engleski

Didactic Images of Pain: Use and Abuse of Ruins in Europe after 1945

The perception of ruins is an age-old cultural phenomenon. Since Cicero’s account on Corinthian ruins in Tusculan Disputations, these views animated and affiliated individual altruism with collective activism, expressing various emotions, ranging from loss and sorrow to catharsis and belonging. The perception and treatment of fragments, however, were not defined as normative set of behaviours in the history of Europeans. From their initial recognition to intellectual and practical responses, these perceptions were adapted to individual and collective demands. As testified by the history of their acceptance, ruins elicited emotions of disappointment, pain and anger and were seen as vivid testimonies of sins committed by our adopted or generic forefathers. For centuries, the anguish of past looking by gazing into ruins motivated creative enthusiasm and revivals, which were gradually adapted to cults of classical and national monuments. In summer 1914 the understanding of ruins – not inherited, but newly created – has dramatically changed, not only due to the gravity of the sudden trauma but also because of the number of the affected. The preservation and creation of ruins became socially and politically relevant, following the pathos of inhibited communities on their way to cultural fulfilment and political emancipation. One of the key issues discussed in this paper is how was this, initially only aestheticized, pain of humanists and antiquarians adapted to post-war therapeutic programs and political utopias, with significant role of ruined images of the past. After an insight into the historical background of inheriting and learning from ruins in ancient, mediaeval and renaissance Europe, article turns to the comparative study of the conservation treatment of new ruins in historic towns of post-fascist Europe. The professional response to political exigencies in bombarded towns of England, divided Germany, Poland, Italy, France and socialist Croatia had to reflect the reformist and therapeutic functions of the martyred and divided Europe. Recently, the historiography of architectural conservation addressed the socio- anthropological aspects of the perception of ruins, especially those appearing after 1918 and 1945. In addition, contemporary discussions in German theory of conservation (Pehnt, Meier, Will) deal with the semantics of monuments surviving the war as omnipresent and uncomfortable fragments, treated by conservation experts and urban planners as either dismissible or crucial parts of the reconstructed urban environments. In the aftermath of war, these implicit images of pain led societies through a novel and in no way consistent process of healing, encapsulated by the reformist or revolutionary politics, philosophy of guilt and its artistic manifestations of survival. Contemporary theoretical accounts strive to decipher this heterogeneous, politically determined iconography of pain by devising an iconology on its own. This paper is an attempt to approach these issues in a comparative and contextual way.

ruins, post-1945 Europe, conservation, reconstruction, trauma, pain

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