The Pathos of Plastic Surgery

Albert Durer House, Nuremberg

Sixty five years ago this night, Churchill and Morgenthau's plan to decimate Germany reached its infernal climax with the firebombing of Dresden. This eighteenth century gem, was not the only architectural wonder to be reduced to smouldering rubble. A month before "Bomber Harris" had sent his crews into the clear winter skies to wreak devastation on the medieval treasure of Nuremberg.

Eighty percent of all German cities were fifty percent destroyed. Dresden and Nuremberg where annihilated almost in their entirety.

It was all part of a plan -- as Morgenthau swore -- to reduce Germany to a permanent cow pasture; and with it, to erradicate forever and for all generations to come, some of the fairest lands in Europe and a thousand years of artistic achievement.

Since then, brick by blackened brick, the Germans have patiently sought to reconstruct the devastation and to give back to future generations some of Germany's mutilated beauty.

This patient labor works on two levels: the reconstruction of renown works of art, such as Dresden's Fraunekirche and the recreation of an urban ambience -- a medieval mileu in Nuremberg's case, baroque grandeur in Dresden's.

However, while we can be grateful, Germans did not entirely resign themselves to the cultural defeat of malls and modernism, the result of their labors seems to me to have produced, on the urban landscape, much the same effect as reconstructive plastic surgery produces on a face.

The pieces are there, but they are too smooth, too linear, too lacking in patina and naturality.

At times, one feels one has gone to a DisneyLand version of Alte Deutschland

Daniel Liebeskind, the American Jewish architect, is critical of Dresden's attempt to recreate "the past". In an interview given to Der Spiegel , Liebeskind says,

"I can understand the impetus of the city wanting to retrieve its past. People want to have something of the city's glory days. But even if you rebuild the Frauenkirche and the city's other great buildings, you cannot bring back the history. The city has been fundamentally altered. The events from the past are not just a footnote, they are central to the transformation of the city.... Sentimentality is not a foundation on which you can build a new city."

Liebeskind believes "recreating the past" ignores the "discontinuity" with the past that is part of true history. In his view, the past was irremediably interrupted. Liebeskind was asked to participate in the reconstruction of Dresden's neo-classical Military Museum. His contribution reflects his perspective.

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Liebeskind explains:

"The triangular structure on the front of the arsenal points to the direction from which Dresden was bombed. It also interrupts the smooth flow of that big arsenal. It creates a question mark about the continuity of history and what it means. It gives people a point of reflection."

Liebeskind has a legitimate point, although what he calls "recreating the past" I have called "reconstructive surgery" -- the aim of which is precisely to pretend the awful accident with it's disfiguring third degree burns never happened.

But I disagree with Liebeskind to the extent that he assumes "recreating the past" can actually succeed in ignoring the "interruption". It cannot. Howsoever "successful," plastic surgery is always a failure and always reflects the discontinuity it seeks to embalm over. Therein lies its pathos.

Accepting the "interruption" and moving on to live in rebuilt modern cities does more to obliterate the discontinuity because literally nothing is continued on --rather a space is simply refilled with newness and "memory" becomes a bronze plaque or footnote to the effect that "a baroque city once stood here."

"Recreating the past" actually does more to underscore the fact that the past was destroyed and therefore needs to be recreated, even though the need will fail in the attempt. Without the too smooth, too new, "old" facade of the Military Museum, Liebeskind's cutting triangular section would be just another instance of glassy geometry in a landscape of impersonal forms. Together with the plastic act of rememberance, we are reminded of history's loss.

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