Wiped Away: The destruction of cultural artifacts-and identity

National Review, May 28, 2001 by David Pryce-Jones

Soon after Chairman Mao died, I went to China. That monstrous man had leveled without a trace the ancient and magnificent walls of the Forbidden City in Peking, now virtually a shantytown. I took a boat down the Yangtze. (Today, they are damming and diverting the river, so such a trip is impossible.) An old guidebook listed pagodas and other monuments along the banks. These had been pulled down in the Cultural Revolution-all there is to see now are industrial plants. Bang goes the Chinese past.

In the cause of Chinese imperialism, Mao's successors are busy eradicating the age-old and unique monasteries and lamaseries of Tibet. Bang goes the Tibetan past, too.

The killing of human beings goes to the moral core of our existence, whereas the destruction of artifacts primarily raises aesthetic concerns. True: except that killers devise ethnic, religious, or ideological justifications for themselves, and so make sure to attack the monuments and places of worship defining the identity of their victims. Cultural cleansing is part and parcel of the obliteration of a people.

Wasn't it ever so? Vandals, Goths, Huns, Mongols, made themselves bywords for ravaging everybody and everything within reach. Law-and- order Romans burnt Carthage and Jerusalem to the ground. Napoleon systematically looted the countries he conquered. A civilization builds slowly, and along comes some brute to stamp it out. "Everything that exists deserves to perish," says the devil in Goethe's Faust. That is the creed of nihilism.

Nihilism in the modern age gained the upper hand over civilization through Communism and Nazism. These totalitarian systems dispensed with everything that did not fit their project for the future. Thousands of historic churches and villages in the Soviet Union were deliberately eradicated. Then came the Germans, and by the time they had finished, Russia was virtually bare of its living past, as it is today. Marcus Hindus, reporting for the New York Herald Tribune, could describe the country elegiacally in 1945 as "a desert strewn with wreckages" from which had been blown away "some of the most exquisite and most joyful art man has created." The wastage is being repeated at Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, once a charming garrison town familiar to Lermontov and Tolstoy, today shelled by the Russians themselves to uninhabitable rubble.

The Rape of Europa (1994), by the cultural historian Lynn H. Nicholas, amounts to an inventory of artistic losses during the last war. Great cities like Warsaw, Danzig, Dresden, Hamburg, and Konigsberg were devastated, and so were palaces, country houses, and monuments everywhere. As in a hurricane, libraries and scientific collections, altarpieces, the famous Amber Room from the czars' palace at Tsarskoye Selo, innumerable paintings and drawings by old masters, were blown away forever. Special attention was given by the Germans, Nicholas writes, to '"the trashing of the houses and museums of great cultural figures" such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Tchaikovsky.

Victorious Russians then repaid the Germans with interest. "Trophy art" was the euphemism they gave to everything they stole. Two Russian specialists, Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov, describe in their book Stolen Treasure (1995) the wholesale robbery of more millions of works of art, many of them to be lost in transit or damaged beyond restoration. Like Russia, postwar Germany remains permanently damaged.

Communist ideology has wrecked Cambodia, where the deranged Khmer Rouge installed military bases in Angkor Wat, a complex of Buddhist temples and one of the world's wonders. They closed down foreign scholarly institutes, and emptied the Phnom Penh museum. Today, dilapidation and pilfering are uncontrolled, with looted statues and carved door frames turning up on the black market. Bang goes the Cambodian past.

In Communist Romania under its dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, there was a Soviet-style plan to halve the country's 13,000 villages. In Bucharest, 40,000 people were evacuated from the old quarters of the city, known as Little Paris, most of which was then razed, including over thirty churches and monasteries, some dating back to the 17th century. When finally Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989, diehard Communists started shooting on the streets, and in so doing they set fire to the National Library. Irreplaceable incunabula, manuscripts, and books went up in flames. Bang goes the Romanian past.

The different peoples of former Yugoslavia have pulverized their country. Croats destroyed the famous 16th-century bridge at Mostar. Among much else, Serbs in Sarajevo alone destroyed the Begova Mosque, often described as one of the most important monuments in the Balkans; the National Library, in probably the largest book-burning in history; and the Oriental Institute. In Kosovo, they destroyed the Central Archives of the Islamic Community, and over a third of the 600 mosques in the province, many of them hundreds of years old. Throughout Bosnia, they dynamited mosques and Catholic churches. Vukovar, once an unspoiled Habsburg gem of a town, is now a ruin. Andreas Riedlmayer, sponsored by Harvard to write a report on these damages, stresses how little of the traditional Ottoman-era architecture has survived in Albanian areas. Serb Orthodox dignitaries have compiled a list of 79 of their churches wholly or partly destroyed. Bang go huge chunks of the history of all those involved in the fighting.