a sunset image of this building from the side. To me, here they suggest natural rock formations, rather than purely human labor. This sheen makes them look as much a part of the Earth – not merely on it – as sandstone pinnacles in America’s western deserts. There is an elevator leading to the roof of the Dom, but I didn’t use it, preferring to experience it at ground level, as it was principally meant to be seen; like this view.

The cathedral is, overall, resolutely Gothic, whereas buildings begun as long ago as it was often accrue embellishments from various eras through which they exist. Thus the great delay in completing the Kolner Dom likely ensured its final stylistic uniformity. Unlike many cathedrals completed in the same era they were begun, this one was spared much of the adulteration inflicted on fully Medieval ones, with Renaissance, Baroque or Rococo decor getting slapped over the original fabric. When Cologne cathedral was being finished in the mid-19th Century, no one wanted it to look anything but Gothic; and so it does, with very few exceptions.

The Dom is now the most heavily tourist-visited site in Germany; most people entering it now probably do so mainly as just another place of historic-artistic interest. And it certainly is that, but its formidable physical and extra-physical presences still present a setting in which contemplation may flourish, a sort of gravitational pull to which many so-disposed visitors surely find themselves responding.

Even in its long unfinished and ungainly state, the Dom was for generations a site of continental pilgrimage, owing to the supposed presence within it of the bones of the Three Kings, the Magi, men who attended the infancy of Christ. So each time I entered it, I reflected upon what Medieval folk – who never saw it complete, could only imagine its full, intended magnificence – might have hoped their journey here might grant them. And on what its tacit evocation of the tension between Eternity and human mortality may still offer us today; it was meant to summon and facilitate such meditation, and can continue to do so.

It is no coincidence that the English words ‘respire’ (breathe), ‘inspire’ and ‘aspire’ share the common root of the Latin, ‘spiritus,’ or spirit. In each case – including the process of breathing in and out – the very force of life itself is implied. ‘Respire’ means the constant cycling of that spirit, ‘inspire’ is the height and depth of expression it may generate, and ‘aspire’ refers to its fondest goals. So an inrush of breath elicited in a place like the Kolner Dom may also hearken to inspiration and aspiration.

Like all man-made spaces emblematic of faith that there is something to our ‘Being’ beyond the chaotic vale of tears we observe daily – even amid the assuaging technology of the 21st century – this church faces the issue of whether human life is irrelevant to an impassive cosmos, or has true and vital purpose. The Dom, like the ideals that brought it forth – joyously as the Three Kings kneeling at the manger – both proposes, and evinces, that it can.

That question takes different forms in different cultures, but its widespread preoccupation suggests it is an entirely natural human inclination, which we rightly use our Reason – as well as the other faculties that make us human – to explore. Animals fear danger and pain, but presumably do not contemplate mortality; our ability to do so may, of itself, alter our relationship to it. There may be some aspect of each of us as eternal as those great sandstone pinnacles in the desert; but unlike them, we can – should? – muse upon that possibility.

by omniagallia

Cologne Cathedral Sideview, Floodlit:

This view of the Kolner Dom illustrates the building’s history and evolution. The part of the church to the right of the transept (the pointed gable), the apse, is complete Medieval construction, finished by about the year 1320. The transept and nave (the long, main open space where most of the congregation gathered for religious services) to the left of it were completed only part way up the walls, till the will and money for construction ran out in the 16th century.

The tower shown here at the left was only a stump about 100 feet high, and its twin rose just a few meters above its foundation. The building remained in that condition – less than one-third complete – for some 300 years. A Medieval crane on the stub of the near tower was left in place that whole time, becoming part of the city’s skyline, and a symbol of hope for the project’s ultimate revival.

It should be noted that before the Dom was completed, Cologne was mostly famous for its several exceptional churches in the Romanesque style that preceded Medieval Gothic (Gross St. Martin’s was the city’s emblem till the completion of the Dom; St. Gereon had the largest dome built in Europe between the Pantheon in Rome, and Brunelleschi’s in Florence). They were ancient and venerable, but the Dom eclipsed them all in splendor and fame, then were all grievously damaged or destroyed when the city was bombed in the 1940’s. Most were later restored, considered to be as integral to the city’s historic self-image as the newcomer cathedral; if not even moreso.  

When Cologne’s region became part of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars, local Romantics, led by a vociferous Gothic-revering merchant, entreated the Prussian kings (the Protestant Hohenzollern dynasty) to finally complete the Kolner Dom according to a recently rediscovered 13th Century drawing of the original plans for its great front façade. At some point, it had been cut into 2 parts which ended up in different places, eventually recognized as intended for the Dom.

I don’t think original plans were ever found for the main nave and transepts, so their final as-built construction in the 19th Century probably had to be largely extrapolated from the façade drawing, the original apse, and the foundations laid long before for the unfinished nave. But I am unsure of that.

The Hohenzollerns agreed to patronize and help support the project. They had several likely reasons for doing so; they were famous for their militarism, so undertaking a legendary work of culture like the Kolner Dom could substantially refine their reputations. Also, finally finishing a great Catholic church, initiated long before the Reformation, would soothe the discomfort that many of their new, mainly Catholic, Rhineland subjects felt at suddenly being ruled by a leading Protestant realm.

Most important, the Hohenzollerns were already trying to position themselves (instead of the Catholic Austrian Habsburgs) as likely leaders of a future united Germany, and wanted to stimulate the spark of shared nationalism that was already stirring. The finally-consummated Kolner Dom would express German genius and artistry, as well as Prussian power and ambition. When eventually completed in 1880, its dedication was a national event, with the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in attendance.

A true architectural expert (unlike me) might dismiss today’s finished Cologne Cathedral as a latter-day adulteration of authentic Gothic design. But to most modern viewers, the building is a great aesthetic success; strong and graceful in a thoroughly Germanic manner, massive without being ponderous – and not semi-sensuous, as some French analog might be.

by omniagallia

Cologne Cathedral from my Hotel Window:

At check-in, the desk clerk of my hotel in Cologne, a brief walk from the train station, asked if I wanted a room facing towards the cathedral, or away from it. At first I asked for one on the far side, assuming it would be quieter and that the great church would probably turn out to be too far away to see decently anyway. But my mind changed for no conscious reason, and I asked for the room with a view.

I often record reminder “voicenotes” on my phone, and after entering this chamber, started to speak disinterestedly into it, recording my room number, hotel breakfast hours, its address, etc. I still have that note, and in it, my voice suddenly crackles with delight as I look out the window and discover this stunning prospect: An imagined fantasy made real, not some vague, quasi “view.”  Very likely the most remarkable sight I will ever have from a window where I reside, even if briefly.

An exceptionally regal design was conceived for this glorious building because it was meant to house some of the most precious relics in Christendom, the alleged bones of the Magi (the Three Wise Men; the Three Kings ‘of Orient’) who, supposedly led by the star of Bethlehem, brought gifts to Jesus in the manger. The towers would have been the tallest structures in the world had they been completed during the Middle Ages (assuming they could have been finished with the building methods then). But within 30 years of the start of this building’s construction in the year 1248, the finances of the project had become unstable.

Cologne was rich (its location gave it access to both cargo ships from the North Sea and inland river-traffic trade), but it would be badly impacted by the discovery of America, which disrupted its profitable trading patterns. So work on the Dom sputtered on intermittently for more than 250 years before it came to a full halt, the original plans only about 30% built. And it would remain that way till construction was resumed in the middle of the 19th Century, for reasons (and motives) I will explain elsewhere.

This spectacle had the dazing effect on me that it might have been intended to have on a pilgrim coming to see the Relics of the Magi – even though, as a modern person, I have seen many other wondrous human works. And even though this building was not finished as shown here till long after the Middle Ages, for whose priorities it was conceived, were over. Unquestionably, the cathedral’s muscular grace, to say nothing of its tremendous scale, have the power to awe.  The Kolner Dom is so immense that its whole mass could not be photographed in a single picture from the open spaces adjacent to it; it wouldn’t fit the frame. A vantage like this one, several hundred feet away, was needed to encompass it all. Conversely however, its garlands of exquisite stone carving cannot be fully appreciated in such a full-scale shot; detail like that must be seen from closer up.

I savored this sight repeatedly during my stay in that hotel, and will keep that voicenote with its abrupt tone shift from distraction to enchantment forever, as a cherished souvenir. (In another now-precious voicenote, the cathedral’s great, sonorous bells can be heard ringing in the background of my speaking.)

This celebrated structure is truly one of the world’s great buildings. Like the far lesser known Virchow monument in Berlin, it seems a sort of counterweight to the poison of Nazism, an admirable face of German achievement that deserves our appreciation. But its story is about far more than stone and mortar, and cannot be told with reference to them alone. In other re-posts, I will deal with other factors integral to its origins, history, unlikely realization, what it was meant to assert, and to what it can continue to offer today.

The cathedral had a profound, wide-ranging impact on me, likely more than on most visitors. With my historical background and personal spiritual inclination, I came better prepared to register a fuller spectrum of its ‘totality.’ But its many aspects, and the attendant impressions of which I will write, were not just flickers of my own projecting: The character and aura of places that strive to represent their societies’ highest efforts and deepest beliefs – the Kolner Dom, the Parthenon, the Great Pyramid, Ankor Wat, etc. – may be accessed by anyone who will stand outside the push and flow of time, rushing events, and cultural assumptions, to admit them.

They exalt human aspiration and potential in ways that transcend the Ages, and the constraints of creed and individual experience.

by omniagallia

Floodlit Cathedral Façade and Roman Arch, Cologne, Germany:

After Berlin in 2016, I only meant to visit one other German city. It wasn’t easy to decide which, as there are so many rich in history, culture, picturesque settings, etc., but I selected Cologne (Koln) in southwest Germany, principle center of the Rhineland, the basin of the great river. This area was long a powerhouse of the nation’s Industrial, and now post-Industrial, economy, with Cologne one of a group of towns (Bonn, Essen, Dusseldorf, etc.) that have grown till their regional boundaries seem to nearly overlap.

Two attractions, both referenced in this image, made me choose it. First, its heritage as one of Germany’s oldest municipalities; the Romans built an extensive urban outpost here, their Empire’s primary foothold in this part of Europe (Berlin, first documented ca. 1300 and long of little consequence, is comparatively new). Its name derives from Latin “Colonia” – Colony – which evolved to “Koln”; ‘Cologne’ is the French spelling. Considerable Roman ruins, including the rough arch shown here, still exist on and under its streets, and it has a superb museum of classical antiquities, mostly local.

Second in time, but more important to me personally, the city is home to what is arguably the greatest Gothic church on Earth, Cologne cathedral; in German, the Kolner Dom (formal name: St. Peter’s Cathedral). Its original design, conceived to hold the supposed relics of the Three Magi, was not completed till 600+ years after construction began; major currents of European history caused both its attenuation and its eventual completion. I’d been aware of this edifice since childhood, and felt that if I could only get to one place especially known for a splendid church, this may be the best of them all.

Cologne’s setting on the Rhine near its confluence with other waterways helped secure its long-term economic importance and prosperity. It remained substantial long after Rome fell, despite the general regression of the Dark Ages, through Medieval times and beyond, but during World War II its prominence and relative nearness to Britain (and its military airfields), made it a target of frequent Allied bombing. On the other hand, when the Third Reich was finally vanquished, the city, being far west, was captured by Americans, rather than Russians. So though already bombed nearly to dust, it was spared a paroxysm of street combat like Berlin suffered, and oppressive Soviet occupation.

I won’t write much on the Nazi era in Cologne as I did for Berlin, the historic focus of my travel in Europe, but it should be noted the Nazis regarded the place with suspicion. It had two alternate centers of power they could never fully co-opt nor crush: A robust presence of both Catholicism and Communism. The Church, though not as defiant of Fascism as it might have been, was by no means fully compliant with it, and was a stout obstacle to Hitler’s ultimate wish to scour Christianity from Aryan society. (In Nazism, Jesus was just another contemptible Jew, offering morality suitable only for vile weaklings. In fact, many Nazis felt that only weak and unworthy people needed the consolations of religion at all; in their view, the only truly worthy folk put their faith in strength, power and victory; ‘Sieg.’)

And Communism had been vigorous in the Rhineland’s vast labor base. The Nazis hated Marxism – like Christianity, a worldview with a Jewish founder – and decapitated the German Communist Party soon after taking power in 1933, imprisoning and killing its leaders, closing its newspapers, etc. But they couldn’t identify and coerce everyone who had ever voted ‘Bolshewik,’ so the heavily industrialized Ruhr Valley north of Cologne was one of several previously Red pockets in the Reich where National Socialism never fully took hold. Scorn, if not outright hostility to it, lay not far below the surface of Cologne’s vicinity; and Hitler knew it.

And his war brought cataracts of bombs down on the tepid town, as on most major German localities, although its lofty cathedral was relatively slightly damaged, deliberately spared by Allied warplanes to serve as a targeting coordinate. They apparently dropped their bombs on anything within ca. 2 miles around it, and thus most other cherished local buildings got smashed. Long after peace came, a few of those were painstakingly replicated, but it was impossible to restore all that were lost. Presumably, as in dozens of shattered urban areas across Europe, hard choices had to be made as to what had to be rebuilt immediately to return devastated, depopulated Cologne to life, and only then to revive its spirit.

Old photos include this arch, remnant of a large Roman gate, in front of the Dom, that seemed to show it had originally been about 15 feet lower. As part of reconstructing the wrecked city, the open space around the cathedral was raised so traffic can pass below it to allow unimpeded pedestrian access to the nearby main train station. The arch may have been lifted to the new grade level, but presumably in its previous horizontal location relative to the Dom, to (partially) preserve this remarkable spectacle, eloquently suggesting fundamental continuity between the distant past and present; of Cologne, and of the world.

Even so, disturbing this venerable artifact would have been a fitting metaphor for the epic upheavals this site, and city, have witnessed.

by omniagallia

Berlin, Tiergarten: A Forest within a City:

A RELEVANT DIGRESSION: Before discussing this image, a restatement about my priorities:

As a self-identified historian, I am attracted to ‘grand’ themes, which often animate my posts for this blog. I fear this may sometimes seem pretentious (or grandiloquent), but please bear in mind the scope and gravity of some of my topics.

For example, many of my posts target Nazism, not just for its abominable crimes, but in shuddering revulsion at one of its root philosophies: It avidly asserted that human beings should adopt the kill-or-be-killed behavior of wild animals, claiming that Nature teaches that only the strong survive and that they have the right to prey on the weak – and Aryan Germans, of course, were ‘strong.’ This premise was not just the private fantasy of Nazi fanatics; it became state doctrine, part of schools’ curricula, and was promoted in official propaganda.

Far from encouraging rising above our bestial impulses as Western civilization had long done, Nazism treated imperatives, embedded in both Judeo-Christian ethics and Humanism, for compassion, empathy, moderation etc., as foul weaknesses to be replaced with nobler qualities; like lethal vainglory, utter ferocity and ruthless self-interest. The Law of the Jungle, Enthroned.

My tirades – jeremiads – about Hitler et al are not pretentious, in that my outrage is no pretense; I am deadly serious about the peril that he and his message of Satanic intemperance were, and still are. So I try to write urgent, bitter lessons of how monstrous phenomena like his worldview can seize control of human affairs.

If my words sometimes seem overheated, it is because I feel Hitlerism (or any win-no-matter-how mindset) remains a danger, and demands exposure as extreme as its potential harm and inherent depravity. And if believing we should follow the example of vicious, mindless animals isn’t depraved, I dare not imagine what is.

I understand most people are absorbed in the challenges of their own lives and cannot dwell on abstract menaces beyond them. But reminding, and warning about these, then become the tasks of people like me, who seem more inclined to brood upon ‘abstract menaces.’  

For we should not assume that Hitlerism, or anything akin to it, could never ‘seize control of human affairs’ again. In my view, every time anyone today doesn’t recognize (or care about) the dangers of glorifying triumph, criminal pride and callousness, if those serve their personal interests, they are blowing life onto the smoldering embers of the Nazi enterprise: Exalting in aggression more fit for brutes than for men and women.

And thus, they help keep that mindset abroad, like an evil spirit. Anyone – not just mad tyrants, but Wall Street wolves, law-scorning managers, salesmen pushing unsafe used cars for commissions, etc. – who believes it is a winner’s virtue to ignore all rules in order to win (or to not lose) is effectively a spiritual heir to Adolf Hitler. Whether they recognize/admit it, or not; if not his willing accomplices, his negligent accessories.

(I exclude those who bend rules in desperation just to survive, while regretting they must do so. I condemn only those who do so to flourish, perversely proud of their lack of conscience. Nor do I suggest that every instance, from mad tyrant to shifty used-car salesman, is equivalent. Some obviously cause far more damage than others, but no such deed is ‘harmless,’ because it helps perpetuate a loathsome attitude.)

So while some of my fellow Americans might be aghast if I claim there is similarity between the ravings of a psychotic dictator and our culture’s near deification of business success, to me, ‘Sieg, Heil’ (Victory, Hail) and our football motto, ‘Winning isn’t everything; it’s the Only thing,’ feel far too close for comfort, in spirit. It is not a huge stretch from that motto, writ large, to the Nazi belief that nothing matters but prevailing, by any means whatsoever. And thus, there are revered predators all over our economy: ‘Victory, Hail!’

The sentiment beneath, ‘Winning – is the only thing’ may not be a roaring fire, but it whiffs of those ‘smoldering embers.’ It would be better if those were smothered once and for all, rather than being revived/recycled by every soulless lout who can conceive of no reason to care about any welfare but his own. And who may even expect to be honored for doing so.

I don’t imagine that self-interest will miraculously vanish, nor should it. Properly used, it is natural, rightful, and a force for improvement; and certainly, I have my own. But if it gets glorified as the highest possible aspiration, Nazism grimly demonstrated where it may lead.

I hope this helps explain why I keep harping on Nazism; I fear the spark of its outlook is still far from extinguished. I sometimes write and advocate about other matters, but never with such unapologetic fervor as for this one.

And now for this image of the Tiergarten park in Berlin, depicting a truly ‘grand theme’; the Edenic enfolding of Nature, offering better lessons about peace, vitality and continuity than any words of mine ever could.

Berlin’s main central green space is called the ‘Tiergarten,’ literally the ‘Beast Garden’ – also a commonly-used German word for a ‘Zoo.’ As often happens in cities that originated in eras that had formal ruling classes, this park was once a wooded hunting preserve of those rulers (here, the Electors of Brandenburg).  They hunted “beasts” like stag, boar, etc., in this space, which still appears to be densely wooded, along with retaining its traditional name.  We roamed around in the park, and I was surprised at how extensive the tree cover was.  Unlike, say, carefully designed Central Park in Manhattan, other than the paved foot paths, the part of the Tiergarten we saw felt a great deal like untouched woodland.  And that is probably deliberate; Germans still have an exceptional affinity to Nature, from their ancient heritage as a forest people. Thus, it must have felt appropriate to leave a great patch of woods in as close to their primal condition as possible, in the center of a vast urban mass like Berlin. 

Many, if not all, of the trees shown here must be replants; most of the ones in this space previously were ruined or cut down, splintered when the Russians fought their way into town in 1945, or burned as fuel by Berliners during and after World War 2, when normal power service got bombed to a standstill. 

Parks are meant to be places of tranquility and self-restoration – ‘re-creation’ – and the Tiergarten seemed to serve that purpose admirably.  It has been replanted and revived as a soothing environment; somehow poignant, given the man-made calamities that once churned through it. Now the madness of men is displaced here by the reassuring constancy and resilience of Nature displaying its benevolence – which the Nazis disregarded in favor of their kill joyously-or-be killed interpretation of it, and which they sought to impose on humanity – reversing our evolutionary ascent to become masters of our passions. Rather than their slaves.

by omniagallia

Berlin: Shrapnel-Mutilated Walls near Museum Island

CONTEXT: The mass of blasted ruins in Berlin has long since been cleared away, but unsettling reminders of the city’s near annihilation in 1945 still skulk on some of the few remaining pre-War buildings. This one, unmistakably marred with the scars of bombing and street warfare, was across the river from the Museum Island, where so many cultural treasures are located. The dome visible here is Berlin’s immense Protestant Cathedral, also on that island.

I photographed this image because its paradox seemed vividly compelling: evidence of human ferocity literally within sight of the fruit of human creativity: The assemblies of our collective genius on the Museum Island. Seeing the proximity of such glories to the ghastliness betokened by these wounded walls would later summon the verse below, ‘We Stones,’ out of me.

The very fact that we, as a species, are capable of such extreme opposites of behavior deserves – demands? – that we reflect on it, lest it ever take us unaware, again. As my verse asks – however clumsily – of us ‘men,’ and our recurrent appetite for raw dominance, ‘Can they not help but be so?’

When preparing to re-post this piece from my 2016 visit to Europe here, I discovered a revelatory irony: I didn’t know what this scarred building was when taking this photo. But when examining a satellite image of the vicinity to confirm the dome is the cathedral, I realized that this wall is near the Deutsches Historisches Musueum – the National Museum of German History (this structure itself seems to be part of the Haus Bastian, a Center for Cultural Education). So it may have been deliberately decided to leave this lacerated stonework ‘intact’ as very much a part of, and testament to, the gruesome chapter of Nazism (perhaps that’s what the sign on the wall at the right says, I didn’t notice). This would not only be consistent with the nearby Museum’s mission, but possibly a more instructive exhibition about ‘German History’ than any of the tidy displays within it.

One hopes that the adamant lesson about the horrendous potential peril of a feverish drive for ‘Mastery’ registers with Germans who happen to see these stones. In fact, with all who see them, wherever they come from.

And at an individual level, not just a nationality one.

We Stones –

Formed of magma in crushing heat, cooled over ages, our mother Earth slowly pushed us to her surface. For millennia, we formed her mantle and her mountainsides, only rarely reminded of the violence of our birth by earthquake, flood and lightning strike.

Then men shaped us with their clever tools, and bonded us together as shelter against the hostile Nature that made us all. For men, we resisted wind, cold, heat, rain, snow and storms, sheltering all within us in small worlds of survival.

But then men brought the violence of our birth back around us. Great, blasting flames fell day and night from the sky, till finally, humans making their own fire to destroy each other, surrounded, then reshaped us – once again.

Quiet returned, and with it our repose and inert witness. How can Men be so clever, yet also like the fierce, mindless Nature that formed us?

Can they not help but be so?

by omniagallia

Berlin, Bode Museum:

CONTEXT: After the forbidding Brutalist image of the anti-aircraft Flak tower, here is a contrasting sequel to both its appearance and purpose, less than half a mile away. In my post about the Ann Frank House’s relative nearness to the museum with Rembrandt’s revelatory ‘The Night Watch’ (posted July 17, 2022), I remarked the irony of that proximity: ‘a summit and an abyss of human endeavor, separated by a brief walk, yet from different worlds.’ And that contrast is reflected here also – with no poignant side-story like Anne’s – though this post contains a story of a different sort of tragic loss.

Few people alive today remember military conflict on a global scale like the second World War, but spectacles like that Flak Tower (and awareness of all the resources wasted on such things) may help drive home the message that national combat is the most pervasively awful, perversely counter-productive sorrow we inflict on ourselves. A British observer of World War I wrote of its devouring trenches, machine gun nests, high explosives, poison gas, etc., ‘It is all the work of the Devil.’

And so it is; in whatever guise ‘the Devil’ may take, trying to supplant our finest efforts and aspirations – such as are amassed on Berlin’s Museum Island – with our very worst ones. Unless one considers absolute indifference to the well-being of others a virtue, there is nothing noble, let alone, glorious about War – something about which we, who lack personal experience of it, must never let ourselves be deceived.

In another of my 2016 posts, this building appeared above a colorfully lit tour boat on the Spree river at night, a display of Berlin’s festive impulses. Germany’s capital is said to exploit its warm months more than any other city in Northern Europe, with an overabundance of outdoor events and pursuits. This was not so visible when we were there in mid-October, but the city felt very lively in any case. Even though signs of its destruction due to its role as Hitler’s capital can still be noticed, and it still suffers in the world’s consciousness from its (none too willing) association with him, it is not just a haunt of evil memories.   

This building sits at the prow of Berlin’s Museum Island, home of a remarkable assembly of exhibition spaces for art owned by Prussia’s kings, and after 1871, by the Kaisers of the German Empire. Aside from this one, the Island is home to the Neues (New) Museum, the Altes (Old) Museum, and the Pergamonmuseum. The latter houses full-scale recreations of architectural elements from Middle Eastern antiquity, including the Ishtar Gate from Babylon. The seminal bust of Nefertiti, an ancient queen of Egypt, is in the Neues Museum.

The Bode Museum now displays sculpture. Originally it held Germany’s national painting Gallery, but after Communism fell and the city was re-united after 1989, the decision was made to move that collection to the new Gemaldegalerie in the Kulturforum (a district of cultural institutions – including the still-unconventional Orchestra Hall, the Philharmonie – south of the Tiergarten Park, created to replace arts venues destroyed in the war).

Or I should say, what remained of the national painting collection got moved. A void in today’s gathering of Old Master paintings (mostly German, Dutch, Flemish and Italian Renaissance) at the modern Gemaldegalerie is a wrenching reminder that violent struggle causes irreplaceable loss beyond human lives. Shortly before World War II, when it became apparent that aerial bombing was likely to be a part of any new military conflict (largely the fault of the Germans themselves, having prepared to greatly expand and enhance air warfare), major cities in the prospective combatant nations made plans to get their movable local treasures out of harm’s way.

Berlin did the same, evacuating much of the great art housed there to safer locations around the country. But there were many paintings in the Bode Museum (then still called by its original name, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum) too large or fragile to be moved. So when it was struck by Allied bombs dropped with the crude targeting mechanisms then available, a number of such monumental pieces were destroyed and lost forever; not just to Hitler’s Master Race, but to all of us. Presumably other treasuries on the Museum Island were also damaged in the bombing – as was the sumptuous Protestant Cathedral there – but I don’t know if their collections had already been removed.

(Something similar happened in the firebombing of Dresden; much of the music of Schuetz, a marvelous late Renaissance German composer which had never been copied, was incinerated and simply gone, depriving us all of whatever joy and delight it might have afforded.)

Today, the Gemaldegalerie, while rich in the modest-sized paintings that could be removed and thus preserved, is notably lacking in larger works. Their absence is a visual echo of how barbarism can tear at the fragile fabric of civilization. Part of Art’s purpose and mission is to moderate human behavior, but it cannot withstand fully unleashed passion; a burst of animal savagery can cause the work of the Ages to be undone.

And at this museum, in Hitler’s Berlin, it did.

by omniagallia

Berlin: Flak Tower –

CONTEXT: The next four posts are from my 2016 visit to Berlin. My friend Paul was with me, so he is the other part of any reference to ‘we’ in these.

I have already put several Berlin posts from that trip on this blog, but chose these to illustrate the whipsaw of history still visible, or manifest, in the city. That is, how the primitive priorities and bestial deeds of the Nazis came to appear, and to remain, amid the great achievements of previous, and 21st Century, German culture. They will show more about Berlin’s heritage as a place of civilization, but also lurking results of Hitler turning it into a stronghold of the unspeakable.

Realizing that such extremities can arise and abide within the same setting and society, may provide a tragic but worthwhile lesson about the breadth – for good and ill – of human capacities.

We were strolling aimlessly when we confronted this menacing apparition on Reinhardtstrasse. This was a platform for anti-aircraft guns (“flak”) to protect Berlin from Allied bombing during the war. It squatted there surrounded by ordinary new buildings; intricate construction to facilitate destruction.

It had the thickest cement walls I’ve ever seen, to resist direct bomb hits, an immovable relic of catastrophic violence like a facial wound that cannot be removed or fully hidden. Massive as this was, it was a lesser fortification; far larger such bastions were built in the Berlin area, some so immense that demolishing them might wreck precious infrastructure nearby. Those have just been allowed to deteriorate gradually, overgrowing with vegetation.

Thus this fearsome bulwark has been left in place, now housing creative-oriented businesses. Its solidity was hard to adapt, so office space got wedged into its existing voids brightened from their military austerity, with cosmetic exterior touches to soften its Bastille-like facade.

Even if one didn’t know its original purpose, there was no mistaking the grim demeanor of this sinister beast, making the harsh realities of war in every sense ‘concrete.’ It is a disfigurement of a city at peace – over which it still casts shadows – that made me shudder. Suggesting a vast dragon’s molar, it is a fittingly brutish image to reflect a regime that conceived and carried out a host of horrors of which the Holocaust was worst, if far from the only one.

The Nazis stole massively from their conquered territories; for example, nearly all concrete produced in occupied France was appropriated by the Germans for their own use, possibly including this tower. But like many Nazi policies, plundering defeated lands contributed to their own undoing, because starving subject national economies (and civilian populations) of resources and food for consumption in the Reich eventually weakened them too much to help the Nazi war effort. To say nothing of how the implacable rage that Germans exalting themselves as a ‘Master Race’ united overwhelming forces against them, including those starving civilian populations, avid for liberation and retribution.

Malevolence Hitler brewed in Berlin spread from the Pyrenees to the Volga like a great, swelling bladder of villainy till it burst, inevitably, on thorns that grew from the violence he had set loose on Earth.  The feral aggression and depraved cruelty of Nazi Germany necessitated things like this tower to defend its own cities against counterstrikes by mighty foes it had provoked.

This bleak hulk failed in its original task of repelling the global onslaught a belligerent mindset had aroused, and now – exquisite irony – shelters creative activity instead. It is both a totem of war’s wastefulness, and an inadvertent, dire warning of what can happen if human reason is perverted to serve faith in brute force.

Quite a lesson there. Though sadly not all have learned it, as Russian ‘faith in brute force’ against Ukraine (as of June, 2023) shows. The fate of the Third Reich surely supports the premise that those who live by the sword are liable to perish by it. And rightly so; aside from all the harm they inflict, nothing less than the gradual improvement of human Nature itself may depend on such men, and such mindsets, not being allowed to prevail.

by omniagallia

Prague, Twilight near Hradcany: 

Another image of Prague, almost the opposite in scale and spirit of my panorama of its splendor from the Charles Bridge. In some ways, this intimate view seemed more typical of how the city’s atmosphere felt overall, in that it evokes what authentic, stable civilization looks, and feels, like.

This is not apparently a famous street, but set on a gentle slope with solid, quietly elegant buildings, it utterly charmed me. In most cities, such calm and unpretentious grace might make it extraordinary – even magical. Yet it seemed to be an area of casually dressed locals, and so may be just an ‘ordinary’ street in central Prague.

I have elementary knowledge of the city’s history, geography, etc., but it is not necessary to know much background about a place to sense when one is seeing something quite special there. This vista felt like a sort of mellow mist, yet also crystallized the essence of ‘authentic, stable, civilization.’

The young woman walking towards me here had a slight smile. I have wondered if she was a resident of the area, mildly pleased to see another tourist register her enchanting daily environs. I do not know, as we did not speak (I would not presume she knew English), but that was the impression her smile gave.

This modest street looked like an ambience to be embraced, not just ‘consumed,’ per the cultural reflex of the 21st Century. Civilization not as dismissal of the old, and frantic pursuit of novelty and progress, but as continuous and cumulative, rather than discrete and episodic. Of recognizing how the past may be imbued with experience that is now, and will remain, worth appreciating. And savoring.

by omniagallia

Prague, View from Charles Bridge:

This is a classic view of Prague, showing some of its main monuments; for example, the spires of St. Vitus cathedral, standing proud above the red roofs of Hradcany Castle, are visible here. The gloomy skies notwithstanding, seeing this was a really singular experience; a panorama of characteristic Old World grandeur.

I took this picture from one of the city’s most beloved sights, its Medieval Charles Bridge (‘Karlov Most’) over the Vltava river, renowned for the sculptures that line it. Those had no unified theme, were clearly installed at different times in honor of different types of subjects, and given such prominent locations that many were probably major artworks in their own right. Most of the statues here are copies, the originals having been moved inside various venues to shield them from the elements.

Besides helping to discourage invaders, gates like those at each end of this bridge often had functions such as collecting tolls to pay for maintenance, or import taxes on transiting goods. Also, because bridges long enough to cross wide rivers were rare till the modern era, they often became focuses to spread information. For example, traitors’ heads were spiked on Old London Bridge as warnings; Venice’s Ponte Rialto was a prime place to hear news.

But Prague came close to having not survived to enchant us today. Heartbreaking as it was for the Czechs to yield their Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 (after France and Britain warned them at the Munich Conference to do so, or fight the Third Reich alone), posterity should be grateful they submitted. Goering, head of the Nazi air force, had already threatened to bomb the city to dust – with regret, acknowledging it was a ‘lovely place’ – if the Czechs resisted this territorial theft.  

All you see here might then have been destroyed, and lost. (As Paris might have been, had it become a battleground in 1940.)     

We should also be glad Prague did not slash many wide, new streets through its venerable fabric for the sake of traffic efficiency (Paris and London did). A few such were added, but most of the central city still has an aura from less rational/regimented eras; small, labyrinthine byways. It is not the easiest urban geography to traverse or to learn, but there are plenty of towns that prioritize the needs of the car, and ease of navigation. Prague is rare both in scale and quality of ambience retained, for not having done the same.

In addition to surviving World War 2 mostly intact, the city’s historic center was largely left alone by the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989, which puts it in a small subset of places that history felicitously bypassed until their unfashionable, half-shabby prospect – by then rare – began to be admired.  Prague, the national capital with some 1.3 million people in its region, is probably large enough to support skyscrapers, but none were visible. That suggests a deliberate decision after Democracy returned not to replace distinguished, elegant buildings in this core with new structures out of scale and harmony with such refined surroundings.

Czechoslovakia emerged from Nazi occupation, then Communist constraint in a subdued upheaval: The Velvet Revolution of 1989. After that, Prague, previously a treasure largely inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain, got rediscovered, to the delight of the world.  And its charm – perhaps the word that best describes it – has been largely, and wisely, cherished and preserved since.