The Building and Burning of Knowledge By Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
Democracy without books is not democracy.
—Marta Minujín
There where they burn books, they burn, in the end, people.
—Heinrich Heine
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.
It was likely against that symbolism that the Greek poet and artist Yorgos Makris turned when, on November 18, 1944, just a month after the end of the Nazi Germany occupation of Greece (before which book burnings of “anti-Greek” and dissident literature had become common under Ioannis Metaxas’s dictatorship), he suggested bombing the Parthenon. His public “Proclamation” begins: “Sharing as we do the aesthetic and philosophical view of destruction and the mortality of the form of beings that are part of the context of life’s consummation … we decide to set as our aim the blowing up of ancient monuments and the promotion of propaganda against them.” Finally, with exasperated candor, he notes: “Our first act of destruction shall be the blowing up of the Parthenon, which is literally suffocating us.” Though the proclamation was simply a critical provocation (never so simple), its espousal of destruction was paradoxically a generative, patently literary gesture—one that might help work against past and future occupations, as well as “national tourism and the nightmarish folklore literature around it.” Only by destroying (imaginatively) the emblem of the supremacy of Western civilization, and Greece’s glorified, projected past, would a new building of knowledge and a Greek future be possible.
Nearly four decades later, the Parthenon inspired another transgressive gesture, this one not built on destruction, however, but its opposite. In 1983, Argentina was just emerging from the dark years of its military junta and dictatorship (this, just a decade past the end of Greece’s own postwar dictatorship). Artist Marta Minujín was working on a series called “La caída de los mitos universals,” or “The Fall of Universal Myths,” when she decided to make a new work for the series, this one titled El Partenon de libros prohibidos—The Parthenon of Prohibited Books. In a square in Buenos Aires, she built a skeleton of the famous Greek temple; then she used approximately 25,000 books, all of which had been banned or burned by the military dictatorship, to build its walls. Thus did Minujín bring together two potent and undoubtedly familiar symbols: the Parthenon as the emblematic building of knowledge and democracy, and the desecration of books under authoritarian rule.
As long as books have been written, they have been burnt. As long as buildings of knowledge have been erected, they have been destroyed—often to be rebuilt again. In 1955, the first documenta was mounted by Arnold Bode in the provisionally restored ruin of the Fridericianum, only a decade past its last fire. The guiding idea of the exhibition was, in part, reconstruction (both of the modern art-historical tradition, severed by the Nazis, and German and European culture more generally dealing with the trauma of world war). Likewise, the strange confluence of the three examples of knowledge building and burning cited here reveal that the buildings erected to hold knowledge are never just that—libraries and temples are embodiments of power relationships and emblems of hegemony (from the Greek ἡγεμονία, or hegemonía, meaning rule). They project and receive power, which always includes violence. Their architecture is indivisible from ideology and political and economic aggression, just as it can serve as shelter for literature and ideas and resistance. Architectural projects can be “understood as cognitive objects allowing us to fathom the potential of the social production of space,” Łukasz Stanek notes. Temples and libraries, those old stories of knowledge climbing upward through the political air, are also our new stories: in them we read and locate our contemporary commons, a kind of debt.
The Fridericianum in Kassel after the Allied air raids of September 8 and 9, 1941
After the Allied air raids of Kassel on September 8 and 9, 1941, the Fridericianum lay open: its library destroyed, books punctuating the rubble. But war and devastation were not new to the late eighteenth-century building; its construction had been made possible by it. Its eponymous founder, Friedrich II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who ruled the area until 1785, and whose first wife was Princess Mary, daughter of King George II, financed the Fridericianum, in part, by selling local mercenaries to Great Britain to fight in the American Revolution. He sent so many that all German soldiers fighting for the British side were eventually called “Hessians.”
Friedrich II used his fortune—blood money, no doubt—to build the Fridericianum, a public museum and state library showing the Landgraves’ collection of books, antiquities, maps, medals, and cork models of Roman architecture. If the building’s Enlightenment-era Neoclassical form was a clear nod to the Parthenon, the Greek temple’s origins as both a temple dedicated to wisdom and a war treasury, as well as its later symbolism of democracy, also found parallels with the Fridericianum’s own foundations in the spoils of war, the presentation of knowledge as an instrument of power, and the creation of a commons.
But the mercenary history of Kassel that made possible the Fridericianum also brought about its midcentury destruction. The region’s investment in militarism extended into the twentieth century, as seen in the military-industrial complex that existed there at the time of World War II. Tanks and aircraft were produced in the region, as were trains and munitions, all of which were targeted in the Allied bombing. By the end of the war in 1945, much of the city center and its surrounding suburbs had been burned and destroyed.
A decade later, in 1955, the first documenta would be staged by Kassel painter, designer, and professor Arnold Bode and art historian Werner Haftmann in the still partially ruined interiors of the Fridericianum, which continued to show scars of the fires of the 1940s. Haftmann said of that first documenta: “It is devised with our young generation in mind, and the artists, poets, and thinkers they follow, so that they may recognize what foundations have been laid for them, what inheritance they must nurture, and what inheritance must be overcome.” —QL
Marta Minujín, El Partenon de libros prohibidos (The Parthenon of Forbidden Books, 1983), installation, Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires
In 1983, Marta Minujín seized upon the Parthenon as an aesthetic and political archetype of democracy, which had been corrupted in her country of Argentina by the national Catholic dictatorship that ruled up until that year. Her idea was to put the democratic ideal back into circulation at the very moment when the military junta fell. This artistic project of mass participation, titled El Partenon de libros (The Parthenon of Books, 1983), was part of a series initiated by the artist called “La caída de los mitos universals,” or “The Fall of Universal Myths,” which entailed her appropriating universal monumental icons in order to replicate them, break them up into pieces, and redistribute them in the public realm.
In “La caída de los mitos universals,” Minujín returns to these symbols—which have been reified and confiscated by the processes of institutionalization or capitalization—the status of offerings that characterized them at the moment they emerged. In so doing, she leads them to literally be digested by a new global social body of which the West represents only one of the poles. For El Partenon de libros, 25,000 books, taken from cellars where they had been locked up by the military, covered a scale replica of the Greek edifice, built out of metal tubes in a public square in the southern part of Buenos Aires.
Minujín’s monument to democracy, and to education through art, revives the ceremonies of spending accumulated riches enacted by archaic societies depicted in anthropology. These regular rituals of destruction allowed the fluidity of exchanges to be maintained between members of communities that were, at times, enemies. The books banned by the junta’s army were no different than property privatized and captured by traders who, through speculating on the debts of states, encourage the suppression of public-sector services and create social shortages. In her mass participatory projects, Minujín rediscovers the initial value of a collective treasure—she melts shared capital back down into cultural currency without remainder.
With her axio-relativity theory, Minujín creates a new horizon. She lies down the verticality of public edifices, which embody a confiscated cultural heritage and a hidebound heritage. She dilapidates the fortune these myths represent and contaminates people with their ideas. By tilting these symbols, Minujín not only gives new meaning to these monuments, she offers them a new sensuality.
—Pierre Bal-Blanc
At the time of his infamous 1944 “Proclamation” calling for the destruction of the Parthenon, the poet and artist Yorgos Vassiliou Makris (1923–1968) was an obscure personality on the margins of the Athens artistic scene. His radical idea to destroy one of Greece’s most treasured and symbolic historic sites appeared to be a completely non-patriotic and immoral gesture; nevertheless, it captured the interest of several intellectuals who likely found in it a refuge from the tyranny of history and the absolutism of ideology.
Makris’s “Proclamation” was neither a strict manifesto nor a set of guidelines for a violent act, but a performative text signaling a desire for the liberation of sacred archetypes so often made to serve conflicting political agendas. The Parthenon was, of course, the primary emblem for the reconstitution of Greece, suffering the effects of poverty and war, and a focus for national morale. It also symbolized the development of the Greek tourism industry, while serving as an excuse for all the iniquities occurring in its shadow. Makris appeared to be against the void-like admiration that the historic monument inspired; while the political, social, and economic destruction of Athens took place uninterrupted at its feet, the Parthenon itself remained somewhat untouched.
Makris’s critical gesture came just a few years after Apostolos Santas and Manolis Glezos removed the Nazi flag from the Parthenon, on May 31, 1941, giving courage to their fellow Greeks to fight the German occupiers. After being imprisoned, Glezos became an emblem of resistance in Greece, with a long political career as the president of the Communist EDA party and then the Socialist PASOK. Makris, in contrast, is discussed by relatively few.
“He lived without home, without profession, without academic titles or rewards, without published record of his writings in a society submissive to the idea of property, power, and illegitimate titles,” writes the poet E. H. Gonatas in the introduction to the only book of Makris’s writings, published in 1986, long after his death. On January 31, 1968, Makris jumped off the roof terrace of his apartment building. The story goes that when the building’s concierge—who saw him going upstairs—asked him if he needed anything, he replied: “No, no worries, I am coming down right away.”
—Marina Fokidis