The Euro-centric view is that Europe is the battlefield of the world, and that Poland is the battlefield of Europe, and during World War II that was more true than ever before or since.
The cities of Rotterdam ('the city without a heart') and Dresden still tell a pretty grim tale today if your eyes are open to it, and Warsaw and Poznan have plenty of places where the repair still hasn't caught up with the damage. There isn't a month that somebody doesn't dig up a piece of ordnance (in some cases very large bombs) when working on their houses or doing public works.
Be grateful for the world you live in and strive to minimise war, it wasn't always this peaceful and the chance is that it will not always be.
Europe is still quite anti-war (in spite of the apparent ease with which some countries, including mine joined the Iraq adventure) there are lots of older people here that still remember what it was like. But we tend to forget and when the last of them dies and stops reminding us how bad war really is the risk is very large that past stupidities will be repeated.
What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades. Suggesting that there could be war between Germany and France would be crazy today but certainly wasn’t always.
That’s not just some flimsy anti-war sentiment which can change as new generations take over, that actually has something to do with lasting change initiated by the war and post-war generation after the war. The EU is the most visible symbol of that change and for all the flack it gets, European integration made war less likely.
Agreed, it's less likely. But idiots like Wilders are pushing the exact same buttons that a certain Austrian guy did and there is a real risk of him or someone like him rising to power.
There are more and louder voices for the break-up of the EU in the last 3 years than I've ever heard in my lifetime.
He's really a nutcase, and a significant portion of a population seem to be willing to vote for a nutcase. I think this applies to any country. It wouldn't be hard to give a recent US example (at least, from the perspective of a non-US citizen).
This group is attracted by populist parties. And research has shown that many Wilders voters favored Rita Verdonk (populist right-wing) and voted SP (fairly extreme left-wing) before.
The interesting question is how large this group is. 1/6 of the voters (Wilders has 24 out of 150 seats)? 1/4? 1/3?
Money’s on the line and that’s just the reason why the EU won’t suddenly disappear.
One of the nice things about a common market (even if it is only partially reality) is that it leads to economic interdependence. Companies can invest wherever they want, companies can sell stuff to wherever they want, people can work wherever they want. There is money to be made and the economic shock waves of making that impossible by leaving the EU would probably be way too much for any EU economy to take.
Maybe the Euro was a bad idea and won’t survive. (My prediction would be that it will.) That won’t, however, be the end of European integration.
Except the casino part of the economy has vastly outsized the productive part. More money changes hands in a day in currency speculation markets alone than does in the productive economy in a year. Thus, what favors the short term gains of a few wealthy gamblers can take precedence over what benefits the people at large.
The cold war is certainly a factor, as is the quick economic recovery of (West) Germany. I have rather big doubts, though, that US occupation caused West Germany (and France) to become a champion of European integration.
I also don’t think that Europe has yet to handle a serious problem. The fall of the Soviet Union is kind of the biggie here. And, sure, the cold war played a large role during the recovery of western Europe after WWII, but, looking back at the disastrous recovery of Europe after WWI and comparing it to the stellar recovery after WWII tells me that this is also quite a big problem which Europe sort of solved. With help, but help can only get you so far.
Well, sure, the Cold War made a European war (as in: a war between West European nations) unthinkable but it is my very strong suspicion that any European war became much less likely independently of the cold war.
There have been long periods of fragile peace in Europe (one example would be the more than forty years of peace between Germany and France between 1871 and 1914). I don’t think the current European peace is anything like that. The events which led up to WWI were by no means huge problems. A little will, a bit of diplomatic elbow grease, eminently solvable if you really wanted to.
The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 90s did not cause huge conflicts in Western Europe. It even looked as though Western Europe didn’t care all that much for most of the time. A conflict between the relatively unimportant Austria and tiny Serbia – a century ago, also on the Balkans – could, however, start the chain reaction which resulted in WWI. The peace was so fragile that it couldn’t handle a local conflict.
The US did indeed encourage European integration but there is always the question as to whether it works. The US always wanted to bring Europe on a course which would lead it to a peaceful future – you know, so they don’t have to come over every other year and fix everything. That didn’t work so well after WWI and a disillusioned US left Europe.
Technically you are right, but most of Europe sees that as the des-integration of Yugoslavia, which would make it a civil war rather than a war between nation states. And I think you meant to write Serbia instead of Yugoslavia.
The other countries getting involved was to stop worse from happening.
From what I know about that war it was basically something that was bound to happen the moment Tito kicked the bucket. He was - like Saddam Hussain in many ways - the person that kept the spring-loaded component parts in an iron grip which some mistook for stability. Once the counter force was gone the various parts flew apart and started a war to try to gain the upper hand.
In Yugoslavia you could say that there never really was stability, only a temporary lack of opportunity to continue the fight.
Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening - the Yugoslav arms industry was nonexistent, and while they most definitely would have kept on killing one another with rocks, I think they would have been less efficient.
I agree with your larger point, though. The breakup of Yugoslavia was unfortunate - and inevitable - but it's kind of the exception that proves the rule. 1914, after all, was the last time a war was started in Yugoslavia, and it took down the rest of Europe and spread beyond the continent. This time, it was relatively self-contained, and the pieces of Yugoslavia are joining the Union, one by one. (After all, Yugoslavia was always a political fiction - Tito needed a platform big enough to fend off the Soviet Union, and by God if Slovenia didn't like it they could go suck an egg.)
Belgium may be next - and nobody's going to get killed over it. I just can't stress enough what incredible progress that really is.
Now that it has broken up though, it does seem more positive for most of the previous members. Slovenia in particular is flourishing, my father worked there for a couple of years as part of an EU consultancy program to help modernise their economy, and they're now (according to wikipedia) at a GDP pp of 91% of the EU average, equivalent to South Korea or New Zealand.
I don't mean to gloss over that the balkans war was a terrible tragedy and was dreadful, but in the end I think they're going to come out better than they were before.
> Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening
That's my impression from reading up on Srebrenica and a bunch of other places, it is very well possible that that is just an 'after the fact' impression, and since it happened the way it did we'll never know what would have happened had there been no intervention.
I know people on two sides in that story (Serbian and Croatian), and there is enough confusion even now that it's probably best they didn't meet. One thing this war did for me though was to open my eyes once and for all to the amount of propaganda in supposedly unbiased media.
It’s kind of astonishing, actually, that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact went as peaceful as it did in Europe. No bloody revolutions, no wars. Not a shot fired in Eastern Germany, Poland or Russia (and so on). Except for, you guessed it, Yugoslavia and Romania.
Oh, yeah, that Balkans thingie. Right. Kinda sucks, for officially more than a century now. The more things change …
I wanted to write “(except for the Balkans)” but ultimately didn’t and probably should have. Just two things: When I say “Europe” I was pretty much talking about western Europe plus a bit of eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, …), also the situation on the Balkans is nowadays unlikely to cause a European or worldwide war (you know, like 100 years ago).
That's true, but ultimately what causes wars might have to do with the impulses of people as much as with the "international situation". While institutions can be put in place that seem to make war less likely, people today are not that different from people yesterday.
People almost never want war. They have to be spurred into it by a combination of heavy propaganda and desperate economic circumstances. The first is often enough if the war is one that most citizens will only see on TV, like all 'wars' America has waged since WWII (they are 'wars' in the sense bullfighting is 'fighting'.)
Real wars, on the other hand (e.g., an hypothetical Germany invading France), would require a big crisis.
Which, on the other hand, is almost guaranteed, cyclically, by the current money system, and otherwise easy to summon, by contracting the money supply.
There are also places in a number of these cities where limited amounts of the ww2 damage are left un-repaired, as a memorial and a live version of these composites.
The photographer has started with the photographs of Saint-Petersburg/Leningrad, where he lives.
The siege of Leningrad [1] was one of the most atrocious events of the WWII in Europe.
I live in Vienna, and am constantly on the lookout for signs of the old wars. Its a very sobering experience to walk down some street and then realize later that was the site of intense street fighting and massacre.
There are, I believe, buildings in Vienna where the bullet holes are left unplastered and the cyrillic graffiti left by Soviet soldiers can still be read. At least, there were when I lived there a decade or so ago.
As remote as these images might feel, it's important to remember that some of our parents and grandparents went through this time. We always feel that the world is a peaceful place, but things got this bad in a very short space of time. Certainly in a shorter space of time than the war in Iraq has been going on. Things can fall apart very quickly, and the ones who fight for peace the most are those who can remember once proud buildings with artillery damage, and soldiers on the streets with weapons ready.
Peace is a fractious and rare state in human history, it's easy to forget that in a modern life. That's where the power of these images lie.
While I agree with you, I wanted to provide a different perspective on how "remote" these images might seem. (I might be misunderstanding meaning you're putting behind that word. If so, please forgive me!)
I'm Russian, and I grew up in different parts of USSR and later ex-USSR. All of my older relatives were, in some sense, involved in WW2. A big part of my family died during that time - some killed in fighting, some from hunger, some from random bullets, some because of repressions of that time... That war greatly affected every family I know, usually in most tragic ways. So to many people over there, such photographs are not "remote" at all - they are an integral part of their own history.
At the same time, it is saddening to see a new generation grow up oblivious to what their grandparents went through... People forget so easily!
clarification : remote as in 'a long time ago'. As you say, the new generation sees black and white images and thinks it happened a long time ago.
I was specifically speaking about families like yours, who have lived through this, my point being it might feel remote to a young person raised on a life of peace and prosperity, but for many people it is very real.
I don't know any of these locations, so I'm sure these are even more amazing for people familiar only with their current state of being. I particularly appreciated image 15 with the soldiers carrying the Soviet flag underneath the modern German flags.
The pictures of the Heldenplatz (here in Vienna) are particularly sobering, considering that its a very bright and vibrant place these days .. oh, except for the one week a year when the Austrian military put on their big displays there, of course .. that is a bit freaky.
Early photography used metal or glass plates, not film, and most certainly existed during the civil war. Here is an exhibition on civil war photography from the Met:
True - I aimed for brevity instead of clarity with my point. I mentioned film for its ease of use in a variety of situations, meaning its invention made it much more likely that photos would be taken and maintined - as you point out, earlier technology has survived.
Lamenting the lack of architectural appreciation remains worthwhile.
Why? Humans conform nature to our needs. If we need a better building, why shouldn't we tear down an old one? All of the previous building's history will remain documented in, say, Wikipedia.
This is probably just the worldview of an inexperienced kid though.
(This is an honest question, not a statement of opinion.)
Everything in the world has a U-shaped value curve. Most valuable when it is new, at some point it loses value, may even become worthless. Down the track, it will become priceless and irreplaceable. Note 'value' here isn't strictly monetary, it can be cultural as well.
Dropping buildings in the midst of the U never gives things the chance to recover and move past fashion. Most buildings discarded are due to the design being old and out of date. But old buildings in a city plant the cities history in time and allow it to tell a story. Remember that 'Gothic' cathedrals were so named because the term was in regular use as a description of something vulgar. The Notre Dame in Paris was at one stage due for demolition until the story of Quasimodo re-inspired the public to keep it - the restoration is still ongoing.
Buildings can be re-purposed and still keep their charm. The mistake is in discarding things just because they are old.
It's very true that not all old things are worth keeping, but the benefit of the doubt must go to the building until the current fashion has moved into the past.
Also, in the case of Berlin, a lot of damaged structures have been reinforced and kept standing as they were at the end of the war. It reminds the city of what can happen if continual efforts towards peace are not made. These scars on the landscape are a constant reminder of the cities turbulent past, and help develop a sense of the story of the city while walking around.
Buildings are the ultimate encapsulator of society - it's where we live, die, make decisions and create history. As such they have a special importance in being kept to tell that story to newcomers.
Much of the Northeast has this flavor. I dunno if you've ever been to the Boston area, but many of the buildings have this same sense of history to them. In the leather district, you've got former tanning factories which became porn studios which became software offices and yuppie lofts. In Maynard, you have old textile mills from the industrial revolution, which became DEC in the 50s and 60s, which became Monster.com in the dot-com boom of the 90s, which are now used for web2.0 startups and consultancies. In Lowell, you still see the old textile mills and canals alongside the remnants of the Wang Labs towers and newer businesses.
From what I know of NYC, it's much the same, with bohemian lofts where old tenements once stood.
That's one of the things I miss most about New England, having moved out to California. Here, everything is cookie-cutter suburbia, built in a hurry during the 70s and 80s. There's none of the charm or history of the Boston area. I can walk around downtown Lowell and say "This is a charming city, even if it's a little economically depressed." I can't really say the same about San Jose, even though it's cleaner, safer, and much more well-off.
I've actually had an office in the 'carpet factory' in Toronto, which was an industrial revolution age textile mill, amazing building, white pine roof beams that were easily 1 1/2' on a side in the section that we were in.
Fortunately some of those buildings remain, but an enormous number of them got torn down.
> That's one of the things I miss most about New England, having moved out to California. Here, everything is cookie-cutter suburbia, built in a hurry during the 70s and 80s.
San Jose was founded in 1776. The houses in my neighborhood were built in 190x, mine in 1902.
All of the "mission" cities date from about that time. They're all full of old buildings. (Yes, there are Victorians in Monterey.) Heck, the Sacramento and Central Valley are full of towns that date from the 1850s.
The southern part of Manhattan Island (below all the streets with numbers, like Wall Street) still has a very "old-world" street layout, and if you imagine shorter buildings down there, it's definitely laid-out pre-car. I'm smitten by how twisty and close-in everything is when I get down to that part of the city. Probably due to that, it's also a bit more walkable in certain ways than the rest of the island.
Some of the old Spanish settlements in the South, and especially the old part of San Juan Puerto Rico are very old world feeling.
The numbered street grid in Manhattan was laid out at the beginning of the 19th century. The reason there are so many streets and so few avenues was to facilitate river-to-river movement of freight. The reason for the standardized grid was to make land development more predictable (it's also called the speculative grid for that reason).
> Everything in the world has a U-shaped value curve.
On this point, a good thing to do is to keep some of the ubiquitous everyday things when you want to throw them away. Especially outdated technology like, say, old mobile phones. In 50 years they will become a rarity.
True, but you have to count in your holding costs. Even a roman penny (whatever the equivalent was) is not worth that much because there were so many made. Yes, it's worth more now than it was back then, but if you consider the holding costs for that long, it's a losing proposition.
Holding costs you ask? Well, if you pay $10000 sq/ft/yr for your house (renting, buying, whatever) then it 'costs' you a fraction of that to keep stuff in boxes. Then, there is moving costs, insurance costs etc. I know this is an inane example, but the point is to make people realise that hoarding stuff has very real costs, one of which is the 'mental space' that it takes. We all know the feeling that comes from throwing stuff in the bin - that's the other side of the ledger to hanging onto it.
My point being that buildings are worth keeping, as are mobile phones to a mobile phone enthusiast. But we shouldn't just hang onto stuff because it might be worth something one day.
As an extreme example; 2 weeks ago a friend of mines floor collapsed under the weight of his record collection. Not that most people try to store ~50k - 100k records in one room, but it does show how limited our ability to store stuff is.
The one thing I always hear Americans say when they visit this side of the Atlantic is that there 'is so much history here'. And with space at a premium in a large part of the cities here the urge to tear down and rebuild is just as large or larger than it is in the US.
But I think that it goes deeper than that. Some of the buildings are so old that they should have fallen down long ago, it's just that there is always somebody that thinks that to repair it is the better course than to throw it down. Having a lot of historical buildings around you and near you sets the stage and it would feel unnatural to remove one of them and replace it with some modern house. When an old farmhouse burns down it usually gets rebuilt.
A big part of this is that all over europe there are heritage commissions that have a keen eye for what is and what is not of historical value and a relatively large amount of money is pumped in to maintaining those buildings that are deemed valuable. It isn't rare at all to see a 16th century building where I live (nl) and I know a couple (churches, mostly) that are older than 800 years.
For me the main reason not to tear it down is that destruction is easy, creation is not. By respecting that which was created by those that came before you get a deeper appreciation for you place in the world. Rather than document what the Sistine Chapel looks like and tearing it down (extreme example, ok), we have the original to look at, which gives a completely different sense of perspective on history. There is a reason why millions of tourists flock here to see these things with their own eyes, an image of a thing is not a replacement for the thing.
That goes for buildings, but it also goes for other works of art.
I agree, but what's considered valuable and what isn't is just fashion more often than not. And once the building is torn down, it's too late to reconsider.
For me old and ancient buildings provide the soul of our cities - providing a tangible connection with the many generations of our ancestors.
Of course, it helps that I live in a beautiful and old city (though hardly ancient compared to some) - as I write this I can look up at a castle perched on the plug of an extinct volcano, parts nearly a thousand years old, and think that this is really rather a nice place to live and work.
I suggest you walk the streets of Rome or Istanbul, sit in the center of an Egyptian pyramid or wonder at the stone houses of Skara Brae and then consider what the value of "old buildings" are.
I grew up in the USA in a house that is older than the United States. But you need to consider how small the population and its overall wealth back then. Building a stone house will last a lot longer but we had plenty of forests back so wood was far less expensive for poor people than it was in Europe. Now days you don’t see a lot of stone buildings being built in Europe because wood has become cheap there as well.
PS: Also, the US population was around 1/4 th of Frances population 200 years ago and that ratio get's more extreme the further back you go.
Without intending to make any comparisons with other events and locations, nor to imply any "coolness" might be involved with the death and destruction, some of the US events that could serve as fodder for photographic and historical retrospectives from the US and territories from the 20th century onward include:
Mine was actually built in 1885 according to the insurance company records of the day (back then, the insurance companies had an actual map of every house in a major town of Indiana, just in case somebody signed up for their insurance - and now it's all on microfiche at the library). The 1905 picture was the earliest I've found so far; it would have been interesting to see one from anything before 1901, when the front porch was built.
I love the house; it's built to last and even has a brick outhouse (which was in fact built like a brick outhouse). The neighborhood, not so much. Richmond's fortunes have fallen since the 1800's.
Very interesting to be able to pull that much historic information up from the records. I've traced some of the older occupants of the house that I live in (one guy in his late 80's!) and invited them over, it was quite the experience to hear them tell their stories. World War II started for the Netherlands about 500 meters from where my house is (it's right on the German border, the Northernmost crossing).
I grew up in the USA in a house that is older than the United States. But you need to consider how small the population and it's overall wealth back then. Building a stone house will last a lot longer but we had plenty of forests back so wood was far less expensive for poor people than it was in Europe.
PS: Also the US population was less than 1/7 th of Europe’s 200 years ago.
Another interesting idea is to compare modern satelite view on google maps with aero photographs from WWII. Here is Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg, which is depicted on many Sergey Larenkov's photographs:
http://wwii.sasgis.ru/en/?lat=59.945749&lon=30.331364...
This set of data is just screaming to be turned into an iPhone app .. imagine, you're somewhere in Europe. The GPS figures out where, and gives you a picture (modern-day) to wipe your fingers over .. revealing the WW2-era pic underneath.
For some European cities, this would be killer .. I know a lot of people who are interested in the history of Europe from the perspective of WW2, and this could be quite an intriguing application to develop ..
Don't think I have read about any well-funded startups in this area yet, but boy there's a business opportunity here. Aside from the major historical locations, most every state/city in the US has a "historical society" of some sort that has thousands/millions of old pictures laying around. My own (Minneapolis) had a project many years back where they went around and took a pic of every single house in the city limits. I'd like to be able to go to a cool neighborhood and point my phone to a street corner and see what was there, sort of my own interactive history lesson. Rather than each of these government agencies or museums figuring out how to do an aug reality app on their own dime, someone needs to build the template/service and offer it up.
The cities of Rotterdam ('the city without a heart') and Dresden still tell a pretty grim tale today if your eyes are open to it, and Warsaw and Poznan have plenty of places where the repair still hasn't caught up with the damage. There isn't a month that somebody doesn't dig up a piece of ordnance (in some cases very large bombs) when working on their houses or doing public works.
Be grateful for the world you live in and strive to minimise war, it wasn't always this peaceful and the chance is that it will not always be.
Europe is still quite anti-war (in spite of the apparent ease with which some countries, including mine joined the Iraq adventure) there are lots of older people here that still remember what it was like. But we tend to forget and when the last of them dies and stops reminding us how bad war really is the risk is very large that past stupidities will be repeated.