KVPT’s Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign - Work to Date - September 2016

The debate has been presented here at length in order
to understand or even appreciate the mind-set of conservationists
from the West who engage in the ongoing
discourse on conservation principles appropriate for a
country such as Nepal.
Part II
The 20th-century experience in Europe:
War and iconoclasm
Scars and decay: Berlin and Auschwitz
In most of Europe’s cities, small scars, wounds or even
ruins turned into memorials are there for all to witness.
In quite a few places, scars on the surface of stone are
highlighted in order to turn a wall, a building, or a site
into a memorial of wars and uprisings.
Probably in no other city in the world does the Second
World War remain as visually apparent as in Germany’s
capital, Berlin. Bullet holes are ubiquitous, recalling the
extensive street warfare in April 1945. One building,
which now houses the administrative offices of the Art
Gallery, is studded with such bullet holes. No attempt
has been made to cover the scars up. Instead, a sheet of
glass has been attached to the wall, leaving a slight gap
between itself and the stone surface. It bears the inscription
“Wounds of Memory” (Fig. 1). The glass covers a
small area of the façade and draws attention to the consequences
of war. In this case the initiative has come from
the nation that brought suffering, death, and destruction
to large areas of Europe. The visibility of the wounds on
the building is an avowal of guilt.
The buildings opposite the Budapest Parliament Building
in Hungary, for example, are pockmarked with
holes into which large balls of iron have been inserted,
symbolizing the bullets used in the autumn of 1956 to
disperse the masses that had assembled in the wake of
the uprising against communist rule. The scars were
made visible after 1990 to commemorate the fight for
freedom, which for Hungary was a painful experience,
ushering in thirty-four years of oppression.
German cities like Berlin have been showered by millions
of bombs, bullets, and artillery shells. The scars
left on stone and plaster are near-ubiquitous. Efforts to
cover up the evidence of war have intensified since the
reunification of the country in 1990. In 2008, Berlin’s
famous Brandenburg Gate re-emerged from the scaffolding
that had covered it for many years. Its surface
was immaculately smooth. Irrespective of size, all the
scars on the structure have been covered up (Fig. 2). But
they remain visible to the tutored eye because the mortar
differs slightly in color from the original grey stone. It
will need decades before the “additions” develop their
own patina to be eventually identified as such only with
a magnifying glass.
Not far from the Brandenburg Gate, the restorers of the
arcade of the New Museum (built in 1855, bombed in
1944, restored in 2009) opted for a different approach.
Scars longer than three centimeters were covered up with
special mortar, while smaller holes were left as they were
to avoid the impression of seamless restoration (Fig. 3).
In this case, the effects of war had to be kept alive somehow
to achieve at least a modicum of memory and authenticity.
National Socialist Germany (1933–45) created a heinous
infrastructure of its own across Europe. Concentration
camps were established to imprison enemies of
state, Roma, homosexuals. Russian prisoners of war, and
Jews. The most abominable was the one at the city of
Auschwitz (Oświęcim) near Kraków in Poland, which
had been annexed by the German Reich in November
1939. More than one million people were annihilated
in the gas chambers there. The German command tried
to destroy the crematoria of the Birkenau camp before
fleeing but did not succeed. Today, one crematorium is
preserved and the ruins of a second one were stabilized in
2 and 3
Scars covered up: gaps being closed
by stone of filled with mortar.
The Brandenburger Tor and the
colonnade of the Neues Museum at
Berlin after restoration.
Photographs N. Gutschow, 2008
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