Barely a week goes by without disputes arising over disputed heritage, from demolished statues and monuments to slave traders and colonizers, the removal of British imperial buildings and the reclamation of mosques in Hindu nationalist India to the fetishism of the “new Pimlicos” pastiche. in defiance of contemporary architecture in the UK.
Robert Bevan’s book attempts to grapple with our built environment, particularly its historic buildings and monuments, and the truths and untruths they embody. He is well placed to help us discover our cities and their meanings: an architectural critic, he is also a member of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (Icomos) and the Blue Shield, which focuses on heritage in crisis. And crisis seems an apt word to describe where we are at with his subject – quoting Eric Hobsbawm, Bevan suggests that this time could be one of “permanent catastrophe”. As much as it is a globe-trotting guide to contested sites, dubious historical restorations and harrowing heritage destruction, Monumental lies is a rogue gallery of bad actors among recent and current governments, associated think tanks, and public figures.
It is published by Verso, the imprint of New Left Books, so inevitably Bevan approaches his subject from this political territory, examining the ruinous attitudes and policies of a host of populist and right-wing governments. But a book on cultural heritage and historic architecture from Bevan’s perspective is needed. “It is one of the great cultural tragedies of the past half-century that the left has ceded the legacy narrative to conservatives,” he writes.
But Monumental lies is not a lenient rant against legacy reactionaries and veneered status quo supporters. It is a deep and far-reaching investigation of the tangible world that argues for the primacy of historical materialism and the evidence provided by the built environment, as opposed to what it describes as “the idea the most unreliable and problematic of memory”. As much as he opposes raving nationalist narratives and bad-faith “keep and explain” policies regarding disputed monuments, he warns against the systematic sweeping of shrines to wrongdoers and questions the use of well-meaning myths and notions. of collective symbols in commemoration.
Bevan belies the charming story that Warsaw was rebuilt after paintings by Bernardo Bellotto
While avoiding the false equivalence and bilateralism he rightly suggests allowing governments to exploit the post-truth environment, Bevan still manages to add nuance and acknowledge complexity when tackling topics often characterized by the most lively debate. But some of his best writing concerns territory that is less immediately relevant. He is good, for example, on how the reconstruction of heritage in big cities like Dresden and Warsaw, although seemingly benign, can be instrumentalized for the construction of myths. He belies the charming story that Warsaw was rebuilt after the paintings of Bernardo Bellotto; on the contrary, he argues convincingly, it accorded with the policy of the Soviet regime. A similar narrative construction by reconstruction continues there and elsewhere in post-communist Europe by “ideologies hostile to difference and which privilege simple and mythical pasts over complicated and messy presents”.
Integrate the scars
He criticizes the way in which the reconstruction of the Mostar bridge, this emblem of the ravages of the Bosnian war, was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, even if it is only partially rebuilt from old stones. It also details the facsimile of Crematorium I at Auschwitz, not where the original was, and without clear signage to indicate that fact, and how Holocaust deniers skipped over the details of the facsimile to make their shameful points. What Bevan advocates, rather than fakes and fudges, is a built environment that incorporates “the scars” of “past trauma,” and in doing so recognizes the human cost that accompanies ruin. Doing so would be in line with the 1964 Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, in which tangible material as evidence was the key principle, and inauthentic reconstruction “equals forgery”, writes -he. Among the buildings he praises for their honesty in this regard are the pasted reconstructions of Munich Alte Pinakothek by Hans Döllgast, and the works of David Chipperfield on Berlin new museum. Rather than retain and explain, he suggests, let’s retain and transform.
The same goes for the statues and monuments that have sparked such fierce debate. Here, Bevan calls for a “subversive transformation”. As a best practice, he cites the intervention of Arnold Holzknecht and Michele Bernardi in a fascist frieze in Bolzano in northern Italy. The frieze remains, but embedded in it are Hannah Arendt’s LED-lit words: “No one has the right to obey.” He uses German expressions to make his point: an Ehrenmal, a monument to commemorate, has become a Mahnmal, its features intact but marked. Bevan’s “subversive transformation” would allow us to “layer our monuments and our city” and turn unworthy places of honor into “sites of shame”, changing their meaning without erasing the evidence they provide from the public domain.
• Robert Bevan, Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth About the PastVerso, 384pp, £20 (hb), published 11 October 2022
• Ben Luke is a contributing editor and podcast host at The arts journal
