We
are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza,
the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But
in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship is
more intimate, not just linguistic or metaphoric but concrete (often
marble). If a stanza is a room for words on the page, a library is a
series of rooms for words—and the books that hold them—on the
ground. And ground is often disputed, desecrated, possessed and
dispossessed. It is always political: just as it is the site for the
building and projecting of knowledge, it is often the site of its
destruction as well. Consider three examples:
The
Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, opened in 1779 as a library and
public museum, one of Europe’s earliest. Along with the art
collections of the Hessian landgraves, it held more than 100,000
books. The Fridericianum’s construction was funded by Friedrich II,
Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who made his fortune by selling local
mercenaries to Great Britain to fight in the American Revolution.
After briefly becoming a parliamentary building under
Napoléon’s brother Jérôme, then King of Westphalia and
Kassel, the Fridericianum was returned to its original function;
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm would work at the library there. The museum’s
collections were relocated to Berlin under Prussian rule, and by the
early twentieth century the building became a state library only.
Thus marks some of the nascent stages of Fridericianum’s building
of knowledge, but burning would come.
On
May 19, 1933, approximately 2,000 books were burned on
Friedrichsplatz, reportedly attended to by enormous crowds. The
bonfire was held in conjunction with book burnings in university
towns across the country, a nation-wide “Action Against the
Un-German Spirit,” as it was termed, that aimed to rid Germany of
“Jewish intellectualism.” Nearly a decade later, in 1941, the
Fridericianum—still a library at the time—caught fire during the
Allied bombing raids that flattened Kassel. In images taken after the
bombing, we notice not just the thousands of burned volumes leafing
out palely from the dark rubble, but the now naked Neoclassical
armature of the building’s columns; indeed, the eighteenth-century
structure was designed in the “spirit of the Enlightenment” by
Huguenot architect Simon Louis du Ry.
The
main architectural embodiment of that spirit, and of the classical
ideal more generally, was, of course, the Parthenon in Greece. Built
during the rule of Pericles in Athens between 447 and 432 BC, the
temple was dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, civilization,
justice, and war, among other attributes. And the Parthenon would
become the architectural model that has most often inspired the shape
of Western public institutions’ edifices of knowledge, among them
libraries, museums, universities, government buildings, courts, and
banks. Though built to shelter a monumental gold-and-ivory statue of
Athena, the Parthenon would also house the city’s treasury. Indeed,
the temple was funded by taxes derived from both the Athens treasury
and tribute from cities across the Aegean after the Athenian
victories in the Persian Wars (Plutarch famously offers a story about
Pericles wasting allies’ money on “sacred buildings”).
Transformed into a mosque during the Ottoman Empire, and partially
destroyed and rebuilt many times in the interim, the deconsecrated
Parthenon of the modern period became an emblem of Western cultural
hegemony, not exclusively democratic.
Text
by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis,
Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
