Europe, a common heritage. Michel Krieger. For a heritage of today, a heritage of social integration.

 

Let us not be under any illusions.  Heritage as such is, fundamentally, a particularly reactionary concept.  Especially since there is no such thing as heritage; it is merely a concept and a vehicle for very often political discourse which can extremely easily, as experience has shown, lead to exclusion by asserting nationalism and placing undue value on a given culture.

As many people have pointed out, the very word “heritage” itself refers to the accumulated property of wealthy families and is part of their value system - with all that could be said about that from a neo-Marxist point of view.

Furthermore, historically, in its most frequent meaning, it refers to a series of prestigious buildings - the buildings erected by royalty, the aristocracy and the Church, ie the centres of power belonging to those who wielded power in past centuries.

The castle or château, which today forms part of the historic heritage, is primarily the legacy of a family wishing to show its strength, power and wealth - a wealth which it did not share and which it was eager to increase in the same way as the château was constantly improved.

 

Portail de l'Hôtel de Cluny

As centres of power, these heritage sites bear the mark of the claims to power and the views of the wealthy classes of the past.

Moreover, this very concept of historic heritage is more than a little suspect.  When Prosper Mérimée set up the Department of Historic Monuments in France, he was reacting - no doubt as the artist he was - to the destruction of one of the most beautiful abbeys in the country, Cluny Abbey, which was transformed into a stone quarry and methodically destroyed to supply property agents with the materials they needed for backfill and new constructions.

The problem was not a new one.  The pyramids, Greek temples and the Colosseum all suffered more from destruction in peacetime than from the ravages of time or of war.

Statue le Viollet Le Duc en Roi de Judée. Galerie des rois de Notre-Dame de Paris.

But let us look at what happened as a result of this perfectly commendable desire to protect monuments renowned for their beauty and their great age. The first list of historic monuments, as I have said, was a list of châteaux proclaiming the power of royalty and the aristocracy, and religious buildings proclaiming the domination of the clergy over French society.  The result of this was the restoration work carried out primarily under the supervision of Viollet le Duc.  The latter’s approach marked a crucial period covering by and large the years 1840 to 1890.

The combination of what was termed restoration and a new European approach to town planning in fact reflected a political ideology.  Rather than restoration, it was more often reconstruction.  In other words the monument was appropriated to be turned into what it was felt it should be.  Notre Dame de Paris had to look like a gothic cathedral as Viollet le Duc imagined one to be.

 

La Cité de Carcassonne restaurée par Viollet le Duc

Which meant that what was created was an imaginary gothic cathedral, or rather a neo-gothic cathedral: things that had not originally been there were added, and other elements and changes judged contrary to the spirit of a gothic monument were removed.

At the same time, people began to talk about monuments in a way which systematically emphasised the sponsor and the architect, even though it might not be known who the architect was.  In other words, little by little, the monument became the result of a combination of wills, that of power - the bishop, the lord or the king, and that of knowledge - the architect.  Gradually, cathedrals and châteaux became the result of action by the elite, the only people able to decide what was right for society.

Similarly, new urban planning schemes created space around monuments, placed them in settings by means of perspective and, in so doing, isolated them from the urban fabric.  As we know, there was a clear military and policing advantage in these wide boulevards where demonstrations could be quelled much more easily than in a web of alleyways.  In the imagination was also the idea of organising cities around main thoroughfares leading from monument to monument, demonstrating the supremacy of the powerful and educated over the city, itself hidden behind the façades bordering these boulevards.

In this way, the whole town became a military network, linking centres of power to other centres of power to create an ideal city, a city of the élite, while the real city was hidden, dissected and obliged to fit in with this new order.  If necessary, these town planning schemes were used to keep at bay the working - and therefore, to use a famous expression, the dangerous - classes.

In parallel, there emerged an attitude to which a number of famous writers contributed and which still persists today.  It relates to the intangibility of monuments which come to be presented as having always been there, rooted in their location.  Have you ever seen in a book, a film or a 19^th-century illustration, one of these monuments actually being constructed?  They are always shown completed, fully finished.  The monument is there and has always been there, and in this way legitimises the authority which built it, which it represents and which it embodies today.

So true is this that even today building sites are still hidden from view, as messy places of gestation which the city does not want to see and which play no part in what will be, as it has always been, the finished monument.

The aim is to conceal this effort of gestation and giving birth; worse still, to conceal those who have carried out the work, the labourers whose participation in the final result is denied.  Cathedrals and castles are the result of an architect’s idea, never the result of human labour.

 

Rodin Museum Paris. Photo MTP.

It is not coincidental that Viollet le Duc was so interested in gothic monuments.  Indeed, until a few decades ago gothic architecture was referred to as the French style in many languages.  Viollet le Duc saw it as the epitome of national genius and nothing was too extravagant to assert its supremacy.  Gradually, then, monuments in France and Germany became a vehicle for nationalist affirmation, nationalist supremacy.  An imaginary ethos was reconstructed just as monuments were reconstructed, and everyone recreated a legend for himself.

I now come to the last, and perhaps most dangerous aspect of heritage: the fact that there is no such thing.  What we refer to as heritage is in fact a portrayal at any given time of what the ruling classes consider should be presented as the collective past.

Above all, heritage changes as much as the way in which it is viewed.  Can it really be argued that a gothic cathedral is being preserved, when we are saving just one third of it?  Today there is nothing readily intelligible left of what it was when it was built.  We do not have the knowledge or the religious culture to understand the organisation of the statuary and the sequence of the stained-glass windows.  The proportions of cities around palaces have changed so much that the palace we see is no longer what it was when it was built; the message it was intended to convey when it was designed is now a closed book to us.

It is not so much the message and vocabulary of the past, but rather the message and vocabulary of the present, that heritage is expected to authenticate, justify and legitimise.

The huge reconstruction projects carried out in Germany at the end of the 19^th century - and I am thinking in particular of Cologne cathedral - were a betrayal of history.  Whatever that unfinished cathedral was trying to say at the time has been erased and replaced with what the 19^th century had to say, in the language of the 19^th century; the completed cathedral of the 19^th century speaks of German efficiency and technical genius.

 

Jardin des Deux Rives. Strasbourg - Kehl. Passerelle Marc Mimram. Photo MTP. 

Heritage, as a concept, must therefore be handled with infinite caution, given that it legitimises the current thinking (whatever that may be) on historical grounds, justifying the exclusion of the working classes and the contributions of foreign cultures.

Moreover, the respect due to heritage, invariably taken to mean heritage protection, imperceptibly imparts a sense of mistrust of modernity and of social conservatism.

However, the situation is not desperate.  This concept is only as dangerous as we allow it to be.

Heritage can and should be an instrument of social cohesion, integration and assimilation into modern society.  I shall attempt, using a number of examples from Strasbourg, to offer some pointers to a possible modern definition of heritage.

The concept itself has evolved significantly, particularly as a result of UNESCO proposals and the initiatives of the Council of Europe, to which we owe our meeting today.  I extend my thanks to the Council, and also to the Romanian authorities for their warm, exceptional hospitality.

In speaking about a common European heritage, we are thinking primarily of this idea of collective heritage.  Nowhere is it written that the heritage which belongs to us, to society, to everyone, can only be a collection of particularly prestigious buildings.

Accordingly, we have managed in Strasbourg to include social, low-cost housing in the historic heritage.  This is a fairly general trend, and in protecting the most outstanding industrial buildings we are quite naturally led to talk about the people who brought them alive, the workers who gave them purpose.  This is the second aspect which I believe is important.

There is nothing that forces us to see heritage solely in terms of conservation; very often this is simply a disguised form of appropriation by those in the know.  Heritage is the stratification of the collective memory, which it must help to rediscover by being protected and preserved.

 

Jardin des Deux Rives. Strasbourg - Kehl. Photo MTP.

We have to make heritage express itself.  We must actively educate people, discarding the stereotyped image of intangible monuments and explaining what they really are, how they came to be constructed, who the men were who built them.  Educational programmes offering not merely sightseeing tours but educational visits, and open above all to the most disadvantaged and isolated sectors of the community, should serve to re-appropriate this heritage by nurturing a more intimate awareness of what it is and what it meant to the people who built it.

A monument is above all masonry, the product of building skills.  This view of heritage will give immigrants and the disadvantaged classes, among whom the various building trades are well represented, a new link with it.  This is what we have attempted to do with Strasbourg cathedral, and even though there is some delay with the programme I believe it is still relevant: it is a means of enabling ordinary people to discover the monument as something made by other ordinary people centuries ago.

 An Algerian bricklayer today living in a Strasbourg suburb will understand, better perhaps than we ourselves can, the art of the 14^th century mason, and in appreciating the finished work he will gain a better understanding of this cathedral from which he feels culturally and socially removed.

Protecting industrial buildings is also a tribute to thousands of lives of toil; but only if we are not protecting an empty shell and if we bring alive a building whose very purpose, then and now, derives exclusively from the workers employed there.

This brings us to another aspect of heritage.  All these monuments are invariably the fruit of labour and skills that all too often are under threat today.  It is not merely a question of protecting a stained-glass window; if we want to preserve the window for future generations, we have to protect the skills of those who are still able to produce a stained-glass window and, consequently, restore existing examples.

But it goes much further than that, and we are touching here on something I feel to be fundamental.  By protecting and turning to account ancient skills, by giving them their rightful place, we can make heritage in the broad sense a force for social cohesion as a means of job creation.

Strasbourg cathedral. Photo MTP.

Let me explain.  The promotion and, above all, utilisation of traditional building techniques, applied in a practical way to the rehabilitation of the historic heritage of our cities, towns and villages, can create a huge number of jobs, generate activities and, consequently, recognition and a sense of belonging, for example for building workers who are under serious threat form modern industrialised construction techniques.  Replacing a wooden beam by another wooden beam instead of a concrete one provides work for a carpenter rather than for a multinational company.  This represents a considerable potential source of employment, but I shall not labour the point; others, I am sure, will be addressing it.

Acknowledging the importance of the non-monumental heritage - and here I am thinking of vernacular architecture, social housing or industrial buildings - protecting skills and restoring heritage as a source of employment, and giving due recognition to the relevant crafts will come to nought unless there is a housing policy pursued in tandem.  It is essential to have a social mix in towns if we do not wish to see historic neighbourhoods, protected and listed, becoming the exclusive property of the well-off while the working classes are pushed out to the modern suburbs.

While many downtown areas in the United States have become areas of abject poverty, the protection machinery in Europe has often led to town centres becoming the preserve of the well-off, meaning that only the most privileged can benefit from this heritage.  This is a real challenge in which only a proactive policy can counter the effects of so-called market forces.

Commission of the City of Strasbourg. Art works along the tramwayline. Photo MTP.

I believe that, despite the pessimistic start to my address, I have given a few pointers to how we can, each at our own level, take the concept of heritage forward by showing that it is the result of the labours of people - all people - from a range of cultural backgrounds, and the influences which European cultures have traditionally had on each other.  There is no cathedral, château or palace which is not the result of intense exchanges, a free-flow of ideas, and cultural influences.  It is high time we proclaimed that, far from being the result of a nation's genius, heritage is above all the result of a broadening of the mind.

Since I am also a living and therefore contemporary artist, I would like to end by stressing a point too often overlooked. If we consider St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, the cathedral in Strasbourg, the palace of El Escorial on the plateau above Madrid, St. Charles' bridge in Prague, St. Elisabeth's in Budapest and the Athenaeum in Bucharest, the fact is that when they were built they were all examples of contemporary architecture.

 

Atheneum Roman. Bucharest. Photo MTP.

When Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens and Gainsborough were painting, when Chopin, Mussorgsky or Rameau were composing, they were contemporary artists and musicians.  It is true that we have a duty to conserve what past generations have bequeathed us. We also have a duty to pass this heritage on to future generations.  But in addition we have a duty, and a yet more pressing one, to enrich the message of our time.

If we do not want our heritage to die, if it is not to congeal into a caricature of our past, we must constantly enrich it with our experience of the present.  A genuine heritage policy must give contemporary creativity - the heritage of the future - its rightful place.  Our towns and cities are not museums and, if they have room for Benetton and McDonald’s, they should also have room for James Turell and the work of Christo, or for the quotations from European authors now displayed on the bridge between France and Germany, linking the lives of two countries and two different cultures.

We should not simply be hiding contemporary art away in museums specially designed for it; it should have a place in the city, everywhere in the city.  Nobody finds it odd to see an 18^th century palace next to a Romanesque church.  While I am not suggesting we build skyscrapers in Cracow market square, I nevertheless feel that a work of contemporary art, free of ornate decorative effects and commemorative ideologies, has its place, and that includes the historic centres of our towns and cities.

This text has been published in french language by Michel Krtieger. "Un passé révolu ?" in the chapter "La citoyenneté". 

Maîtresse d'ouvrage de la publication : Claudia Constantinescu.  I hope that all the numerous free copies left in the Library of the European Institute of Cultural Routes have not been put in the garbage by the Directors in charge after I left in 2011.  

Michel Krieger, former member of Strasboug City Council, painter and teacher in art school. He was responsible of contemporary art commissions in the city of Strasbourg. One of his main urban concept was the "Garden of two banks" opened during the Landesgartenschau in Kehl. Another one was the invitation of artists, writers, designers, philosophers to express themselves on the "Pont de l'Europe" bridge. Two projects helping frienship ane reconciliation between France and Germany across the River Rhine.  

Projects prepared in co-operation with the European Institute of Cultural Routes. Competition for the garden opened with the co-operation of Gilles Clément.