Bringing history up to date
History’s rolling river, and its little oxbow lakes
Last weekend saw me in a friendly discussion with another Substacker on one of my favourite subjects: cathedrals. When I worked in the adolescent travel industry, one of the boredom syndromes that we tour directors knew was dubbed as “ABC”, which translates variously as another bloody cathedral, another bloody castle, another bloody country, another bloody city, or whatever it was that you were about to embark on another bloody one of (that began with c). The trick was to convince the teenage customers that what we were all about to do together was new, fresh, exciting and, oh, so relevant. So, we had to know our stuff.
In the discussion referred to, the subject turned on desecration of religious sites. The OP talked about Native American burial grounds that had been moved in the past and then later moved back to their original location. I mused on whether the practice of renting cemetery plots or even moving entire graveyards when churches are deconsecrated was any different.
That led to a comment by another reader, and here’s what our exchange led to. It’s kind of interesting because we’re both right, and maybe we’re both wrong:
Lady correspondent: I visited the vast Cathedral of St Denis just north of Paris recently. Its [sic] much older than Notre Dame and all the ancient French Kings were buried there. There are impressive tomb monuments. However those are 19th century and really only symbolic as this place of sacred sanctuary was trashed and despoiled in the French Revolution. So it’s a symbolic place to respect King Louis 16th and Marie Antoinette, not the villains, [that] the real villains painted them as.
(Oops, I maybe pulled rank here:)
Not so fast with the “much” older, there, Jane! The building date of churches like St Denis is very much up in the wind, for this basilica (not, unfortunately a “cathedral” as such) was built in stages up to about the end of the 13th century. But it was built with amazing speed (the stone was transported more than 20 km by hand) and is regarded as the first proper gothic building (because of the niceties of nomenclature, Chartres is the first gothic “cathedral”). However, with all the restoration work (St Denis was struck by lightning, thus losing one of its towers; Chartres was plagued by fires throughout its construction, and even poor old Notre Dame suffered from an outbreak of fire in recent years (apparently from the same cause as Düsseldorf airport), it’s hard to say what exactly their “completion date” was.
Notre Dame was laid down in the same century as the choir was completed at St Denis, so they’re of a type. But it was Chartres, with its height, that saw the inception of flying buttresses, and these were then imitated at Notre Dame because they allow of a far greater transmission of deadweight to the ground than simple solid walls, thus allowing for much more glass in the walls and more slender columns, thus giving an “airy” feel to the structure. The epitome of this approach was probably Canterbury in England.
However, all that aside, let me put three questions: how do you know ahead of time that your cathedral will not come tumbling down? Truth is, early architects simply built until fall down they did. Everything in those days was trial and error.
Second, why were they built? I’ll leave that one to you. (And the French Revolutionaries.)
Third, you’re right, St Denis is the final resting place of the kings of France, nearly down to the last one. But why aren’t the emperors there? Nap II doesn’t really count. Nap III is easy. He died in Kent and was buried in Hampshire. But Nap I is buried in Paris. How come? (Clue: he’s buried in a building built by Louis XIV).
Now, I say this in all modesty because there are guide books that tell you facts: how high, how wide, when built, when finished, who inaugurated and that sort of thing, most of which is uncontroversial. Then there are guide books that help you to draw conclusions, by … drawing them for you. What the side channels along the streets at the excavation site in Pompeii were for, how the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum actually perished. Finally, there are the history books which give less of a conclusion and more of a judgment on the ambitions, goals, motivations, reasons, and origins; of movements, of rulers, of nations, and so forth: why exactly did Napoleon seek to reconquer France in the 100 Days? Why is Austria so small and relatively insignificant today, whereas a hundred years ago or so, it was a vast empire? Is there any difference between Germany and Nazi Germany? Or between Britain and Nazi Britain? The US and the Nazi US? Or between France and Nazi France?
When we talk about Germany between 1933 and 1945, we generally call it, not Germany but Nazi Germany. Why do we make that difference? Was there, is there, a Nazi Britain? A Nazi US? What makes a country a Nazi country?
France is an interesting case in point because, during World War II, France was both Nazi and non-Nazi, so you can draw some kind of a comparison. However, the dilemma comes when you need to decide which part of France was Nazi and which was non-Nazi. One part was occupied by Nazis, and the other part was ruled by Nazis, so it can be a close call in deciding what the difference is between a Nazi France and a non-Nazi France. And that doesn’t even take account of the shenanigans that Humphrey Go-cart was getting up to in far-off Casablanca, where Claude reigns.
Part of the fun of being a historian is sifting through what we believe to be evidence and deciding the answers. Like, for instance, whether Vichy France, which was ruled by Frenchmen (call them what you will, they were French, in France) and had its capital at Vichy was the real France or whether Occupied France, which had its capital nominally at Paris, but actually in Berlin, was more the real France. Whether the German Democratic Republic was more, or less, democratic than the Federal Republic of Germany. Or than the Germany that both of them were before they became what they then were.
Whether the United States of America encapsulated the true spirit of the founding fathers, or whether the Confederate States of America were what the founding patriarchs were really trying to achieve. I shall offer no answer to any of these questions, because my answers would probably run counter to what a whole host of much more learned historians have already said, and, for Heaven’s sake, we wouldn’t want that, not for all the world.
They would look at things like who eventually won, which generally automatically colours your opinion, simply because you are often living in the wake of that win, no matter how long ago it occurred, and in wars there is no win-win, which makes me wonder if it even exists anywhere. Living in the wake of the win is something that generally makes you think: what a wonderful win it was!
Non-Russians all think that Soviet historians twisted and tortured the facts to present a rosy picture of the USSR. Like, they got together and said, Heavens, we can’t possibly present this awful fact as it was; let us present it completely differently. No, I think they really believed the awful facts were different. They presented nice facts as nice facts, because they thought they were nice. Which calls into question what the other side’s historians were doing at that time: telling the God’s honest truth? Well, they were also telling what they firmly believed in their hearts. And those that weren’t were being attacked as renegades and mavericks and traitors and bloody Marxists. ABMs, I suppose.
I think it’s fair to say that Israel is under a bit of international pressure right now. It is a big fish in a little pond, and it has been oppressing a little fish in its own big pond. And the judgment on the dreadful set of events that constituted the Holocaust is starting to change in some people’s minds.
I have been on many occasions to Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. I have visited Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechia (Böhmen und Mähren), Mauthausen in Austria (Ostmark) and Fort Breendonck in Belgium (Belgien). And, in 1989, I visited the former concentration camp at Oranienburg, near Berlin, and that was an interesting visit.
Oranienburg, the town, sits to the north of Berlin, on the River Havel, the same river that bisects the capital itself. I was on a group visit to Berlin from a place which is not far from Stuttgart called Schwäbisch Hall, where our group were studying the German language at its Goethe Institute. We were travelling by coach, and a quick look at the map of Germany will confirm that Berlin and Stuttgart are virtually at opposite ends of this vast country. The journey was a long one.
Image: The vast country of Germany.
However, the day of our departure back home, one of the group asked the professor who was acting as our group leader whether we would be visiting Oranienburg concentration camp, given its proximity. The reply came that we would not, because it was not in our programme and we had a long journey ahead of us, so couldn’t really afford any deviations. This reply was met with outrage. Incandescent outrage, to be precise, on the part of the young Israeli who had posed the question.
The group leader relented, spoke to the driver, also a German gentleman, who likewise relented, and that was that. We, the rest of the group, were not consulted. We acquiesced, on the basis that one additional visit sounded like an attractive idea. By the time we arrived home in Schwäbisch Hall in the wee, small hours, our enthusiasm had somewhat dimmed, since we were due back in the classroom at 8.30 that morning. Indeed, the coach driver needed to drop us all off at our various homes, since the town’s public transport had stopped for the night.
There is no question but it was worth it to have satisfied Yossi’s request. Many of those present had never seen a concentration camp at all and, at the time, I felt it was interesting to “collect” this one, like one collects commemorative spoons from places one has visited, or stamps in your passport. Some of the group were from Brazil, Venezuela, the United States and might very well never have had a chance to visit a concentration camp again, once they returned home.
But Oranienburg had been a deviation, of 180°. An hour up there and an hour back, and we were given about 30 to 40 minutes for the visit. You may ask, why only 30 or 40 minutes? Well, because there’s nothing to see. A wall. A brewery wall is all there is. But we could have a pee and a smoke, and that took about 15 minutes and the wall, which we looked at from various angles, to appreciate its entirety: that took about five minutes. Five minutes disembarkation and (it always takes for ever) about ten minutes to get everyone back on board. Once we’d seen it, we embarked on the seven-hour journey back to our base in Schwäbisch Hall.
It is true that Oranienburg was a concentration camp. But it was not a death camp (although sixteen people did die here): it was one of the earliest concentration camps, opened in 1933, and it was fairly open: locals could easily see the inmates over the wall. The SA ran it until the SS took over (inter alia by liquidating the SA) in 1934. It housed mainly political dissidents, as well as undesirables like homosexuals and irritating priests. But, if there were any Jews there, they were few and far between. The camp closed in 1936, when Sachsenhausen was opened by the SS. That’s why there’s nothing to see: the Nazis opened it and the Nazis closed it and used the site for something else: brewing, a very popular German occupation (unlike Vichy France).
There are various points to make about this: Yossi, who was from Tel Aviv, had done his research. He knew about Oranienburg. I’d heard of it and a few others had as well, but we had no idea where it was located, or that we were so close to it. Yossi did. Incandescent as it was, he needed to apply very little pressure to our leader and coach driver to get us all to visit it, which, even though it was in completely the wrong direction and pretty much irrelevant to the Holocaust, in which so many Jews died, did not actually raise any great questions at the time.
These, then, are the facts surrounding that visit to Oranienburg. I have no regrets about visiting the place, even if I couldn’t buy a commemorative spoon. I could draw some conclusions, regarding, say, the bewilderment of the party upon learning we would be making the deviation, the fuel supplement the school would probably have to pay for the extra kilometres, and the risk we ran of exceeding the driver’s permitted driving time. But it will have to be a historian who draws conclusions about why we went, why the driver and the group leader acquiesced in Yossi’s demands so easily, and why we did as well. And then we might consider whether we would do so again now, 35 years later. And, if not, why not.
French speakers write minutes of meetings in the present tense, and this makes for an interesting problem when they are translated into English, which uses the past tense: do you use the preterite (simple past) tense (the board members decided to do something) or do you use the imperfect past tense (the board members have decided to do something)? If you’re unaware, the preterite relates to an identified point of time in the past, and the imperfect to an open-ended period in the past, ending with the present. In fact the tense can change: if we cite the board minutes for laying down the Titanic, the ship, it will be preterite. But if we’re having a new luxury yacht built this year, we’ll probably use the imperfect form, because the yacht is still in construction. However, when it’s finished, we would tend to cite the minutes in the preterite form. It’s done and dusted.
Well, the problem isn’t restricted to board minutes. It extends to all of history: is it fixed in the past, or will we constantly be revising it to bring it up to date?
Lest we forget
Top left: Breendonck, Belgium. By JoJan - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2145314
Top centre: The Theresienstadt ghetto, as depicted by Czech artist Bedřich Fritta. By Bedřich Fritta - Ghetto Fighters House, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38474793
Top right: Prisoners arriving at Mauthausen, Austria. By Unknown author - https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa10476 #76317 Entered into evidence at the Mauthausen trial at Dachau, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91485538
Bottom left: Heinrich Himmler doing a sort of meet and greet at Dachau. The man on the right is deciding whether the man on the left will live or die. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-11-12 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5337638
Bottom right: the brewery wall at Oranienburg. By Mwehle - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83289586