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

In the summer, more than 20,000 tourists visit the cathedral
daily. In 1996 the cathedral was included in the
World Heritage List.
Healing a wound, regaining “heavenly perfection”
On 3 November 1943 a bomb hit an abutment of the
cathedral’s northern tower. By the end of the year, the
site was cleared and 27,500 bricks used to fill the gap
torn by the impact of the bomb (Fig. 6. 7). The brickwork
was nicknamed “die Plombe”, the German word
for a tooth filling. Involved in the work of filling the
gap were army personnel, ten prisoners of war, and 20
“convicts”, a euphemism for inmates of an outpost of
the Buchenwald concentration camp. Remarkably, two
fragments of the abutment were retrieved from the rubble
and incorporated into the brickwork as spolia.
For the next half century, this “emergency repair” was
the subject of heated debate. One party insisted on the
maintenance and preservation of the “filling” in memory
of the “inferno of the Second World War”, while the other
side demanded that “the venerable face” of the edifice
be restored. This discussion came to an end in the mid-
1990s when the lower end of the abutment was consolidated
and the master builder of the cathedral announced
his intention to remove the filling. Historians argued
that this “evidence” of the Second World War was still
needed as “a monument and memorial.” In 1995, the
master builder, Arnold Wolff, was of a different opinion
and finally resolved to submit a formal application for
permission to act in accordance with the conservation
law. He argued that the cathedral is first of all a church,
“a house of God and a place of worship”, which should
not be misappropriated for alien purposes. In his view,
the march of time would ultimately make it impossible
for uninformed visitors to understand why there should
be brickwork on a sandstone church. More importantly,
the totality of the cathedral, regarded as a “work of art”
(Gesamtkunstwerk), would lose “an important part of its
identity” if “traces of its history are valued higher than
the meaning invested in the edifice by the original builders.”
According to Wolff, the wholeness and integrity of
the cathedral constitute its “inner essence”.
The master builder also emphasized that the builders
of Gothic cathedrals aimed at the highest possible perfection.
Taking into account the inadequacies of earthly
life, at least the building of a church should mirror
“heavenly perfection”. Criticizing the cathedral building
for attempting to create the illusion of a perfect world
was considered an unsubstantiated accusation.
In March 1996 building permission was granted; actual
work on the site started in 2004 and was completed
by August 2005 (Fig. 8). 103 cubic meters of sandstone
were built into the structure. 823 stones were cut to size,
and 124 sophisticated sculptural elements such as capitals,
finials, and crabs were fashioned.
6,7,8
Cologne Cathedral. In November
1943 the abutment of the northern
tower was hit by a bomb; the gap
was filled with bricks. In 2008
the “tooth filling” (Plombe) was
removed to restore the abutment
in Gothic style in order to regain
“heavenly perfection”.
Source: Postcard Ziethen-Verlag, ca.
1995, and Schock-Werner, 2005
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