Much has been written and said about the reconstruction or rather the plans to rebuild the Saxon Palace in Warsaw. Triumphant voices have mixed with expressions of indignation. Enthusiasm over the possibility of a full reconstruction with concerns about whether exempting the investment from oversight will not result in a conservation-architectural curiosity, another macabre that will become a caricature of political dreams of grandeur.
However, I would like to draw attention to another, somewhat less obvious aspect of the planned project. The reconstruction of the Saxon Palace is the final stage of healing the traces of trauma. It is a plastic surgery that will remove the Scar on the city's body. When the New Saxon Palace is built, the most important post-war ruin in the capital (and perhaps in the entire country) and the Void that surrounds it will disappear. A void that is as eloquent as a section of the Arcades of the neoclassical palace designed by Adam Idzkowsky. A void that terrifies and overwhelms. An emptiness that we as a society are unable to cope with. Which we are unable (or perhaps unwilling) to incorporate into the collective memory, and which we therefore seek to fill.
It is therefore necessary to reflect on the contemporary Polish memory space. It is dominated by a simplified content, a flat message. Instead of room for individual interpretation - one obligatory narrative straight from the history books. Nation. Community. The flutter of banners and the steady step of marching representative companies.
Why is there not a single patch of the city of Gdansk or Wroclaw that bears witness to the tragic fate of both cities in 1945? Is the well-being of tourists, who prefer to see the colorful image of a vibrant reconstructed historic downtown, more important than the memory of the tens of thousands of victims that could be commemorated by the ruins of one of the tenements - a burnt-out stump of walls testifying to the horrors of war? An empty lot, a pile of soot-reddened bricks, moss that has overgrown parts of the wall, would constitute a monument with a power of expression incomparable to anything else, for emptiness can shout more loudly than any form.
from Sasa do Lasa
il. Błażej Ciarkowski
As the years go by, I become more and more convinced that some places should never be rebuilt and no new monument will fully convey the tragedy that was both World Wars, the Holocaust, Stalin's terror. The ruins of Prora on Rügen said more about the failure of the Nazi project than any historical study. A fragment of the destroyed Frauenkirche in Dresden was a reminder of the hell of the Allied carpet bombing raids that turned the city into a sea of fire and ruins. The ghetto field in the Jewish cemetery in Lodz, a sea of grass overgrowing the space that was a burial ground in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, sends a message many times more loud than the granite memorial plaques in Survivors' Park. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the boundlessness of the Birkenau camp site marked by turrets, chimneys speaks more powerfully than a monument, moves more powerfully than the voice of a tour guide. That's why Oskar Hansen's concept of " The Road" was so unique, as it seemed to give new meaning to Theodor Adorno's words, while suggesting that a memorial cannot really be designed.
Perhaps this is why the most powerful memorials are those where a person has decided to stop the need to create and surrender the power of the place to the Void. In France after World War I, the government designated the so-called RedZone (Zone Rouge) - an area in the northeastern part of the country that was destroyed during military operations and was not settled afterwards. Localities such as Fleury-devant-Douaumont still appear on maps and even have their own mayor. Instead of houses and streets, however, their urban planning is marked by bomb and shrapnel craters, which have overgrown trees and shrubs over the years. That the towns "dead for France" were once full of life is evidenced by the modest street nameplates. A similar example is Oradour-Sur-Glane, a town in central France pacified by the Germans during World War II. The ruins of burned-out buildings, rusting household appliances, disintegrating car bodies and pervasive emptiness are reminders of the apocalypse that befell the town's residents on a June day in 1944.
Why, then, does the concept of a permanent ruin as a poignant testimony to dramatic history lose out to reconstruction? Why does the object speak to us more strongly than its absence? Is it the victory of life over death and the idea of creation over destruction? We are afraid of the Void and what it represents. We want to control it, but it refuses to submit to our power. Ultimately, in the face of defeat, we fill the Void with new content. But why might filling the Void in Saxon Square have disturbing consequences?
subsequent stages of reconstruction
il. Błażej Ciarkowski
The Frauenkirche in Dresden has been rebuilt in recent years. Prora has been renovated and is again a lively resort. These are different facets of the same story. Different examples of an operation to remove scars, install prostheses. This is our way of saying that World War II was an "accident at work." She was an aberration. That nothing like it will ever happen again. Not here, not in Europe. We put the slogans "never again war" "never again fascism" into the memory architecture of the 1960s. They may have made sense then, but now? Let's live and enjoy life! Let's build! Let's fill our world with content appropriate to the great era in which we lived. The tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s is so distant as to be almost unreal. It represented a negation of all the values represented by our civilization....
Meanwhile, as Enzo Traverso writes, Nazism and the crimes of World War II were not an aberration, but a natural consequence of a particular model of development based on violence, exploitation, discrimination and the cult of efficiency. Similarly, World War I - was not the sole result of the accident of the death of Archduke Ferdinand, but an inevitable consequence of earlier events. Then, as now, people were swayed by progress. They saw the future in bright colors. They believed in a vision of a glorious future. The tragedies of 1914-18 and 1939-45 successively shattered these visions. They died in the trenches at Verdun, suffocated by gas poisoning at Ypres, burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, and were buried in the rubble of Warsaw tenements. That is why it is so important for us to remember. So that the void in the heart of Warsaw is still a scar reminding us of the trauma, seeming to say "never again."
