Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

Last week's destruction of Nimrud by Daesh-IS is nothing less than a calamity.

Nimrud is a very ancient Assyrian site. The city was founded in the 2^nd millennium BC, and became the capital of the mighty Assyrian empire in the 9^th century under its legendary king Ashurnasirpal II. His palace was one of the most magnificent buildings of its age. You can see for yourself by going to the marvellous Assyrian Galleries in the British Museum (or by visiting the website www.britishmuseum.org). Two whole rooms are dedicated to Nimrud including the famous palace reliefs. They show in amazing detail the kind of activities that kings liked to engage in such as battles, lion-hunts, chariot rides and sacrifices. From Nimrud king Tiglath-Pileser III launched his campaign to overrun the kingdom of Israel in 721 BC. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold; his cohorts were gleaming with silver and gold wrote Byron. It was the end for Israel. Twenty years later, when the capital had been moved to Nineveh, the Assyrians attacked again, this time the southern kingdom of Judah. The palace reliefs showing the siege of Lachish are among the Museum’s most precious treasures.

One of the Nimrud sculptures in the galleries is a statue of a winged lion. It was one of a pair that stood at the entrance to Ashurnasirpal’s throne-room. Because the king was seen as a divine figure, this room was the most sacred space in the palace complex. The carved lamassu, as they were called, had a ritual, protective function. The lion’s strength and the eagle’s wings together symbolised keeping chaos at bay. By defending the space against the demonic, they kept it as a ritually safe place where the gods could do business with the king and through him with the people whose sacred representative he was.

Some sculptures from that era survived in situ at Nimrud until last week. They must have been a magnificent sight. Not now. Even its famous winged lions and bulls have not been able to protect it against the power of the bulldozer. IS has said that it has levelled it. We needn’t doubt that they have razed its walls and buildings, ground its peerless sculptures and decorations into dust. They claim that these relics of an ancient civilisation are idolatrous. They are an affront to Islam with its prohibition of images; whatever is pre-Islamic must be destroyed. They glory in the iconoclastic project of erasing every survival, every trace, every memory of what is seen as subverting the purity of monotheism. It is an act of cultural cleansing. It's a crime against humanity. And it's heart breaking.  

How do you measure the value of heritage as against the value of human life? 

I've learned a little about the human and spiritual significance of heritage, having lived and worked in the Durham World Heritage Site these past 12 years. It has raised for me the sharp question about whether we shouldn't have an uneasy conscience about investing too much in ancient stones. We no doubt regret the loss of Nimrud, but shouldn’t we care more about the human beings and communities of Iraq and Syria who have been treated so cruelly? Isn’t the life of even one man or woman or child worth more than all the treasures of antiquity?

As soon as I pose the question that way, I see that it’s based on a false premise. It's not either-or: each is part of the other. The callous treatment of Iraq and Syria’s heritage is just another aspect of a regime that is callous in every other respect. Nothing is sacred to it except its own corrupted version of faith, its concept of a hideous deity whose pleasure is to exact vengeance. The destruction of heritage with all that it symbolises of human life, culture and achievement is just another expression of this murderous world-view. It is hardly the first time. Iconoclasts have flourished in many periods of history. In the 20th century, precisely this was true of Nazi Germany with its hatred of all that was not Aryan. The book-burnings, the re-writing of history, the suppression of ‘decadent’ art and culture were part and parcel of the terror, the deportations and the extermination camps. Where life is cheap, so are civilisation and heritage. These too become the objects of wrath and revenge. There is nothing new under the sun.

We have wept for many months for the victims of this tragedy that is being played out in the lands of the ancient near east. We would not have believed the cruelty inflicted on so many innocent victims if we had not seen it on our screens with our own eyes. The world seems powerless to stop it. ‘Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!’ And desperate is what it seems, when the lone and level sands stretch far away over the bodies of murdered victims and the vanishing human traces of millennia. But Ozymandias himself had become a mere memory in Shelley’s sonnet, his impotent toppled colossus a symbol of how all principalities and powers fall in time. There is a reign we look for that will be the judgment of all the cruelties and corruptions of human systems. Only this kingdom lasts for ever.

Meanwhile, we can still visit the Assyrian Galleries in London and wonder at the treasures from Nimrud. But for me, it will be with a deeper sense of the tears in things. The Assyrian empire was itself a theatre of cruelty: the atrocities of Ashurnasirpal were legendary. These ancient artefacts already speak of terror from the past. Now they speak of a terror of today that is the daily experience of ordinary people in Iraq and Syria. The palace reliefs, sculptures and winged lions mustn’t leave us untouched. They should evoke our lament and compassion, return us to the work of prayer and action on behalf of people we must go on holding in our hearts.

Valuing heritage must always mean reverencing human life, showing our solidarity with all of humanity past and present, especially the suffering peoples of all ages. If we don't cherish the memory of the past and try to understand it, perhaps there's something missing from our care for the victims of the present. Good remembering is a symbol of our capacity to be humane. It should excite our social conscience because at heart it is always about people. Those who despise it show us what their values really are.

At least no one can destroy the Epic of Gilgamesh.

'Germany - memories of a nation'

I've been signed off work while recovering from surgery. So with time hanging heavy on the sofa, I went to the iPlayer and downloaded all 30 of Neil MacGregor's programmes on Germany - Memories of a Nation. The series ended yesterday, and inspired me to blog about the part Germany has played in my own life. 

I've no hesitation in saying that this series has been among the very best radio listening this year. BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service all give me huge enjoyment each day, so that's a big claim to make. Neil MacGregor is a consummate radio performer - suave, authoritative, interesting, personable, and with just the right degree of tentativeness in his judgments that makes you want to go on thinking about what he has said. Whether it is the Holy Roman Empire, Dürer's engravings, the death camps, hyper-inflation or beer and sausages, he has the gift of a born educator which is to make us curious. I hate to invoke what's rapidly becoming a cliché, but it does seem to me that he is something of a national treasure.

So what do I take away from these excellent programmes? Here are three (tentative) observations about Germany that have been taking shape in my mind as I've been listening. 

First, the infinite capacity of the German people for invention. I guess that what inspired MacGregor to embark on this series was the endless creativity of Germans in the arts, whether it is literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music or performance art. Most of the 'objects' which act as focal points of the German story are art-works of various kinds: the coins of the Hanseatic city-state of Hamburg, the imagery on Weimar bank notes, a painting of Goethe, Gutenburg's Bible, Ludwig of Bavaria's Valhalla presiding over the Danube, the exquisite sculptures of Riemenschneider and Barlach, the Meissen porcelain hippopotamus, Bauhaus design, even the Volkswagen. The list is endless. Add to that a soundtrack drawing on German music from Bach to Weill and you have a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a 'complete art work' that embraces virtually all that human creativity is capable of. 

Of course, Germany is not unique in this respect. The same could be said of France, Italy, Spain, Britain and the Americas, not to mention the great civilisations of the Middle and Far East. We shouldn't try to evaluate the cultural achievements of one people against another. This was precisely the mistake Germany made under the Third Reich in its mindless pursuit of Wagner's 'holy German art' and its purge of all that the Nazis reckoned to be 'unGerman'. MacGregor quotes Heine's prescient saying, 'where today they burn books, tomorrow they burn people': what other people has ever treated its own heritage so callously? But no one is going to deny that the contribution of German-speaking peoples to the world's cultural legacy has been immense. Without it, we would be immeasurably the poorer. 

My second observation is perhaps a special case of the first. It's the German propensity for myth-making. It takes a certain kind of mentality to invent stories about your people that turn out to be pervasive and formative. In this, the Germans have been past masters. I'm thinking of how, after the collapse of Roman civilisation in Northern Europe, it was a 'German' (yes, I know it's an anachronism to use that word) who reinvented the idea of a people united under a single figurehead and bound to one another by common values and traditions. Charlemagne, or Karl der Gross (depending on whether you tell the story the French or the German way) created the notion of a Holy Roman Empire that gave identity and meaning to the disparate Allemanic world for more than a thousand years. His coronation at Aachen in 800AD launched a myth that even today has not lost its potency. 

This was just the beginning. In his turn, Luther's Bible helped fix the German language into a vehicle that could articulate the voice of a whole people, just as Shakespeare and the King James Bible did for England. The poetry of Goethe, the paintings of Kaspar David Friedrich and the folk-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm helped create the romantic idea of Gemany as a mythical northern land of forests, mountains, light, shadow and far horizons. Next came Bismarck whose Prussian determination forged the new myth of a United Germany, fought for with 'iron and blood', 'Deutschland über alles', meaning not world domination so much as putting 'Germany' as a nation above all other loyalties to region, state or locality. The Nazis' consummate myth-making about Aryan supremacy was only another iteration of a long series of imaginative re-inventions. Which is why, if I have a criticism of the series, I missed a programme about Wagner and his own capacity for mythologising, surely a key influence on the distorted vision of Hitler and the Third Reich.

My final observation is something I hadn't thought about before listening to these programmes. It's a throw-away remark MacGregor makes that while the public art of other nations celebrates their victories and honours their citizens' achievements, so much 20th century German art does the exact opposite. It memorialises shame, sorrow and defeat. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Topography of Terror where the SS once had their headquarters, Barlach's grieving soldiers in the war memorial at Magdeburg, Käthe Kollwitz's heart-searching etchings of bereaved mothers are among many Gedenkstätten where contemporary German art memorialises the tragedy of its own story. There is a strain of melancholia in the German psyche that is exactly captured in Dürer's famous etching of that name, and which perhaps helps explain the paradox of its people. If every nation has its archetypal flaw, perhaps this is Germany's. (It raises the question of what the British or French flaws might be.... Scope for another blog?)

I was especially struck by one programme that focused on the gate of Buchenwald concentration camp, the 'beech woods' where Goethe used to walk. The inscription says, not 'Arbeit Macht Frei' as at Auschwitz, but 'Jedem Das Seine', 'to each their own'. It's a Latin saying quoted by Luther; Bach wrote a cantata with that title. The elegant contemporary lettering was designed by Franz Ehrich, an inmate who had been a Bauhaus artist. This to me captured the paradox of Gemany: how a dark shadow falls even in places of inspiration and beauty; or put it the other way round, even in the terrible crucible of suffering and death that Nazi Germany became, the creative instinct could never be extinguished. Someone bothered to affirm the best a human being was capable of, an unconscious protest against all that diminished and demeaned.

Today, 25 years after the Iron Curtain was torn down and Germany became a united nation once again, there are still painful memories of a dark past to be healed. In this respect, I think Germany has found a language with which to acknowledge, 'own' and speak about its tragedy and shame in a way that France, with its own conflicted story of defeat, occupation, Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism has found much harder. Armistice Day can help us all to feel and remember, not just loyally but accurately. That MacGregor's fine series concluded at the Reichstag on the threshold of Remembrance weekend and the anniversary of German reunification is surely an intended part of the narrative. It has certainly made this listener think - and be grateful.