Genocide, crimes against humanity, religious persecution: Slobodan Milosovic isn’t short of charges to face at his trial in The Hague. But one charge in particular is intriguing: “The intentional and wanton destruction of religious and cultural buildings of the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat communities.”
This is an important moment, argues Robert Bevan in his powerful new book, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. This is the first time that anyone has been properly charged in a court of law for wartime attacks on architecture as well as civilians, and a direct connection noted between the two.
During the Nuremberg trials, Goering, Rosenberg and Ribbentrop were the first to face prosecution for cultural crimes under the 1907 version of the Hague Convention. But, writes Bevan, they “got off lightly from this line of questioning . . . the issue was not dwelt on”. After Nuremberg “attacks on architecture, and their links to war crimes and crimes against humanity, were barely noted, let alone prosecuted. That is until the war in the former Yugoslavia, when the connection could hardly be missed.”
Iraq is conspicuous by its absence in the book. The situation there, says Bevan, is constantly changing and the issue is less the overt targeting of architecture than the looting of cultural objects.
It is in the former Yugoslavia, he says, that the connection between human and architectural atrocities is most pronounced — and continuing. In 2004 riots in Kosovo destroyed monasteries and Orthodox churches in Prizren and elsewhere, before spreading to Montenegro and Serbia, where Belgrade’s only mosque was set alight in reprisals. Three years earlier, when Muslims laid a foundation stone to rebuild one of Banja Luka’s 16 demolished mosques, Serb nationalists rioted, and a pig was let loose to defile the site. Croats, Serbs and Muslims now stand accused of cultural attacks.
Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic have been indicted for the destruction of sacred sites, General Slobodan Praljak for the symbolic destruction of the elegant Stari Most bridge in Mostar, and army and naval commanders for shelling the Old Town of Dubrovnik, despite Croatia having demilitarised what is a Unesco World Heritage site.
The cultural charges, of course, are not the most grievous on the list. But at least they’re there, says Bevan. “All the conventions in the world won’t change anything without people understanding and realising what is going on when architecture is attacked. And of absolute importance is prosecuting the crime of cultural genocide.”
Nietzsche identified in monuments “the stamp of the will to power”, and books aplenty catalogue architectural creation as a weapon of authority. This is the first, though, to suggest that architectural destruction has the same function. Architecture is targeted because it is collectively symbolic, even if this symbolism is arbitrary (classical columns are favoured equally by fascists, liberal democracies and premier-league footballers).
Mostar’s bridge was destroyed precisely because it was a bridge, a symbol of togetherness in a city with the highest numbers of mixed marriages in Bosnia. Just as architecture legitimises claims over space, its removal disenfranchises, defamiliarises.
Bevan’s book continually returns to Kristallnacht, the most vicious and recent act of “cultural genocide” involving architecture — though one with deep roots. In Against Jews and their Lies Martin Luther advised: “First their synagogues or churches should be set on fire and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or a stone of it.”
Four centuries later, that’s exactly what the Nazis did: 191 synagogues burnt, another 76 demolished in what Bevan calls a “proto-genocidal” act to dehumanise a population in preparation for its eventual annihilation. The Nazis used the same methods time and again.
Hitler, for instance, planned the complete removal of Poland’s “brain”, Warsaw, and its replacement with a small garrison town, though this didn’t begin until the Red Army was at the door in 1944, when Himmler began dismantling the city street by street. A quarter of a million people died; of 957 historic monuments, 782 were completely destroyed; we can thank the speed of the Russian advance, which left scant time for retreating Germans to lay explosives, for any survivors.
The magnificent medievalheart of Krakow, though, was left: Hitler thought its architecture sufficiently “Germanic”. Paris was saved from a similar fate only because its commander, Dietrich von Cholt, couldn’t bring himself to destroy its beauty during the Nazi retreat.
The Allies weren’t without sin. Eisenhower instructed his commanders in Italy to respect its cultural monuments, but German architecture — perhaps thought less “civilised” — wasn’t afforded the same protection. Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s carpet-bombing of German cities was ruthless and efficient. The Germans thought he was targeting their culture. But Harris had a colder aim: the dense, wooden medieval cores of German cities were “like a firelighter”, he said. After the destruction of elegant, “civilised” Dresden, Churchill ended Harris’s campaign. It was no longer clear who were the barbarians.
Architectural destruction is like a drug. It’s addictive. It’s instant proof of change, of authority. That’s why it is so popular. And that’s why it can become so rabid. Carthage was not only destroyed by the Romans: its site was scattered with salt to make sure that nothing ever rose again. It’s as if in the pursuit of blood and soil we have to burrow deep to the earth’s core to fulfill a literally fundamentalist belief in the genius loci. In Israel and Palestine today, so loaded is the land with symbols, so rabid is the conflict, even gentle archaeology and town planning become weapons.
Historically, Britain has got off lightly, though through the slow, bureaucratic creep of ordinary planning we still shape and censor our townscapes according to our prejudices. And there’s always terrorism. Irish republicans have targeted British symbols of power since the 19th century: the Tower of London, Palladian Anglo-Irish stately homes, the City. Today, Muslim extremists follow suit.
Bevan looks fondly upon a brief moment, after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, when Trotskyists detached the glory of architecture from its context in deciding what to do with bourgeois monuments of the past. “The Renaissance only begins,” wrote Trotsky, “when the new social class . . . feels strong enough . . . to look at Gothic art . . . as material for its own disposal.” Then, alas, Stalin turned up with his wrecking ball.
Bricks and mortars: architecture and war
World Trade Centre, New York Destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Coventry Cathedral Bombed in November 1940; reconsecrated in the early 1960s.
Frauenkirche, Dresden Destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945. A replica was reconsecrated last October.
National Library, Sarajevo Bombed in 1992, now being rebuilt.
The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War by Robert Bevan is published by Reaktion Books, priced £19.95
