ID565Patrimoine en

Responses to violence in everyday life in a democratic society
Dividing lines, connecting lines Europes cross-border heritage
Council of Europe Publishing Editions du Conseil de lEurope
Dividing lines, connecting lines

Europes cross-border heritage
Co-ordinated by Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper
Directorate of Culture and Cultural and Natural Heritage Integrated project Responses to violence in everyday life in a democratic society Council of Europe Publishing
French edition: Patrimoine europen des frontires Points de rupture, espaces partags ISBN 92-871-5545-3
The opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not all necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic (CD-Rom, Internet, etc. ) or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the Publishing Division, Communication and Research Directorate.
Cover photo: John Schoeld Cover design: Graphic Design Workshop, Council of Europe Layout: Pre-press unit, Council of Europe Council of Europe Publishing F-67075 Strasbourg Cedex ISBN 92-871-5546-1 Council of Europe, December 2004 Printed in Germany
THE AUTHORS
Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper is visiting professor at the Technical University of Berlin, where she holds the Chair in Conservation. She has previously been conservator at the Berlin Ofce for the Conservation of Historic Buildings and a guest scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. A specialist in monuments of recent history, contested sites of heritage, contemporary art of commemoration, twentieth century architecture and conservation theory, her most recent publications include: Lieux de mmoire et lieux de discorde: la valeur conictuelle des monuments in Roland Recht et al. (eds); Victor Hugo et le dbat patrimonial, Paris, Somogy 2003; Sites of hurtful memory in Conservation: the Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 17.2002, No. 2 (Summer 2002) and The Berlin Wall an archaeological site in progress in Material culture the archaeology of 20th century conict, John Schoeld, William Gray Johnson and Colleen M. Beck (eds) London, Routledge, 2002. Marieke Kuipers is professor of cultural heritage at the University of Maastricht, and a senior researcher with the Netherlands Department for Conservation at Zeist. An architectural historian specialised in the built heritage of the nineteenth and twentieth century, she is currently involved in various research projects concerning most recent heritage (after 1940). Her most recent publication is a contribution to Cultural heritage and the future of the historic inner city of Amsterdam, Aksant, Amsterdam 2004. Carmen Popescu is a research assistant at the Sorbonne (University of Paris IV) and lectures at the Franois Rabelais University (Tours) in the history of contemporary architecture. She is specialised in nationalistic architectural tendencies and assertion of identity in architecture. Among her several publications, Le style national roumain: construire une nation travers larchitecture 1881-1945, Presses Universitaires de Rennes/Simetria, 2004, discusses nation-building through architecture as exemplied by the Romanian national style. Issues of power and identity are addressed in Du pouvoir et de lidentit: une cathdrale pour la rdemption de la Roumanie, in Catherine Durandin (ed.), La Roumanie en perspective, Paris, LHarmattan, 2004. Lon Pressouyre, an archaeologist, is a professor at the Sorbonne (University of Paris I). A consultant for Unesco, the European Commission and the Council of Europe in matters of cultural heritage protection, he is the author of The World Heritage Convention, twenty years later (Unesco, 1993), also translated into Japanese. John Schoeld has a background in prehistoric archaeology, but works mostly with the contemporary past. He is head of Military Programmes at English 3
Heritage where he co-ordinates work on recent military sites and is a visiting lecturer at Southampton University. His recent projects include work at Cold War peace camps in Nevada and at Greenham Common and among the abandoned bars and streets of Valletta and Berlin. He recently co-authored Modern military matters, a research framework for twentieth-century military heritage. Bernard Toulier, a historian of architecture and a former intern (pensionnaire) of the Acadmie de France in Rome, is a Unesco expert (World Heritage Centre). He also heads a programme run by the French National Centre for Scientic Research on holiday-related architecture in France. His numerous publications include La Cte dEmeraude about the northwest coast of Brittany (co-edited with F. Muel), Paris, Editions du Patrimoine, Cahiers du Patrimoine series, 2001 and Villes d'eaux. Architecture publique des stations thermales et balnaires, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 2002, a treatise on public architecture in watering places and seaside resorts.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTO CREDITS

Chapter I Santiago bridge at the Franco-Spanish border, p. 25: photo Dominique Delaunay Carved monolith on the Franco-Belgian border, p. 26: photo Dominique Delaunay View of Pheasant Island, p. 27: photo Dominique Delaunay Chapter II Western Front landscape, p. 45: photo John Schoeld Trench systems at Vimy Ridge, p. 46: photo John Schoeld Landscapes of remembrance on the Western Front, p. 46: photo John Schoeld Coastal battery and anti-tank wall on Guernsey, p. 47: photo John Schoeld Direction-nding towers on the Atlantic Wall, p. 47: photo John Schoeld Chapter III Prussian boundary pole, p. 65: photo Marieke Kuipers Bi-national Newstreet in 1992, p. 65: photo Peter Muller, from Grensverschijnselen, M. van Rooijen, Shell Journaal, Rotterdam 1992 Caf on the Border, p. 66: photo Marieke Kuipers Eurode Business Centre, p. 66: photo Marieke Kuipers Concrete stele beside the motorway, p. 67: photo Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper Watchtower at the Drewitz motorway, p. 67: photo Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper Pink demolition vehicle, p. 68: photo Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper Former death strip in the forest of Frohnau, p. 68: photo Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper Chapter IV Photographic narrative through Brick Lane and Tower Hamlets, East London, pp. 85-92: photos Kristin Posehn Chapter V Marienburg/Malbork Castle, p. 105 : Institute of Art History, TU Berlin Cologne Cathedral engraving, p.105: Institute of Art History, TU Berlin Cologne Cathedral, west front today, p. 106: photo Institut fr Stadt und Regionalplanung, TU Berlin 5
Cologne Cathedral, plan for west front and towers on parchment, p. 106: Dombauarchiv Kln Cathedral of the Coronation in Alba Iulia, p. 107: vintage postcard collection, Carmen Popescu Cathedral of Cluj, p. 107: vintage postcard collection, Carmen Popescu Sighis oara Cathedral, p. 108: photo from Architectura, 1939, No. 2 New church in Bogdan Voda, p. 108: photo Carmen Popescu Chapter VI Berlin propaganda poster, p. 113: Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin Stalinalle in East Berlin, p. 114: Institute fr Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung in Erkner Architectural model for the Interbau housing project, p. 114: photo Interbau catalogue, 1957 (Berlin Senate and Verlag Das Beispiel, Darmstadt) House of the People, p. 115: photo Carmen Popescu Chapter VII The Huovila villa, p: 133: photo Olivier Monge Nice, the two faces of Orientalism, p. 134: photo Olivier Monge The Palais de la Mditerrane, p. 135: photo Olivier Monge The White House, Rotterdam, p. 136: photo Marieke Kuipers Norwegian Seamans Church, p. 137: photo Marieke Kuipers Holland-America Line ofce, p.137: photo Marieke Kuipers Bonded warehouses, p.138: photo Marieke Kuipers The Bijenkorf, p. 138: photo Marieke Kuipers Mevlana mosque, p.139: photo Marieke Kuipers Chapter VIII Statue of Vercingetorix, p. 149: photo Michel Thierry, courtesy of the Direction rgionale des affaires culturelles de Bourgogne Stonehenge, pp. 150-151: photo George Rodger/Magnum Photos Irish euro, p. 152: photo Council of Europe
Every effort has been to made to nd the rights holders of the photos and illustrations reproduced in this publication. We apologise for any inaccuracies or omissions, and will take care to rectify them in subsequent editions. 6
CONTENTS
Page
Foreword ..................................................................................... Introduction Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper .................................................................... I.
9 11
Breaches in borders: ritual crossing points an ambiguous concept Lon Pressouyre .................................................................... 17 Lines of tension Marieke Kuipers and John Schoeld .......................................... 29 Boundaries in the landscape and in the city Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper and Marieke Kuipers .............................. 49 New urban frontiers and the will to belong John Schoeld ...................................................................... 69 Asserted identities, conquered territories Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper and Carmen Popescu .............................. 93 Borders of fact, borders of the mind Carmen Popescu .................................................................... 109
II. III. IV. V. VI.
VII. Commerce and cosmopolis Europes maritime borders Marieke Kuipers and Bernard Toulier ......................................... 117 VIII. Mental territory the Celtic connection Bernard Toulier ...................................................................... 141 Postscript: the way ahead Daniel Thrond ............................................................................... 153
FOREWORD
In 2003-04, the Council of Europe ran a number of initiatives aimed at preventing conict and violence in our societies. In this context, and as part of its work on intercultural dialogue, it seemed a good idea to take a fresh look at a concept which is both meaningful in itself and a good starting-point for further activity that of cultural heritage. Heritage reects the periods of openness, peace and prosperity in our continents past but it also reects the periods of tension. If we want to form a clearer picture of the history of European society and of the origins of some of the conicts which have divided it, then we need to consider the various ways in which cultural heritage has been interpreted and the disagreements which it has engendered. This collection suggests linking the heritage theme with that of frontiers natural frontiers or frontiers of the mind. Frontiers are critical. One is either on this side or that side. Frontiers are disturbing. They are places of confrontation, expansion or negation. They mark off identities and groups. But they also hold a special fascination, as dividing lines which invite us to strike out in new directions, forge new contacts, and transcend the old and familiar. Europes frontiers are undoubtedly the place where Europes identities can best converge and meet. Indeed, European identity may emerge most clearly on these critical dividing lines where everything initially seems harder, and then suddenly becomes possible. This publication points the way to deeper research into European identity and the history of relations between the cultural communities which are Europes greatest asset. It should generate various new initiatives. In this way, by focusing on heritage, we shall rediscover the guiding threads we need to push ahead and break new ground together.
INTRODUCTION
Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper
This publication sets out to pinpoint and highlight some aspects of Europes shared cultural heritage. However, instead of focusing on well-known monuments in famous cities, we are following a different path a path that leads us to borders. We are looking, in other words, at outer boundaries, the lines which separate one territory or identity from another, and these are the things we want to study, understand and relate to one another. Borders may well be the place where the special, the distinctive is most powerfully afrmed, but they are also the places where people meet, where adventures and experiences undreamed of at home become possible:
[B]orders are not just dividing lines, places where differences assert themselves; they can also be places of exchange and enrichment, places where plural identities are formed. They furnish a setting for encounters which could never take place in any other place, since, snugly at home in ones own village or tribe, one stands every chance of meeting only carbon copies of oneself, hearing ones own words in the mouths of others, and running into ones own certainties. (Warschawksi, 2000, editorial translation.)
Why treat borders as heritage? Because Europes nation states, and all the territorial and national units which preceded them, have left us a legacy of borders, borders old or recent (sometimes very recent), accepted or contested, fortied or open, threatening or all but invisible. These borders are lines, but only on the map. In reality, they stand for something bigger border regions, which are also transit zones, places where cultures have met and mingled or, like many armies on the same ground, clashed. The architectural and landscape traces of the history made on those borders the defences and gateways, the checkpoints and meeting places, the symbols of co-operation or rejection together form a heritage which we consider precious. Throughout Europe, they are places where shared memories converge. They recall adventures and meetings, but strife and disagreement too. If they mean different things to people who live on either side of them, and so become sites of discord,1 then this makes them even more interesting. In fact, discord and differing interpretations are not inimical to sites of memory and heritage sites on the contrary. Sites of memory can highlight the things which unite a group, region or nation, the things on which they agree, while sites of discord make negotiation
______ 1. The term sites of discord is intended to complement the term sites of memory, coined by Pierre Nora, the better to underline the ambiguous nature of heritage (Dolff-Bonekmper, 2003).
11
necessary, encourage debate and demand critical exploration. They can become sites of memory and a focus for consensus, just as sights of memory thought to be pacied by their heritage status can at any moment spark bitter conicts. Alternatively, they can remain ambivalent and double-edged. These are two sides of one coin. Once we realise that discord can be part of memory, and memory part of discord, this particular heritage offers us an even richer eld for exploration and reection. Our aim in focusing on the heritage of borders is to highlight the special quality of cultural heritage, and particularly of buildings, sites and landscapes which still carry the signs and traces of the intentions which shaped them, their original uses, and the changes, destruction and conversions they have gone through in the meantime. Far more than written sources, they reflect the advances and relapses, the agreements and conflicts which have made our societies what they are today. Their material complexity is matched by a semantic complexity which often ensures that more than one interpretation is possible and plausible. But we need to be able to read them, decipher their message, interpret their traces and sometimes dig through to a meaning which contradicts what they seemed at first to be saying. And yet we know that the last word on heritage will never be spoken, that new ways of interpreting it and the values it embodies will always be possible. Indeed, our vision of heritage is fundamentally coloured by the different ways in which successive generations have interpreted and used it, adjusting their vision to match changing social needs, which have often changed the material substance of buildings and artifacts. Discussion of heritage has itself become heritage, sometimes clouding our vision of actual objects to a point where we need to pull back and re-focus. Thus, social interpretation affects our perception and treatment of physical substance, which remains while it is preserved an intractable irritant to those who want to become a master of history. The authors who have worked together closely on this publication British, Dutch, Romanian, French and German all agree that Europes narrative will not be pieced together through an inventory of objects, but through joint projects. Lon Pressouyre sets the ball rolling by outlining the long history of borders in Europe, with a special emphasis on crossing points. These are, by denition, the most interesting places the places where people enter and leave, with or without permission, where defences are built and attacks launched in wartime, and where passports are checked, goods imported and exported, and smugglers sometimes caught in peacetime. In their article on Lines of tension, Marieke Kuipers and John Schoeld take a searching look at lines of defence constructed in the twentieth century. They discuss the defensive curtain round Verdun, the Atlantic Wall, which ran from northern Norway to southern France, the Iron Curtain, which cut Cold War Europe in two, and the fence which protected Britains Greenham Common airbase against 12
Introduction
the peace protesters. What is left of all these once deadly defences, what can their traces tell us, what do they evoke? Finally, what is their potential heritage value for Europe? Marieke Kuipers and myself approach the same questions from another angle, using two very different examples to study borders in the landscape and border landscapes: the remains of the Berlin Wall, marking a border where the dangers were real and deadly, and signs and traces of the old frontier in the twin town of Kerkrade/Herzogenrath, half-German and half-Dutch, on a border erased by the Schengen Agreement. The barbed wire fence between the two, erected by the Germans in 1939 and 2.5 metres high, was progressively lowered after 1945 and totally demolished in 1991, although there are still some traces and a few markers show where the border used to be. We actually think it important in Berlin, Kerkrade/Herzogenrath and other places too to preserve the physical traces of borders once fortied at times of conict and tension, so that we are at least free to remember them. They should remain a visible part of the rural and urban landscape, as an archaeological reminder of frontiers once fortied and now dismantled. Borders between states and power blocs left their mark on huge tracts of territory. John Schoeld takes us to the other extreme in his article on new urban frontiers in one of Europes great metropolises, London. These new frontiers develop around specic communities, and he nds them in outlying districts in east and north London. When people who share a nationality, an ethnic group, a religion or sexual preference congregate in a given area, the result is a social and cultural homogeneity, which is reected in signs, decor and recognisable patterns of behaviour. Recognisable, above all, to those who share the codes, and know exactly where their territory starts and ends. Sometimes obvious, sometimes invisible, these frontiers are social realities in Europes major cities, and are transforming their cultural topography, particularly in underprivileged areas, where ethno-cultural groups cluster in ethnoscapes sometimes coexisting, but usually in conict. Once social archaeologists start exploring them, these community frontiers may become sites of memory for tomorrows urban society. Borders are the places where we meet others, but they also delimit our home. What is home? Who dened it, when and for what reason? Whose home is it, and is it more a home to some than to others? Home, as the focus of personal and collective identity, can expand or contract, and exist on many levels from private to public, local to national. Since the Europe we are thinking of is a conglomerate of national states, let us look at the national aspect. The contribution on Asserted identities, conquered territories, co-authored by Carmen Popescu and myself, describes the important part played by heritage and architecture in the emergence of the nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sites and buildings dating from the distant past were used to legitimise the new formations and represent their new-found political and territorial unity. They gave them a historical depth, and also a visibility in 13
the modern world, which they would not otherwise have had. The restoration of countless medieval monuments in the nineteenth century obviously reects the growing interest and respect commanded by these cultural and artistic masterpieces, but can also be seen as cultural propaganda a means of strengthening the cohesion and unity of the young nations. The use, on new buildings, of an architectural style redolent of a countrys past and national character served the same function. This revisiting of the nations past to afrm its present was also evident on borders and in border territories, particularly when those borders had been recently drawn (redrawn), and those territories recently acquired, by treaty or, more often, force of arms. In her essay on Borders of fact, borders of the mind, Carmen Popescu invites us to think about the huge East/West divide created in Europe by the Iron Curtain. The physical border, with its watchtowers, mines and barbed wire, may have stopped people from passing, but its mental correlative the border in peoples minds went as high as the clouds and stopped ideas from getting through either. The result was a bipolar world, where even building styles reected the division, as they did in east and west Berlin. Marieke Kuipers and Bernard Toulier write on Commerce and cosmopolis Europes maritime borders. Their contribution brings us back to the idea that frontiers are places for exchange. For centuries, seaside resorts and the great international maritime and river ports have been places where people meet and anything can happen. The well-heeled visitors, who used to converge from all the countries of northern and eastern Europe to winter on the Mediterranean, turned Nice into a cosmopolitan almost extra-territorial enclave, where the rich could take their ease in comfort. Their second example is Rotterdam, a great trading centre, which the presence of seamen and merchants from all parts of the world has effectively turned into a free zone. For years, Rotterdam has been a place where natives and new arrivals from all classes of society work side by side. Its multi-ethnic community has brought it a multitude of languages, cooking styles, cultures and subcultures. Like Nice, this has made it extra-territorial, although the adjective cosmopolitan has to be used a little differently when applied to each of these two places. In his contribution, Mental territory the Celtic connection, Bernard Toulier takes us to a land which has never appeared on a map, and so has no geographical boundaries. Although the Celts penetrated all parts of Europe, leaving traces for todays archaeologists, philologists and musicians, the mists of legend still enfold them. It may be impossible to pin them down to a definite region at a definite time, but there are many countries and communities today which identify with their rebellious, non-conformist spirit. The only problem is that most of these Celtic countries or communities, which are scattered across part of Europe, are embedded in nation states where the ethnic and cultural majority is firmly non-Celtic, such as Brittany in France, or Wales and Scotland 14
Introduction
within the UK. So what function does this imagined Celtic realm serve for those who are anxious to affirm their Celtic identity and those who are trying to construct an identity for Europe?
Cosmopolitanism: is it something which really exists, or just an aspiration the dream of a world in which people of various origins live harmoniously together, agree on certain basic cultural values, and accept one another without making any attempt to impose their own values and customs? Is it necessarily limited to the privileged few, who pass effortlessly from one European country to the next, with money smoothing the way? Can cosmopolitan discourse, which rejects nationalist attitudes and purely local loyalties, and sees nationality itself as modular and exible, become European discourse? Can cosmopolitanism be accepted as a heritage value in constructing a community of the mind to embrace a city, or indeed all of Europe?
And that other much-touted concept, multiculturalism: does it simply mean that all the ingredients in the mixture are equal and compatible? Does it correspond to anything in the real world, or is it just a social theory, worked out in the great cities of the West and aimed at integrating immigrants who since they cannot attain the same economic, social and political status as natives should at least be able to win acceptance through their culture? We need to explore ways of putting this concept to work in our research on Europes heritage.
Finally, what about our constructed identities? Put together in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the nation states were emerging, they are now the starting point of all our thinking on unity and diversity in Europe. These constructs have themselves become heritage, transmitted as part of the socialisation process, and there is no denying their reality. As a result, the boundaries which dene identities often, but not always, coinciding with territorial and state frontiers are now an inherent part of Europes shared heritage. This is not to say that any identity construct must be accepted without question the moment it is formulated. On the contrary, to tap their heritage and practical potential, we need to examine these self-imposed identities, question them, rethink them, and review their boundaries, which are often too narrowly drawn. This is something we need to do together, in co-operation with one or more partners. In fact, it is a joint project for Europe.
Just to make sure there are no misunderstandings: our aim, in writing about borders, is not to get rid of them, but to make new sense of them in heritage terms. A further aim is to dismantle any remaining border defences, either physical or mental. This book points the way to future action. We hope it will inspire productive uncertainty in our readers. 15
References
Dolff-Bonekmper, Gabi, Sites of memory, sites of discord: Historic monuments as a medium for discussing conict in Europe in Forward planning: The function of cultural heritage in a changing Europe, Council of Europe, 2001, pp. 53-58. Dolff-Bonekmper, Gabi, Lieux de mmoire, lieux de discorde: la valeur conictuelle des monuments in Recht, Roland, et al. (eds), Victor Hugo et le dbat patrimonial, Ed. Somogy, Paris, 2003, pp. 121-144. Warschawski, Michel, Sur la frontire, Stock, Paris, 2000.
16
CHAPTER I BREACHES IN BORDERS: RITUAL CROSSING POINTS

AN AMBIGUOUS CONCEPT
Lon Pressouyre
The good border? It should be natural but unobtrusive, open but protective, a place for exchange and contact, discussion and encounter, in short, ideal (Foucher, 1991). Talking about breaches in borders also means considering the highly complex concept of border, whose contradictions are underscored by this quotation from Michel Foucher. The rst thing a breach suggests is a break in a closed linear system, whether natural barrier, built wall or agreed limit. The most obvious kind is a pass, carrying a steeply winding road up and through a mountain range, a tunnel, or a bridge spanning a valley or river. Another is a crossing point on a political border which is carefully watched by the police or even army a place where stringent controls are carried out, or a weak point where fugitives can scale the wall, cut the barbed wire or slip through without being seen from the watchtowers. Lastly, it may be an ordinary border post, where travellers show identity papers, passports and visas, and are questioned by immigration, police, customs and health ofcials, or a point of transgression, where illegal immigrants are smuggled or sneak into another country. Even when invisible, these borderlines are real; they may affect herds or ocks on their way to summer pastures in the mountains; and the concept of territorial waters little changed since Cornelius van Bijnkerschoek published his De dominio maris dissertatio (Essay on Maritime Sovereignty) in 1702 really comes to life when deep-sea trawlers are competing offshore for sardine and tuna. Yet we know very well that borders are not just the lines to which maps and sailors charts reduce them. Without invoking Karl Haushofers Kulturgrenzen (Haushofer, 1927), discredited forever by the Nazi theorists who based their concept of Lebensraum on them, we can see that border areas have a long tradition, in Europe and elsewhere. They emerged in various situations, and were given various names. The Roman Empire had the limes, and the Middle Ages the Marches lands conquered and settled whose outlines were constantly shifting. In the same way, in the late seventeenth century, the treaties of Carlowitz, Passarowitz, 17
Belgrade and Constantinople established neutral zones on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire. These included the barren area no mans land, in modern terms created between the towns of Azov and Perekop in 1700, which combines all the symbolic contradictions inherent in these ambiguous concepts. For a long time, borders were simply lines or zones. Then came air travel, which, in a sense, did away with them, creating a third and wholly new kind of border new because it no longer lies on the outer edge of the country it delimits. The modern airport Marc Aug (1992) calls it a non-place constitutes a new border, totally, unforeseeably innovative in its morphology and function. International airports, which exhibit all the contradictions of borders, are ostensibly doors to the world. They offer tax-free or duty-free goods, and Welcome! seems written into their design (Berlins Tempelhof opens its arms to new arrivals, while Roissy 1 in Paris pushes out its satellites to meet them). But these doors are also rmly locked. Border controls are more systematic and restrictive at airports than anywhere else: security checks, identity checks, customs checks and sometimes health checks are concentrated there, as they are in prisons, providing a rm reminder that airports far from opening wide to the skies and the world strictly limit and regulate access to both. This brings us to a crucial question: is a breach really a barrier in disguise? Some place names indeed might suggest that. The Brche de Roland, an impassable rift in the wall of the Pyrenees between France and Spain, sounds like something hewn out by a giant sword, and not like a safe and easy passage. The Iron Gates on the Danube also sound rmly closed. General Weygand may have had them in mind in 1933, when he spoke of Vaubans wish to encircle France with an iron barrier under Louis XIV. Twelve years later, condemning the sealing of the Soviet border in a letter to President Harry S. Truman on 12 May 1945, Winston Churchill coined the term Iron Curtain. This again harks back to the Iron Gates not an enclosure, but the gorge through which the Danube, having crossed almost two thirds of Europe, cuts its way east on the Serb-Romanian border. This region has always been a point where civilisations meet. The Palaeolithic site at Lepenski Vir and Trajans Table both testify to age-old contacts on a dividing line deeply incised in the landscape. But the Iron Gates are not an opening: they are there to be closed and locked against invaders. In heritage terms, their function is epitomised in the Fortress of Golubac (now in Serbia) which, with its nine crenellated towers, is one of Europes nest examples of mediaeval military architecture. The open/closed dyad is reected, not just in place names, but also in landscapes shaped by history. At Neum on the Dalmatian coast, one result of the Dayton Peace Agreements giving Bosnia and Herzegovina a window on the Adriatic is 18
Breaches in borders: ritual crossing points an ambiguous concept
two borders in the space of six kilometres. Since 1995, tourists wishing to visit Split in the north and Dubrovnik in the south have had to cross them. If visitors nd this annoying, Croatians are unlikely to nd it any less so. In December 2003 Prime Minister Ivo Sanader actually announced plans for a colossal project the Klek Bridge from the Peljesac peninsula, bypassing the Neum land corridor. At Calais, the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar provide a new entre to the United Kingdom. But this breach, too, has its bolt. Until recently, would-be immigrants, many of them from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and even Asia, were screened at the Sangatte centre. Now, they simply hang around in sheds and on wasteland close to the tunnel, waiting for a chance to slip past the police and get across the Channel. And so the crossing point becomes a checkpoint. This paradoxical combination of easy passage and tight security, openness and vigilance, is typical as if one automatically summoned up the other. Access to the bridge at Pont-Saint-Esprit, long the main crossing point on the old Rhne border between the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire, where boatmen said Empi (Empire) and Riau (Kingdom), instead of port and starboard, was controlled by a tower on the French side. The message is still plainer further downstream, where the castles of Beaucaire and Tarascon guard the approaches to the last major bridge above the delta. Nowadays, these fortresses from another age stand on either side of a dead border. With the military rationale gone, an appearance of symmetry is the only thing left as if the aim had been to glorify, not fortify, the river.
Symbols of a frontier, images of a breach

Fortied frontiers are an extreme case, and they highlight the complex issues raised by the physical markers or symbols of places where frontiers can be crossed but where their divisive character is clearest. Europe has never had anything like the Great Wall of China, that continuous military and cultural frontier started by Qin Shi Huang-di in 215 BCE except the Iron Curtain, locally embodied in the Berlin Wall. This version of the closed border still had its (watch)towers, but checkpoints replaced the gates. The same system was adopted in Cyprus in 1974, where 139 observation posts were established along the green line, and only a few, United Nations-supervised crossing points connected North and South. Military frontiers in Europe have rarely been so rigidly linear. Looked at in the long term, they are typical border zones. This is true of the limes, apart from a few fortied segments, the best known being Hadrians Wall between Wallend and Bowness-on-Solway. It is also true of the line of fortied towns (bastides), which separated English Aquitaine and the Kingdom of France from the thirteenth century 19
on. Vaubans pr carr scheme, which used just a few fortress towns to seal a whole frontier, is another example. Finally, there are the fortied lines of the twentieth century the Siegfried and Maginot lines, which were, like the Atlantic Wall, neither continuous nor impassable. In military terms, a breach is above all a vacuum, a point of least resistance, where the right strategy can force a passage. Walls, forts, blockhouses (and the gaps between them) are not alone in expressing this open/shut dichotomy on frontiers. Boundary stones carry the same ambivalent message. These have a long tradition, going all the way back to the golden age of the Greek city states, when associated efgies of Zeus or Hermes sometimes lent them sacred status. Europe has many old boundary markers, some of them reecting the evanescence of yesterdays dividing lines, others the persistence of their traces. An example is the monolith on the Franco-Belgian border at La Flamengrie, bearing on one side the eur-de-lys of France, on the other the two-headed eagle of the Habsburgs (Culot, 2001: 112-113). Frontiers seen as eternal sometimes need to be made visible. Between 1886 and 1950, 602 stones some of them cruciform were set up on the Franco-Spanish frontier. Others followed, with mixed results. For example, the stone carved by Jorge Oteiza and erected on the Santiago Bridge between Hendaye and Irun was toppled by Basque separatists in 1995 (Culot, 1998: 44). For them, the border dividing Euzkadi into two was a mockery, arbitrarily imposed by the colonising nation states, Spain and France. In smashing the stone, they were getting rid of a spurious division and proclaiming their national demands. Frontier markers delimit territories, but the barriers they create are often more imaginary than real. For a long time, seasonal migration of livestock was one of the commonest transgressions on marked frontiers. Under pacts between guilds, referred to in all the traits de lie et de passeries (treaties between pastoral communities), Spanish shepherds and their ocks regularly moved to summer pastures on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees in the Capcir, Conent and Val dAran areas, in spite of occasional border incidents, such as those in the Pays-Quint, which were settled only by the Treaty of Bayonne in 1856. Conversely, French shepherds took their ocks south, to the upper Segr Valley. At the other end of Europe, Walachian ocks and herds moved freely between Romania, Albania, Greece and the former Yugoslavia; until the practice died out, 400 Greek and Albanian families regularly moved their livestock between Trikala in Thessaly and Perivoli in the Pindus mountains (Ancel, 1938: 18-19). The modern form of transgression is unauthorised entry by political refugees or mere job seekers, for whom the good border is always the unguarded one. 20
Like walls, forts and boundary markers, customs regulations have left a lasting mark on border zones. Initially, when customs barriers coincided with maritime and land frontiers, they affected national peripheries, but heartlands were also involved, once the bulk of international trade began to pass through the inland river ports. Londons enormous Customs House, designed by Laing in 1814, with a monumental facade 150 metres long by Robert Smirke, is the clearest reection of border displacement pre-dating the age of air travel. The Paris Customs House, constructed on the Canal Saint-Martin in 1844, is another. It is best known to students of nineteenth-century architecture for Jules Lischs ornamental additions, which help to underline the anomalous nature of its presence in the capital. ClaudeNicolas Ledouxs customs posts at the old city gates make obvious sense, but the Customs House strikes an incongruous note in a setting where nothing since the canal was decommissioned is left to suggest a frontier. So where are customs barriers breached? For a long time, they were breached only in out-of-the-way and inaccessible places. Smugglers Way, Smugglers Ford, Smugglers Creek are some of the place names that still identify sites of transgression regular, but limited. Road, rail and air travel have substituted new offences for the old ones. Coastal smuggling is the only traditional form which has survived, with tobacco and narcotics as key items. Another embodied in ventas, bazaars and other markets followed the line taken by Voltaire, whose house at Ferney was constructed on the border with Switzerland, making sure that refuge was just a room away, if needed. Today, sales points astride frontiers have largely been replaced by border zone supermarkets, outside the nearest towns.
Border heritage an aid to understanding others

There are two ways of approaching Europes border heritage: the rst is concerned with typology, the second with education. Establishing a typology of borders and breaches is not difcult. Alongside the geographers, who have painstakingly classied natural frontiers, and the geopolitical specialists, historians and art historians can easily compile summary tables of monuments, sites and cultural landscapes which illustrate the concept of frontier, whether line or zone. There is no shortage of function-based criteria: demarcation, with boundary markers and frontier posts; defence, with all the fortications constructed from classical times to our own; goods control, with customs posts; currency control, with exchange ofces; health control, with yesterdays lazar houses and todays forward medical units to contain epidemics. These criteria could be used to compile a systematic inventory of breaches, both natural (straits, mountain passes) and man-made (canals, bridges, ports). Clearly, too, this aspect of heritage is both modern and rooted in the distant past. 21
But this cataloguing exercise, though essential, is not enough. No catalogue, however detailed, will ever generate that sense of belonging which gives people a feeling for heritage and ensures its transmission to future generations. This is particularly true of border heritage, which, more than any other, seems unlikely to foster a sense of shared identity. Its natural associations are with conict, with repression and control with others seen as alien and hostile. This fact may justify a selective approach to border heritage. Military architecture, for example, is highly sensitive, and can serve as common ground only when sufcient time has passed and memories of war have been sublimated. A case in point is the fortress at Maastricht on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, which is now a landscape feature with no polemical signicance. In the same way, the fortress of Smederevo on the Danube, constantly fought over by Serbs and Turks from 1429 to 1887, and heavily damaged in 1941 and 1944, was one of the biggest tourist attractions in the former Yugoslavia, just as it is now in Serbia. This is even truer of castles built to guard frontiers between territories which no longer exist as separate entities. The Guelphic and Ghibelline fortresses in Italy are now simply part of the medieval heritage, and the bitter struggles between Empire and Papacy are forgotten. In France, Chteau-Gaillard, fortied by the Normans, and its French counterpart, Gisors contending products of the Treaty of SaintClair-sur-Epte (911), through which the King of France ceded the future Normandy to the Scandinavian chieftain, Rollon, are just holiday centres west of Paris. For Spaniards, the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada no longer carry memories of a threat extinguished in 1492. Once appropriated and hispanicised by Charles V, they later recovered their status as the jewels of the Arab-Muslim civilisation of Al-Andalus. So, must we resign ourselves, take the easy way out, and keep the heritage treatment for monuments which have no conict-related connotations? This, clearly, would be totally at odds with the thinking behind the border heritage project, launched at a time when Europe is pulling together, in spite of crises like the one which devastated the former Yugoslavia. The real aim of this project is to incorporate recognition of others, and respect for them, into a purely identity-based vision of heritage. This means placing the accent on a positively educational approach, based on real-life situations and shared experience. As with all intercultural policies, towns and cities are probably the best place to do this. The surveys already undertaken on the heritage of border towns located in areas long disputed between two countries, such as Strasbourg and Metz, could inspire many others. Vyborg, Danzig, Novisad, Timisoara and Rhodes all lend 22
themselves to study of the process whereby layers of heritage accumulate in towns whose identity has been shaped by successive inputs through centuries of conict. However, focusing on the exceptional, which might also prompt a study of enclave towns, like Trieste in the past and Kaliningrad today, should not preclude a broader approach. All cities today are multicultural by denition and incorporate new frontiers, whether overt or invisible. Such frontiers exist in the Bengali area of Tower Hamlets in London and in the Goutte dOr Arab district in Paris. Sometimes, when ghettos are recreated, or areas occupied by new communities are organised around places of worship, they are explicitly religious. Sometimes, too, they are language-based, as in the Chinatowns, where all East and South-East Asian communities are welcome, but shop signs mean nothing to the few native residents who hang on stubbornly, as if in a foreign land. Studying these new areas could help us to devise a heritage policy to cover a range of potentially conictual frontier situations. Paradoxically, leaving governments alone to manage border heritage would entail a twofold risk. It might produce a starry-eyed tendency to focus complacently on sites regarded as symbols of concord, such as Pheasant Island, a tiny Franco-Spanish condominium on the Bidassoa, or the resundsbroen, the huge bridge that has linked Denmark and Sweden since 1999. Conversely, it might spark a rabidly nationalistic insistence that frontiers actual or claimed are sacred and non-negotiable (this happened in connection with the war memorial at Cavour in Italy (Guichonnet and Raffestin, 1974: 1; Foucher. 1991: 59-60), and is happening today in the republics that have emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union since 1990). Involving border regions like Alsace (France), Thrace (Greece), the Banat (Romania), the Serbian Vojvodina and the Carpathian forest in Slovakia and looking at the problems they have faced, the kinds of cultural exchange they have fostered, and the daily migration some of them are increasingly seeing, might help us to devise a rst educational approach to borders. But we also need to look at the new situation in our major cities, and their inner- and outer-city districts, where a major contemporary problem learning new ways to live with others arises with special urgency. Towns and cities might thus become places where people could be taught to appreciate heritage without any of the old nationalist associations, and be made aware of other peoples values. Not merely reected in monuments and museums, those values would be seen and experienced more directly in everyday settings public transport, the workplace and social facilities.
References
Ancel, Jacques, Gographie des frontires, Gallimard, Paris, 1938. 23
Aug, Marc, Non-lieux, introduction une anthropologie de la surmodernit, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1992. Culot, Maurice, (ed.) Hendaye, Irun, Fontarabie, villes de la frontire, Norma ditions, Paris, 1998. Culot, Maurice, (ed.) Charleroi, Mons, Valenciennes, villes de la frontire, Norma ditions, Paris, 2001. Foucher, Michel, Fronts et frontires, un tour du monde gopolitique, new revised and expanded edition, Fayard, Paris, 1991. Guichonnet, Paul, and Raffestin, Claude, Gographie des frontires, PUF, Paris, 1974. Haushofer, Karl, Grenzen in ihrer geographischen und politischen Bedeutung, K. Vowinckel, Berlin, 1927.
24
On the Santiago Bridge, at the Franco-Spanish border between Hendaye and Irun, a monumental border stone was carved by Jorge Oteiza to highlight the demarcation line. During the winter of 1995, this conspicuous monolith was toppled by Basque separatists claiming the existence of one single nation stretching from Bayonne (France) to Bilbao (Spain).
25
Carved monolith in the village of La Flamengrie on the Franco-Belgian border. On one side, the eur-de-lys symbolising the kingdom of France; on the other, the Habsburg two-headed eagle. The border stone bears witness to political entities that no longer exist, and has gradually acquired the status of a historic landmark belonging to a common heritage.
26
View of Pheasant Island from the Spanish bank of the Bidassoa River. After lengthy negotiations, the provisions of a peace treaty between France and Spain were signed here on 7 November 1659, and the nal version of the Peace of the Pyrenees was ofcially ratied on 6 June 1660. Three days later, Louis XIV, King of France, married Maria Theresa of Spain at Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Since that time, the tiny island has also been known as Conference Island. The island is a condominium belonging half of the year to Spain, half of the year to France.
27
CHAPTER II LINES OF TENSION

Marieke Kuipers and John Schoeld
Throughout history, nations and ethnically or politically motivated groups have occupied territories and sought to claim or defend these places as their own, often necessarily through aggression. As a consequence, historic lines of tension are constantly being negotiated, contested and renegotiated and new lines established. Since the Treaty of Vienna (1815), the concept of the nation state and related international borders has formed a signicant part of the European character and experience of place. This chapter will explore that European border heritage through the history, character, meaning and signicance of these lines of tension, highlighting examples from the two world wars and the Cold War. The lines of tension that are created or recreated during periods of conict have been a feature of Europes cultural landscape for hundreds of years. Some of these lines reect deep-rooted ethnic disputes that have led to the creation of permanent international borders that further impose division on landscape and society. At the other extreme are more transient borders reecting impermanence, for example where they occur on the eld of battle, as on the Western Front. Some borders may be imposed by strategists predicting some last line of defence; the Taunton stop-line in south-west England and the Salpa line in south-east Finland are examples of this. All lines of tension will however have particular social and cultural signicance in understanding the impact of conict on society and communities. This is especially true for the two world wars, the Cold War, and the subsequent civil and ethnically-motivated disputes of Eastern Europe.
Traces of local conicts

Conict varies in form, extent and intensity, all of which combine to determine the material culture that survives to represent it in the archaeological and historic records. Street ghting for example may involve the construction of temporary and transient boundaries and barricades, using materials close to hand which are easily swept away once the skirmish is over. Such conicts will generally leave no physical trace. Evidence of this type of conict will often be conned to peoples memories, and also media accounts (for example the Eel Riots in Amsterdam, 1886, the students revolt in Paris, May 1968, the Russian intervention in Prague, August 1968 and the subsequent protest in 1969). Some signicant events can be reinvented by means of popular culture, marking places of conict in retrospect and bringing them into collective memory through the interpretation of authors or 29
directors (for example, the bloody incidents on the stairs of Sebastopol, in reaction to the revolt on the battleship Potemkin of 1905, in Sergej Eisensteins lm Potemkin). A re-enactment between striking coal miners and police at Orgreave, South Yorkshire in 1984-85 demonstrated how popular culture and memory can combine, in this case to achieve catharsis among former combatants. This event also illustrated the uidity of boundaries, as the running battles extended across the landscape, with groups of combatants splitting and converging as the battle unfolded (Deller, 2002), contrasting the still photographs that appeared in the media, of a line of police facing a line of miners. One needs lm, movement, a careful reading of the media accounts and interpretation of oral historical evidence to understand the true nature of the conict and the meaning and signicance of the lines of tension it created. Other better-known examples of this type of conict are from Northern Ireland. Here the uidity of street conict can be seen in contemporary news footage of Bloody Sunday for example, while the permanent lines of tension are the substantial but less well documented peace-lines that divide Catholic and Protestant communities (Jarman, 2002: 285; see also Schoeld with Posehn, this volume).
Legacies of the First and Second World Wars, and the Cold War
More conspicuous are the physical traces of military conict that survive across Europe. Some military works were built as national defence lines during peacetime, as a means of conict-preparedness (for example the fortress lines between Lige and Verviers, the Maginot line, the Salpa line and the Metaxas line). In the case of the young Republic of Czechoslovakia, French engineers had been consulted, so that its long defence line was inuenced by the French Maginot line (see Gross et al., 1997). Other works were constructed by occupying forces for purposes of attack or defence during wartime, such as the Atlantic Wall. Lines of tension existing in the First World War were both uid and xed. Almost by denition the Western Front was meant to move, yet it did so to such a limited extent that for much of the time and especially to participants and informed observers looking on it appeared xed. The rideaux dfensifs around Verdun had been xed from the start. The material remains of these lines, as well as of the militarised zones that existed behind them providing logistical support, airelds and hospitals, are signicant and substantial, and their impact on the landscape obvious. The trenches themselves often survive well, as do gun emplacements and tunnels, together marking the Allied and German front lines. The location of those lines has impacted directly upon the remainder of this landscape of war: the ordnance that was produced, transported and red, and then after the war the commemorative layer, directly reecting the footprint of the old. Together these remains, combined with personal attachment and now to a very limited extent memory, give the landscape a commemorative character, made even more explicit by the abundance of war cemeteries, memorials and signs constructed after the conict. Due to written and visual records as well as popular lm and literature, these 30
Lines of tension
former battleelds speak to our imagination as places of bloodshed and comradeship; the historic front lines have now become places of pilgrimage and tourism and cultural resource management. On another level is the awful landscape in which the dangers posed by unexploded ordnance create a daily hazard for farmers and others that work this countryside. Long lines of tension, crossing what are now national borders and fought over during the Second World War are represented by the well-known Maginot line, Westwall and the Atlantic Wall. These examples are synonymous with huge construction efforts to reinforce boundaries and create barriers to enemy incursion. The Westwall in the Rhineland, also known as the Siegfriedlinie, stretched from the Dutch to the Swiss border and was conceived as a decentralised though permanent defence line with 14 000 concrete constructions based on some 200 standardised building types. Behind the wall the so-called Air-Defence Zone West was built with anti-aircraft batteries and shelters (Gross et al., 1997). Directly after the Second World War most of these defence works were blown up because of their location near the French and Belgian borders; only short stretches of Hckerhindernisse around Aachen remain as well as ruined gun emplacements and Panzerabwehrkanone (PAK) Garage. In all, just 1% of the Westwall structures built in the region North RhineWestphalia survive (ibid.: 114). Exactly on the German-Dutch border, in the former testing area of the Dutch air force, the Venlo airbase was built for German night ghters that helped to defend the industrial Ruhr area. On the German side of the airbase parts of the airstrip and an airship hanger are used by the Venlo aviation club, while on the Dutch side the control tower and command post have survived, serving nowadays for alpinist training. Although not strictly speaking part of the defensive Westwall per se, these structures are among the most visual reminders in this region. The Salpa line in the north is less well known, though massive: stretching for 1 200 kilometres of the border between Finland and Russia. To the south it had permanent fortications, with less substantial eldworks to the north. This outstretched fortication line was constructed immediately after the Winter War in 1940-41 and again in 1944 to defend Finland, but it was never fought over. It comprised trenches, over 700 mostly concrete bunkers, 3 000 wooden eld fortications and between two and six rows of stone tank barriers stretching over 200 kilometres (Kauppi, 2002). Even after the boundaries between Finland and the former Soviet Union had changed in 1945, about 90% of the Salpa line was in Finnish territory where it remains today. On a smaller scale anti-invasion defensive stop-lines were constructed in countries including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, using anti-tank ditches accompanied by concrete pillboxes, barbed wire entanglements and so on. Among the Dutch examples are the Maas and IJssel line and the Peel-Raam line of 200 and 150 kilometres, reinforced by 700 and 300 pillboxes, respectively. These works were constructed in 1939-40 (Visser et al., 2002). In comparison to the heavily 31
economised Dutch works, the English defences were carefully planned, substantial and well managed. Although comparatively little survives today a few examples in England remain in more or less their original form and conguration, and in a landscape setting relatively unchanged since 1940. These so-called defence areas have been studied by English Heritage1 with a view to ensuring sympathetic future management (Foot, 2003). The Iron Curtain is a well-known example of the legacy of political-economic conict, in this case dividing East from West in the Cold War. Massive in construction, this is remarkable both for its size and effectiveness as a boundary, but also for the speed with which it was rst constructed and then removed. It continues to have an impact on the landscape of the former borderlands, both along its length (see, for example, Szpanowski, 2002) and in Berlin. Not only along the border, but also in its respective hinterlands enormous military works have been erected, in preparation for or countering long-distance attack. The Cold War is also an interesting material legacy as it represents a combination of national policy and construction effort through the inuence of alliances. Nato for example brought American units to the United Kingdom, and British units to West Germany, Nato construction being very different to that undertaken by the UK government. Nato settled also in the Dutch province of Limburg, immediately inside the borders with Belgium and Germany while the headquarters of the Allied Forces North Europe (previously Afcent) have settled since 1967 on the abandoned Hendrik and Emma mines (providing new employment but at the expense of the regions mining heritage). In the East, Russian units were stationed in vast numbers in East Germany meaning that now, within the national borders of Germany, the legacy of the Cold War has particular pertinence, with the line of the frontier and the material culture of opposing forces available for scrutiny and study. The Cold War was everywhere and nowhere; a placeless war (Uzzell, 1998: 18), and it is that which makes its material remains of such interest to those engaged with conserving and interpreting the recent past. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 and the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997 (including the Schengen Agreement of 1985), new frontiers seem to take shape as lines of tension, not so much in military terms but rather in political-economic or political-social terms. These freshly evolving frontiers mark the European Union, though extending as a new bulwark against the less privileged countries of the Mediterranean, the former Soviet Union and Asia. It is conceivable that these frontiers will impact on our present interpretation of the cross-border heritage of previous military conicts as mutual heritage of a previously divided past.
______ 1. A non-governmental organisation that advises the British government on heritage matters in England.
32
Lines of tension
Spatial context
In almost every European town physical reminders of conict can be traced, be it commemorative plaques, war memorials or war damage and post-war reconstruction. This was the case at Ypres, almost entirely reconstructed following the First World War, and numerous rebuilt cities after the Second World War (from Coventry to Dresden, Warsaw to Le Havre). Traces of conict will also often be found outside the towns in the form of military works, battleelds and war cemeteries (for instance around Ypres and Verdun). Whether urban or rural, these lines of tension are best appreciated at landscape scale as examples are often either massive constructions that cover large areas or related smaller works whose signicance lies in their close association within a landscape context (see, for example, Foot, 2003). Local manifestations of lines of tension exist as well, reecting what were often comparable ideological and political disparities, enacted at a local scale. At Greenham Common, West Berkshire, England, for example, three lines of fencing separated the presence of ground-launched cruise missiles from those opposed to their deployment. These fences, with their cuts and repairs, survive nowadays as an example of the archaeology of opposition, while there is also a wealth of oral historical evidence, from peace women to security guards, members of the local community to students who marched on Greenham under the banner Archaeologists for Peace (see http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/greenham/index.htm for a selection of oral historical accounts and pictures). Material remains of former lines of tension exist therefore on various scales, in different forms and with a diversity of degrees of permanence. They all, however, have signicance in understanding the nature of conict, its impact on society, and its effect on landscape change as well as the interpretation of history. At the same time it is important to stress that the material remains provide a moral lesson about repetition and learning the lessons of history, thus creating a real challenge for those involved in conservation and management. This paper is partly written with these curators and custodians in mind. The following examples will give a short introduction to this legacy.
The Western Front

The Western Front, stretching from Nieuwpoort (Belgium) to Belfort with a bow around Verdun (France), provides material evidence for one of the most signicant and tragic events of the recent past when more than 10 million soldiers were killed and over 20 million injured between 1914 and 1918. It now mainly exists as an agricultural landscape with multiple (and to various degrees hidden) layers of meaning related to culture and society, memory and the dead. It is a:
multi-vocal landscape: an industrialised slaughter house, a vast tomb for The Missing, a landscape of memorialisation and pilgrimage, a location for archaeological investigation, cultural heritage development and tourism (Saunders, 2002: 106).
33
Among these various layers some things remain constant, notably the degree to which the lines of tension dene the nature of the war, and give tangible reference points to the otherwise unimaginable scale of loss and destruction that occurred here less than a century ago. The material culture of the Western Front (predominantly the trenches and barbed wire) remain, but to varying degrees. Some areas contain battleeld landscapes that have seen little post-war alteration, except to create sacred commemorative landscapes and limited areas of reconstruction for the benet of visitors. At Beaumont Hamel for example, where the Canadian Newfoundland Regiment fought on 1 July 1916, the trenches survive as denuded earthworks, still deep and coherent enough in plan to be an accurate reection of the battleeld terrain. At Vimy Ridge, however, the situation is different. Here some trenches have been restored, with boardwalks and timber shuttering, and re-excavated to their former depth. But equally here it is easy to appreciate the full impact of battle, with the many shell holes visible in the adjacent woods, signs warning of unexploded ordnance, and access to tunnels deep underground. Barbed wire is a signicant component of all lines of tension since its invention in the late nineteenth century. In Olivier Razacs Barbed wire: a political history (2002), its role in the First World War is assessed including in terms of its constant referencing by Second World War poets and artists. Barbed wire became part of the aesthetic of the battleeld (Razac, 2002: 48), and an example of how material culture can become critical to interpretation and meaning. Besides differences in German and French trench systems, Razac noted similarities in the way these opponents used wire, which contemporary accounts describe as at once dangerous and terrifying. It represented the risk the soldier must run, in defence and in attack. It was:
a salient attribute of the memory of the Great War. It never became a metaphor for the war, because it does not symbolize the entire conict, or even the ghting in the trenches. Nevertheless barbed wire could be said to have the artistic role of evoking the monstrous sublimity of the forces of destruction liberated by modern war (ibid.: 51-2).
Beyond this material layer, Sarah Tarlow (1997) has addressed the question of remembering and the role that cemeteries and war memorials play in retaining that sense of remembrance within an ever-changing landscape. She recognises the value imbued by such places for the power they give to expressions of intense and personal feelings. At a landscape scale it is also these cemeteries and memorials that give an accurate reflection of the scale of the war, both in its physical size, and the number of casualties which remain hard to imagine. Also significant for reasons of memory is so-called trench-art, the artefacts of war brought or sent home by combatants to loved ones. These items often carved shell cases were pride of place in homes and communities, where many still survive (Saunders, 2000). 34
Lines of tension
Finally, these landscapes of memory that have emerged around the trenches have value as commemorative and sacred landscapes, and this value is repeatedly underlined by such organisations as the British War Graves Commission, especially when plans are being made for new infrastructure that impacts upon former battleelds. Here the tensions between commemorating a tragic past and the desire for improved access to an open Europe are deeply felt. These landscapes of memory now bring cultural benets in terms of tourism and education. Parts of the former Western Front are tourist attractions, with signs and carved demarcation stones to indicate points of attack and places of loss. It is interesting that in these memorials and markers, as well as in cemeteries, the commemoration of German losses remains problematic. In order to retain the historic military character of former battleelds and encourage interest in them, the correct balance must be struck between authenticity and a respect for the sacred, and provision of an informative, revealing and challenging visitor attraction. Leaving some sites as found and developing others provides one answer, as do on-site museums and interpretative centres, guidebooks and so on. But another option is to consider meeting all needs on single signicant and evocative sites. This has recently been the subject of study sponsored by Veterans Affairs Canada for the sites at Vimy Ridge and Beaumont Hamel (Cave, 2000). With experts from various conservation bodies and agencies, solutions were sought and worked through on site and under workshop conditions, based on earthwork conservation, and interpretative principles. The need for balance was agreed upon, and the sites zoned according to their sensitivity and sacredness as archaeological sites and landscapes, and their suitability for public access and some limited alteration and signage. Balance was achieved and management plans were created on the basis of these discussions. Although neither of these French sites has formal statutory protection, an agreed management plan provides an appropriate response to meeting future management needs.
The Atlantic Wall

After the German forces had occupied the countries along the North Sea coast, they started in 1942 to transform the littoral zone into a permanent defence line by constructing over 15 000 defence works. This chain stretched from the Nord Cape in Norway via Denmark, the German coast, the Netherlands and Belgium to the French-Spanish border along the Atlantic Ocean, and along the French Mediterranean coast (Rolf, 1983). Initially, the line was conceived and propagated as the New Westwall (to distinguish it from the Westwall on the original German territory), concentrating on the defence of the major seaports, but in 1944 Marshal Rommel changed the name and the concept in favour of total coast defence. Beyond the dunes, where most defence works were constructed, often by forced labour, the beaches were made inaccessible. In comparison with previous lines of defence, the Atlantic Wall was provided with advanced technology and heavy guns. 35
The German defences constructed on the Normandy Peninsula and in the Channel Islands formed one section of the wider Atlantic Wall. This section of the wall has survived well and represents one of the most signicant battleelds of the war. The Normandy coast north of Bayeux (where William the Conqueror invaded France) was chosen for Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied France by the Allied forces on D-Day, 6 June 1944. The ve landing beaches or sectors between the mouths of the rivers Orne and St Marcouf had codenames, one for each, of which Omaha Beach and Utah Beach are today best known, partly due to the novel and lm The Longest Day, and Spielbergs more recent Saving Private Ryan. Near Arromanches-les-Bains the so-called Mulberry harbour is partially kept. This was meant for temporary use but consisted of pontoons, caissons and sunken ships, forming piers 12 kilometres long. Despite their signicance, neither the Mulberry harbour nor the beaches are protected as cultural sites. Many German defence works remain in the region, several being in use as war museums. Near Cherbourg several half-built defence works can be found which were not completed due to the invasion. Also an originally French battery from the 1930s has survived, albeit under the German name Seeadler. Although not strictly part of the Atlantic Wall, this area and in particular between Cherbourg, Bricquebec and Valognes had been used by the German army for the production, distribution, transportation and launch of the V1 and V2 missiles. Parts of these huge complexes and their related infrastructure also remain. Some were destroyed during the war; other intended sites were never completed. All these relics refer by their various stages of completion or ruination to the quick changes in military action and counteraction. As such they are really historical landmarks, material witnesses of the nal and decisive war phase. The British Channel Islands were the only part of Great Britain to be occupied during the Second World War (Cruickshank, 1975), the remains surviving today being mostly on Jersey, Alderney and Guernsey. Apart from anti-tank walls, batteries and other military structures, the islands were provided with impressive concrete direction-nding towers which are unique among all works of the Atlantic Wall. Their symbolic status, like clenched sts creating a defensive perimeter encircling the islands and threatening potential invaders, must have been noticed by the islands population, and by the Allies. On Jersey, the vast underground hospital, constructed by forced labour and initially planned as barracks and an ammunition store, has served since 1960 as a museum on the German occupation (see www.jersey.co.uk/ attractions/ughospital). On Alderney, a high proportion survives of the fortications built by the Germans in addition to the nineteenth century fortresses (Partridge and Davenport, 1993). The German fortications on Guernsey are of particular note, being described in detail at the time in an ofcial handbook. This handbook has recently been analysed and its content described (Renier, 1995). There are two copies known to survive with subtle yet signicant differences between them, yielding important information about defence policy. By comparing the content with surviving sites it is possible to conrm the high proportion of sites remaining on the island, some of which are protected (Schoeld, 1999: 177-8). 36
Lines of tension
Memory plays a key role in understanding and conserving these sites of the Atlantic Wall. These are different to fortications in England say, as these sites were built by an occupying force that was eventually defeated. Paul Virilio, who started just before 1960 to document the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, describes the reactions he had among those that witnessed his work: there was hostility in the form of grafti, the concrete anks covered with insults and the interest I was showing in measuring and taking pictures of them sometimes had me bearing the hostile brunt (Virilio, 1994: 13). Feelings of vengeance were noted, in the form of bunkers destroyed to the joy of local inhabitants, as in summary execution. Many told me that these concrete landmarks frightened them and called back too many bad memories (ibid.). And nally hatred, passers-by concentrating on their fears of the occupants of these places. These are affective landscapes therefore, the lines of tension their most potent force. Interpretation will gradually change as memories fade and sites are experienced in new and perhaps unimagined ways. The inuence of nature has made the neglected defence works seem much more vulnerable than under the anticipated military attacks and some, like Virilio, became attracted by the aesthetics of the disappearing ones and the complexity of their meaning:
These concrete blocks were in fact the nal throw-offs of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface architecture, had shipwrecked at lands limits, at the precise moment of the skys arrival in war; they marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one nal time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space (Virilio, 1994: 12).
Due to the differing experiences of the German occupation and different priorities in post-war conservation and rural policy, the countries involved (Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the Channel Islands) have developed diverse strategies to deal with the remains of the Atlantic Wall. In all countries detailed documentation and publications are available, while at least some defence works serve nowadays as defence museums. Some signicant sites also now have statuary protection as historical landmarks or representations of the last line of permanent fortication. For others a preservation policy is under discussion, as well as the creation of educational/recreational routes (in the Netherlands).
Greenham Common, West Berkshire, England

Places of conict are traditionally dened as battlegrounds, the places where actual combat occurred. Greenham Common is a battleground in a sense. It was a Soviet target during the later Cold War, and therefore could in those terms have become a battleeld, its distance from enemy territory a reection of the improved capability of sophisticated weapons systems that brought this place within range. But the signicant line of tension at Greenham turned out not to be that between East and West, but between the military community charged with maintaining, securing and being prepared to operate ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs), and those of 37
the peace community opposed to this deployment. The line of tension in this case is the boundary that divided these two constituencies (Schoeld and Anderton, 2000). Greenham Common is synonymous with the escalation of the arms race in the Cold War (Cocroft and Thomas, 2003: 76-8). It was one of the six bases in Europe that were home to ground-launched cruise missiles, and it was the place that became the focal point for opposition to nuclear arms and armament: Greenham women were frequently in the news, causing obstructions to cruise convoys and disrupting movement around the base perimeter. This was therefore a place of opposition within the society that hosted American service communities within the wider context of Nato. In effect, the United States Air Force was responsible for maintaining this weapons system, and did so at the specially (Nato) commissioned GLCM alert and maintenance area (Gama). Beyond the fences that dened this site was one of the several peace camps at Greenham occupied by the women who opposed cruise deployment. Like the Cold War, that gave these actions a global political context, this too was effectively a stand-off, articulated at local scale. The peace community and service personnel lived a more or less peaceful coexistence, the war in their terms being more a war of words than physical actions. Now, ten years after cruise missiles were removed under international treaty, Gama remains, as do the physical remnants of the peace camps and signicantly the boundary that kept these communities apart. This tattered fence denes the ideological struggle that in part dened this later period of the Cold War; it places gender issues central to the discussions of conict and its role and purpose in the modern world, and provides a physical legacy of the actions and interactions of military personnel and the peace community. No longer visible but recorded on lm, photograph and oral histories are various symbolic forms of protest such as brightly coloured wools, childrens clothes, photographs, placards and leaets attached to the fences (Blackwood. 1984; Junor, 1995). Their purpose was to subvert the fences; to make them less male, less military, less functional and more ridiculous (Schoeld and Anderton, 2000: 244). For all of these reasons the fence has been included in the sites statutory protection. In this example, conict is recognised as occurring at a local scale, and in a microcosm of global events and conicting ideologies during the Cold War, between East and West on the one hand, and within the West, between those favouring and opposing nuclear arms. The remaining fence holds signicance as the focus of that opposition, a signicance that appears greater given that most other boundaries of the Cold War are reduced now to memory. Greenham has also inspired numerous artists and writers since its abandonment ten years ago, people who feel its strength and inherent value for conveying messages forward into the future (such as Kippin, 2001). Some will gain insight from the crumbled ruins and expanses of concrete that remain; others will be more inspired by art and literature, just as many have been inspired by war art and the war poems and novels of the First World War and the artistic reections of the Second World War. A diversity of legacies will therefore bring greater benets to a wider range of people. 38
Lines of tension
Interpretations
What all of these examples demonstrate is the multi-vocality of these historic lines of tension, specically in terms of cultural heritage. For every group veterans, politicians, activists, archaeologists, historians, preservationists, tourists the material remains represent different values and priorities. As archaeologists and historians we recognise their potency as places of historic value and signicance, places that convey the meaning of past events. We need these artefacts, sites and landscapes to provide that rst hand experience; that sense of place and of occasion. We try to interpret these places objectively, and now increasingly in a critical way, enquiring as to the accuracy and comprehensiveness of written sources (rst hand and ofcial historic overviews), oral histories and physical remains. There are reports of some trench systems on the Western Front that archaeological remains clearly show having seen conict, yet which do not appear in any ofcial records. Here archaeology will play a signicant part in interpretation. Over time perceptions have changed, and will continue to do so under the inuence of new developments and new priorities in society, both at local, national and international level. Remarkably, the continuity of specic public acts of remembrance such as the daily Last Post ceremony at the Meense Poort at Ypres, Remembrance Day, the national ceremonies on 4 May in the Netherlands have a varying association with the physical remains of the former places of conict commemorated; their location is sometimes far away from the places of ceremony and often their appearance or surroundings have changed more than the rituals. However, the reinterpretation of historical events by means of popular culture has an even greater impact on the remnants. The divergence between the original material authenticity of the place and the reinterpreted sense of the place increases. As Detlef Hoffmann has noted for other examples, the authentic places of memory are increasingly dened by the longing for authenticity and experience, by the subjectivity of the recalled and the objectivity of the place; and the line between the two is difcult to draw (Hoffmann, 2000: 43). Military archaeology is comparatively new as an objective study of the past, having previously been more for collection and often the sale of artefacts and war memorabilia. Battleeld tourism is often signicant immediately after the end of hostilities, with a period of grieving, burial, mourning and remembrance giving way to interest in the conditions of war. Commemorative actions will continue and the sacred land will inevitably and always be laden with meaning and memory for that reason. In terms of memory, John Keegan has noted how all 600 British war cemeteries in France survive and are:
much visited by the British, sometimes by the grand-grandchildren of those buried within, as poignant remembrance cards testify, but also by the curious of many nationalities. None fail to be moved by their extraordinary beauty. In spring, when the owers blossom, the cemeteries are places of renewal and almost of hope, in autumn, when the leaves fall, of reection and remembrance (Keegan, 2001: 407).
39
In the case of (formerly) occupied territory the feelings had for long been dominated by hatred and vengeance, while in countries that successfully defended themselves attitudes are likely to be very different. This is inevitable, though the distinctions will gradually reduce with time, as can be noticed in the case of the Atlantic Wall, which became placed in the range of historic fortications. According to Virilio:
the Atlantic Wall is, in fact, a military conservation area on Europes outer shore the last bastion is a theatre where wars past and present are condensed in one spot Fortress Europe is a masterpiece of retrenchment; every trick in the book is used to defend it (Virilio, 1975, editorial translation).
Since the end of the Second World War many defence works have been destroyed to erase the symbols of painful memories, but equally some have been converted into permanent houses or holiday accommodation; others are nowadays in use as war museums. From works of defence they have become monuments to be valued and protected (Ambachtsheer, 1995).
Meaning
All books on European history contain references to historic conicts as a constituent element for understanding the past; often the narrative is composed as a series of military conicts and a redivision of powers and land. The very term interwar period makes evident how deep the impact is of the two world wars, especially on European culture, but only rarely are the exact places of the contested borders, the battleelds, the numbers of lost lives and casualties indicated. Only those who nowadays cross the borders and seek to explore former places of conict will nd the traces of wartime heritage in all its ambivalence and its changing surrounding landscape, and mostly in peace; in that respect the sense of place is nowadays more positive than it was during the period of conict. The remains of the lines of tension the military works as well as the memorials and the cemeteries can be read in various ways: as products of fortication techniques, of military architecture, of military technology, of commemorative art, of human tragedy. Rather than relating the heritage to heroes and victims, to national glory or defeat, it is important to redene the lines of tension in terms of a common heritage of a closed conict. Just like the Roman limes, the long lines related to the three major conicts in twentieth century Europe can be regarded in terms of crossborder heritage providing a unique sense of recent history. According to the increasing interest, reected also by a large number of fortress groups, publications and websites, the newest function will be a site of historic interest, an interesting place to visit, in the long tradition of other fortications, be it of Roman, Norman, Venetian or Napoleonic times. Perhaps it will be more difcult to keep the piety for those killed and retain the landscape setting of fortications and battleelds than to preserve the remains of buildings and monuments. Thus far, only at national or regional/local level have preservation policies been developed, if at all. As a consequence, the former lines of tension that once belonged to one entity 40
Lines of tension
have survived in a different representation, but gradually they are seen increasingly in the perspective of cultural heritage rather than as alien or awful objects. The main point here concerns the signicance of these battleelds and places of conict and memory for providing a context and a tangible legacy to denitive historic events, and the key role of the actual lines of tension, the places at which the opposing forces met (in reality or symbolically), in the interpretation of these sometimes painful pasts on a European scale. It is for these related reasons that we can read signicance into the fence that divided the peace and military communities at Greenham, shouting at each other from either side of a decorated fence; feeling the gaze of East German border guards as one looks across the wall from West into East Berlin; and the strategists view of the Western Front, with troops lined up in opposition, or the Atlantic Wall, a robust defence of sts and armour, facing an unseen enemy. In all cases it is the line itself that provides the key to interpreting the event from both sides, as well as all the other material remains preserved in the locality.
Proposals for future action

Lines of tension provide valuable lessons for present and future generations of Europeans. They provide the material evidence for a collective past, and a context for planning for the future. This can be achieved in two ways: research and conservation (including education). Research will ideally move beyond the constraints of separate disciplines, and become more integrated. Historians and social historians can combine to examine sources both for conict per se, and its wider social and economic implications. The physical mapping of remains is important, and here geographers and archaeologists can work together to develop a more thorough understanding of the landscapes of war. Geographical information systems will be invaluable in providing views of the battleelds never before seen or appreciated, and allowing a more experiential interpretation. Anthropologists too will have a valuable contribution to make, both in understanding the experience of war, and the motivations for researching it. Those engaged with the media could explore popular and media accounts to determine the degree to which actual events contradict media reporting. Archaeologists, heritage managers and anthropologists can combine to research the most effective ways of managing these historic battleelds, and to contribute to a wider debate about the role of heritage in reducing the risk of future conict. Another aspect of research is less archaeological but more pragmatic, and more pressing. These places of war and especially the lines of tension are deadly landscapes, with unexploded ordnance and landmines a major threat in areas often now in agricultural use. The role of historic aerial photographs in determining risk by predicting the likelihood of unexploded ordnance has already been applied to the Second World War (Going, 2002), and will have wider application. 41
Conservation involves taking decisions now that will determine the legacy available for future generations. The remains of contested borders and places of conict vary in character, recognisability, coherence and spatial context. Most European countries have included historical defence works in their lists of protected monuments on the basis of their historicity (from the Roman limes to the Cold War). Some countries are still hesitant to see the physical traces of the Second World War in terms of heritage because of the painful memories. Also legal rules can have a restrictive effect on acknowledgement or protection, such as the fty-years rule, which excludes sites less than fty-years-old from being listed. A revision of these restrictions would enable a wider range of heritage resources to be considered at all levels. Meanwhile, the former strategic landscape of the places of conict is in a constant process of change for peaceful reasons (urban development, recreation and tourism, infrastructure, coastal reinforcement and so forth). To guide these changes with respect for the historical meaning of these places, an integrated policy of preservation and cultural planology is recommended, such as the adoption of cultural historical value maps used in the Netherlands, or based upon characterisation principles, as is taking place now in England and elsewhere (Fairclough and Rippon, 2002). In some cases former fortresses can be converted to museums dedicated to the conict in which they played a role, but other kinds of reuse which will leave the sites military character more or less intact should be encouraged as well. Some former lines of tension are now already part of recreational routes, provided with information panels. Also war cemeteries and former battleelds are indicated as places to visit. The theme of historic lines of tension has thus far been mostly addressed at a national level, and especially in western European countries. It is recommended to encourage more international collaboration and exchange of knowledge across Europe, in order to develop a better understanding of the two sides of all contested borders.
References
Ambachtsheer, H.F., Van verdediging naar bescherming. De Atlantikwall in Den Haag. Municipality of The Hague (VOM series), The Hague, 1995. Blackwood, Caroline, On the perimeter, Flamingo, 1984. Cave, Nigel, Battleeld conservation: rst international workshop in Arras, 29th February-4th March 2000, Battleelds Review 10, n.d., pp. 41-60. Cocroft, Wayne, and Thomas, Roger J.C., Cold War: building for nuclear confrontation, 1946-89. English Heritage, 2003. Cruickshank, Charles, The German occupation of the Channel Islands, The Guernsey Press Company Ltd, 1975. 42
Lines of tension
Deller, Jeremy, The English Civil War Part II: personal accounts of the 1984-85 miners strike, Artangel, 2002. Fairclough, Graham, and Rippon, Stephen, (eds) Europes cultural landscape: archaeologists and the management of change, Europae Archaeologiae Consilium Occasional Paper 2, 2002. Foot, William, Public archaeology: defended areas of World War II, Conservation Bulletin 44, 2003, pp. 8-11. Going, Chis, Historic air photographs help map war risk, GI News, JanuaryFebruary 2002, pp. 38-43. Gross, Manfred, Rohde, Horst, Rolf, Rudi, Wegener, Wolfgang, Der Westwall, vom Denkmalwert des Unerfreulichen, Rheinland-Verlag GmbH, Cologne, 1997. Heijster, Richard, Ieper 14/18, Lannoo, Tielt, 1998. Hoffmann, Detlef, Authentische Erinnerungsorte. Von der Sehnsucht nach Echtheit und Erlebnis, in Meier, Hans-Rudolf und Wohlleben, Marion, Bauten und Orte als Trger von Erinnerung. Die Erinnerungsdebatte und die Denkmalpege, Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zrich, Zurich, 2000, pp. 31-46. Jarman, Neil, Troubling remnants: dealing with the remains of conict in Northern Ireland, in Schoeld, John, Johnson, William Gray, and Beck, Colleen (eds), Material culture: the archaeology of twentieth century conict, Routledge, 2002. Kauppi, Ulla-Riitta, The Salpa line: a monument to the future and the traces of war in the Finnish cultural landscape, in Schoeld, John, Johnson, William Gray, and Beck, Colleen, (eds) Material Culture: the archaeology of twentieth century conict, Routledge, 2002, pp. 49-57. Keegan, John, The First War, an illustrated history , Random House, London, 2001. Kippin, John, Cold War pastoral: Greenham Common, Black Dog Publishing, 2001. Junor, Beth, Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp: a history of non-violent resistance 1984-1995, Working Press, 1995. Northern Star Magazine, June 2002 (article 6: RHQ AFNORTH celebrates 35th anniversary). Partridge, Colin and Davenport, Trevor George, The fortications of Alderney, Alderney Publishers, 1993. Razac, Olivier, Barbed wire: a political history , Prole Books Ltd., 2002. Renier, Pierre, Festung Guernsey 1944 an analysis of the ofcial German handbook on their island fortress Part 1, Channel Islands Occupation Review 20, 1995, pp. 5-29. Rolf, Rudi, Der Atlantikwall, Perlenschnur aus Stahlbeton, AMA Verlag, Beetsterzwaag, 1983. 43
Rolf, Rudi, Der Atlantikwall. Die Bauten der deutschen Kstenbefestingungen 1940-1945, Biblio Verlag, Osnabrck, 1998. Saunders, Nicholas J., Bodies of metal, shells of memory: Trench Art and the Great War recycled, Journal of Material Culture 5 (1), 2000, pp. 43-67. Saunders, Nicholas J., Excavating memories: archaeology and the Great War, 1914-2001, Antiquity 76, 2002, pp. 101-8. Schoeld, John, Conserving recent military remains: choices and challenges for the twenty-rst century, in Chitty, Gill, and Baker, David, (eds) Managing historic sites and buildings: reconciling presentation and preservation, Routledge, 1999, pp. 173-86. Schoeld, John, and Anderton, Mike, The queer archaeology of Green Gate: interpreting contested space at Greenham Common Airbase, World Archaeology 32 (2), 2000, pp. 236-51. Szpanowski, Piotr, Before and after the Change: the social-economic transition period and its impact on the agriculture and cultural landscape of Poland, in Fairclough, Graham, and Rippon, Stephen, (eds) Europes cultural landscape: archaeologists and the management of change, Europae Archaeologiae Consilium Occasional Paper 2, 2002, pp. 125-32. Tarlow, Sarah, An archaeology of remembering: death, bereavement and the First World War, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 7(1), 1997, pp. 105-21. Uzzell, David, The hot interpretation of the Cold War, in Monuments of war: the evaluation, recording and management of twentieth-century military sites, English Heritage, 1998, pp. 18-21. Virilio, Paul, Bunker archeology, Les Editions du Demi-Cercle (translated from the French edition of 1975 by George Collins), 1994. Visser, H.R., Wieringen, J.S. van, and Kruijff, T. de (eds), Kazematten in het Interbellum, Stichting Menno van Coehoorn/Buijten & Schipperheijn, Utrecht/Amsterdam, 2002. Selected websites for illustrations and background http://www.atlantikwall.net/ (The Atlantikwall Website) http://www.ctrebova.cz/co/ (Hlavn strnka eskoslovenskho opevnn 19351938) http://www.geocities.com/pentagon/1630/fortications_info.htm (Fortications) http://www.greenham-common.org.uk (Greenham a common inheritance) http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/greenham/peacecamp.htm (Greenham Common the Womens Peace Camp) http://www.victorian.fortunecity.com/lexington/12/ (The fortress page) http://www.worldwar1.com/sftour.htm (Western Front tourists guide)
44
Peaceful now, but evocative, such landscapes of the Western Front serve to memorialise the War and impress upon visitors its scale and physical impact.
45
Excavated and restored. Trench systems at Vimy Ridge.
Landscapes of remembrance on the Western Front.
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A coastal battery and anti-tank wall on Guernsey, now enjoyed by tourists.
Clenched sts on the Atlantic Wall: direction-nding towers on Guernsey's west coast.
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CHAPTER III BOUNDARIES IN THE LANDSCAPE AND IN THE CITY

Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper and Marieke Kuipers
State boundaries are traditionally conceived of as the limits of a national territory. But they are also socio-spatial constructions related to territoriality, sovereignty, identity and landscape. Their manifestations as well as their meanings result from various practices and discourses in relation to power and place. Borders express both lines of division and lines of contact, inclusion or exclusion and, possibly, contestation. Besides the intended artefacts of demarcation and national defence, various side effects can be noted of the presence of a boundary in the landscape. Differences in legislation, policy, economy, ideology and culture have also a direct inuence on the borderscape. The signicance and the location of boundaries have changed tremendously among European countries, especially in the course of the twentieth century. Recently, some of the former barriers are tending to become more open and partially obsolete, if not removed, while new barriers are being constructed around the extended European Union. This chapter addresses the spatial effects of the geographical boundaries within Europe, especially within cities, and includes examples of Berlin and Kerkrade-Herzogenrath. The concept of Europe can be related to many entities: a continent, a collection of communities in an area of moderate and sometimes wet climate or a co-operative political entity of forty-six individual states. Each state is dened by a name and a territory, each territory is dened by boundaries to distinguish it from others. The impact of borders on the landscape goes beyond the common boundary markers and border-related premises. Over the past century, the boundaries have changed tremendously, both in character and location, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Schengen Agreement of 1992. Just as the metaphor of the Iron Curtain indicates, borders are not simply division lines on a map, they can also be material and mental barriers representing the fault lines of cultural, ideological, political and economic entities. They are equally social, political and discursive constructs, not just static naturalized categories located between states. Even if they are always more or less arbitrary lines between territorial entities, they may also have deep symbolic, cultural, historical and religious, often contested, meanings for social communities (Newman and Paasi, 1998: 187). Historically, the introduction of settled agriculture created the rst needs for boundary markers and for protection of land against wild animals and invaders. The 49
delimitation of private land started with stones, poles, fences, trees and hedges, xed on the imaginary borderline and visible for all in the landscape. As early as in Biblical times, and throughout antiquity, any re-location of the boundary markers would be severely punished.1 Markers were followed by contracts and maps, and nally by inscription in land registers, less visible on the spot but xed in lines and words on paper and secured by administrative rules. The Napoleonic administration supplemented private ownership in much of western Europe with a range of public territories municipality, province, state and these principles have kept their validity up till today. Also, land has a double meaning, one related to earth, another to country and community, and the two lands do not necessarily coincide rather the boundaries have been contested over time. As a consequence, borders between states are man-made constructions, even in desolate areas. Often, natural barriers serve to establish the boundaries, such as water, swamps and mountain ranges (for example, the Pyrenees and the Riesengebirge). Rivers can either be a boundary or an international route for trade and transport; in the latter case, articial barriers were made across their route (for example, the Rhine, Meuse, Oder, Danube). In built-up areas similar ambivalent situations exist, especially in the case of bi-national cities. Moreover, economic and sociocultural differences, like land use, language or ethnic group, are reected in the landscape in various ways. One way or another, borders create distortions in the built environment or nature, like solidications of the topographical division lines; they provide typical borderscapes on either side of the borderline (Harbers, 2003).
Types of borderscape
Depending on the chosen parameters, around six different types of civic borderscape can be distinguished, apart from the military borderscapes of national defence lines: traditional borderlands, bi-national cities, zones of interrupted connections (for example the never completed Adenbach railroad viaduct in the Rhineland), freeport zones, zones of irregular allocation or migration and obsolete delimitation zones. For the issue of cultural heritage, the deliberate border demarcations, and their recent removal in (bi-)national cities, are perhaps the most interesting and are elaborated in this chapter. The traditional model includes the borderlands on both sides of the historical boundary markers. If natural barriers were not available or not sufcient, articial barriers were created to indicate the edges of each national territory. The types of demarcation derive from the historical models used to delimit private land, though the technology has been modernised and several controlled gateways are usually created to allow legal crossing. In some cases the ancient border markers have become historical landmarks, monuments of demarcation representing several stages of border agreements.
______ 1. Cf.: Cursed is the man who moves his neighbours boundary stone, Deuteronomy 27:17.
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Boundaries in the landscape and in the city
In the Netherlands, for instance, the 544 kilometre-long irregular border with Germany reects the long history of feudal states; some border stones of 1558 near Denekamp and Hardenberg are the oldest remaining types, showing the arms of Bentheim and the Burgundian cross as references to the two rulers. Even four different series of land markers can be distinguished, referring to four different stages in the history of land re-division. The 450 kilometre-long border with Belgium was dened in detail in 1843, when it was decided to place a series of identical border poles of iron or stone with the arms of the new Belgian state and the Dutch lion on the relevant sides and a torch on top, as a symbol of vigilance.1 After more than 160 years, these poles still exist and every year they are communally inspected and, if necessary, repaired. Even on high, rugged mountain ridges, permanent boundary markers can be found, such as the square poles in the Silvretta massif, indicating the border between Switzerland and Austria. The symbolic meaning of boundary poles is so strong that this form was chosen for the recently erected monument to the Schengen Agreement to create a Europe without borders; it is located at the Europa Platz in Schengen, Luxembourg, near the borders with Germany and France. Since borderlines were meant to regulate the movement of people, by concentrating it at specic places, nature could develop without restriction on either side of the poles or fences demarcating the border. Such natural areas have otherwise become rather rare in western Europe, and after the Schengen Agreement various countries took advantage of the new opportunities arising from free border crossing and designated large borderland areas as a bi-national nature park, where the historic border landmarks are often the only man-made construction. Where border crossing is only allowed at slow speed on foot, perhaps bicycle or horse (instead of by car) one can experience the articiality, if not the arbitrariness, of a land division between nations, much more so than at a regular customs post on a highway, let alone the passport control post inside an airport terminal. One feels even more the impact of such an articial land division between two nations within a city which once formed a single cultural-historical and administrative unit. Here the historical changes of political power have been most manifest, and in recent cases also most painful. The majority of these international divides in cities arose after the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Like a lifeline on the palm, the national borderlines are inscribed in the streetscape, accompanied by different signs and various structures. Often, the borders are also noticeable by ear, due to the use of different languages. In a bi-national enclave like Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog in North Brabant, resulting from the never resolved political-administrative border conict ended by the
______ 1. For images see: www.grenspalen.nl.
51
Treaty of London (1839), where the Dutch-Belgian borderline is sometimes drawn through an old house and the control of crossing has never been very strict, the presence of a frontier within the city centre has never caused serious trouble and certainly not trauma. The scarcely tangible references to the international subdivision have a rather banal, inconspicuous character; if they have any value, it is anecdotal, very local and painless. In sharp contrast with this is the subdivision of Berlin, where the concrete wall became the symbol of the Iron Curtain between the nations of East and West in Europe. On a minor scale, the evolution of the age-old Land of s-Hertogenrade in the Maas Valley, split up into two municipalities with different cores and different nationalities, has been deeply inuenced by the internationally agreed subdivision of 1816. Just after the big wall in Berlin fell, the little Berlin wall in the Nieuwstraat/Neustrae (Newstreet), which separated the Dutch town Kerkrade from the German town Herzogenrath, was removed. At present, this binational and bilingual city is in the process of shaping the Eurode community.
Bi-national Newstreet towards Eurode: Kerkrade-Herzogenrath

Origin of the borderline on Newstreet The adjacent towns of Kerkrade (the Netherlands) and Herzogenrath (Germany) have belonged for centuries to the Land of s-Hertogenrade in the east of the Maas valley, which has a long and complicated history of ever-changing regimes and boundaries. In 1794 the territory was conquered by French troops and became incorporated into the French Republic. The entity of s-Hertogenrade, where an ageold coal mining industry had been established under the direction of the Augustinian monastery of Rolduc/Kloosterrade, fell apart after Napoleons defeat at Waterloo and the following Congress of Vienna in 1815, when new boundaries were negotiated. The Concert of Powers and local geographical elements like rivers and roads help to explain the awkward result. Here, at its west side, the old kingdom of Prussia had sought compensation for the lost territories in the east to Poland, while respecting the territorial claims of the newly-created kingdom of the Netherlands. During the negotiations population numbers and hectares of land were counted and weighted in the search for an acceptable balance in the re-division of land, but military considerations also played a role. Therefore, it was stipulated that Prussia should nowhere border on the River Maas and that the borderline on the eastern river bank should be kept back a distance corresponding to the reach of a cannon shot, as the required minimum for national defence. Consequently, the borderline is as irregular as the course of the river. In the particular case of s-Hertogenrade, the initial plan was to designate the River Worm as the new border between Prussia and the Netherlands. But when the Prussian governor discovered that a part of the trade road from Aachen to Geilenkirchen, which could be of strategic military value for possible transport of 52
troops, would then come into Dutch hands, new negotiations started. By the Treaty of Aachen (1816) the political division of the two towns, demarcated by Newstreet, became a matter of fact, despite the protests of the local authorities. When this paved road was constructed in 1785, for the transport of coal from the monasterys mines, it crossed almost completely undeveloped land, but soon it became attractive for settlement and so the linear cluster which grew up began to be called Nieuwstraat or Neustrae (Newstreet), after the nearby hamlet Stra, and then this became a street name. After 1816, for almost a century, Newstreet also functioned as a neutral, almost invisible, state borderline. The existence of a state border was simply indicated by wooden poles (replaced in 1847 by more durable ones of natural stone) and the route was marked by Prussian milestones (some of which remain). Only at the beginning and the end of the nearly two kilometre-long Newstreet, and at the road junction in Holz (at pole 231), did customs formalities have to be fullled. For the people living along this street or in the nearby settlements, the new state border did not make a serious difference in their daily life, apart from the reallocation of parishes and the establishment of road tolls by Prussia. The local inhabitants were used to frequent changes of power and kept the same dialect, culture, family relationships, social contacts and work. In this respect, it was important that the mining company kept its rights to exploit the coal basin on both sides of the state border and to make use of the River Worm for power and drainage. By then, the mining industry had become a nationalised Dutch enterprise, as a result of the earlier French conscation of the monasterial possessions of Rolduc. This was expressed by the new name of Domaniale Steenkolenmijnen. Interestingly, the French period had started to increase the importance of nation state power, not only in administrative affairs and the demarcation of state boundaries, but also in the appropriation of mineral resources, which formerly had belonged to the owner of the land according to ancient principles of the Roman Law, but then became part of the states rights of exploitation or concession. These changes remained in place in the new kingdom of the Netherlands, also after the separation of Belgium in 1839. Since that date, the polynuclear municipality of Kerkrade has belonged rmly to the Dutch part. In practice this political change did not mean very much; until 1867 eastern Dutch Limburg was also a member of the German Union, the main currency in use was Prussian, the (rail) road connections with the Dutch hinterland were poorly developed until 1871. There was nothing to hinder the development of new building activities along Newstreet, such as the ofces and workers houses of the Dominiale Mijn (now mostly vanished). In contrast, due to a radical turn in national cultural policy, the Prussian Catholics felt it necessary to seek the other side of the state border for the building of new monasteries, which was forbidden in their own state. The former Franciscan monastery, and its adjacent boys boarding school, Maria ter Engelen, on Pannesheiderstraat (now protected), 53
built in 1891-92 by Brother M. Klein, is a typical reminder of this border-crossing Kulturkampf. Visibility of the state division During the First World War, the Netherlands had anxiously but successfully tried to keep its political neutrality. For the rst time, the state division became very tangible in the streetscape and it caused serious tensions among the population. The international controversies were felt in a very harsh manner at the local level of a street. Barriers were installed in the side-roads to keep control over the trafc on Newstreet, which was no longer a neutral border zone. On the contrary, the Germans started to build a two metre-high iron curtain of barbed wire in 1915 in the middle of the street and the Dutch created a parallel entanglement in 1916, all in order to prevent espionage, desertion (from the German army) and specically smuggling and illegal trade. The Dutch inhabitants were not even allowed to open their front doors and windows on the street side. After 1918, the borderline was precisely xed between the western sidewalk (belonging to the Dutch) and the main road, which became fully German. Many so-called ying shops appeared, housed in wooden sheds on Newstreet, to take advantage of a protable cross-border trade. Also, common cultural and sports activities were organised. In the 1930s, however, the economic and political climate changed again. After a bypass had been constructed in 1936 to lead the main trafc between Herzogenrath and Aachen away from Newstreet, and thus the state border, most shops closed and the sheds were removed. New tensions arose and they increased after a 2.5 metre-high wall of barbed wire was created by the Germans in 1939 on Newstreet and placed under armed control. In May 1940, Kerkrade and the entire state of the Netherlands became heavily involved in the Second World War; the traditional cross-border contacts were blocked and instead, both population and buildings suffered from the (military) ghting and from severe border control. After 1945, the physical division of the state border in Newstreet remained, as well as strictly limited cross-border trafc, mainly for economic reasons. And it took a long time before social relations between the neighbouring towns were restored. Besides the negative wartime experiences, the inux of Ostfremde (strangers from the eastern provinces) in Herzogenrath, who did not speak the local dialect and could not share the common local history, made the Dutch keep a mental distance. Gradually, the tensions became less severe and restricted cross-border trafc was allowed for people and goods under the vigilant eye of the douaniers, though smuggling activities went on. Along with the diminishing of the Dutch-German tensions, the physical border division decreased. In the mid-1950s, the barbed wire was replaced by a 120 centimetre-high fence and in 1968 this construction was replaced by a long series of Leicon concrete blocks about 40 centimetres in height in the 54
middle of the now widened (on the German side) and tarmac-surfaced Newstreet. Although two passageways were provided for local cross-border trafc on foot, this small barrier was nicknamed the little Berlin wall, to indicate that the physical separation was the embodiment of an unwanted division between the two communities. The elongated Newstreet became surrounded by new city extensions from both Kerkrade and Herzogenrath; the cities grew together, closer to the borderline. Meanwhile, a tremendous shift took place in regional employment patterns. For centuries the coal mining industry had been of major importance at Kerkrade. But in 1969 the Dutch government decided to close down the Dominiale Mijn (and other mines), because it was no longer of economic advantage. The Dutch authorities had developed a preference for other resources of energy (oil, gas, nuclear power) and their liberal economic policy was not in favour of protecting the costly national mining industry. In 1974, the headgear of the Dominiale Mijn, which had been a characteristic industrial landmark of Newstreet, was pulled down and much more of the industrial heritage including some border-related railway buildings was to disappear in the area. Closure was seen as synonymous with superuity, with the inevitable consequence of demolition. The removal of all mining installations was aided by national and European Community funds. Kerkrade had to develop a new economic base and a new cultural identity, just like nearby Heerlen. Cross-border commuting to Germany, which already existed, increased, but in the later 1970s, employment was also hard to nd on the other side of the state border. Cross-border trade and currency exchange still provided some income, but even these economic activities were to become less protable in the course of time because of increasing western European co-operation, since in 1951 the European Coal and Steel Community had been founded, to be followed soon after by the European Economic Community. Fading traces, fading memories However seriously the challenge to prevent smuggling was regarded, the Dutch and German douaniers were not allowed to continue their work across the state border (in marked contrast to the Belgian situation in relation to the Dutch and vice versa). Apparently, this was a reaction to unpleasant wartime experiences. The customs ofcers had to know their territory and the exact borderline by heart, and to walk along these to control and prevent illegal crossing. For the control of legal crossings, at each end of Newstreet two sets of simple but separate ofces were built with an equally nondescript no mans land between. A new crossing point had been scheduled for years, to be located at the new highway from Limburg to Herzogenrath, but was never realised. Instead, the customs ofcers began much closer co-operation and in 1972 the Dutch moved into the German customs ofce building at Haanrade-Herzogenrath, which was more comfortable. For passengers, the border crossing if it had any impact at all was reduced to one moment and 55
often did not even require a stop. Entering another state became just as mundane as the unremarkable buildings of the customs ofces. Today it is hard to imagine how serious a border crossing was in the early post-war period. On a personal note, I [Marieke Kuipers] recall my rst passage across the Dutch-German border at Emmerich or Venlo in 1968. Travelling east, leaving the Netherlands, was much more stressful than going south. The controls at the borders were very different, because the close co-operation with the Belgians had started at a much earlier stage and there still remained high sensitivity towards the Germans. For a long time my parents had wanted to avoid direct visual confrontation with German ofcials in uniform, due to their personal hurtful wartime experiences, and therefore they had preferred the badly signposted routes through Belgium and France on the way to Switzerland rather than the more convenient Autobahn. It was impossible not to notice that one was crossing a state border; it was announced a good three kilometres ahead of the actual gate, where a complete stop was compulsory for passport control, with, additionally, a thorough inspection of the interior of the car. What made the impact of the border crossing even more striking was the mere fact that one had to pass two controls and the long strip of no mans land in between. Nearing the second, German, control post one was fully aware of entering another country, because of the different signs, uniforms and language. The intensity of control mostly to check smuggling was always unpredictable, but in most cases carried out very properly. Although West Germany was and remains the most important economic partner of the Netherlands and political relations had been normalised again after 1945, there was still a distinct slight tension when entering Germany, because it was associated with the dark period of the occupation of the 1940s and with the dark clouds above West Germanys eastern neighbours behind the Iron Curtain, bringing the coldness of the Cold War nearer. But these feelings of tension faded as soon as the German customs ofce was left behind, just like the moment after the monthly test of the warning signal in our hometown. Four years later, I was able to stay a short while in Berlin and to experience personally its intense dividedness: the humiliating inspection for passport control at Checkpoint Charlie and viewing at night, from the television tower on Alexanderplatz, the contrasts between the bright lights of West Berlin and the scarcely-lit East. Standing on the Pariser Platz, I could experience the essence of the closure by the wall, when the view through the Brandenburg Gate was blocked by the concrete panels behind it. Instead, it was clear I was expected to look around at the eastern side and take notice of the red banners covering the facades and proclaiming the friendship between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Cuba. No wonder the Berlin Wall became the symbol of the ideological division between East and West, the paradigm of a hard borderline in Europe. After these Berlin experiences, nearly all border crossings in western Europe lost (not only for 56
me) their tensions and went hand in hand with a decrease of formalities. Only the pragmatic aspect of different currencies and languages reminded the traveller of crossing a state border. The noticeable relaxation of formalities after the 1970s was a prelude to the Schengen Agreement. The neighbouring towns of Kerkrade and Herzogenrath were the rst to seek both political and pragmatic solutions to reduce the impact of the state border between them. In July 1991, the two municipalities decided to create an overall cross-border co-operation under the name Eurode. This name refers both to Europe and to the place name element rode (to take root, to reclaim land), which is similar to the sufx rade and which is represented in the names of the two main historic buildings: Rolduc (Rode-le-Duc) in Kerkrade and the Rode castle in Herzogenrath. One of the rst actions was to pull down the low wall of Leicon blocks marking the dividing line on Newstreet and to reconstruct the road as a single trafc route. The inauguration of the reconstructed road and the newly added monuments, in May 1995, was attended by the two foreign ministers, to underline the international and European dimension. For the two local communities this event was accompanied by great Eurode festivities to promote mutual understanding and participation. Additionally, various projects have begun to intensify the inter-communal activities in the elds of education, language (especially the local dialect), culture, sports, the re service, government and business (Technologie Park Herzogenrath, Eurode Business Centre). One remarkable result is the Plitschard housing estate, built on German soil, in Merkstein/Herzogenrath, according to a Dutch method. More festivities and attractions have been organised to strengthen the common ties between the two communities, initiated by the Eurode 2000+ Foundation. Although most initiatives are clearly future-oriented, the common heritage of the past is also used as a tool for building a closer relationship in the bi-national city. The future will be based on their common history, which has very long roots. The cultural heritage of the border is an important element in this strategy, in a very subtle manner. The line is now indicated by dark rubber dots in the pavement, or as an engraved line in a circular oor plate inside a new building over the borderline, while a section of the Leicon blocks has been preserved, in the middle of a roundabout. The reshaped Newstreet is now back to normal as it used to be before the First World War. The memories of the sharp division will gradually fade away, perhaps, while the small border monuments will last, as truly historic landmarks.
The Berlin Wall a frightening border, today redundant

The Iron Curtain made visible The Berlin Wall, a geopolitical border between East and West, rigid and frightening, with the constant efforts to strengthen its defences to perfection. It was all the 57
more shocking and violent because it was raised on a dividing line which already ran through the city, but had never been more than an invisible abstraction. In the space of a few hours, on the night of 12 to 13 August 1961, the boundary between the Russian-sector districts Mitte, Friedrichshain, Treptow, Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow and the others, which the three western allies had occupied since the end of the Second World War, was turned into a deadly barrier. As the years passed, that barrier was extended and strengthened. Mined and studded with anti-tank obstacles, oodlit at night, surveyed by soldiers on watchtowers and patrolled by others with guard-dogs, the border between the two Germanys was as impregnable as human ingenuity could make it. Even the white sand along the death strip was kept carefully raked to show any trace of footprints. A frightening border in a dead, uncompromising landscape. Slightly less visible to most Berliners, the same thing existed on the border between West Berlin and Brandenburg. Brandenburg was part of the Russian sector, and later of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), while West Berlin (in spite of its status as a four-power city) belonged to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), that is, to the western half of the Cold War world. Travellers leaving West Berlin by car had to pass through one of the checkpoints, at Drewitz/Dreilinden, Staaken or Stolpe/Heiligensee, take one of three designated transit routes across the GDR and reexit into the FRG through one of the four checkpoints at Hirschberg, Marienborn/Helmstedt, Herleshausen/Wartha or Zarrentin/Gudow. Conned to the East and prevented from even approaching the border by barriers and checkpoints at a safe distance from it, East Berliners were accustomed to narrow horizons, and not really aware of the borderscapes physical realities. West Berliners, on the other hand or at least the ones who travelled knew what transiting across East Germany was like. There were no special dangers if they followed the rules, but the experience was striking enough to leave some of them rigid with anxiety. The checkpoints were the only openings in the East/West border, and guards, watchtowers, mobile barriers and a sophisticated system for screening people and vehicles were there to protect them. Transit Having lived in Berlin for a year and a half before the wall came down in November 1989, I [Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper] well remember the whole ritual of transit: we left West Berlin on the motorway and entered a no mans land between Dreilinden and Drewitz on our left, a small tank on a concrete plinth commemorating the Red Armys liberation of Berlin in 1945, on our right, a tall slab of white concrete, carrying the GDRs emblem, the hammer and compass. Directed off the motorway into the checkpoint area, with its squat, sturdy watchtower, we chose a queue and stopped the car. On ne days, we switched off the engine to cut down the fumes and like 58
people in the other queues got out and pushed the car, chatting to other drivers. Depending on trafc and the number of lanes open, this part of the process could take anything from 10 minutes to an hour. Back in the car, we edged up to the rst guardpost a hut-like structure, rather like a tollbooth on a French motorway and handed in our passports. A guard with a gun in his belt came over and started asking questions: How many people? Where are you headed?, etc. Other soldiers with ries stood around on the perimeter. Not a smile in sight, and we stayed deadpan too. No point in wasting energy better to keep ones mouth shut. We moved forward, alongside a covered conveyor belt, which was taking our passports to the hut at the other end, where we would get them back, with a transit visa, indicating our names, car number and time of entry. How many people? Uncover your ears! Yet again, our faces were scrutinised. On bad days, the car got searched too inside and (using mirrors) underneath. That could take some time, and the toilets were off-limits. Then we were off and, swinging left, back on the motorway. Over one bridge, under another with adverts for Wolfen lms and we were in the GDR. On both sides, the Brandenburg landscape to us remote and unreal, since leaving the road or stopping, except at approved rest areas, was forbidden. The speed limit was 100 kilometres per hour. The road was bad and police checks were frequent. When we left the GDR, the same ritual, the same questions. No, we hadnt left the road. No, we hadnt bought anything at the Intershop. Once again, our faces were peered at, our visas were collected, probably for ling, and we left the GDR, crossing another stretch of no mans land into the FRG back to real life in a real landscape. The whole thing should have got easier with practice. In fact, the third or fourth time was as hard as the rst if not harder. Guarding the border To repeat: transiting was not really dangerous, and the formalities were relatively quick. People entering the GDR as visitors and, above all, leaving afterwards, were checked far more thoroughly, and the whole process was much slower. With very few exceptions, GDR citizens could not visit the West. The border guards (Grenztruppen) were the only ones who got to know the dead and empty landscape on the border. All-powerful at the checkpoints, they could lord it over travellers, but the life they led on their watchtowers and along the sealed frontier was itself one of constant anxiety. They operated in twos, but switched partners every four to six weeks, so building up mutual trust was impossible. They lived in dread that a fugitive, or even a eeing fellow-soldier, would appear out of nowhere, shoot at them, and that they would have to return his re. Any misconduct, any lack of courage was instantly punished by court martial. The authorities fed them ctitious accounts of escape attempts to keep them on their toes and scared. 59
Our sources for all this are the research and interviews carried out by the various associations and individuals who are working to ensure that the border is not just forgotten.1 A regular part of this has been campaigning to save actual traces of the wall and the other defence works on the border, many of which have now been listed as historic monuments by heritage departments in the regions concerned.2 Tracking the remnants Why preserve the traces of this deadly barrier? Why remember the anguish and the horror? Who wants to remember? Who wants to know? What is the heritage value of these remains? What do they look like now? How much do they tell us? How clear is their message? What will their emotional impact be on people who knew the border, and people who did not? We need to remember that the border fortications between the two Germanys were dismantled years ago, and that we celebrated the fteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 2004. The mines, the anti-tank obstacles, the barbed wire, the metal barriers and the electric fences were all cleared in the months after the opening of the wall. The concrete slabs, with their tubular coping of asbestos cement, which epitomise the wall, have been taken down and recycled for use in building roads. The only exceptions are the protected areas, where a few hundred metres of the wall, a piece of the death strip and a couple of watchtowers have been preserved. Even that took a lot of doing. For one thing, there were local residents and local decision-makers who never wanted to see the wall again and were anxious to forget it as quickly as they could and their opposition had to be overcome rst. Memories of imprisonment, oppression and fear were simply too recent. To start with, in other words, there were very few people who wanted to be reminded of the wall, and also very few who could imagine that they might want or need to remember it later. The conservationists, who have a professional duty to anticipate changes in the public mood, found themselves facing stiff opposition. Some Berliners now regret that, in the wave of euphoria which engulfed the city when the wall came down in 1990, so much of it was lost. On 13 August 2002, the Berlin Senate declared that all surviving remnants would henceforth be protected. Tourists are not the only ones who want to know where the wall used to be. East and West Berliners also want to see the physical traces of a division, whose effects social, political and cultural are still far from being erased. People today, unlike those in 1990, want to preserve the bits of the wall that are left, and gener______ 1. For example the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum in Mdlareuth near Hirschberg, in Franconia/Thuringia, where Heinz Schaffner looks after a preserved section of the wall and records rst-hand accounts by soldiers (see: http://www.moedlareuth.de/). 2. The former checkpoint at Marienborn, the Htensleben and Mdlareuth sites and what remains of the Drewitz site watchtower, pillar and plinth are listed monuments.
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ally acknowledge their historical importance. What made the public change its mind so sharply? Fortunately, no one today nds the remains of the wall and the old internal frontier the borderscapes between the two Germanys frightening. There was a time when West Berlins Bernauer Strae, overshadowed by the wall, seemed a place at the end of the world, a place lled with menace and wrapped in a brooding silence. Even people who remember it like that now look at it and see just another street, with a piece of the wall a harmless relic on one side of it. Physically, the Berlin Wall is fading, and weeds have long since invaded the death strip and covered its white sand. At astonishing speed, the border has become a historic landscape or, more accurately, an archaeological site. As such, it has also become a target for research, and a place where the imagination can roam freely. 1 As a result, it is not just the largest surviving or best-preserved sections of the wall which attract attention, but also the places where the traces are barely visible. Researchers, artists, residents and visitors are all welcome to join in helping the wall and its era to nd a place in the citys, the countrys and the worlds collective memory. Living with the traces Now that the vestiges of the Iron Curtain have become precious reminders of the Cold War and no longer frighten, people can live with them without really being aware of them. People walk their dogs on the death strip, which cuts a swathe through the city, following the line of the wall. The landscape is distinctive, with blocks of houses on one side and vegetation running riot on the other an innercity wasteland, where the borders presence is felt through its absence. Untamed, unfettered, this seems a free zone, where the normal rules do not apply, and it keeps the former East and former West apart. Suspended between past and future, it none the less hints that the future holds change. Dogs love it. The old patrol road (Postenweg), which circles West Berlin out in Brandenburg, is well surfaced and makes for good cycling. The northern part of the city, east of the suburb of Frohnau, has a pleasant stretch of open heath land. This was gouged out of the forest by the border, reected in surviving concrete posts and in traces of barbed wire embedded in tree trunks. Further south, where the landscape opens out into meadows and elds near the village of Lbars, the route is lined with bushes which have grown where the wall used to run another stretch of wasteland, which neither Berlin nor Brandenburg has bothered to clear. So, there is a choice to be made. One can look for signs of the past in the landscape, read up the background or simply stretch ones legs. One can try to imag______ 1. See, for example, the Dutch artist Ronald klein Tanks website http://www.berlinermauerspuren.de.
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ine what life was like when the wall was still standing, talk to locals or simply enjoy the fresh country air on the old patrol road, once closed to everyone except the border guards, who rattled up and down it in their Trabants. There was nothing pleasant about the Cold War but, to learn more about it, its traces on the landscape, and the remnants of the wall, can help to unlock the past.
Interpretations and meaning

Traditionally, monuments are regarded within a national framework and related to national territory as well as to history and art. History, however, has shown that the borders of a state territory can change and that boundary markers, customs ofces and barriers can become obsolete. Moreover, recent political developments have led to an intended removal of two separating walls in two cities. Here, the English saying good fences make good neighbours did not work at all. On the contrary, the separation was a traumatic experience and it is regarded by almost all as a blessing that the borders are now open again and easy to cross. But does this positive development justify the total disappearance of the material remains of the former dividing walls? However ordinary the physical substance was, the symbolic meaning was and remains immense. A border will always be needed, not to create undesirable separation within one entity but to demarcate an identity, a territory to which one belongs and where one can welcome another. In the same way, a tangible reference, on the ground, to the historic location of the now cleared division is necessary for educational reasons, as part of the common heritage of two nations and of Europe: it needs to remain visible in the landscape or in the city, just like archaeological remains showing that borders, fortied and dangerous in times of acute conict, are now de-fortied. These borderscapes will change even more in the near future, but the heritage of historic borders will retain its usefulness in promoting a common understanding of the complexity and interwoven character of history and geography.
References
Augustus, L., Driessens, J. and Schaeps, L., 200 jaar steenwegen in Kerkrade en Herzogenrath, Kerkrade, 1986. Baker, F., The Berlin Wall: production, preservation and consumption of a 20thcentury monument, in Antiquity 67, 1993, pp. 709-733. Bauwelt 24, 2002 (Stadtbauwelt): Sondernummer Berliner Mauer, Berlin, 2002. An English version may be ordered from the editor: Bauwelt, Schlterstrae 42, 10707 Berlin. Bouvy, K., Niemandsland Berlijn zonder muur, de Verbeelding, Amsterdam, 2002. 62
Brousi, R., Jannink, P., Veldhuis, W. and Nio, I. (eds), Euroscapes, Must Publishers/Architectura et Amicitia, Amsterdam, 2003. Brouwer, T., Grenspalen in Nederland, Walburg Pers, Zutphen, 1978. Ehlers, N., and Buursink, J., Bi-national cities: people, institutions, and structures, in Velde, M. van der, and Houtum, H. van (eds), Borders, regions and people, Pion, London, 2000. Dolff-Bonekmper, G., Sites of hurtful memory, in Conservation: the Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 17.2002, No. 2 (Summer 2002). Dolff-Bonekmper, G., The Berlin Wall an archaeological site in progress, in Schoeld, John, Johnson, William Gray and Beck, Colleen M. (eds), Material culture: The archaeology of 20th century conict, Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 236-48. (One World Archaeology, 44). Dolff-Bonekmper, G., Lieux de mmoire et lieux de discorde: la valeur conictuelle des monuments, in Recht, Roland, et al. (eds), Victor Hugo et le dbat patrimonial, Ed. Somogy, Paris, 2003, pp. 121-144. Feversham, P., Schmidt, L., Die Berliner Mauer heute: Denkmalwert und Umgang/The Berlin Wall today: cultural signicance and conservation issues, Verlag Bauwesen, Berlin, 1999. Flemming, T., Koch, H., Die Berliner Mauer, Geschichte eines politischen Bauwerks, Berlin, 1999. Graham, B. (ed.), Modern Europe, place, culture and identity, Arnold, London/Sydney/Auckland, 1998. Harbers, A., Borderscapes, The inuence of national borders on European spatial planning, in Brousi, R., Jannink, P., Veldhuis, W., Nio, I. (eds), Euroscapes, Must Publishers/Architectura et Amicitia (Forum Vol. 41), Amsterdam, 2003, pp. 143-166. Herpers, R.J. (ed.), Kerkrade, van dorp naar stad 1816-1998, Rabobank Kerkrade e.o., Kerkrade, 1998. Jansen, J.C.G.M., Architectuur en stedebouw in Limburg 1850-1940, Waanders/RDMZ, Zwolle/Zeist, 1994. Klein Tank, R., Berlinermauerspuren. Artproject Remaining Traces of the Berlin Wall, researched and documented on photo-video, 2000 (ongoing project, www.berlinermauerspuren.de). Kutsch, T., Almanach Herzogenrath, Verlag Josef Essers, Herzogenrath, 1972. Mbius, P., Trotnow, H., (eds), Mauern sind nicht fr ewig gebaut. Zur Geschichte der Berliner Mauer, Propylen, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin, 1990. Newman, D., Paasi, A., Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography, Progress in Human Geography 22, 2, 1998, pp. 186-207. 63
Rooijen, M. van, Grensverschijnselen, Shell Journaal Nederland, Rotterdam. Spapens, P., Kemenade, K. van, De grens gemarkeerd, Grenspalen en grenskantoren aan de landzijde, Kempen Pers, Hapert, 1992. Stenvert, R. et al., Monumenten in Nederland, Limburg, Zwolle/Zeist, Waanders/RDMZ, Zwolle/Zeist, 2003. Zandvoort, R. van (ed.), Kerkrade en de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Drukkerij Deurenberg Kerkrade, 1994. Websites www.eurode.nl (Welcome in Eurode) www.grenspalen.nl (De Grenspalen van Nederland) www.herzogenrath.de (Herzogenrath Online) www.kerkrade.nl (Gemeente Kerkrade)
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Prussian boundary pole near the crossing of Newstreet and Pannesheidestraat.
Bi-national Newstreet in 1992, with its low boundary wall of Leicon blocks in the middle.
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The Caf on the Border, at the northern end of Newstreet, Kerkrade, today closed. The street sign indicated the integration of German and Dutch street names.
The Eurode Business Centre, located exactly on the borderline at the northern end of Newstreet, KerkradeHerzogenrath.
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Concrete stele beside the motorway in the former no mans land. The GDRs emblem, the hammer and compass, was removed from the circle.
Squat watch-tower at the old Drewitz motorway checkpoint; today the weeds have taken over the tarmac.
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A Soviet tank one of those which helped to liberate Berlin in 1945 used to stand on this concrete plinth. Painted pink after 1990, it has now been replaced by one of the demolition vehicles, also painted pink, used to demolish the Berlin Wall.
The former death strip, now a mere gap in the forest of Frohnau, north of Berlin. A sandy sub-stratum was laid bare and kept raked, so that any attempt to cross could be detected. The heather took over from 1990 on.
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CHAPTER IV NEW URBAN FRONTIERS AND THE WILL TO BELONG

John Schoeld
This chapter describes the degree to which borders and distinct places are constructed and used in the urban environment. It describes how people distinguish the places where they live from the other that lies beyond, and how that separateness manifests itself both to the community and to those from outside. The historic fabric of these places its buildings and monuments will often play only a minor though signicant part in creating this distinctiveness. After a background that covers theoretical frameworks and relevant principles of heritage management, three case studies describe three distinct communities in London, with a view to assessing: the methods by which information might be gathered concerning these new urban frontiers; the tangible and intangible heritage that communities call their own (intangible in the sense of heritage without expression through material culture); and the difculties that can arise where physical boundaries are imposed as a replacement for the hidden or invisible boundaries that existed before.
Constructing urban space

Segregated residential patterns within urban space will generally reect the operation of twin processes of choice and constraint: in some cases a community may choose to live segregated from other groups; in other cases processes of prejudice and discrimination may be at work (Moon and Atkinson, 1997: 265). The principles and protocols that govern this division of urban space and give it physical expression are well documented, in particular in the elds of human geography and urbanism (Newman and Paasi, 1998). Readers will be familiar with the manner in which neighbours set themselves apart with the generally mundane and predictable, sometimes imaginative, and occasionally provocative use of hard (brick, concrete, wood) and soft (hedges and beds) boundaries. Also well documented are the hard boundaries that divide communities within cities, boundaries that may have their origin in political or religious divisions, sometimes deep rooted, sometimes recently formed. The Berlin Wall, for example, is well known, surrounding West Berlin during the Cold War as part of a wider Iron Curtain. As Feversham and Schmidt have said (1999: 10), the Berlin Wall stood both as a symbol of the Cold War and a tangible marker of the geopolitical division of Europe. Managing the legacy of the wall as cultural heritage (Dolff-Bonekmper, 2002), and its impact on 69
social identity and social practice in Berlin during and after the Cold War have also been discussed (Borneman, 1992; 1998). In Belfast, peace-lines or interface barriers separate many working class Protestant and Catholic areas of the city. Neil Jarman has described the effect these boundaries have had on the city and its inhabitants (Jarman, 2002: 283-4). He notes how most residential areas have for a long time been dominated by one community, rather than being mixed or balanced. Churches are segregated, as is the school system, workplaces as well as sports and social clubs. Most people are therefore born, brought up, live, work, socialise and are buried among their own community. Jarman goes on:
The two working-class communities have lived relatively segregated lives since the early expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, but over the thirty years of conict [approximately 1969-99] these patterns of segregation have hardened The families who lived in the streets that connected the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankill Road were in one of the most vulnerable locations and were subjected to extensive rioting and violent intimidation. The already divided communities were further polarized and a no mans land was established as a boundary zone after people moved away from the interfaces and further into the heart of their community. Initially improvised barricades or rolls of barbed wire segregated the two sides. Soon these were enhanced by more solid sheet steel fences and then further strengthened by a two-tier steel fence so that the barrier reached some 6-7 m in height.
These barriers and physical boundaries have obvious signicance in demarcating urban space and dening or imposing a sense of community. Comparisons can be made between the effect of boundaries at different scales, recognising that communities like those in Belfast withdraw from boundaries within cities just as they do from those of nations and states (Wilson and Donnan, 1998: 13). The emphasis here, however, is on exploring that sense of community and cultural identity in those places to which distinct socially- or culturally-dened groups feel attached (these places are sometimes referred to as ethnoscapes). These are often places where physical constraints are not imposed or constructed, but the interface is more subtle and therefore difcult to trace. In Berlin for example, the wall is well known. Less well known are the cultural divisions that existed and which began to take shape through the presence of French, American and British service communities during the Cold War period. These cultural differences were certainly apparent before 1989 (Schoeld, 2003). How far these traces continue to dene the character of these areas of the city today, fourteen years after the wall came down, is not known.
Character, sense of place and cultural diversity

Cultural heritage has over the past decade broadened out signicantly to include far more than just the material world the buildings and monuments with which we 70
New urban frontiers and the will to belong
are so familiar. Characterisation as a suite of techniques and ideas for understanding landscape (including townscape) in totality and on a broad scale as a means to promoting informed conservation, is now widely used in the UK and increasingly across Europe (see, for example, Fairclough and Rippon, 2002). Sense of place forms part of this characterisation agenda, seeking out what matters, why and to whom, based on well-developed principles of human geographical and historical environmental research. In turn, social signicance is an important component in determining sense of place (Byrne et al., 2001; King, 2003), recognising that values will result from social and personal experience of place, and will therefore in large part be culturally constituted. Modern heritage the recent past is also now recognised as having value, however recent or mundane the buildings or places may be (for example, Jones, 2002). And it is also now recognised that cultural heritage can be tangible in the form of buildings or monuments or intangible, in the form of customs, language and dialect, musical styles, arts and performance, rituals and so on. All of these are relevant and related considerations in dening and understanding new urban frontiers and the will to belong. A short discussion of these issues will therefore precede some examples. To begin with characterisation, the character of a place or area is dened by the unique combination of factors and inuences (characteristics) that make it distinctive, and set it apart from its neighbours (Fairclough, 2002). Areas of landscape can be distinctive in this way, as can parts of a town. Historic inuence is a major determinant of character, alongside its contemporary use and the impact of traditions and customs. Characterisation as an approach to recording these differences seeks to take account of them at a general level, seeing and valuing with a view to managing change. It recognises all areas and their characteristics, not just selected and special areas. Characterisation champions local diversity, recognising the importance of the commonplace and everyday; that these more mundane places are recognised by all, creating peoples links to history and the past, as well as to identity, sense of place, nature and the future (ibid.: 30). Characterisation also seeks to engage communities and promote participation, enabling citizens to take part in decision-making about signicance and future change. It is also about perception, considered to lie at the heart of understanding. Of particular relevance in assessing the links between cultural diversity and place is the recognition that urban and rural landscapes are a construction of intellect and emotions, containing different ideas, feelings and associations. While heritage professionals undertaking a characterisation exercise will recognise distinctive areas in terms of historic fabric, layout, design and urban topography, another level of distinctiveness will involve the perceptions of inhabitants, sometimes of very different social and ethnic origins. Recognising that degree of diversity and its implications for cultural heritage management and implementing social policy is one of the objectives of this paper. 71
Related to character is sense of place and belonging. Sense of place can operate at various levels and with various degrees of connectivity. Culturally, places will have value and signicance, and these places may be historic or landmarks in one sense or another, or they may be mundane, such as a street market for example. Either way they may be valued by the community, whose members will have a common cultural link and connection to that place, for example in remembering parades or community events and outings. Families can recognise sense of place, for example in a house they once occupied, or places where family holidays were taken. And sense of place can operate at the personal level, for a whole host of intimate or professional reasons and motivations (for example, Read, 2003, who describes these personal connections with place as sometimes creating inspirited places); place will have signicance as home as well as cultural heritage. But signicant here is the general connection between memory and place, and the recognition that places are valued at different levels and in different ways dependent upon peoples social and cultural context. Early work in this area included signicantly Dolores Haydens Power of Place project (1995), which demonstrated the cultural dimension of urban history as relevant to the construction of place and identity. Michael Bell (1997) has written about sense of place in terms of the ghosts of place, a phenomenology of place recognising the presence of those who are not physically there. Cultural heritage management practice is something traditionally imposed by heritage professionals on communities. Decisions are made by those that are qualied to know, on behalf of their constituents. That situation has changed signicantly in recent years, cultural heritage management having become more concerned with participation and accountability. Some of the more innovative work in this area has been in Australia where initial studies with the Aboriginal community on social signicance have extended to include work with recent immigrant groups. The Australian Heritage Commission for example have engaged the Chinese community to determine the signicance of Chinese heritage places, a guide has been produced to enable migrants to nd and document their own heritage places, while work by the National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales has focused on the Macedonian (Thomas, 2001) and Vietnamese communities (Thomas, 2002). In the UK, projects have been developed to examine heritage interests, for instance among the Jewish (Kushner, 1992) and Bengali communities (Gardner in press). This is a signicant area of development therefore, and one that has enabled sense of place, character and social signicance to sit centrally within discussions about cultural heritage planning. These developments have meant that heritage managers and planners can now take account of historic fabric and urban and rural morphology, but also the character of places as dened by their communities own sense of ownership. In some cases this will be manifest in physical form: religious build72
ings, for example; shops and shop frontages; signage. But ownership may also be expressed (and be potentially recoverable) in less tangible form. As Porteous (1996: 8-9) has explained, experiencing place is multi-sensory, involving smell, touch and sound alongside the obvious signicance of sight. Intangible characteristics of place can involve the distinctive smells of regional styles of cookery, and the presence of a unique combination of products on market stalls, sounds of music and singing, voices reecting styles, dialects, languages, and the acting out of customs and traditions. All of these factors contribute to the character of a place, making it distinctive and setting it apart from other neighbouring areas and places. To summarise then, places will be distinctive and display unique character in a diversity of ways. These will include historic and contemporary fabric, and peoples own sense of the past and of belonging, all of which will contribute to that areas sense of place. As we have seen some such places will be divided by physical boundaries for reasons of security, or for political or ideological reasons of separation. Most cities have distinct communities who maintain this sense of place and separation without hard boundaries. In these cases the boundaries are intangible, and rely on more subtle forms of enquiry to understand and map their extent and inuence. Indeed among some communities the boundaries will be more a matter of personal experience and an intimate engagement with their community space. It is important to recognise these various manifestations and the means by which boundaries are constructed and experienced, for reasons of strategic and community planning, and for the communities themselves to retain their sense of identity as a contribution to informed conservation and management. Below are some examples to illustrate this.
Three distinct London communities

Tower Hamlets gay space This rst example concerns methodology, and the means by which communities that are sometimes quite difcult to engage can contribute to discussions of place and identity. It also introduces the view that any will to belong is not conned to groups dened by ethnic codes, and can equally apply to groups dened by social status (see, for example, various papers in Pacione, 1997), age (for example, Skelton and Valentine, 1998) and sexual preference. Of these perhaps least attention has been given to communities dened by sexual preference, whose sense of place may be governed more by social constraints and sexual practice, and personal safety, than by any other culturally constituted criteria (but cf. Kenney, 1998; Moran et al., 2003; Reed, 2003). One particular study by Gavin Brown (2001) of gay mens narratives of pleasure and danger in Londons East End is signicant here for two reasons: methodology and meaning. To begin with methodology, the approach taken to assessing sense 73
of place and identity in this area involved cognitive mapping: the mapping by participants of their experiences of place social; personal or culturally constituted; or experiential. It is a simple method, now much used in geographical studies, and supported by subsequent interviews to interrogate maps and add further depths of meaning. Cognitive maps involve providing maps of the study area to members of the community for them to annotate. The result is layered information that together constitutes a cultural statement of ownership and belonging. It can dene boundaries (in this case gay space and, within and beyond that, boundaries dening zones of social and cultural signicance); it reveals meaning that members of the community attribute to places within those boundaries. Cognitive mapping is a procedure for giving meaning to place, yet at the same time allowing a high level of personal attachment to be expressed in connection with place. One of the maps described and presented by Gavin Brown highlights some distinct parts of Tower Hamlets: an art studio, and areas of housing, for example. The author dened gay areas within the borough as, areas that I consider to be gay. I would probably have to put the proviso on that I consider these areas to be, like, visible middle class, white, gay (Brown, 2001: 53). Another map, however, shows a very different perception of gay space, its author having drawn a line around the entire borough; no specic locations are recorded, although many (pubs, parks) were highlighted at interview. A third participant presents the middle ground: some large parts of the borough as constituting gay space (including the areas of housing noted by the rst interviewee), but in this case three large and quite tightly dened danger zones are also identied. Other communities have no idea of these perceptual boundaries, identied only by members of the gay community, and it may be that only those in touch with gay culture and social practices would recognise that they had indeed entered gay space. It is also the case that perceptions will vary, depending, for example, on how comfortable members of this community are with their sexuality; to what extent they have come out. These then can be among the most intangible of boundaries, dened purely by social practice (but cf. Reed, 2003 for an example of gay space dened by a physical boundary). They can nevertheless be dened, mapped and understood as constituents of urban space. The information contained in cognitive maps, and the understanding they can enable within a wider community, contribute also to promoting a cultural diversity agenda and tolerance of difference. As Brown says (2001: 60), this information has the potential to allow discussion and debate, and thus build alliances across these apparent divisions, challenging the continued privatisation of signicant (for some) public space. He goes on: [b]y listening to ordinary peoples descriptions of the urban landscape, radical urban planners and community activists can help 74
bridge the tensions between the right to privacy and access to public space and attempt to create safer and less alienating cities for everyone. Tower Hamlets Bengali space This example which uses text and photographs to describe character and distinctiveness in Londons East End makes reference to a study by Jim Gardner, being a survey of heritage protection and social inclusion (in press). The example is derived very largely from this study which concerns the Bengali community the largest minority group in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, where it has developed a distinct cultural and commercial identity within a dened geographical area. This example describes how that identity is dened, rather than focusing on its implications for heritage management and protection. As Gardner explains, this mainly Muslim community has adapted existing religious and secular historic buildings to give them new use, and thereby a new cultural signicance. Kristin Posehns photographs demonstrate how new and existing buildings, colour schemes and street furniture give a physical expression of British Asian culture in streets like Brick Lane, setting this area apart from its neighbours and allowing this appreciation of distinctiveness to feed into management and planning discussions with community workers and leaders. To walk into and out of this part of Tower Hamlets is to clearly move into and then beyond Bengali space. With buildings and other material expressions, discussions with members and leaders of this community have revealed a diversity of site types that contribute most to the character of the area, and have signicance as a result. Religious buildings (in this case mosques) are prominent, as are community centres, streets or markets, parks and gardens, housing, schools and public monuments and sculpture. The Jagonari Centre on the Whitechapel Road is an example of how importance to the community is recognised and expressed. This community centre was purpose-built for local Asian groups and includes on its street faade mosaics in the Islamic tradition. Community centres like this provide a clear focal point: a venue for community, cultural and musical events as well as services including immigration and general advice, training and employment counselling, and day care for the young and elderly. Moving beyond the buildings themselves, some streets were identied as having particular signicance. Brick Lane for example, which is best known to Londoners for its balti houses and 24-hour bagel shops; it is however also the economic, social and cultural hub of the Bengali community. Here we see the interface between communities most clearly expressed. Brick Lane extends from the south, where Jewish and Bengali-run clothing manufacturing is based, through the Bengali retail, cultural and restaurant area in the centre, to the Pakistani-dominated leather industry to the north. This northern part of Brick Lane houses two Jewish 24-hour bagel shops, and terminates at Boundary Estate, now home to many Bengali families, as evidenced 75
by signage and grafti tags. As Gardner has recorded, Brick Lane now contains more than two dozen curry houses, grocers selling Asian produce and halal meat, Asian video, music and book shops, fabrics and clothing retailers as well as other businesses and professional ofces serving the local community. The signicance of Brick Lane has been increased, however, by the desire of the community since the late 1980s to make a stronger impression on its streetscape; to further impose on an area of mixed cultural afliations a distinctly Bengali sense of place and community. As Gardner has noted (ibid.), part of the motivation for this was to draw tourists and Londoners to their restaurants and businesses as part of Hospitality Bangladesh. Sense of identity is clearly apparent in the street furniture decorated with traditional motifs and colours (red, green), and street signs in both English and Bengali. An arch forms a gateway into and out of this cultural space which has sufcient identity (and now also formal recognition) to ensure this rst Little Bangladesh can sit alongside the Chinatowns that now form a distinct part of (and a distinct space within) most major cities around the world. Distinctiveness is also apparent in the visual codes of dress, and shop window displays, the smells of food in the market or cooking in restaurants, and in the voices and music streaming from open doorways and windows and market stalls. The sense of place here is all embracing. What this example demonstrates is the extent to which urban space can be agged as having distinctive character reecting historic origins and contemporary use. It shows how distinctiveness can indeed be read in the language of grafti tagging and (literally) of signage, as well as the buildings, the use of space, street furniture and temporary street decorations. But it can also be read through the more subtle traces: the use of that urban space, and its buildings and streets; the exploration of place using all the senses, and taking in the distinctive smells, sights, sounds and tastes. The photographic essay is an example of this. North-west London Jewish space and the case of the eruv This nal example explores the difculties that might arise when the intangible becomes tangible; when there are proposals to make an invisible imagined boundary real (see Reed, 2003, for another example of this situation). In 1991 Barnet local council, north-west London, was asked by a group of Orthodox Jews for planning permission to erect clusters of posts around the six-and-a-half square mile area dening their community (www.nwlondoneruv.org). This eruv would take the form of 6 to 7 metre-high posts connected near the top with wire or string creating an enclosure. Not a hard boundary therefore, but something symbolic and indicative; something that exists mainly in the minds of those who believe in it (Trillin, 1994: 50). Most of the boundaries for this eruv were in place already: existing sections of the Northern Line of the London Underground for example, and 76
parts of the M1 motorway. People who live within eruv in other countries are not even aware of it: in Israel and the United States for example. The justication or desire for an eruv is worth outlining. Some of the Orthodox observe Sabbath restrictions that include a prohibition against carrying anything unless they are within their own private domain their home in other words. The purpose of the eruv is to extend that private domain to the boundaries of the eruv (effectively therefore co-operative private territory). This proposal to connect existing points with wire, and to erect some eighty-ve new posts in an area of London that already had 40 000 to 50 000 posts of one kind or another, was nevertheless opposed, with anti-eruv groups formed and petitions signed. The case of the eruv attracted the national media. Arguments against the eruv included the escalation of street clutter, but most noted that in an area where people of diverse backgrounds had always lived peacefully together by treating religion as a private matter, it was divisive for a minority to impose its religious symbols on everyone else. Where would it all end: totem poles on the heath? (Trillin, 1994: 55-6). The point was also made that eruv poles could provide a magnet for anti-Semitic vandalism, and that the wires would remind refugees of the ghettos and of concentration camps. But interestingly it was quite another view that was expressed most frequently by eruv opponents, that the eruv would create another kind of ghetto, the eruv boundaries signifying an area where Jews live, and where more Jews would come to live in order to avail themselves of the eruv. Here was a case where one group of residents wanted to impose a physical boundary, for reasons of religious practice, where an imagined (and anticipated) one already stood. The controversy about this is worth recalling, as is the fact that disagreement was also felt within the Jewish community, not just between and outside of it. It took several years for a decision to be reached. The proposal to construct an eruv was nally granted permission six years after community members rst went around mapping out its boundaries. It eventually came into use in February 2003.
Interpretations
Boundaries only exist in the mind (grafti written on a Department of Energ y sign on the fence separating the nuclear testing grounds of the Nevada Test Site in the USA from the peace camp at which protestors voiced their opposition).
The three examples cited each contribute separately to interpreting the construction of urban space and identity. They describe the criteria by which identity and character may be considered distinctive, focusing on the tangible and intangible traces of urban life. They demonstrate how boundaries can be clear and marked, or blurred, as in parts of Brick Lane, London. Boundaries can be hard or soft, real or imagined, 77
visible or invisible to the outsider. They can be transient and as ubiquitous as the location of experience, and they can be time specic, applying, for example, only at certain times of the day, or of the year (Moran et al., 2003). The perception and recognition of boundaries can be culturally constituted and widely recognised within society, or a reection of personal experience. And one territory may have several boundaries, recognised by different groups within society: the gay and Bengali community in Tower Hamlets, for instance. In the past boundaries tend to have been recognised where they exist or have existed as hard and fast often political barriers. Their signicance in other words concerned their physical form and its social and political implications. These are the boundaries of nations and states; the boundaries that have international borders and checkpoints as their contact points; the border identities of Wilson and Donnans (1998) collection of essays. This collection of work containing ten anthropological case studies examined the various ways that international frontiers inuence cultural identity. But it also explored the social signicance of borders, notably in Bornemans chapter which describes one womans experiences in pre- and post-unied Germany, and her desire to seek openness and a lack of boundaries through relationships and sexual liberation in her own life. That is really the point of this contribution: that boundaries can have an inuence at all levels within society, from the cultural (nation) to the social (an ethnic group for instance) and the individual. Until recently only the rst of these with their easily recognised boundaries and their clear cultural implications were much studied. In the last few years, with the recognition in urban planning and heritage management, that boundaries can also exist and have signicance at a community scale, interest has extended to cover this wider eld of view. It is also recognised, and demonstrated here, that these intangible boundaries are identiable, and will typically dene areas that have distinctive characteristics. Finally there is now the realisation that personal space is also something that can be recognised and mapped, marking at the most intimate level experiential space in an urban landscape. There is also now recognition that community space has equal relevance to those groups on the margins of society. The gay community in Tower Hamlets is hardly marginal, and neither of course are the Jewish or Bengali communities. But the voices of youth culture are rarely heard. A project being proposed for Liverpool, to assess the signicance of popular music in constructing space and local identity has this as one of its objectives, building on work which has assessed sense of place (the hood) and its reexive relationship with rap music, for example. The homeless, asylum seekers and drug addicts also construct space and create (or live within perceived) boundaries. For example, in Germany Fiona Smith describes how:
between the GDR revolution and reunication a period of relative openness led, in many areas which had been centres of squatting and alternative scenes, to the
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establishment of groupings of mostly young people who sought to change the dominant urban planning concepts and to establish alternative housing and culture projects. One such was the Connewitz Alternative in Leipzig, located in a small area of poor quality nineteenth century workers housing: We want to save this unmistakable quarter and we want to transform it at the same time and give it an alternative-cultural character (Smith, 1998: 299).
Smith goes on to describe how urban spaces became the domain of largely left wing youth cultures and those with few political convictions. The right wing scene:
developed its own geographical strongholds, most often in the modern estates of the GDR period One element in the geography of youth cultures then became, very obviously, the divisions and violence between left wing and right wing groups, further increasing the youth as problem discourse and creating particular sites as areas of conict (ibid.: 301).
It is worth noting here that some of the studies described in this paper focus on maintaining boundaries and ensuring continuity of character within the urban fabric; some like these last examples are more about the removal or softening of such boundaries to improve conditions for those disadvantaged by them.
Meaning
These new urban frontiers may not always be so new, but the emphasis placed upon them, and their signicance in understanding sense of community, belonging and the use of urban space is immense. This has relevance both in a contemporary sense and setting, but also over time. Buildings, sculpture and artefacts will remain as tangible links with the community, giving it clear and obvious legibility. Other traces (music, smell, dress and language for example) will have signicance in maintaining sense of identity and belonging in the present, but will be given chronological depth only through lm, photography and artistic intervention, and the recording of oral historical accounts; there will be no physical expression that can be identied as historical. It is important to recognise that social and political conditions, and planning policy, will cause these urban boundaries to change and recongure, and that this process of change and renegotiation is also something of importance, both to the community and to us as archaeologists and historians in charting the evolution of urban space. With increasing emphasis being placed on the recognition of social signicance in cultural heritage management and planning, and with a move to improve community participation in the heritage, the full range and diversity of these boundaries, the various forms they can take, and the processes of change, need to be understood. 79
The three main examples presented here are all from England, where moves to promote cultural diversity and social signicance agendas are being promoted by government, and pursued by national heritage agencies and local authorities. But the signicance of new urban frontiers is Europe-wide. Europes cultural map is extremely ne-grained compared to some other parts of the world, and diversity has contributed in a signicant way to the cultural heritage that we and the many visitors from outside of Europe enjoy. This sense of place and identity, of community and belonging, and of the transmission of meaning and signicance over time, has value therefore for maintaining that diversity and ensuring communities retain their distinct sense of place and of their own pasts for the benet of all.
Proposals for future action

New urban frontiers and the spaces and communities they dene are potential sources for a diversity of research and outreach programmes. We still have much to learn about urban space, and how it is dened and perceived by its inhabitants. More community-based research, with cognitive mapping and interviews, of the kind undertaken in Tower Hamlets, will be worthwhile. Such studies can be conducted over time to examine the uidity of boundaries and the degree to which changes reect wider social developments, as Brown (2001) has suggested. Further projects could seek to uncover the hidden layers of signicance and meaning, perhaps by engaging youth culture and the homeless for example. And this may indeed bring social benets: understanding the use of space by the homeless or drug addicts could create better conditions for support and treatment, as well as improving peoples perceptions of personal safety and intimidation. Research like that undertaken by Paul Watt and Kevin Stenson (1998) can challenge received wisdom about territorialism and the degree to which young males will defend their areas on the basis of racial or ethnic exclusivity (for instance, Webster, 1996: 26). To what extent do shared neighbourhoods and mixed schools mitigate this degree of separation, for example through personal knowledge of others. But as Watt and Stenson make clear, that their example illustrated that borders were crossed doesnt of course mean that they were removed (ibid.: 262). Another angle concerns heritage conservation and awareness: using public outreach programmes, and perhaps road-show events and publications, to demonstrate the signicance of urban character and urban space in managing change. Most inhabitants will consider the historic buildings as signicant, alongside community facilities and public space. But outreach could emphasise how character is dened as embracing all of these tangible characteristics and more: and emphasise also the benets of experiencing place using all of the senses, not just sight. This approach can be developed for use in schools, and to engage the disadvantaged (the blind for example) in experiencing their local neighbourhoods. A project that seeks to 80
engage young people in their heritage has recently been launched by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) in England. Heritage open days can be arranged to promote the character of the place, and peoples various perceptions of it. This can be achieved through public art programmes, using artistic media (including literature, sculpture and photography for instance) to reect the personal and cultural experience of place and ownership. The Public Sculpture Project at District Six, Cape Town, South Africa, is an example of reoccupation through artistic intervention, the community lling an area with life thirty years after their forced removal (Soudien and Meyer, n.d.). Such initiatives can usefully draw on local schools, colleges and youth clubs for involvement. Arranging associated workshops and discussion groups can also produce tangible and helpful outcomes that can ultimately contribute to planning decision-making.
References
Bell, Michael, The ghosts of place, Theory and Society 26, 1997, pp. 813-36. Borneman, John, Belonging in the two Berlins: kin, state, nation, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Borneman, John, Grenzregime (border regime): the Wall and its aftermath, in Wilson and Donnan (eds), Border identities: nation and state at international frontiers, 1998, pp. 162-90. Brown, Gavin, Listening to queer maps of the city: gay mens narratives of pleasure and danger in Londons East End in Oral History , Spring 2001, pp. 48-61. Byrne, Denis, Brayshaw, Helen and Ireland, Tracy, Social signicance: a discussion paper, New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, 2001. Dolff-Bonekmper, Gabi, The Berlin Wall: an archaeological site in progress, in Schoeld, John, Johnson, William Gray, and Beck, Colleen (eds), Materiel culture: the archaeology of twentieth century conict, Routledge, 2002, pp. 236-48. Fairclough, Graham, Towards integrated management of a changing landscape: historic landscape characterisation in England, in Swensen, Grete (ed.), Cultural heritage on the urban fringe, Nannestad workshop report, March 2002, NIKU publikasjoner 126, pp. 29-39. Fairclough, Graham and Rippon, Stephen (eds), Europes cultural landscape: archaeologists and the management of change, Europae Archaeologiae Consilium Occasional Paper Number 2, 2002. Feversham, Polly, and Schmidt, Leo, The Berlin Wall today, Verlag Bauwesen, 1999. 81
Gardner, Jim, Heritage protection and social inclusion: a case study from the Bangladeshi community of East London, typescript submitted to International Journal of Heritage Studies, originally prepared 2001. Hayden, Dolores, The power of place: urban landscapes as public history , MIT Press, 1995. Jarman, Neil, Troubling remnants: dealing with the remains of conict in Northern Ireland, in Schoeld, John, Johnson, William Gray, and Beck, Colleen (eds), Materiel culture: the archaeology of twentieth century conict, Routledge, 2002, pp. 281-95. Jones, David (ed.), Twentieth century heritage: our recent cultural legacy, Proceedings of the Australia Icomos National Conference 2001, School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, The University of Adelaide, and Australia Icomos, 2002. Kenney, Moira R., Remember, Stonewall was a riot: understanding gay and lesbian experience in the city, in Sandercock, Leonie (ed.), Making the invisible visible: a multicultural planning history , University of California Press, 1998, pp. 120-32. King, Thomas F., Places that count: traditional cultural properties in cultural resource management, Altamira Press, 2003. Kushner, Tony (ed.), The Jewish heritage in British history: Englishness and Jewishness, Frank Cass and Co. Ltd., 1992. Moon, Graham and Atkinson, Rob, Ethnicity, in Pacione, Michael (ed.), Britains cities: geographies of division in urban Britain, Routledge, 1997, pp. 262-76. Moran, Leslie, Skeggs, Beverley, Tyrer, Paul and Corteen, Karen, The formation of fear in gay space: the straights story, Capital and Class 80, 2003, pp. 183-98. Newman, D. and Paasi, A., Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography, Progress in Human Geography 22.2, 1998, pp. 186-207. Pacione, Michael (ed.), Britains cities: geographies of division in urban Britain, Routledge, 1997. Porteous, J. Douglas, Environmental aesthetics: ideas, politics and planning, Routledge, 1996. Read, Peter, Haunted Earth, University of New South Wales Press, 2003. Reed, Christopher, Were from Oz: marking ethnic and sexual identity in Chicago, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 2003, pp. 425-40. 82
Schoeld, John, Memories and monuments in Berlin: a Cold War narrative, Historic Environment 17(1), 2003, pp. 36-41. Skelton, Tracey and Valentine, Gill (eds), Cool places: geographies of youth culture, Routledge, 1998. Smith, Fiona M., Between East and West: sites of resistance in East German youth cultures, in Skelton, Tracey and Valentine, Gill (eds), Cool places: geographies of youth culture, Routledge, 1998, pp. 289-304. Soudien, Crain, and Meyer, Renate, (eds), The District Six Public Sculpture Project, The District Six Museum Foundation, n.d. Thomas, Martin, A multicultural landscape: National Parks and the Macedonian experience, New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service and Pluto Press, Australia, 2001. Thomas, Mandy, Moving landscapes: National Parks and the Vietnamese experience, New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service and Pluto Press, Australia, 2002. Trillin, Calvin, Drawing the line, The New Yorker, December 12 1994, pp. 5062. Watt, Paul, and Stenson, Kevin, The Street: its a bit dodgy around there safety, danger, ethnicity and young peoples use of public space, in Skelton, Tracey and Valentine, Gill (eds), Cool places: geographies of youth culture, Routledge, 1998, pp. 249-65. Webster, Colin, Local heroes: violent racism, localism and spacism among Asian and white young people, Youth and Policy 53, 1996, pp. 15-27. Wilson, Thomas M. and Donnan, Hastings, Nation, state and identity at international borders, in Wilson and Donnan (eds), Border identities: nation and state at international frontiers, 1998, pp. 1-30.
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The following photographs are by Kristin Posehn. They were especially commissioned to form a photographic narrative to convey sense of place and ownership within the Bengali community of Brick Lane and Tower Hamlets, East London, as described in the rst case study of this chapter. Kristin writes: In making these photographs I was encountering these areas for the rst time. I was drawn from the start to the physical and spatial manifestations of the communitys boundaries; in retrospect, to photograph was to discern and make clear boundaries that were otherwise only intuitively sensed. In these photographs, gates, doors, windows and intersections function as membranes between the more intangible qualities of the communitys inside and outside.
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CHAPTER V ASSERTED IDENTITIES, CONQUERED TERRITORIES

Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper and Carmen Popescu
Many of the nation states that now make up our continents political topography emerged far more recently than we might imagine. Germany, for instance, has been a nation state only since 1871, Belgium since 1830, Bulgaria since 1879, Romania since 1859/78, Italy since 1861 and Greece since 1833. This is not to say that no territories which could justiably have been called Germany, Italy or Romania had existed before that simply that the specic construct which fuses territory, government, economy, society and culture to form a cohesive unit, and which we call the nation state, is a recent phenomenon. It was, we might say, a product of the new ideas on the state and on citizenship which developed in the eighteenth century, and of the political and territorial upheavals brought about by the French Revolution of 1789 and the wars which swept Europe in its train. At a time when loyalty to kings and dynasties was being severely challenged, or no longer sufced to create political cohesion, some other means of binding citizens to the state and one another had to be found. If citizens were to take the place of subjects, a new-style bond supported not just by authority, but also by collective resolution and shared sentiment was required. Nations, both the aim and vehicle of progress, needed building. But what, besides a common language, law and parliamentary representation of the people, would go into them? History, of course, and myth the great tales of the founding heroes or liberators but also something which had the huge advantage of being totally accessible and visible to anyone with eyes to see: heritage. Heritage includes historic monuments which, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, helped Europeans to an understanding of their national histories, cultures, arts and architectural styles. The people who were building nation states saw monuments as images of national greatness and unity, but also of diversity and wide-ranging cultural achievement, and identifying, restoring and refurbishing them mobilised and rallied whole communities local, regional and national. Initially, after the 1789 revolution and through the Napoleonic and Restoration eras in France, and also after the secularisation of the German lands (1803), nationalising cultural assets meant auctioning off artworks and historic buildings, and collectivising the proceeds. Later, after erce controversy, cultural assets were 93
acknowledged as such and taken care of, instead of being put up for sale or demolished. Their value to the community was no longer rated in terms of the cash that selling them would raise, but in terms of enhancement potential, which state, local and regional authorities were now prepared to spend large sums on realising. This whole historical development has been studied by the conservation historians (Huse, 1984; Choay, 1992; 1996; Denslagen, 1994; Recht, 2003). Here, we are interested in nding out how monuments and sites, which were once used to construct, afrm (and consequently delimit) national identities, can today be reinterpreted and used to construct other things, particularly a European heritage. While heritage has, in the past, reinforced Europes national identities, it has also helped to cement its borders. In dening the Self, it also dened the Other. Since the process was more or less simultaneous in all the countries of Europe, heritage (or, more accurately, the things people said and thought about it) could provoke conict in the cultural sphere, just as physical borders could provoke conict on the ground. The identity-conferring aspect of heritage is thus inherently ambivalent, a potential source of both harmony and strife. So how do we cope with this ambivalence and the things it can lead to? Looking at a few selected cases may help us to clarify the picture. One preliminary remark: the buildings and works of art which helped to shape the nation states identities were all created long before those states existed, in other words, in another world and another territorial and political system one in which, moreover, the leading political figures and artists, and indeed the works of art themselves, were highly mobile. The great religious orders, particularly the Cistercians, were trans-territorial concerns, exporting their architecture and monastic rules the length and breadth of Christian Europe. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Teutonic Knights, who built Marienburg (now in Poland), were what we would now call global players, with a footing in Jerusalem, Venice, and Western and Eastern Prussia. The renowned goldsmith and artist, Nicolas de Verdun, worked at Klosterneuburg in Austria until 1181, before moving to Cologne to work on the Shrine of the Three Kings. The black stone baptismal fonts made in Tournai in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were exported to the recently Christianised territories in modern-day Poland. There was nothing predestined about the role these future heritage items were to play in shaping national identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries apart, perhaps, from their semantic complexity, which made various interpretations possible. The art historians brought all of this to light some time ago, and it is no secret to anyone today. So was nationalising art and heritage just one of our many past mistakes, and something to be corrected now? 94
Asserted identities, conquered territories
Marienburg/Malbork Castle
The castle was founded by the Teutonic Order in the thirteenth century, at a time when the Germanic Empire was bent on conquering new territories and expanding to the east. It became the seat of the Grand Master of the Order in 1309, and was later extended and sumptuously redeveloped, using the most advanced building and decorative skills of the age. The Grand Masters palace, with its summer refectory which opens onto the castles west faade, and has filigree vaulting supported by a single central pillar, and the grand reception and banqueting hall (Meisters groer Remter) with its delicate vaulting and facing rows of large ogival windows, is certainly one of the nest examples of medieval architecture. The castle stands majestically above the river Nogat not far from Danzig/Gdansk, and is a perfect image of the fairy-tale Ritterburg people dream of. It was placed on the World Heritage List in 1997. Contested from the thirteenth century on, the Teutonic Knights presence at Marienburg/Malbork ended when they were defeated by the Poles in 1466, and the castle became a Polish administrative centre and temporary residence for the Kings of Poland. After various wars and other developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including a period of Swedish occupation which led to the first partition of Poland in 1772, Marienburg was taken over and garrisoned by Prussia. In 1794, the Prussian Government despatched the architect, David Gilly, to carry out a survey of the castle, with a view to turning it into a magazine. Gilly decided that the project was unsound, and recommended demolishing the castle and using the stone to construct a new building. However, his son Friedrich, a talented artist who had accompanied him on the assignment, was alive to the beauties of the site, and made a number of drawings, which went on show in Berlin in 1797, and were published as engravings between 1799 and 1803 making the far-off castle famous in the Prussian capital. It was protected, restored and redeveloped in several stages in the nineteenth century, becoming a showcase example of Germanys discovery of the Middle Ages and of the history of conservation in that country. A special ceremony, marked by medieval pageantry and costume, and attended by Kaiser Wilhelm II, celebrated the works completion in 1902.1 Marienburg was on Prussian territory, that is, in Germany, and its restoration coincided with the German nation states emergence. Symbolising the grandeur, glory, culture and arts of the Middle Ages, it was both a perfect iconic site for those who were forging the new nations identity, and an idealised model for its culture. At the
______ 1. The history of Marienburg and its restoration is extensively discussed in German and Polish sources. The following may be consulted: Boockmann, 1992; Lubocka-Hoffmann, 2002; Torbus, 1998.
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time, the question of its also being part of Polands heritage did not arise, since the Congress of Vienna had partitioned the country for the third time and effectively removed it from the map. After 1918, when Poland recovered its status as a nation, but Marienburg remained German, German attitudes to the site became more aggressive, and increasingly nationalistic and anti-Polish. In the end, Nazi propaganda, with its demands for Lebensraum east of the Third Reich, revived the castles old function as a military stronghold in a conquered land. This was taken literally at the end of the Second World War, with the result that the Red Army destroyed it. Marienburgs role in construction of an ofcial German identity came to an end after 1945, when the border shifted west to the Oder-Neisse line, and Marienburg/Malbork was again well inside Polish territory. Moving on to consider Polish interpretation and use of the castle, it is interesting to note that repair work on the seriously bomb-damaged sections started in 1947, in other words that the Poles were, in a sense, taking care of the enemys heritage. But what part could it later play in constructing an identity for Poland? It would have been easy to Polonise it by focusing on some Polish aspect of the building, on the Polish masons who had worked on it in the Middles Ages, or on its capture by the Poles in 1466. Apparently, however, no rhetorical posturing of this kind was needed, since the castles exceptional quality and its importance in the history of European architecture were reason enough for the Poles to restore it. This makes their saving it all the more laudable, and they can be justiably proud of having accepted this castle, which will always hold memories of German conquest, as part of their own heritage (Torbus, 2003). It is this, rather than its Gothic splendour, which may well qualify Marienburg/Malbork for a role in construction of the European heritage.
Cologne Cathedral
Cologne Cathedral was modelled on the Gothic cathedrals of France, and the apse, in particular, was copied from Amiens. Work started in 1248, but was never completed in the Middle Ages. The apse was nished and so was part of the south tower, on which the 1560 crane was still standing when building nally stopped. The difference in scale between the soaring Gothic sections, which stopped short in midair, and the relatively squat Romanesque nave, was incongruous but striking. This was how the cathedral appeared on paintings or engravings of the city. Cologne was a Free Imperial City, and the bishopric was with Mainz and Trier one of the oldest in the German lands. During the revolutionary wars, the French took the city in 1794, and remained in occupation for the next twenty years. The convents were secularised, and numerous churches demolished. The bishopric was transferred to Aachen, and the cathe96
dral, having rst been used to store arms, was downgraded to parish church status, and was damaged by re in 1797. When Napoleons army withdrew in 1814, and the Prussians retook Cologne, the cathedral began to exert a powerful hold on the national imagination. The rediscovery of the Middle Ages and the Gothic heritage, and the liberation and construction of the nation fused to form one picture, with completion of the unnished cathedral on the Rhine as the nal stage in the process. The project became feasible when the medieval plans for the two west towers, lost since 1794, turned up again. Restoration continued throughout the 1820s and 1830s, and a huge project for completion of the whole was launched in 1842, in the presence of King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who took a personal interest in the work, and contributed from his own pocket. Building the cathedral coincided with building the nation, and Gothic became the new national style. This image of the completed cathedral as both heritage and vision of the future, both Gothic and neo-Gothic, pregured a reconciliation of contemporary society torn by social, political and religious strife with its roots in a distant past, pre-dating the divisions of the modern age. Remarkably, the discovery of the French origins of Gothic in general, and of the apse in particular, rst publicised by Franz Mertens in his 1841 lectures on the history of architecture (see Dolff-Bonekmper, 1992: 5-14), had little effect on continuation of the work. It could well have robbed the whole undertaking of its rationale, but this did not happen probably because the public were simply not interested in academic distinctions and continued to believe in the cathedrals German spirit. Another explanation may be the importance of the great west towers on all the drawings and engravings which showed the cathedral in its nished state. The medieval plan for the towers, for example, prepared shortly after 1300, is very large (4.05m by 1.79m) and drawn on parchment, and is a wholly original conception, in its scale and in its details.1 The last stone was laid on 15 October 1880 in the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and the cathedral has since been Germanys heritage item par excellence something all Germans know and identify with. Its lacy spires have become an iconic image instantly recognisable and symbolising Germany on stamps, posters, guidebooks and souvenirs. In the 1950s and 1960s the Klner Dom also became, with Berlins Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of German unity, while remaining inaccessible a lost site of memory for East Germans. The cathedral, indeed, is a national monument in the fullest sense, since the national connotations were there from the start, and not simply pasted on later, as they were with buildings which pre-dated the nation states emergence. It was built while the nation was being built, and was itself part of building the nation, so the two cannot really be
______ 1. Borger, 1980: reproduction and explanation of the plan on pp. 262 and 263.
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separated. The homogeneity of the vision, and later the cathedral itself, made for an idealised image of the nation. But the image does not tell the full story. Throughout the period covered by the building of the cathedral, there were erce disputes between the Kings of Prussia (and later German Emperors) and the Bishops of Cologne, and between the Catholic citizens of Cologne and the Protestant authorities of Prussia. In fact, since 1814, Prussia had been operating in conquered territory. True, it had driven out the French, but it was itself occupying a city which had been free and Catholic from time immemorial. The adversaries, who met on the site where the cathedral and nation were both being built, were not easily reconciled (Parent, 1980). To nish the job, they had to communicate and work together and that is what they did. In other words, the cathedral does not simply embody a shared and unanimous intention it symbolises an understanding achieved between opposing camps. If it ever came to be associated with another identity, and not just with Germany, its function as a place where people of different religious persuasions worked effectively together would still have to be remembered.
Nationalising territory: Transylvanias cathedrals

If old buildings were interpreted in national terms, and used to construct and represent nation states, then new ones were obviously used in the same way. In such cases, it was not the substance or the re-imagined past of a site or monument which carried the national message. Instead, architecture, design and decoration were given national connotations, or at least regional connotations, which could then be made to t the broader national picture. This was how national architectural styles developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the process was simultaneous or sequential in nearly all the countries of Europe, these national styles were closely related. International, but with distinctive national variations, the movement spawned buildings which are quite as inseparable as Cologne Cathedral from their countries national discourse. Transylvania has a certain mythical dimension, and two separate groups identify with it. It is a remote area in Edwin Ardeners sense of the term (1987): an area lled with ruins from the past. Both Romanians and Hungarians look to Transylvania as the cradle of their civilisation, and see it as the boundary separating them from the rest of the world the Romanians from the West and Catholicism, the Hungarians from the Balkans, Orthodoxy and the East. This has turned the region into a buffer zone, a kind of broadened frontier. As a result, although Transylvania is far larger that any normal border area, the culture created on its territory has all the attributes of a border culture. 98
In December 1918, immediately after the First World War, the Peoples Assembly at Alba Iulia decided to unite Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania. Similar decisions were taken in Bessarabia and Bukovina, and the Versailles Treaty ratied union of these territories a year later. This marked the birth of Greater Romania, realising the Romanians nationalist aspirations. The enlarged state adopted a powerful centralising stance, setting out to unite the country rmly around its core. It also launched a concerted drive to nationalise the annexed territories. This dual approach was rooted in the nationalistic ideology on which its policy was based. It was no longer seeking an identity as it had when the modern Romanian state was founded in the nineteenth century but asserting one. To prove that the nation was indeed united, it did so with particular insistence in the annexed provinces. Transylvania was the main target for the message, and with good reason. This was the province which meant most to the Romanians, but also the hardest to absorb into the kingdom. Bukovina, the northern part of the old Moldavia, had been ceded to Austria under an agreement between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires in 1775, while the peace treaty concluded between Russia and Turkey in Bucharest in 1812 had given Bessarabia to Russia. Unlike these two provinces lost relatively recently Transylvania had been a Hungarian province since the eleventh century, and had never been politically controlled by Romania. None of this had stopped its Romanian community from preserving its identity through the centuries on the contrary. Indeed, Transylvania became emblematic of the national struggle, and the main hotbed of Romanian proto-nationalist militancy from the late eighteenth century on. Although it had a larger Romanian population than the other two annexed provinces,1 Transylvania was the territory most intensively nationalised, once Greater Romania had come into being. It was indeed the territory, and not the population, which was being nationalised. The province was far larger than Bessarabia and Bukovina and long subjection to Hungary made a special effort necessary. Hungarian and Saxon culture had left their mark throughout the area from the twelfth century on, largely eclipsing the few modest traces left by Romanian architects. These traces were modest both in materials and in number, since the Romanian population had had to operate under rigorous restrictions. In the late nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth, before union with Romania, the Hungarian associations of the areas imposing medieval fortresses and proud Catholic and Protestant churches were reinforced by the efforts of a group of young Hungarian architects, who were seeking a distinctively national style. This group (Karoly Kos, Dezs Zrumeczky, Bla Janszky and others) looked for
______ 1. In 1930, Romanians constituted 57.8% of the total population of Transylvania, and 56.2% and 44.5% of the population in Bessarabia and Bukovina respectively (see Livezeanu, 1998: 20).
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inspiration to vernacular architecture, particularly in Transylvania, which they hailed as a sacred repository of the most authentic traditions (Le Coudic, 1993: 31-7; Eri and Jobbagyi, n.d.: 74-5). This could not fail to make an impression on Romanian architects, who were also looking for a style to express their national identity. This identity conferring style was accordingly selected to nationalise Greater Romania. Commonly known as the national or Romanian style, this was assiduously cultivated from the late nineteenth century on. Emerging victorious from the First World War, Romania gave it full ofcial status, using it on all the countrys public buildings. Fed by local tradition (vernacular, but above all religious), it was the perfect style to unify the country, since it set out to preserve continuity with the past, while synthesising all the styles which had preceded it. This historicist architecture, which drew its main inspiration from the great religious tradition, was the one the Romanians used to nationalise annexed Transylvania. They were trying to eclipse not just the Hungarian style but the entire heritage of the previously dominant civilisation (which combined the Hungarian and Saxon cultures). Their choice might seem a strange one for two reasons: rst of all, as expressions of national identity, the Hungarian and Romanian styles were direct counterparts; secondly, the version of the former developed by the young Hungarian architects movement had actually assimilated Romanian examples of the Transylvanian vernacular and used them to express Hungarian identity. Instead of looking to the same vernacular tradition for an identity, the Romanian architects decided to go further back, transcending the immediate context in an effort to make up for centuries of missing history. This choice was in fact a response to the position of the Hungarians who, previously dominant, were now a minority within the nationalising Romanian state.1 This change of status led to the Transylvanist movement, a local brand of Hungarian nationalism, which took indissoluble unity with the Magyar fatherland as its basic principle. Hungarian identity, as the Transylvanists saw it, was rooted in the sharing of values and ideals, regardless of borders. And they saw their territory as the very essence of this national identity (Kurti, 2001). This explains the Romanians response: they were seeking to counter the Transylvanists unceasing demands (which fuelled Hungarian revisionism) by setting up an equally powerful ideology. Their nationalisation programme accordingly focused on the building of cathedrals,2 which were places of worship and also monumental embodiments of the Romanian ethos, erected to the glory of the Romanian nation. Why cathedrals, and not some other kind of building? Firstly, because Orthodoxy counted as one of the mainstays of Romanian identity. Secondly, because the
______ 1. Roger Brubaker (1996) speaks of nationalising states, instead of nation states, applying the term to countries which comprise several nationalities, and have a political elite and dominant culture. 2. The use of the word is symptomatic: it was introduced in the nineteenth century, when modern Romania was nding its feet, and sometimes refers primarily to the churchs monumental dimensions, rather than its function.
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Orthodox Church had played a vital role in promoting national ideals, and even keeping the Romanian community alive, in Transylvania. In other words, erecting imposing Orthodox churches was a way of reconquering the territory. This was not just a matter of politics. The landscape was affected too, as visual revenge was taken on the Catholic and Protestant churches which had once towered over their Orthodox counterparts, kept modest by strict regulations. The cathedral idea was put forward prior to 1918, but little was done until Transylvania was united with Romania. A huge building programme was launched immediately after the First World War, and continued until 1940, when large tracts of Transylvanian territory were (temporarily) lost. Throughout this period, the cathedrals were regarded as symbols of national identity. This is clear from the speech made by the Bishop of Cluj when work started in 1923: Today, Cluj has ceased to be the Golgotha of our torments; today, Cluj has become a centre of Romanian culture, a centre of light and dazzling sunshine (Moraru, 1998: 120). In 1938, King Carol II noted in his diary: Afternoon: audience; Bishop Popovici of Oradea, here to talk about his plan to build a Cathedral, as a question of prestige and national afrmation on the western border (1995: 153). The vocabulary adopted for these cathedrals was triumphantly historicist, drawing on the nest examples of the old church architecture of Walachia and Moldavia (the two principalities which made up modern Romania). The tone had been set by the Cathedral of the Coronation in Alba Iulia, where Ferdinand had been crowned King of Greater Romania. This was a symbolic choice, since the town had powerful historical associations, both recent and ancient (the Grand Assembly had voted for union with Romania there in 1918, and it had witnessed the Wallachian Prince Mihai Viteazuls triumphal entry in 1599, an event seen as foreshadowing that union). The cathedral itself was designed to symbolise union both in copying famed Wallachian models, and in being sited opposite the impressive thirteenthcentury Catholic cathedral. Its spire therefore vies with the tower of that cathedral, a key example of Hungarian Romanesque in Transylvania. Alongside these references to old church architecture, which were used to legitimise the national identity, the main element in the architectural vocabulary of these monuments to all things Romanian was Byzantine.1 This gave the Romanian dimension the necessary added authority by invoking the most prestigious of all sources. As well as afrming Romanian identity, the Transylvanian cathedrals embodied a quite distinct culture of their own. Nearly all of them combined the oriental heritage, symbolising Orthodoxy, with a western touch, namely bell-towers. This East/West blend symbolised the special character of Transylvanian culture, which
______ 1. The Byzantine style had been deemed the most suitable for Romanian religious buildings even before 1918, as shown by Sibiu Orthodox Cathedral (1902-1905), which was modelled on the Hagia.
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was the product of encounter and exchange. This was also a feature of Romanian culture itself, particularly when the Uniate Church was established in Transylvania.1 This cosmopolitanism was viewed with suspicion by ideologists in the capital. And yet it had its champions, one of them being the architect who designed Sighis oara Cathedral (Petrescu-Gopes, 1939: 33). He justied the bell-towers presence by stressing that this was a typical feature of traditional Transylvanian architecture, and insisting that national styles must accommodate regional variations. Transylvania may still be a place where different currents meet, but the massive Orthodox church remains a powerful symbol. The cathedrals constructed between the two wars have now been joined by the monumental churches erected since 1989: people express their sense of belonging by piling heritage on heritage a trend which minorities watch with some misgivings.
Afrmation revocation
Analysing all these identity-founding, heritage-invoking, iconic, architectural constructions throughout Europe, it is hard to say where the building stops and the fantasising starts. Standing back, we could easily break down these amalgams of monument, narrative, image and fancy, analyse their components, deconstruct the whole and declare it arbitrary, nay untenable. But this would leave us facing one major problem: approaching identity constructions dispassionately is not easy they rouse strong emotions. Anyone who attacks them is attacking a societys foundations. We know that our own national saga, identity and heritage are recent, and sometimes highly articial, constructs but we still defend them against others, just as they defend theirs against us. In other words, these constructs have taken root in their societies, have been handed down from one generation to the next, have become progressively stronger, and have paradoxically turned into facts. So how are we to set about rethinking heritage, territory and identity, with a view to afrming something other than the national? Before trying to answer this question, we need to determine what the various discourses are saying, how they delimit identity, where they are exclusive, and who they exclude. Some of the leitmotivs which have impregnated national rhetoric, for instance unity, or ethnic and cultural homogeneity of a given people, need to be refuted, since their murderous effects on communities and heritage have been amply demonstrated. After that, we need to discuss our aims. We obviously want to put our work in a European context. We suggest taking a fresh look at history and the history of heritage, with a view to nding perhaps unnoticed pointers, and answers to unasked
______ 1. In 1692, the Austrian Emperor issued a decree, granting Uniate clergy the same rights as Catholic priests.
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questions, concerning the transnational nature of the culture of the past, regardless of the boundaries of identity and territory. One nal point: the European heritage which we want our readers to discover will necessarily be composite, if not actually heterogeneous, since connections and disjunctions, harmony and conict, will all be part of the picture. So the identity we build on all of this may not prove as assertive as some of the national identity constructs which are still current.
References
Ardener, Edwin, Remote areas: some theoretical considerations, in Jackson, A. (ed.), Anthropology at home, Tavistock, London, 1987, pp. 38-54. Boockmann, Hartmut, Die Marienburg im 19. Jahrhundert, Propylen, Frankfurtam-Main, 1992. Borger, Hugo (ed.), Der Klner Dom im Jahrhundert seiner Vollendung, 1. Katalog der Ausstellung der Historischen Museen 1980/81, Cologne, 1980. Brubaker, Roger, Nationalism reframed: nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Choay, Franoise, Lallgorie du patrimoine, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1992 and 1996. Denslagen, Wim, Architectural restoration in Western Europe: controversy and continuity, Architectura and Natura Press, Amsterdam, 1994. Dolff-Bonekmper, Gabi, Wem gehrt die Gotik? Wissenszuwachs und nationale Mythenbildung in der Architekturgeschichtsforschung des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, in Recht, Roland (ed.) Lart et les rvolutions, Actes du XXVII congrs international dhistoire de lart, Section 6 Survivances et rveils de larchitecture gothique, Strasbourg, 1992, pp. 5-14. Eri, Gyngyi and Jobbagyi, Zsuzsa (eds), A golden age. Art and society in Hungary 1896-1914, Corvina, Budapest, n.d. Huse, Norbert (ed), Denkmalpege, Deutsche Texte aus drei Jahrhunderten, C.H. Beck, Munich, 1984. King Carol II, Insemna ri zilnice, 1937-1951, Vol. I, Scripta, Bucharest, 1995. Kurti, Laszlo, The remote borderland. Transylvania in the Hungarian imagination, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2001. Le Coudic, Daniel, Sav-Heol. Bretagne et Europe centrale in Monuments Historiques, No. 189, 1993, pp. 31-37. Livezeanu, Irina, Cultura s i nat ionalism n Romnia Mare, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1998. 103
Lubocka-Hoffmann, Maria, Marienburg, das Schlo des Deutschen Ordens, Geschichte, Architektur, Denkmalschutz, Excalibur, Bydgoszcz, 2002.
i Moraru, Alexandru, Catedrala arhiepiscopiei ortodoxe a Vadului, Feleacului s Clujului, Editura Arhidiecezana, Cluj-Napoca, 1998.
Parent, Thomas, Die Hohenzollern als Protektoren der Klner Domvollendung in Borger, Hugo (ed.), Der Klner Dom im Jahrhundert seiner Vollendung, 2 Essays, Cologne, 1980, pp. 114-24. Petrescu-Gopes, Dimitru, Catedrala din Sighis oara, in Arhitectura, No. 1, 1939. Recht, Roland (ed.), Victor Hugo et le dbat patrimonial, Somogy, Paris, 2003. Torbus, Tomasz, Die Konventsburgen im Deutschordensland Preussen, Schriften des Bundesinstituts fr Ostdeutsche Kultur und Geschichte, 11, Oldenburg, Munich, 1998. Torbus, Tomasz, Die Denkmler des Feindes sich zu eigen gemacht. Das Erbe des Deutschen Ordens in Polen, in Das Parlament, 53rd annual series, No. 27, Berlin, 30 June 2003.
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Marienburg/Malbork Castle in Poland. View from the Nogat, west of the castle. On the right, the upper castle (Hochschloss), on the left, the palace of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.
Cologne Cathedral, engraving from a drawing by Angelo Quaglio (1809). The Gothic apse and lower sections of the south tower frame the Romanesque nave. The crane on the tower had been there since work stopped in the sixteenth century.
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Cologne Cathedral, the west front today
Cologne Cathedral, plan for the west front and towers, c. 1300.
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The Cathedral of the Coronation in Alba Iulia (Victor Stefanescu, 1922). In the right background, a thirteenth century Romanesque Catholic cathedral.
The Cathedral of Cluj (George Cristinel and Constantin Pomponiu, 1923-35).
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The Sighis oara Cathedral (Dimitru Petrescu-Gopes, ante 1939).
A new church in the village of Bogdan Voda.
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CHAPTER VI BORDERS OF FACT, BORDERS OF THE MIND

Carmen Popescu
This chapter deals with the ways in which the mind builds on borders, creating barriers where there are none, or, on the contrary, taking very real barriers and erasing them mentally. Borders created by the mind can be imagined or imaginary. Invisible in principle, they complement real borders, sometimes strengthening, sometimes relaxing them. Imagined and imaginary must not be confused. An imaginary border exists in imagination only, while an imagined border is an articial construct with very real effects. Imagined borders follow the general concept with its positive and negative connotations while accentuating certain elements which are very much their own. The chief of these elements is identity. This is not the identity proclaimed and already adequately protected by physical borders (the best example being, since the early twentieth century, the nation state). It is a kind of supra-identity, transcending physical frontiers, and it recurs in all the great political, spiritual and/or cultural movements. In the political sphere, the most glaring example remains the Iron Curtain, which split Europe into communist and capitalist blocs. Pan-Slavism, pan-Germanism, and the concepts of separate Celtic and Latin, or Christian and Muslim worlds are examples of the great cultural and spiritual families. It will be noted that these two types of supra-identity engender different attitudes. Cultural supra-identity aims at inclusion, its political counterpart at exclusion. To dene itself, the rst transcends real borders and imagines exible new ones, delimiting an area of communion; the second erases borders within the area it controls (or at least claims to do so), while erecting absolute barriers around that area. Cultural supra-identity is essentially dynamic, and people accept it because they choose to. Political supra-identity is rigid and aggressive, and people usually accept it because they have to. In spite of these differences, both are assertive in the pursuit of their goals, which is why they need borders, imagined or imaginary. One might even say that the concept of borders is vital to both, since it gives them a reality which cannot be denied. Both develop their own special vocabulary, which is recognisable, not just to insiders, but also and above all to people outside that particular family. In other 109
words, this vocabulary is not just a common language. It is a propaganda instrument as well. Imagined or imaginary? If political doctrines exclude and cultural afnities unite, then one might say that the barriers erected by the rst are essentially imagined, while those which delimit the second are essentially imaginary. The imaginary projects itself into a virtual open space the realm of the imagination. The imagined (see Anderson, 1991) occupies real space, and uses invisible barriers to redene it. It may be true that human beings have always dreamed up divisions, some arbitrary, some less so, on the basis of political, social or cultural criteria, or any combination of the three, but none has ever been more effective and explicit than division of the world into two blocs, communist and capitalist. Tested in Europe, this paradigm soon gained currency worldwide, creating a gulf that seemed unbridgeable. This type of Manichean split is a constant in human history: Good on one side, Evil on the other with each party free to decide which is which. The borders that separated the communist and capitalist blocs before the 1989 collapse were as real as borders can be. So why talk about imagined borders here? Probably because actual barriers were compounded by mental ones, which both sides shored up solidly. The famous phrase Iron Curtain reected the existence of this imagined border and its effectiveness. At its height, the clash between the two worlds found expression in the Cold War, where mutual hostility reached paroxysm in sustained propaganda on both sides. As Hannah Arendt has noted (1985), propaganda is, above all, an instrument for convincing others. The cohesion that existed within the communist bloc was freely accepted only in appearance. This meant that it had to be proofed against outsiders, and also made credible to insiders. Like the Soviet Union, on which it was modelled, the communist bloc was a transnational community. National characteristics were not questioned to start with (this was the period of socialist realism), but a shared doctrine was supposed to erase the borders between brother countries. Ideological differences made sure that this never really happened (think of Titos Yugoslavia or of Albania). However, even if the communist bloc had perfected itself to a point where its internal frontiers really disappeared, the result would have been to make an even stronger barrier between it and the capitalist bloc. On the other side, anti-communism also played up the divide, which was partly real, and partly a mental projection. This layering of the real and the imagined redrew the political map, creating new alliances and eclipsing the old ones. The most telling example of this ambivalent dualism of real and imagined borders was undoubtedly the Berlin Wall which, even before it was actually built in 1961, had existed as a mental barrier between East and West. These were the twin poles which dened the new world, with communism on one side and capitalism on the other a binome which could be varied to suit the user: dictatorship of the 110
Borders of fact, borders of the mind
people (East) versus dictatorship of money (West), progress (West) versus terror (East), and so forth. The Soviet Union, which had initiated this polarising process, was obliged to construct an image of the new world it was preaching, to justify (and also sustain) its dogma. This was the starting point of socialist realism, famously described (supposedly by Stalin himself) as national in form, socialist in content.1 Its language could be used both to reinforce the message at home, where it helped to educate the masses, and propagate it outside, where it reected the new world. Already obsolete by the late 1950s, it was a short-lived phenomenon, but as a language totally unique to the new (socialist) citizen, and totally unlike those used by others it became a permanent part of the communist blocs image. What were the effects of this ambiguous game, based on imagined frontiers, on built heritage? The rst was isolation, a kind of heightened separation. This was sought and practised by both sides, as if each wished to quarantine the other. The results of this were both practical and ideological. The iron curtain is a metaphor which evokes safety measures aimed at staving off disaster, and also suggests a weight pressing on the masses. But the action taken was not simply metaphorical: the borders between countries belonging to the rival blocs were systematically strengthened, both physically and in surveillance terms. Secondly, close attention was paid to the language of architecture. On one side, under Moscows watchful eye, the communists worked out a common language, which was meant to reect a common identity, based on Marxist-Leninist theory. On the other, the capitalists proclaimed their attachment to liberty, and sought to project a modern, progressive image. Split between the camps, Berlin offered the most striking example. East Berlins Stalinallee, constructed between 1951 and 1960, and West Berlins Interbau housing project illustrate the contrast. The rst, faithful to the spirit of socialist realism dictated by the Soviet Big Brother, is deliberately monumental, to reect the greatness of the working class, and utterly rejects cosmopolitanism and formalism. The second is up-to-the-minute, embodies the search for efcient building methods, and owes its existence to the combined talents of architects from all parts of the free world, and to American money supplied under the Marshall Plan (Castillo, 2001). Kaliningrad (formerly Knigsberg), the old capital of East Prussia, which was taken by the Soviets in the Second World War, provides another example. The communists demolished what was left of the Castle of the Kings of Prussia and raised the Palace of the Soviets on the site, substituting a symbol of the new world for a symbol of the old one. Finally, the third effect of the imagined borders game between the blocs was simply the obverse side of exaggerated isolation. This was fascination, which is actually a border syndrome. People on either side of an imagined frontier are always
______ 1. Introduced in the late 1930s, particularly at the National Agricultural Exhibition (1939), socialist realism was imposed on fraternal countries as soon as they became satellites.
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obsessed with what is happening on the other. Cut off from the rest of the world by real (and almost impassable) borders and by invisible, but even more effective barriers (censorship, restrictions, often total, on access to information, etc.), people on the Soviet side started to dream about the world across the line. They could not travel, so fantasy took over, opening the door to a world no longer imagined, but imaginary. Often, that imaginary world shaped what was left of their own private one, and the minor trappings of life under capitalism from trashy souvenirs to the much-envied landscape wallpaper pushed their way into the innermost recesses of socialist space. Sometimes, of course, there were surprises. People in the East were convinced that massive, drab housing schemes were endemic to dictatorship of the people, and were astonished to nd, when communism collapsed, that the West had them too. Ceaus escus House of the People in Bucharest is a complex example of what happens when border-fuelled fantasies are played out in a totalitarian system which has gone off the rails. This gigantic, Tower-of-Babel structure, for which a large section of the city had to be razed, was the product of propaganda and of fascination too. This was primarily the fascination felt by the man who ordered it built Nicolae Ceaus escu, First Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party and President of the Socialist Republic of Romania for a celebrated heritage. Theoretically an emblem of communist Romania, the building is actually a huge, jigsaw anthology of all the styles ever current in western Europe. In other words, communist ideology constructed a deliberately synthetic image of western culture which it otherwise rejected so that it could confront it more squarely. The imagined frontiers born of dogma and ideology are always liable to be shifted and rethought. With the Berlin Wall gone since 1989, a new East/West polarisation is now developing. As the European Union enlarges, Eastern Europe is retreating and the new Brussels Wall will coincide with the wall built all those centuries ago by the Roman Emperor Trajan.1
References
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities. Reections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso, London/New York, revised edition 1991 (1983). Arendt, Hannah, The origins of totalitarianism. The totalitarian movement, Harcourt, New York, 1985. Castillo, Greg, Socialist realism and built internationalism in the Cold War battle of styles in Centropa, May 2001, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 84-93.
______ 1. See website http://lisieresdeurope.free.fr for more details.
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Berlin more beautiful than ever!. 1952 propaganda poster, depicting the rst Stalinist buildings in East Berlin. The Weberwiese housing complex (Hermann Henselmann, 1952) was inaugurated on 1 May 1952.
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Stalinallee in East Berlin (now Karl-Marx-Allee).
Final architectural model of the Interbau housing project in West Berlin displayed at the International Building Exhibition in 1957. The buildings are placed on green spaces, whose rims merge with the surrounding Tiergarten.
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House of the People in Bucharest.
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CHAPTER VII COMMERCE AND COSMOPOLIS EUROPES MARITIME

BORDERS
Marieke Kuipers and Bernard Toulier
Europe is a oating label, and for a long time no one knew what to pin it on ... Europe is a dream of unity (Febvre, 1999). Europe is a oating label ... an arrangement of countries and societies, where exchange, economic and cultural, is essential to the birth and development of a truly international civilisation. Here, we shall be looking at the part played by permeable frontiers in fostering the interchange of people, goods and ideas. On these international crossroads, we shall also be tracing the effects of this interchange on mentalities, by observing the built environment and interpreting heritage. National borders are not always rigid or insuperable. Trade and cosmopolitan lifestyles hold the surest key to mobility, physical and mental and tourism is part of this. There is nothing new about going abroad for a rst-hand look at buildings, artworks or exotic landscape which ones own small corner cannot offer. But Grand Tourism is not an option for everyone. In the nineteenth century, these aesthetic pleasures were the privilege of a leisured and aristocratic few, who created Europes high-society culture. At the other end of the scale, migrant workers, who were forced to leave home to make a living, passed on and eventually imposed their home national or regional cultures in the new country, whose own local culture suffered in the process. This is an example of cultural transnationalism. Being open to the sea, ports are archetypal hubs of trade and interchange. We shall be looking at two examples Nice and Rotterdam. On a natural border, the sea, and in contact with numerous European countries, they illustrate the effects of comings and goings on a citys identity. Nice was one of the main places where cosmopolitan high society congregated, while Rotterdam is a centre of world trade.
Borders as models for exchange and interaction

Europe is a continent with many frontiers geographical, cultural, linguistic, religious, political and economic. Over the centuries, the geographical and mental borders between its countries have shifted repeatedly, generating various kinds of 117
cross-border movement. Looking at borders in terms of intersection and communication, we can distinguish two types. The rst is the border as demarcation line the border which separates two territories, marks off a complex of interlinked places and delimits an area. The second is the border as intermediate zone a place on the way to somewhere else, a meeting point, growth zone and no mans land. In these transitional zones, these borderline in-between areas, the central cultures certainties crumble, and haphazard contacts spawn new cultures and unexpected artistic and architectural forms. Paradoxically, these cut-off areas on countries outer edges are breeding grounds for culture, where people react to exclusion by expressing their identities in new ways, which then generate new identities and new types of heritage. Ports and seaside resorts, the coastal centres where people meet, interact and communicate, give us a chance to study the buildings often seen as ephemeral and temporary, which go up in places where anything goes places which give their inhabitants a special kind of independence in relation to the hinterland, centre, capital and government. Along geographical or political borders, transit, exchange and trade are the hallmarks of frontier areas, which are seen as points of entry, as duty-free zones with few restrictions. In particular, they are home to tourist amenities shops and places of entertainment in a world of their own, unaffected by the rules that apply inland (Thrond, 1999). The time needed to reach them is also reducing steadily. In fact, the process launched by the industrial revolution has turned Europe into one vast area, where proliferating transport networks are helping more and more people, ideas, goods, capital and information to circulate more and more quickly. In the nineteenth century, indeed, sea and rail travel combined to squeeze time and distance in Europe.
International exchange on maritime borders cultural crossroads for Europe and the world
In the twentieth century, aviation took the process further, conquering the skies and transcending the frontiers below. Airports are vital international hubs, but are still located outside the major cities and have little effect on urban planning. The seas impact is far greater, and it generates similar patterns of exchange and interaction in all of Europes great ports, which are also international cultural crossroads. The sea, like a border, symbolises transition. Ports are doors to cities and their hinterlands, and gateways to other countries places where local and international rub shoulders, xed and oating combine, emigrants and immigrants meet, and cargoes in and out are piled together on the quayside. Their identity is a compound of international trade and cosmopolitan culture. Venice, where trade and culture were once 118
Commerce and cosmopolis Europes maritime borders
inextricably entwined, is the European cosmopolitan port par excellence. Starting in the nineteenth century, however, economic development separated ports from their cities and drove a geographical wedge between the classes. London, for example, not just a capital, but a great commercial, industrial, scientic and cultural centre, was divided into East and West Ends truly a tale of two cities. Port-based industry and the trafc in freight and passengers changed the face of port cities. Warehouses, factories, shops and ofces were built, working-class, business and luxury residential districts were laid out, and cultural and civic buildings were erected within easy reach of the quays. The arrival of steam and other modern technologies, and the rise of world trade, often based on the colonies, brought great prosperity, particularly from 1870 to 1914, and from 1918 to 1939 two periods when Europe was at peace. During the rst, borders rmly delimited the nation states territory; during the second, they became less rigid, particularly for educated people with passports and money. In the late twentieth century, rising unemployment and a growing social divide sparked urban crisis in some of Europes major ports. Lack of cultural interchange and communication between immigrants and natives has now created a situation in which the internal frontiers between districts and classes are sometimes harder to cross than those between countries. The various classes and ethnic groups have not always integrated successfully, in spite of all the talk about multicultural societies. The old cosmopolitan ideal, often restricted to the happy few and embodied in the world citizen, who feels at home everywhere (particularly in cities) still lingers on. Now, however, mass immigration, facilitated by recent developments in transport (air travel) and telecommunications, has produced something new transnationalism. The immigrants, many of them non-European, are easily recognised from their dress or physical appearance. The transnationals form communities which are split between two nations, have two passports and are influenced by their home country in their social, cultural and religious practices. They are not well integrated into the host countrys culture, and their double identity is sometimes sustained through several generations. The American anthropologists, Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc (Amersfoort 2001), have dened transnationalism as the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement, adding, [we] call these processes transnationalism to emphasise that many immigrants today build social elds across geographical, cultural and political borders. Today, because of the radical changes in their status and population, Europes port cities are again seeking an identity. Moreover, the new patterns of world trade are 119
changing the face of the old harbour districts. Cities like Antwerp, Barcelona, Hamburg, Lisbon, Marseille, London and Rotterdam are pursuing urban renewal strategies, without completely losing their character as ports (Meijer, 1997). The urban wasteland around ports, with its warehouses, customs sheds and factories, is being reclaimed, and some commercial or industrial buildings are now being used for cultural purposes. Closer links between city and port are a necessary part of building bridges between the service activities centred on the rst, and the manufacturing and commercial activities centred on the second. Port heritage and culture are accordingly seen as factors which help the local community to nd its place and assert its identity as a commercial and cultural crossroads. To illustrate the various cosmopolitan trends, both old and new, in Europes port cities, we have chosen Nice, Europes winter capital, and Rotterdam, which was Europes cultural capital in 2001 and is, more importantly, a world port and gateway to Europe.
Nice, Europes winter capital

The old county of Nice, which lies on the Mediterranean and became part of France after the 1860 referendum, has been invaded by British winter tourists ever since the late eighteenth century. Once rail services were introduced in 1864, it took just 15 to 18 hours instead of ve days by coach to reach the town from northern Europe. The Russian court arrived, and the rest of Europes royalty followed. During the belle poque, from 1870 to 1914, Nice was the place where the nobility spent the winter. Queen Victoria was a regular visitor from 1895, and a whole wing of the Rgina Hotel in Cimiez was built specially for her.
Nice is the cosmopolitan city. Twenty peoples lap from its river of sand, which is a side-arm of the Neva; people from all walks of life, known and unknown, bespangle its diadem. Russians, Wallachians, hordes of Romanians, a few Britons, Germans, Yankees, Portuguese majors, Swiss admirals ... all sorts, even French, can be found on its shores: a curious pandemonium indeed. And they all rub along well together, all these people with their onomatopoeic-sounding names these kovs, novs, skys and skas who ock to Nice in search of pleasure (Ligeard, 1988: 286).
The seasonal inux brought a rush of wealthy people with private means, hangerson and adventurers. The rst wave of visitors, or winter swallows, started by renting, and went on to build in the new neighbourhoods. Many of them, like the Russians, spent freely, and quickly found their place among foreign aristocrats and local residents. The second wave, less inclined to settle, stayed for short periods in the grand hotels and had less contact with the locals. The old town was redeveloped and re-landscaped to provide the accommodation needed, and extravagant, monumental buildings, inspired by international models, 120
were erected (Toulier, 2002). The jete-promenade was built as a landing stage for the casino. Structures like this, jutting out into the sea, were modelled on English piers, particularly the one in Brighton. The newcomers changed the landscape: olive trees gave way to palm trees, and experimental gardens and landscaped parks were planted around the foreign communities in Cannes and Nice. According to Stephen Ligeard, author of La Cte dAzur (a term coined in 1887), many private gardens were open to the public, who were free, for example, to wander through the Villa Bermonds orange and lemon groves in Nice at any time of the day. The many varieties of palm tree were greatly admired by the winter visitors. Gazing at the shimmering surface of the Mediterranean, they dreamt of the East, and sought to recreate its landscape, adding Marseille-style rock gardens to give it a western touch. The luxury tourism practised by this cosmopolitan community of winter visitors got a mixed reception from the locals. Queen Victorias bounty and the Russians generosity were welcomed up to the start of the twentieth century, but most people took a less favourable view of the buildings constructed for the visitors particularly when summer tourism started in the 1930s.
Palaces in the style of Buenos Aires, an oriental pier, a Russian church, exotic hotels all jumbled up together in a total mess. What are you planning with your dance halls, carnivals and masks a cosmopolis? Having held out against so many rufanly soldiers, will my beloved Nice be engulfed at last by a horde of mere pleasure-seekers? After the trials, tribulations and glories of the past, are we to become a mere backdrop for an endless parade of idlers... are we to play host to a world rst publicised across the globe by Monte Carlo? (Cappati, 1929: editorial translation).
Certain symbols of that city of pleasure, such as the casinos, found little favour with the Nice elite, who preferred their select clubs. The town had ve casinos in 1910, and all of them have gone; the only casino in 2004 is the Palais de la Mditerrane, which was built in 1929. The Municipal Casino was erected in 1884 on the Place Massna, where the new town, which extends towards the station, meets the old one. The building was much appreciated by its foreign clientele, but locals steeped in the austere Turin style widely used in the county of Nice objected strongly. They dubbed it the Barn, and sniffed at the visitors enthusiasm for an exuberant, eclectic, overloaded style, which mixed Byzantium with Fontainebleau, and clashed with the sober simplicity of its Piedmontese surroundings. It was not until 1939, more than half a century later, that the faade was remodelled in Italian style, with false pillars, a central pavilion and a balustrade along the top. In spite of these changes, it lost ground after the war, as clients 121
tastes changed and mass tourism arrived on a scale to rival Monte Carlo and Cannes. It was demolished in 1979 (Prelorenzo, 1999). The magnicently exotic oriental-style casino, with a short pier leading to the water, which was constructed on the front in 1891, epitomised everything the town stood for as a winter capital. It was destroyed in the war and unlike other seaside casinos in Normandy was not rebuilt afterwards. The building of the Palais de la Mditerrane on the Promenade des Anglais in 1929 reected the fact that Nice was now attracting summer, as well as winter, visitors. It, too, fell victim to the changing tastes of wealthy clients, who now travelled more widely and came less regularly. By the 1960s, it was in a bad way. Paris ordered protective measures to save the monumental Art Deco faade in 1989, but these were never accepted by locals, and a mere window-dressing operation ensued. After twenty years of legal wrangling and inertia, the only fragment that has been preserved and restored barely masks the plate-glass frontage and swimming-pool terrace of the luxury hotel recently opened on the site. Many of the townspeople still nd it hard to see the remnants of this culture introduced by foreigners, and the French-style buildings constructed when the county had become part of France, as heritage. For most of them, Old Nice is the conservation area, where the buildings dating from the pre-French era, the baroque churches and the Turin legacy are concentrated. In spite of the Promenade des Anglais, the town has mentally turned its back on the sea and is reluctant to accept the new heritage values embodied in the cosmopolitan hillside settlements constructed for yesterdays visitors. The heritage most readily acknowledged today is that of the baroque town, still sometimes contrasted with the seaside town. This divide goes back a long way. What the natives objected to so strongly in the early twentieth century was not so much the damage done by the new seaside developments as the changes made by the French to the rules laid down by the Consiglio dOrnato. They were accused of undermining efforts to embellish the town, and denounced as having no feeling whatsoever for town planning. It was in this climate of mistrust that the Academia Nissarda was founded in 1904, with the declared aim of rallying all good and true Niois in defence of our towns works of art and literature. A bastion against the ravages of cosmopolitan tourism, it strove tirelessly in the face of this motley throng of pleasure-seekers, wheezy millionaires, dolled-up girls and ashy foreigners to preserve and revive the glories of Nices real past by rediscovering and building on the epics and legends of the town and the county (Cuturello, 2002). It sought roots in heredity, championed local identity and took a new interest in the local dialect, debating whether it came from Provence, Liguria, some other part of Italy or was in fact native to Nice. Surprisingly, it reacted to the dangers of international cosmopolitanism by reafrming its loyalty to France and 122
accepting a vigorous assimilation policy, that repudiated local idiosyncrasies and dialects in favour of the French language alone. A century on, the Academias battle to uphold Nices identity is focused more on defending the intangible heritage of festive traditions and language than on running down the eclectic cosmopolitan architecture that some locals are actually starting to appreciate. The Cte dAzur label, originally dreamed up to give the town an international aura and make visitors forget the very recent border changes, is starting to work in its favour. This cosmopolitan identity is at last being superimposed on the local identity embodied in the county of Nice, which reects and expresses the proud legacy of the localitys past.
Rotterdam, gateway to Europe

Rotterdam, on the last bend of the River Maas in the Dutch delta, has always been the Netherlands second largest town, and a constant rival to Amsterdam and (less so) Antwerp. Cosmopolitanism in the traditional sense (enlightened world citizenship and global culture) is not, perhaps, the rst thing people think of in connection with it, but they certainly think of world trade, business, movement, international cultural exchange and dynamism. This basic energy is symbolised in the spectacular railway lift bridge (de Hef) Europes second highest bridge when it was built in 1927 which links the Noordereiland with the harbour facilities and bonded warehouses on the left bank of the Maas. Joris Ivens lm, The bridge (1933), made it an international symbol of the new aesthetics of modern technology. Over eight centuries, Rotterdam has grown from shermens village to world port, as the clich has it. Its name derives from the dam constructed in 1240 at the mouth of the Rotte, a minor river, near the point where it joins the Maas. Its pride was once the triangular and picturesque Water Town, with its inland harbours and green river front on the Maas; this, and the surrounding Land Town, formed the old centre (Camp and Provoost, 1990). When the French occupiers withdrew and the Kingdom of the Netherlands was established in 1813, Rotterdam embarked on a ve-stage process of expansion, which turned it into a Stad van Formaat, or city of substance (Laar, 2000). The opening of the New Waterway in 1872, and the building of harbours large enough to accommodate the great steamships, helped to establish its image as an industrious port city, and lavishly illustrated magazine articles, emphasising the modernity of its facilities and the hard work which had gone into them helped to drive home the message. These facilities were now the pride of the city, and most people regarded the cramped centre of the old Land Town, and the workers housing built outside it by speculators, as ugly. A new canal, 20 kilometres long, linked Rotterdam directly with the North Sea (at the Hook of Holland, which became part of the municipality) and indirectly with 123
the reviving hinterland. Its location and function as a transit point earned it the Gateway to Europe label, which it still carries today, and its reputation as a place where (maritime) borders were constantly being crossed. Its image as an international port city is now deeply rooted, but its modern identity has also been shaped by the massive bombing raids of May 1940 and the devastated city centres subsequent reconstruction in modernist style. In the years between the wars, the international Modern Movements inuence had already been absorbed and put to work by progressive entrepreneurs like Kees van der Leeuw, who commissioned the Van Nelle factories (where tobacco, coffee and tea were processed and packaged) in 1925, and by the architects, designers and photographers in the Opbouw association. The latter included gures like C. van Eesteren, J.B. van Loghem, J.J.P. Oud, M. Stam, W. van Tijen, L.C. van der Vlugt, W.H. Gispen, J. Jongert, P. Schuitema and P. Zwart, who responded to the streamlined aesthetics of aircraft, cars and ocean liners. The members of Opbouw designed various buildings for the citys shipping and trading companies, but worked above all on the new social housing projects, which were presented as models at the prestigious Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM). Post-war urban development, in particular, was totally future-oriented. Dynamism, change and renewal became keywords for this city on the move (Blijstra, 1965). In his detailed study, Paul van de Laar considers the way in which the citys own development and image interacted with the rise of external logistical networks. He decides that Rotterdam has been in turn: Koopstad (city of commerce and trade) 1813-50, Transitopolis (1880-1918), Werkstad (city of labour) 1945-75, and Cultuurstad? (city of culture?) 1975-2000 (Laar, 2000: 8). The question mark after the last Cultuurstad? reects continuing ambivalence concerning the whole concept of Culture with a capital C. In fact, the Werkstad label still applies, and is itself rooted in the earlier Transitopolis. Interestingly, Rotterdam changed and grew most conspicuously at times of transition, when it had to adjust to new transport, commercial and cultural conditions, and to a massive inux of foreign workers from Belgium, Germany, Russia, China, Spain, Italy, Morocco and Turkey, and travellers (seamen, migrants and tourists) arriving by sea from Europe, the Americas and the Dutch East and West Indies. Rotterdam underwent major changes from the 1870s on, when the old town had to nd room for the modern transit port. It responded to the challenge by incorporating and developing the left bank of the Maas, initially with the help of private initiative and capital. Three new harbours were constructed, including the free warehouse harbour in 1873. An immense complex of ve bonded warehouses at the time, the worlds largest and most modern storage facility was built in 1879. Its name The Five Continents reected the citys worldwide trade, and its earlier function as a customs frontier. The Holland-America Line established itself at the 124
end of the Wilhelmina Pier in 1900, building ofces, an emigrants hostel, workshops and terminals all symbolising the great age of the ocean liners, which continued until the 1950s (most of the buildings are preserved) (Barbieri et al., 1982; de Winter et al., 1982). The city authorities were anxious to control and supervise the inux of new arrivals and seamen in transit hence the large quarantine complex built along the Heysehaven in the 1930s (also preserved). However, it was not until 1918, when J.J.P. Oud was appointed municipal architect, that they seriously tackled the problem of housing for workers. Instead, they encouraged the better-off to come and settle in the city, where limited space and a limited municipal budget were more of a problem than international borders. The rst planned extension of the town dates back to about 1850, when building governed by strict aesthetic rules started on the right bank. This project, or New Scheme, was followed by development of the Muizenpolder around Veerdam and Parklaan, the Second New Scheme. Together, these produced the attractive Scheepvaartkwartier (Shipping District), combining high-grade residential and working-class housing. All of this was closely connected with shipping and the sea, and it gave the Transitopolis, poised between Koopstad and Werkstad, a positive image. Having escaped both war damage and post-war urban renewal, this (by Rotterdam standards) select area is now the oldest part of the city on the right bank, and fronts on the Maas. It has extensive green spaces and luxurious shipping ofces (costly natural stone and imported tropical timber were used in building them), terraced housing and villas (originally built for the well-to-do, now partly used as ofces), as well as the citys rst modern apartment block (Parklaanat, 1932) and warehouses. The park, Rotterdams rst public open space, was laid out in the romantic English style in 1852-63, and has been extended twice. Hugh Maaskants Euromast was erected just above the Maas tunnels in 1958-60. This huge concrete tower was built for the international Floriade exhibition, and its crows-nest restaurant gives visitors a stunning view of the citys harbour complex. The elegantly eclectic Yacht Club building at Veerkade 10 on the north-east side of the park dates from 1849-51. With its yellow stucco faade and balcony looking out on the Maas, it became a meeting place for all the leading citizens, and especially the so-called harbour barons (the clubs patron was Prince Hendrik, brother of King William III). Many of the members were involved in shipping and international trade, and they built up an impressive collection of maritime and ethnological artefacts. When the club ceased to exist in 1878, the building, with its collection, was converted into two museums. It now houses the World Museum, while the Prins Hendrik Maritime Museum has moved to a new building, designed by Wim Quist, near the Leuvehaven. The Maas Rowing Club, a Jugendstil building by Michiel Brinkman and Bernard Hooykaas (1908) is located nearby, at the 125
Veerdam. It also serves, more modestly, as an informal meeting place for the local establishment. Also interesting, on the town side of the park, is the Norwegian Seamens Church, built in 1914 to designs by the Norwegian architects, M. Poulsen and A. Arneberg. Timber for the building was shipped from Norway, and combines with a distinctive design, inspired by traditional models, to create a genuinely Norwegian atmosphere. Other typical facilities for seamen and foreign visitors are scattered throughout this neighbourhood. Most of the buildings are linked, directly or indirectly, with port activities, and are the work of well-known architects. They were constructed between 1840 and 1940, and their names, materials and styles reect the broadening international horizons of the people who commissioned them. For these reasons, and because it is unique in Rotterdam, the entire Shipping District has been declared a protected townscape and many buildings and monuments are also individually protected. Although it was the basis of Rotterdams prosperity, this area does not feel truly cosmopolitan. One reason for this is the fact that, from the 1870s, many harbour barons and captains of industry chose to live at a certain distance from the harbour, founding new residential districts at Hillegersberg and Kralingen on the northern and eastern sides of the city not to mention the plutocratic Rotterdam enclave (the Van Stolkpark) at Scheveningen 25 kilometres away. Scheveningen, an internationally famous seaside resort close to The Hague, had a far healthier climate (sandy beaches, sea air) and a livelier cultural life (centred on the Kurhaus) than Rotterdam, and new transport connections (tram and, from 1903, rail services) made daily commuting possible (Attema, Berends, Kuipers et al., 1994). Another reason is the fact that modern cultural and commercial activity was mainly focused on the nearby historic city centre, redeveloped in the early decades of the twentieth century by local businessmen (cf. the Hollandsche Bank Unie/Erasmushouse by W.M. Dudok, and the Stock Exchange by J.F. Staal, 1938-40). Although the city imported goods from all parts of the world, and funnelled them on to other parts of Holland and Europe, it was particularly responsive to American inuence (for example, skyscrapers, grain elevators). Many local businessmen and architects visited the United States to familiarise themselves with the latest building styles and technologies, and purchase the machinery they needed to mass produce at home and cut down on labour costs. Examples of this early American inuence include the White House on the Wijnhaven (1898), which, with its eleven storeys and roof terrace overlooking the rapidly growing port, was Europes rst and (at the time), highest skyscraper, and the huge grain elevator and our mill buildings on the Rijnhaven and Maashaven. 126
Between the wars and after 1945, Rotterdam promoted itself energetically as Europes leading port and a dynamic centre of modernist culture by staging, or participating in, various major exhibitions, with joint backing from the municipality and local business circles. The Dutch Trade and Industry Exhibition, Nenijto, was staged in Blijdorp (now site of the zoo) in 1928, and Rotterdam had its own pavilion at the Barcelona (1929) and Antwerp (1930) World Exhibitions, where models of the port were displayed alongside photographs of housing project designs and works of art produced by students at the Academy of Arts and Technical Sciences. As Marlite Halbertsma (2001) suggests in her exhaustive study of art and culture in Rotterdam between the wars, the interior of the Holland-America Lines agship, the Nieuw Amsterdam (1938) to which many internationally known designers (for instance Gerrit Rietveld, Willem Gispen, J.J.P. Oud, Eva Besny) contributed can fairly be regarded as a oating exhibition. The exhibitions, of course, were always meant to be ephemeral, but the many buildings constructed for cultural purposes were not. There are four places where the citys cultural life was concentrated, and their metropolitan avour still comes through in old photographs and publications. They are: the Coolsingel, the main thoroughfare, with its theatres, hotels, cafs and restaurants, the Town Hall, the Post Ofce, the Stock Exchange and various banks; the Witte de Withstraat intersection, the Rotterdam equivalent of Fleet Street, with six newspaper ofces and a publishing house; the Hofplein square, with its dance halls, restaurants and cinemas, and the Land of Hoboken, with the Boijmans Museum, the Volksuniversiteit, the Unilever ofces, modernist villas and the Erasmus Grammar School.
The ten-storey Hotel Atlanta (by F.A.W. van der Togt) has a roof terrace, and so does the Bijenkorf department store (by W.M. Dudok). Frequented by local artists and nationally known writers, these elevated meeting places provided what the author Menno ter Braak called an aerial view. Writing in 1932, he noted: Looking out over the city, one sees hundreds of kinds of architecture monstrous architecture, aesthetic architecture replete with Bauhaus problems, compromise architecture and one loses ones objections to the conditions of daily life down in the street (ter Braak, 1932, quoted in Halbertsma, 2001: 69). This exactly encapsulates the hybrid nature of Rotterdam, the two-speed town. While the Bijenkorf (beehive), Europes most up-to-date department store organised a great international exhibition of paintings by Picasso, De Chirico, Lger, Kandinsky and Mondrian in 1932, Van Beuningen and Van der Vorm harbour barons both built a new museum to house their collections of paintings, sculpture and artefacts, as well as the municipal Boijmans collection. The Boijmans-Van Beuningen Museum a brick building, with a lofty tower inspired by Stockholm Town Hall is now one of the landmarks of the Museum Park in the Land of Hoboken dis127
trict (Jo Coenens Netherlands Architectural Institute and Rem Koolhaass Kunsthal were added in the 1990s). Several pre-war buildings on the Coolsingel have survived, and are now protected, because of their architectural and historical interest. Otherwise, the streets appearance suffers heavily from trafc and from the many tall buildings erected after 1945, which have left it a pale shadow of its metropolitan, interwar self. The Atlanta Hotel (enlarged and renovated in the 1950s) is still standing, however, and a new note has been struck by the foreign architects and artists invited to contribute to various projects. A typical example is the new Bijenkorf (M. Breuer, A. Elzas, 1957), with its travertine facing, and the tall, intricate sculpture by Naum Gabo which stands in front of it. The same rm donated Ossip Zadkines impressive sculpture, La ville dtruite, which came to symbolise the citys post-war recovery. Much as it was admired (it had even survived the wartime bombing), Dudoks original building was demolished when the new Bijenkorf was opened, because the urban rebuilding plan called for an unobstructed view of the River Maas, heart of the port city. Unfortunately, this romantic conception came to nothing, since the port and city were even further apart than they had been before the war. Willem Witteveen was initially appointed to rebuild the devastated city centre, and produced a fairly conventional plan in 1941. Kees van Traa, his post-war successor, was heavily inuenced by modernist ideas on functional town planning. His Basic Plan took maximum advantage of the national rebuilding regulations, which permitted radical changes in street layout and land-use. Approved in 1946, it set out to give the city a new heart modern, spacious and people-friendly, pointing the way to a better future and to free it at last from the troubles of the past. Travel in the United States again provided inspiration for various new projects, such as the pedestrian shopping precinct (Lijnbaan, van den Broek and Bakema), the Groothandelsgebouw (Maaskant and van Tijen) and city hotels like the Hilton (Maaskant). The resurrected city showed itself proudly to the world, becoming the subject of magazine articles, conferences, guided tours and exhibitions. As Lewis Mumford noted in 1957, Rotterdam was the only war-damaged city in Europe which had turned disaster into triumph the triumph of a forward-looking international style, characterised by high-rise buildings and the use of modern art (Andela and Wagenaar, 1995) Rotterdam Rebuilds! Witteveens dream of a harmonious metropolis has now been replaced by the vision of a modern skyscraper city. Todays aim is to create Manhattan on the Maas and keep abreast of all the latest that world culture has to offer (for example, the International Film Festival). Todays Rotterdam reects another aspect of international exchange, which is becoming steadily more conspicuous the arrival of non-European immigrants, especially since the 1970s, when new oil, container and bulk storage facilities were added to the 128
port (Botlekgebied, Europoort), and unskilled workers were needed in large numbers. Initially, they were contracted as guest workers, and expected to go home when some years had passed. The reverse soon happened, however, as family reunions brought thousands of newcomers in to join the breadwinners. All of these immigrants are now permanent residents, and their presence cannot be ignored. One sees many people in non-western dress in the streets, and the city now has about 30 mosques. Generally speaking, these have so far operated on much the same lines as the various foreign churches, which themselves tted easily into Dutch society, with its 50 or so different Christian denominations. The conversion of disused schools into mosques caused little controversy, as long as they stayed low-key in the streetscape. However, the recent building of mosques with lofty minarets has provoked strong reactions. Architectural objections focus on the use of traditional oriental models, while some local politicians complain about the size of the mosques, and especially the almost provocative minarets, which are over 40 metres high (for example a listed 1920s school building, typical of Dutch schools at that time, which has been converted to serve as the Koatepe Mosque). Most new mosques are nanced from the Middle East, and the private funding agencies seek to export their own brand of Islam and Islamic architecture (www.moskeedatabase.com Nederlandse Moskee Database). In the north-west section of the city, the huge cultural contrast between Western modernity and Eastern traditionalism is summed up in the glass-fronted Van Nelle factories (commissioned by theosophist Kees van der Leeuw) and the colourful Mevlana Mosque, with its large dome and slender Hagia Soa-type minarets, which face each other across the Delfhavensche Schie canal. The mosque was opened in 2001, and the reference to Istanbul is deliberate, since it serves Turkish immigrants, although many of them come from remote Anatolian villages. The nearby residential areas Spangen, Tussendijken and Nieuwe Westen are home to many immigrant families, who practise transnationalism by primarily cultivating their traditional culture and customs, and social contacts with their homelands. Their attitude to both modernity and heritage differs profoundly from that of other locals, who have lived for at least a generation in the same town or country and are, if not rooted in, at least familiar with Dutch culture. In an effort to give multiculturality a more positive image, various international cultural festivals and harbour days are organised and people from a wide range of backgrounds do indeed participate. The positive contribution which immigrants make to Dutch culture has only recently been studied (Buikema and en Meijer, 2003). Functional segregation had already taken hold in the early post-war decades, and social segregation driven by international migration, itself the product of global trade and maritime transport began to develop towards the end of the twentieth century, revealing the big city concepts chief weakness. At present, over half the citys young people are of non-Dutch origin, and integrating them into Dutch cul129
tural life is a major challenge. In todays multicultural society, education is badly needed to help people to understand one another, and also to appreciate the values inherent in the countrys built heritage. In the meantime, because the ideal of social progress still survives, the municipality is developing ever more radical plans for urban renewal, in both inner and outer-city districts often at the expense of recent heritage. Its plans to revitalise the abandoned harbour areas carry the same danger. Wellknown Dutch and foreign architects are being invited to contribute to the new skyline and a new shopping area. The motivation is mainly commercial, but various industrial monuments on the old harbours have been preserved and converted for residential, working, shopping, sailing, leisure and cultural purposes. These are the real challenges to reinvent the organic cosmopolitan city, add a new historical layer to its cultural identity and, above all, make the various communities feel harmoniously at home in it. In 2001, when it became (with Porto) Europes cultural capital, it adopted the slogan, Rotterdam is many cities. That says it all. Rotterdam is not just a port it is also a fascinating meeting-place of peoples and cultures, with a rich cross-border heritage.
Cosmopolitanism as heritage?
Can the cosmopolitan ideas generated by two centuries of foreign visitors ideas that substitute a modular, exible conception of citizenship for nationalist attitudes and parish-pump attachments be European ideas as well? At present, soulsearching on the part of nation states is giving cosmopolitanism a new lease of life. Europe is taking shape in a globalised world, where networks count for more than nations, and people and goods are increasingly mobile. The maritime border communities we have been considering, whose members come from a wide range of ethnic, national, social and cultural backgrounds, are more open to the forms of modernity generated by ports, those centres of global trade and investment, but are also anxious to preserve the customs and heritage of their various ethnic, regional, social and linguistic groups. Can cosmopolitanism be accepted as heritage and help us to forge a new vision of community, locally and at European level? Can we use it to win acceptance for social and other kinds of diversity at European level by stripping identities real or assigned, constructed, imaginary or ctitious of their existing geographical basis and giving them a new one? Does it offer an alternative to segregation of nationalised cultures and heritage? And what would its role be in cities where heterogeneous groups with no template for living together are increasingly cohabiting? As things stand, these groups are creating new urban borders, which cut through our inner and outer cities. Is simply crossing those borders enough to 130
make a person cosmopolitan? Or do we need new terms and concepts to make sense of the multitude of separate identities and cultures which we encounter in Europes major cities, and which are forcing us to rethink our views on modernity?
References
Amersfoort, H. van, Transnationalisme, moderne diasporas en sociale cohesie. IMES, Amsterdam, 2001. Andela, G. and Wagenaar, C. (eds), Een stad voor het leven, Wederopbouw Rotterdam 1940-1965, Uitgeverij De Hef, Rotterdam, 1995. Attema, Y., Berends, G., Kuipers, M.C. et al. (eds), Monumenten van een nieuwe tijd, architectuur en stedebouw 1850-1940, Jaarboek Monumentenzorg 1994, Waanders/RDMZ, Zwolle/Zeist, 1994. Barbieri, U. et al. (eds), De Kop van Zuid, Ontwerp en onderzoek, Rotterdamse Kunststichting Uitgeverij, Rotterdam, 1982 (Architecture International Rotterdam). Blijstra, R., Rotterdam stad in beweging, de Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1965. Braak, M. ter, Demasqu der Schoonheid (1932), quoted in Halbertsma, M.E. and Ulzen, P. van (eds), Interbellum Rotterdam, Kunst en cultuur 1918-1940, NAi Uitgevers/Stichting Kunstpublicaties Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 2001, p. 69. Buikema, R.M. en Meijer, M., Kunsten in beweging 1900-1980, (Vol. 1), Sdu, Den Haag, 2003. Camp, D.L. and Provoost, M. (eds), Stadstimmeren, Rotterdam: 650 years, Phoenix & den Oudsten Publishers, Rotterdam, 1990. Cappati, Louis, Oh! Ma petite patrie, Nice historique, May-July 1929. Cuturello, Paul, Cosmopolitisme et identit locale. Touristes hivernants et socit locale sur la Cte dAzur au dbut du XXe sicle, in Cahiers de lUrmis, No. 8, Dec. 2002, pp. 29-38. Febvre, Lucien, LEurope, gense dune civilisation, Perrin, Paris, 1999 (lectures given at the Collge de France in 1944/1945). Halbertsma, M.E. et P. van Ulzen, Interbellum Rotterdam, Kunst en cultuur 19181940, Rotterdam, NAi Uitgevers/Stichting Kunstpublicaties Rotterdam, 2001. Laar, P. van de, Stad van Formaat, Geschiedenis van Rotterdam in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw, Waanders, Zwolle, 2000. Ligeard, Stephen, La Cte dAzur, Serres, Nice, 1988, (1st edition 1887). 131
Meijer, H. City and port. The transformation of port cities, London, Barcelona, New York and Rotterdam, Jan van Arkel, Utrecht, 1997. Prelorenzo, Claude, Une histoire urbaine, Nice, Hartmann Edition, 1999. Thrond, Daniel, The cultural heritage of tourism and travel: an asset for development? in European heritage, Europe, a common heritage, No. 5, 1999. See http://www.Coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operation/Heritage/Resources/EuropeanHeritage. Toulier, Bernard, Les villes deaux, Dexia/Imprimerie nationale, 2002. Winter, P. de, et al., Havenarchitectuur: een inventarisatie van industrile gebouwen in het Rotterdamse havengebied, Rotterdamse Kunststichting Uitgeverij, Rotterdam, 1982 (Architecture International Rotterdam).
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Nice, Promenade des Anglais. One of the few Art Nouveau buildings left in Nice, the Huovila villa, (Marius Allinges, 1911, sculpture, F. Viriex) built for Charles-Colin d'Huovila.
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Nice, two faces of Orientalism. On the right, Orthodox church (M. T. Preobrajenski), construction authorised by the Czar Nicolas II, in the park of his Villa Bermond. On the left, a neo-Moorish building, inspired by the Orientalism of the Mediterraneans southern shores.
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Nice, Promenade des Anglais.Faadism of the restored Palais de la Mditerrane. This casino (Charles and Marcel Dalmas, 1928), nanced by Frank Jay Gould, was demolished in 1990. Only the protected Art Deco faades were restored (Pierre-Antoine Gatier, 2004). Today they hide a vast complex with hotel, swimming pool, casino and concert hall.
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The White House, Rotterdams and Europes rst skyscraper, located at the Wijnhaven (W. Molenbroek, 1899-1901).
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Norwegian Seamans Church at the Westzeedijk, built in 1914 (designed by A. Arneberg, M. Poulsson) moved in 1938 for the construction of the Maastunnel.
The former Holland-America Line ofce building. Built in several stages (1901, Muller and Droogleever Fortuyn; 1908, main parts, C. B. van der Tak; 1916, tower with clock, 1920 westfront, architect unknown), today it is the New York Hotel.
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Bonded warehouses (Vrij Entrepot), called the Five Continents. Built in 1875 and once the largest storage building in Europe, today it is used for international food stores and restaurants
The Bijenkorf (beehive), on the Coolsingel. The travertine-clad Bijenkorf is the result of international collaboration (architects: Marcel Breuer and Abraham Elzas, sculptor: Naum Gabo). Once considered the most advanced department store of its time, it became the symbol of postwar modernity and economic revival. Its location just across from the Stock Exchange, reected the urban reconstruction concept of the "window to the river". Recently, a semi-underground shopping area was created, leaving the concept intact.
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The Mevlana mosque on the Delfshavense Schie, opened in 2001. The adjacent square, named after the Medieval prince Aelbrecht, was renamed Mevlana square.
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CHAPTER VIII MENTAL TERRITORY THE CELTIC CONNECTION

Bernard Toulier
In Europe, Celtism provides a rallying point for all the Celtic regions which are seeking to afrm their identity and regain their independence. Devolution in Scotland, for example, which went some way towards restoring the countrys identity by reviving its parliament in 1998, also underlined the differences between it and England. Even Ireland, Englands oldest colony and now entirely separate, is still struggling to shake off its inuence. Wales has managed to preserve its language and culture peacefully, by taking a vigorous stand against Anglo-Saxon efforts to impose uniformity, and is keeping its poetic and lyrical traditions alive. Of all the Celtic countries, it is also the one with the most tenacious language: Welsh is still in everyday use and remains an effective literary medium. In the face of French centralism, Brittany still cherishes notions of autonomy. All these countries and regions are gradually becoming more aware of the thing that makes them special, of the history they once shared. Some other regions, such as Galicia and Asturias in Spain, are keen to join the Celtic family. The Celtic legacy is also embraced by the extreme right-wing nationalists behind various racist movements. Other attempts to jump on the Celtic bandwagon are more peaceful in their aims. Italys Northern League has connected with the nineteenth-century folk tradition by inventing Padania, and kitting it out with its own national history and culture. Northern Italy, it would seem, has Celtic roots as well: The Druids, victims of foreign invaders and Roman Catholic intolerance, have been enlisted by the Padanian militants in the ght against taxation (Thiesse, 1999). The exhibition, The Celts, the rst Europe, staged in Venice in 1991 with nancial backing from Fiat, is one of many recent attempts to recycle the panEuropean ideal and make it serve the political needs of the moment. The exhibition was presented as being a tribute to that new Europe, its unity and its origins far back through the centuries to Roman and Christian civilisation, and also to the civilisation of the peoples who have left the continent a heritage that no one can ignore. 141
This new passion for things Celtic looks to a shared European past for its references. In Europe and beyond, archaeological ndings and contemporary sources bear witness to the existence, movements and lifestyle of the peoples known as Celts. The language they spoke was used over a vast area, and latter-day versions are still current on the western fringes of that area. Celtic art and culture spread throughout Europe, reaching the westernmost parts of the continent: Ireland has manuscripts which record a long-dead oral tradition, and allow us to catch an echo of that vanished world. For over two centuries, the Celtic reference to a nomadic, transnational culture, undened by any known historical borders, has been a constant in many European countries. This search for Celtic roots reects advances in historical research, but also a shift in attitudes. This transnational culture older and more authentic than the Latin and Christian cultures is invoked to legitimise regional or national resistance to the dominant cultures hegemony. These cultural movements dream up historical and geographical frontiers, and use them to connect areas and places which are actually separate. These territories of the mind are all part of inventing heritage and manufacturing national identity. Since the eighteenth century, every nation has (re)written its history, (re)created its links with illustrious ancestors, put together its gallery of heroes embodying the national virtues, nurtured a language and folklore, selected its monuments and shrines, and adopted a national anthem and ag (Orvar, 1989) but minorities have seen awareness of cultural unity as a means of holding out against invaders and occupiers. For minorities or communities subjugated in their conquered land, constructing an identity is also a matter of (re)assessing their origins, so that they can (re)connect with their forebears, (re)discover their founding fathers and (re)amass the relics of their past. In eighteenth-century Edinburgh, a number of Scottish nobles asked the poet James Macpherson to track down and transcribe the old Celtic legends, and recast them as an Iliad-type epic. Macpherson did nd some fragmentary texts, worked them over very freely, and himself wrote in Gaelic most of the songs of a Celtic bard who came to be known as Ossian. The discovery/invention of Ossians epic verses, which were published between 1760 and 1763, had an enormous impact throughout Europe, demonstrating that Greece and Rome were not the only sources of European culture (Thiesse, 1999). The dominant contemporary culture was French, and there was a strong desire to combat it by appealing to Romantic emotion and dreams of liberty. The classical tradition was at odds with nature, which only the people had managed to preserve. Shown to be forgeries only in 1805, the poems of Ossian had a profound inuence on many of the European peoples 142
Mental territory the Celtic connection
who were ghting to defend their national identity. The Hungarian poet Sndor Peto (1823-1849), for example, drew heavily on the Ossianic legends. Throughout Europe, including France, the ancient bards found modern imitators, bent on promoting Celtic culture. In Wales, the Maen Gorsedd ceremony was revived in 1792, with the bards gathering round an altar and circle of stones at the spring equinox, in their own far-fetched version of an ancient tradition. These fanciful visions were combined with the study of antiquity; classical texts and records of oral traditions were given equal attention. Although the French revolutionaries were primarily inspired by Greek and Roman ideals, there were also some who felt that study of the Celtic past held the key to unity. The Gauls were accordingly chosen as the nations ancestors which tied in with the French nobles claim to be descended from the Frankish conquerors (with conquest legitimising their privileges). A Celtic Academy was founded in Paris on 9 Germinal of the year XIII (30 March 1805). Its aim was to trace all the remnants of this past, and identify the glorious legacies of the Celts, Gauls and Franks, by studying their language and antiquities (Belmont, 1996). In the 1830s, the French romantic imagination was still haunted by the Druids and megaliths it found in the Celtic-Breton tradition. In Brittany, Viscount Hersart de La Villemarqu gave the Ossianic epic a new lease of life. He discovered/invented the Barsaz Breiz (Songs of Brittany), which were published in 1838, at a time when serious efforts were being made to eradicate the Breton language and culture, so that French the national, unifying language could take over. The Barsaz Breiz was not the only collection of Celtic music published in Europe at that time. At the end of the eighteenth century in Ireland, Edward Bunting set out to collect the Irish harpists best compositions, anticipating P.W. Joyces Ancient Irish Music of 1873. All of these collections, and advances in historical research, contributed to rediscovery of the Celts and their traditions, and many pan-Celtic folk festivals were organised from the nineteenth century on. When La Villemarqu inaugurated the rst Inter-Celtic Congress in 1867, he invited relatives from Wales, brothers from Cornwall, and cousins from Ireland and Scotland to attend. This inter-Celtic union was again evident during the interwar period, when the Breton separatist movement Brettz Atao (Bretons forever) was founded. Breton artists and architects also drew heavily on their Celtic forebears for inspiration. In 1924, the architect James Bouill said that, in their prime, the Iron Age Celts had produced a national art, whose further development had been interrupted by Caesars invasion of Gaul. Chased from continental 143
Europe, it had re-emerged in Ireland, where the natives had given it a warm welcome. Irish monks later reintroduced it throughout western Christendom which explained its presence in Brittany. The important thing now was to identify the traces of this ancient Celtic nation in decorative forms and popular traditions (Bouill, 1924). This particular pan-Celtic movement was directed against the French and English, and rallied its adepts around shared beliefs and rituals, whose traditions were still very much alive when the various regional movements gathered strength in the late twentieth century. This romantic enthusiasm for the Celtic past masked a latent nationalism which became more pronounced as the nineteenth century progressed. Throughout Europe, national Celtic heroes were dusted off and celebrated. A statue of Vercingetorix was erected at Alesia in 1865, Boudicca appeared on the Thames embankment in 1902, and Ambiorix (striking a heroic pose) received the same tribute in Tongres. European protohistory was increasingly studied in the mid-nineteenth century, and the existence of a signicant Iron Age culture, predating the Romans, was conrmed. From 1871 on, artefacts from tombs in Champagne (France) and the shores of Lake Neuchtel (Switzerland) were linked to those found in Etruscan tombs at Marzabotto (Italy): this was clear evidence of the Celts movements, in accordance with the linear invasionist model generally applied up to the 1960s. These artefacts were also tied in with those found in central and eastern Europe, although very few turned up in Greece and Asia Minor. Archaeologists took on the task of nding a link between the languages attested in large parts of the Iberian peninsula, Britain and Ireland. After 1870, and through much of the twentieth century a period of open or latent conflict, in which German militarism played a major part another image of the Celtic warrior was current. The traces of Celtic art found when settlements were excavated were cited as proof that Celtus domesticus was less bellicose, more rural and more inventive than his Germanic counterparts. In the period following the last world war, the vestiges of Celtic civilisation were still being interpreted in very allegorical terms. In 1949, at a time when Europe was becoming a reality, these lines were inscribed on the new monument erected below the hill-fort at Alesia: On this plain, two thousand years ago, the peoples of Gaul preserved its honour, under the command of Vercingetorix, by taking arms against Caesars legions. After the defeat of its armies, Gaul reconciled with the victors, united against the Germanic invaders, and open to the enlightening influence of Greece and Rome enjoyed three centuries of peace. In the 1980s, Franois Mitterrand (like Napoleon III, but for different political reasons) 144
launched a new multinational programme of excavations at Bibracte, capital of the Eduens, and declared that he wished to be buried on Mont Beuvray. Today, recent changes on the European political scene and European Community enlargement have produced a new picture. Archaeologists studying the Celts are more interested in patterns of economic development and urban settlement in the oppida (Cunliffe, 1997) although the pan-European image of the Celts is flexible enough to retain its political relevance. Indeed, the cross-border unity of the Celtic peoples almost seems to prefigure the European unity we aspire to today. Nowadays, Celtism is also used to shore up fuzzy ethnic theories, is exploited as a pretext for political extremism, and is embraced by the merely confused or frankly weird. Druidism, neo-paganism and revived ancient Celtic beliefs are behind many groups with folk-culture or environmental connotations which have sprung up outside Europe, in the United States, New Zealand and Australia (Green, 1997). The link between the Druids and Stonehenge has given the site a romantic and fanciful aura and many Druidic orders insist that they are entitled to celebrate their rites there. Indeed, use of the site by neo-pagan groups who want unrestricted access has provoked frequent clashes with English Heritage. Druidism and Celtic music are also a presence on the World Wide Web. Part of the old Europes legacy, traditional Celtic music breaks with US musical standards and rejects American cultural hegemony. The Celtic music revival is normally dated from the early 1970s, but the Breton pipers were already being recorded in the late 1940s, and the old folk melodies, songs and dances transcribed. Bodadeg Ar Sonerion, an association of Breton pipers and musicians, was founded in 1946. It soon spread beyond Brittany and formed ties with groups in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, rescuing thousands of Celtic songs and airs from oblivion. Today the Breton biniou and bagadou, the bagad of Lann Bihou, the northern Spanish gata (all types of bagpipe), kilted pipe bands from Scotland, and harpists and male voice choirs from Wales enliven many Celtic music festivals, such as the Lorient InterCeltic Festival Frances largest cultural festival and the Paris international Celtic night. Other regions, too, use imagined territories to create an identity for political ends. In 1997, Didier Patte, leader of the Norman separatist movement, borrowed his Breton neighbours arguments: We are sons of Scandinavia, we are sons of the sea. Our community is present in Quebec and also in the British Isles, since we conquered England. For us, Paris and London are twin poles, and all the many relationships of Norman geopolitics are played out between them.1 An important part 145
of dening identity in Europe is constantly reinventing imagined or authentic histories, peopled with legendary Celtic, Viking and other heroes the heroes celebrated by Ossian, Vuk Karadzic, Barzaz Breiz and the Kalevala.
Heritage value
Taken as a whole, the Celtic world is a land of the mind, and so has no geographical borders, but its components Brittany, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and any other country which wants to be part of it do have borders and are particularly vociferous in asserting the distinctiveness of their territory, customs, people and culture. They even tend to isolate if not actually separate themselves from the national authorities and civilisation of the nation states, which once sought to suppress the culture and language of the Celts. This is why Celts have long been seen as personifying resistance something which gives them a very special heritage value. Their misty, mythical world, with its fierce warriors, melancholy bards and pale women in flowing garments, inspires dreams of freedom and adventure. This imagined Celtic realm is not a projection of todays enlightened world, the world of civic liberties, parliamentary government and progress, but a hidden corner of a (very) old world, which predates the modern age. The people who credit the Celts with creating Europe are basically right, in so far as the traces found by archaeologists throughout the European mainland and its islands show that they really lived in all those places. Indeed, their simultaneous presence in so many different areas offers a convincing argument against spurious claims concerning the ethnic unity and uniformity of communities living in just one.
References
Belmont, Nicole (ed.), LAcadmie celtique, Comit des Travaux historiques et scientiques, Paris, 1996. Bouill, James, De lart celtique et de lutilit de son tude pour la cration dun art breton moderne, Ed. Buhez Breitz, 1924. Cunliffe, Barry, Ancient Celts, Oxford University Press, 1997.
______ 1. Normandie, Nation dEurope, interview with Didier Patte, leader of the Norman separatist movement, in La Padania, 22 February 1997.
146
Green, Miranda, Exploring the world of the Druids, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, 1997. Orvar, Lfgren, The nationalisation of culture, in National culture as process, reedition of Ethnologica Europeae, XIX, 1, 1989, p. 5-25. Thiesse, Anne-Marie, La cration des identits nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe sicle, Le Seuil, Paris, 1999.
147
Statue of Vercingetorix, the proclaimed King of Arvernes, who led Gaelic tribes in battle against Julius Caesar in 52 BCE. His defeat marked the end of Gaelic resistance against the Romans. Commissioned by Napoleon III and sculpted by Aim Millet, this statue was erected on 27 August 1865 on Mont Auxois at Alise-Sainte-Reine in Burgundy, the site of the battle of Alesia. Vercingetorixs features are those of Napoleon III.
149
Druids celebrate the winter solstice at sunrise, 1960. John Aubray in the eighteenth century, then William Stukeley a century later, believed Stonehenge to be a Druid temple, though dating techniques have since disproven the Celtic origin of the site. In 1900, neo-Druids started using the site for celebrations.
150
In 1975 a New Age festival was created here, but in 1984 Stonhenge was placed under the control of English Heritage for better preservation of the site. The festival was cancelled and the Druids no longer had access.
151
The Irish euro: the national side (designed by Jarlath Hayes), with Eire, the Irish name for Ireland and the Celtic harp.
152
POSTSCRIPT THE WAY AHEAD

The effects of globalisation are still not fully understood, and the uncertainties attaching to the process now give added point to the public demand for heritage, which reects a desire for reliable standards and reference points in a world where nothing seems sure. This book invites its readers to break new ground, but it will not lead them to nal certainties, or conrm their preconceptions. On the contrary, it will prompt them to continue thinking, and to take a fresh and possibly more clear-sighted look at what they regard as their cultural heritage. The border journey this book proposes involves us in taking a new look at a concept which, far from being xed, is itself a work in progress. The nineteenthcentury conception of heritage underwrote the historical narrative on which the nation states were founded. In the second half of the twentieth century, experts and international organisations broadened the concept and laid down principles for the protection and conservation of cultural assets. In 2004, in preparing a framework convention on the cultural heritage, the Council of Europe has been relying on a trans-sectoral denition of heritage, encompassing the tangible and intangible items to which people and communities attach meaning, as reections of their values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions. Heritage now confers identity on areas and communities in an information society where knowledge and skills cultural heritage in the broadest sense are distinguishing features and also a source of prosperity. Among other things, this publication provides a useful reminder that heritage, although it founds identity, carries no single, sacrosanct message. Looking closely at a heritage item takes us on a journey into the past, offering various insights which no cursory glance could ever give us. Considering the various ways in which heritage can be interpreted, and has been, is quite as rewarding, since it shows how situations have changed with the passing of the years, and how European society has evolved at times of progress and turmoil. Looking at the different ways in which different people have interpreted heritage at different times in border areas, where the winds of history blow strongest, is bound to help us understand the distinctions between cultural traditions and, in many cases, the origins of conflict. Indeed, working in this way on our societies memory may well help us to build up a collective narrative at European, no longer just nation state level to provide a human, cultural and social basis for progress towards European unity. As well as opening our eyes to Europes cultural diversity, this process may also help us to pinpoint a range of shared val153
ues as permanent elements in European identity, for example acceptance of diversity, a desire to settle conflicts peacefully, respect for human rights, and love of democracy.
We have the choice of subverting our violent history by reclaiming in it the traces of a shared future precisely that shared European future, which our divided and divisive European past rmly denies.1
The contributions in this book also remind us that cultural heritage is the everexpanding product of successive additions and of a process of transmission. Nearly always, it results from the meeting and mingling of knowledge, skills and people. And this applies, not just to movement within Europe, but also to Europes relations with the rest of the world. Studying these cross-currents is not just an academic exercise; it can help us to inculcate and practise that intercultural and inter-religious dialogue which organisations like the Council of Europe have a duty to promote. Amin Maalouf touches on this point in Les identits meurtrires when he encourages us to acknowledge our own diversity, and see our identity as the sum of our various afliations, instead of losing ourselves in just one of them, and exalting it into an overriding attachment, an instrument of exclusion and sometimes of war. In the same way, societies, too, should acknowledge the many afliations that have shaped their identity throughout history, and are still doing so today What we have to do now is consider how we can build on the outline provided in this publication and take the work further. Recent events, and the destruction by extremists of cultural assets in Europe, which show that working on heritage, far from being a sideshow tacked onto the ne arts, raises fundamental questions concerning the co-existence of different identities, make this even more desirable particularly when attacks on heritage involve loss of life. The Council of Europes use of the term common European heritage in its new heritage instrument, and its insistence that Europeans share responsibility for all the heritages which embody their various cultural traditions, mark a step in this direction. This actually draws on one key aspect of European citizenship mutual acknowledgement and cohesion of cultural identities, whose interaction makes European identity itself so varied and distinctive. The issues are, in other words, both political and cultural, with the desire to live together and acceptance of others as the basic prerequisites for collective political action. The only key to meeting those requirements at European level would seem to be generalised, mutual recognition of heritage, and acceptance of certain basic shared values. The Council of Europes cultural co-operation programme and the monitoring schemes for its various conventions should help us to take things further. The contributors also suggest that an activity embodying a new approach to the various meanings of Europes common heritage should be launched and given due media
______ 1. Ernst Bloch, as quoted by Peter Wagner in the report, Forward planning: The function of cultural heritage in a changing Europe, Cultural Heritage Division, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 2000.
154
Postscript: the way ahead
coverage. Other places, other people our multiple heritage might be a suitable theme. In a Europe still looking for a social bond and unifying message, the aim would be to offer a vision of heritage conducive to cohesion and good relations. Heritage in Europe is rarely if ever hermetic, but has always been shaped or inuenced by the heritage of others, near or far away. A particularly useful part of focusing on heritage diversity and deciphering its various messages would be highlighting the human and cultural potential of a heritage born of a meeting of traditions, ideas, techniques and people. When we look closely at heritage cathedrals, the arts of the Baroque, industrial technology, the myths and legends which have fed into music and literature the reality we see is anything but blinkered or chauvinistic. The project would involve historical and scientic research, and co-operation between universities in many different countries, but Europes cities and regions might also by taking a fresh look at their artistic, economic and social heritage rediscover past, and sometimes forgotten, ties with communities in other parts of Europe and the world. The resultant projects and co-operative ventures might include: action by twinned regions to project a shared image, educational exchanges, technical and vocational co-operation, and revival and development of economic links. A new awareness of the contributions made by migration to culture and prosperity might also foster cohesion between communities from different backgrounds living in the same area. Ultimately, any heritage is the product of a composite society, of its disagreements, ambitions and successes. Heritage is the reection of a never-ending process of change and that is what makes it a source of hope.
Daniel Thrond Head of the Division of Cultural Heritage Council of Europe
155
OTHER PUBLICATIONS FROM THE INTEGRATED PROJECT RESPONSES TO VIOLENCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
Urban crime prevention a guide for local authorities (2002) ISBN 92-871-4943-7 The prevention of violence in sport (2002) ISBN 92-871-92-871-5038-9 Facets of interculturality in education (2003) ISBN 92-871-5088-5 Security and democracy under pressure of violence (2003) ISBN 92-871- 5202-2 Violence, conict and intercultural dialogue (2003) ISBN 92-871-52-51-9 Violence in schools a challenge for the local community (2003) ISBN 92-871-5326-4 New patterns of irregular migration (2003) ISBN 92-871-5626-4 Prevention of violence against women a European perspective (2003) ISBN 92-871-5291-8 Rebuilding community connections mediation and restorative justice in Europe (2004) ISBN 92-871- 54-54-1 Violence against vulnerable groups (2003) ISBN 92-871-5447-3 A partnership approach to crime prevention (2004) ISBN 92-871-5478-3 To order: Council of Europe Publishing Website: http://book.coe.int E-mail: publishing@coe.int For more information on the integrated project Responses to violence in everyday life in a democratic society, see: http://www.coe.int/violence 157
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Europes great periods of peace and prosperity are reflected in its cultural heritage, but so are its self-destructive conflicts. Indeed, heritage itself a vector for national identity since the nation-states emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has an inbuilt ambivalence, an ability to unite and divide. Separating and defining territories and identities, borders suggest a stark division: this side or that. But, as a kind of no mans land, where worlds meet and connect in unexpected ways, they also have a powerful fascination. Border areas are surely the ones most likely to generate those many-sided, compound identities which often prove amazingly creative. European identity itself may perhaps show most clearly in these sensitive zones where influences combine in mutual enrichment, and the unthinkable becomes the possible. The texts in Dividing lines, connecting lines Europes cross-border heritage link heritage to borders real or imaginary. They look at border landscapes, at the old fortified barriers which evoke the conflicts of the past. They also consider the new urban frontiers, which separate ethnic and social groups in Europes great cities. Focusing more closely on selected examples of heritage, and their meanings past and present, the authors break new ground and offer a new vision. They show that heritage, however firmly rooted in a given area, always includes outside elements, and sometimes goes a long way to find them. This is a book which challenges us to rethink our concepts of heritage, territory and identity in new regional, transnational and European terms in short, to stretch our horizons.
The Council of Europe has forty-six member states, covering virtually the entire continent of Europe. It seeks to develop common democratic and legal principles based on the European Convention on Human Rights and other reference texts on the protection of individuals. Ever since it was founded in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Council of Europe has symbolised reconciliation.
ISBN 92-871-5546-1
789287 154514
10/US$15
http://book.coe.int Council of Europe Publishing

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Responses to violence in everyday life in a democratic society

Dividing lines, connecting lines Europes cross-border heritage

Council of Europe Publishing Editions du Conseil de lEurope

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Co-ordinated by Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper

Dividing lines, connecting lines

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTO CREDITS

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Foreword ..................................................................................... Introduction Gabi Dolff-Bonekmper .................................................................... I.

II. III. IV. V. VI.

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Dividing lines, connecting lines

CHAPTER I BREACHES IN BORDERS: RITUAL CROSSING POINTS

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Breaches in borders: ritual crossing points an ambiguous concept

Symbols of a frontier, images of a breach

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Breaches in borders: ritual crossing points an ambiguous concept

Border heritage an aid to understanding others

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Breaches in borders: ritual crossing points an ambiguous concept

Dividing lines, connecting lines

CHAPTER II LINES OF TENSION

Traces of local conicts

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Dividing lines, connecting lines

The Western Front

Dividing lines, connecting lines

The Atlantic Wall

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Greenham Common, West Berkshire, England

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Proposals for future action

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Excavated and restored. Trench systems at Vimy Ridge.

Landscapes of remembrance on the Western Front.

A coastal battery and anti-tank wall on Guernsey, now enjoyed by tourists.

CHAPTER III BOUNDARIES IN THE LANDSCAPE AND IN THE CITY

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Bi-national Newstreet towards Eurode: Kerkrade-Herzogenrath

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

The Berlin Wall a frightening border, today redundant

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Interpretations and meaning

Boundaries in the landscape and in the city

Dividing lines, connecting lines

Prussian boundary pole near the crossing of Newstreet and Pannesheidestraat.

CHAPTER IV NEW URBAN FRONTIERS AND THE WILL TO BELONG

Constructing urban space

Dividing lines, connecting lines