10
Urban bombsites
Introduction
The Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island, first opened in 1855, was gutted by bombs in the Second World War. In 2009 it reopened after a lengthy restoration, displaying its extraordinary prehistoric and Ancient Egyptian collections, including the famous bust of Nefertiti (Barndt 2011). The architect David Chipperfield, who oversaw the lengthy and troubled rebuilding of the museum from what he described as a ‘Piranesian pile’ into an award-winning recreation, retained large areas of bare brick, burned stone columns, fragmented frescoes, bullet holes, and the scars of shell and bomb fragments (Kimmelman 2009). In this unflinching exhibit of its architectural wounds, together with displays of artefacts burned in the bombing, the contemporary Neues Museum is as much a museum of the urban bombsite as a museum of archaeology.
The life history of the Neues Museum from its first (of several) bombings in 1943 through to the present illustrates many of the themes surrounding urban bombsites. In its partial destruction, it was one amongst millions of buildings across the world left scarred by the Second World War, and its ruins remained a blackened reminder of the horrors of that conflict for another half century in the heart of divided Berlin. Chipperfield’s reference to classical ruins marks another theme in the lives of urban bombsites: attempts to find comfort, meaning, and a sense of healing in the evocation of more romantic and politically sterile monuments of the reassuringly distant past. Unusually, the Neues Museum manages to reconcile two generally distinct pathways in the later life histories of bombsites: the first being rebuilding and the comfortable amnesia of material erasure; the second being the preservation and presentation of architectural ruins as sites of commemoration.
In this chapter I want to present some of the principal themes, trends, practices, adhesions, representations, and confusions surrounding urban bombsites. To weave together these disparate threads, I will consider the bombsite as a place that is created, inhabited, used, transformed, annihilated, and represented across a range of trajectories. One of my over-arching aims is to dismiss any conception of the life history of bombsites or any ruins of violence as a straightforwardly linear progression from the violent wound of destruction through a gradual process of ‘healing’ through, variously, rebuilding, clearing and redeveloping, or the softening processes of time and nature (Moshenska 2015). This too simplistic and teleological approach to bombsites as ‘healable’ is often implicit in the notion of architectural ruins as ‘wounds.’
I am an archaeologist, anthropologist, and historian of bombsites writing these words in an office built upon a Second World War bombsite, from where I can watch YouTube videos of Predator drone missile strikes reducing buildings to rubble on the other side of the world. In my journey to work today I have travelled past the sites of bombings in the 1880s, 1940s, and 1970s in a city – London – whose bombed ruins have witnessed social cleansing, modernist dreaming, cinematic absurdity, children’s play, ecological diversity, archaeological discovery, death, haunting, and wave upon wave of rebuilding and re-rebuilding. The life histories of bombsites between place, memory, and haunting absences is a part of everyday life for many people across the world in societies ripped apart by, or healing from the violent conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Coming into being
In the modern city built of brick, stone, steel, and glass, the bomb presents an existential threat in the way that fire did (and still does) for cities of wood and thatch. My focus in this chapter is the individual or bounded bombsite: not the remains of a city flattened by an atomic bomb, artillery barrage, or a firestorm of incendiary bombs, but the ruined building made notable and disturbing by the juxtaposition of surviving buildings nearby. The opposite case can also be seen: the survival of St Paul’s Cathedral during the London Blitz was made particularly striking by the near-total destruction of every building surrounding it (Allbeson 2015).
The urban bombsite is the remains of a building marked out for destruction, either by guided missile or smart bomb in some more recent conflicts, or by the more inhumanly random finger of fate directing a bomb, rocket, or missile from the sky. Or it could be seen as the absence of that building in the space where it had previously stood.
The creation of a bombsite might appear instantaneous, but it is a combination of several distinct events taking place within moments of detonation (Cullis 2001). The bomb, typically a high explosive charge inside a metal casing, might detonate on impact, close to the surface, or after burying itself some distance into the ground. The initial blast of hot, high-pressure gas will destroy structures close by and cause diminishing damage further away. The fragments of bomb casing will cut into walls and act as projectiles over longer distances, while the secondary fragments – pieces of nearby structures and other objects carried by the blast – will also be propelled at high velocity across the blast area and beyond. Shockwaves after the initial blast will cause further damage, and seismic shockwaves will damage or even demolish buildings further from the detonation point, literally shaking them to pieces. The heat of the detonation can char or ignite flammable materials such as timbers and soft furnishings, and fires from broken gas pipes can also spread through the wreckage. Many of the stranger effects of a bomb are caused by the blast wind, in which the low pressure caused by the initial blast wave creates a powerful suction, drawing wreckage and fragments back towards the point of detonation. All of this occurs within seconds, leaving a building transformed into a bombsite.
The social construction of a bombsite continues after this point. In many conflict areas such as London during the Blitz or contemporary Syria, dedicated teams of Civil Defence workers will arrive at the site. Fire crews will work to extinguish fires and turn off gas and water mains, while rescue crews will make the wreckage stable and begin to search for survivors and casualties. Police, military, or paramilitary troops might be deployed to guard the site against looters or to create a protective cordon, and efforts will be made to clear the wreckage and debris from the street back into the footprint of the destroyed or damaged structure (O’Brien 1955). Unstable structural elements such as standing walls might be torn down to prevent their subsequent uncontrolled collapse and possible harm to those nearby. In some cases these rescue efforts might themselves be targeted for attack, either by a continued blind or random bombing of the area, or by deliberate targeting: some contemporary drone operators have been accused of targeting rescuers who rush to the scene with follow-up missile strikes. When the fires have been extinguished, the wounded rescued, the dead removed, and the site made safe and bounded, the next stages in the life of a bombsite can begin.
Rubble
The defining artefact of an urban bombsite is rubble. Rubble has a curious life of its own, and one worth following briefly. Some of the rubble of bombed British cities in the Second World War was carried to America as ballast by the empty convoy ships that had brought war materials, food, and other resources to Britain. Shipped from Bristol and dumped in New York, this rubble formed the foundations of the waterfront in parts of Queens, and is marked today with a memorial stone (Lstiburek 2014). The rubble from other cities was shipped to the east of England and formed the foundations for the miles of runways and taxiways for the new airfields from which the bombers of the British and American air forces reduced German and continental cities to rubble. The work What Dust Will Rise? by artist Michael Rakowitz included a piece of rubble from a bombed British building that had itself been dropped by bombers, labelled ‘Stone fragment dropped by the Royal Air Force over Essen, Germany, 1942. British bombers released the rubble of English buildings destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain on German cities as a prelude to actual bombs’ (Rakowitz 2012).
The vast heaps of rubble in bombed cities in post–Second World War Germany presented logistical problems. Winston Churchill described Europe in this period as a ‘rubble heap,’ and Bertold Brecht called Berlin ‘the heap of rubble near Potsdam,’ but gargantuan efforts were made by teams of workers, mostly women, to sort and clear the rubble. Much of it was dumped out at sea, while more was formed into mounds, artificial embankments or hills, and covered with earth (Sebald 2003). Nevertheless, an object-agency perspective on warfare might conclude that it is a means by which rubble reproduces itself.
What kind of place?
Rubble, together with the weeds that grow quickly on bombsites, contribute to a sense of bombsites as ‘fuzzy’ spaces, in contrast with the hard-edged spaces of the urban built environment. Bombsites can be considered ‘fuzzy places’ in a number of different ways, and it is worth considering some of these briefly, again drawing primarily on accounts of the bombsites of Second World War Britain.
The rich and complex ecology of bombsites fascinated horticulturalists and others in wartime Britain. As Richard Mabey noted, the ruins of London including those around St Paul’s became a rich carpet of colour with the rosebay willowherb and buddleia that grew enthusiastically on burned and ruined sites (1996: 236). The director of Kew Gardens gave a lecture on the ecology of London’s bombsites in 1945, noting the prevalence of windborne seeds as well as others liberated from the long-buried urban earth, amongst the more than 150 species of plant found growing on bombsites. Alongside the flora came the fauna: birds nested amid the rubble, stray cats found quiet spots to birth and house their kittens, and stray dogs foraged for food. Where standing water could be found – including the huge emergency water tanks erected on some bombsites during the Blitz – a wealth of insect life could be found on and below the surface (Moshenska 2014).
The chaos and mess of bombsites attracts more than wild animals. In conflicts across the world and into the present, children and young people have found the disorderly spaces of bombed buildings to be irresistible play spaces, with near endless potential for imaginative play, transformation and modification, escape from adult supervision, risk-taking, privacy, fighting, hiding, and illicit sexual activity (Moshenska 2014) (Figure 10.1). Geographers Cloke and Jones (2005) have traced both the longstanding attraction of disordered spaces to children, but also the cultural history of children in ruins as an expression of their wildness and closeness to nature. The ‘adventure playground’ movement from the 1940s onwards drew heavily on the wartime experiences of educational reformers such as Marie Paneth who had observed children’s play on bombsites and recognised the potential it held for free expression, creative play, and working through traumatic experiences (Kozlovsky 2007). The typical adventure playground of this period with open spaces and construction materials including scrap timber, bricks, and scrap metal bears a clear resemblance to the bombsites in Denmark and Britain that inspired educationalists. Meanwhile, first person accounts of wartime childhoods reveal the social complexity and cultural richness of children’s encounters with bombsites, including the physical dangers, joys, complexities, competitiveness, possessiveness, and imagination that characterise children’s play in free environments (Cranwell 2003).
Figure 10.1Boys digging an allotment on a bombsite in London, 1942.
Source: Ministry of Information/Wikimedia Commons.
The marginality of bombsites extends beyond children and stray cats. In many conflicts such as wartime Europe bombsites, alongside air raid shelters, became hiding places for deserters, refugees, criminals and others on the margins of society. Many people whose homes had been destroyed built modest shelters in the wreckage of their homes, as social services struggled to find replacement housing in the face of heavy demand, or totally collapsed as the war took its toll. In many cases people were reluctant to leave the wreckage of their homes due to psychological trauma, or due to the not wholly irrational fear that their possessions would be looted or the land taken away from them. The fuzziness of the bombsite blurred boundaries of possession as well as concepts of indoors and outdoors, the home and the street. In the reverse of looting, bombsites – and particularly isolated ones – often become sites for the illicit or official dumping of rubbish.
Transformations
How are bombsites transformed by human intervention? What ‘next chapters’ are available in their life histories? The primary theme here is development, of bombsites put to work as productive spaces within society. Here, what they become – a public park, a new block of flats – is almost as important as what they are not – an eyesore, a patch of waste ground, an urban wilderness. This sense of absencing, of bombsites as absences that must themselves be made absent, highlights an important aspect of their being: that they are not wanted, not valued in their own right, not regarded as an end-point or a legitimate form of urban space by anybody with any power to decide. Wild children and stray cats do not constitute stakeholders. What else must be made absent? The redeveloped bombsite is an erasure of the past in numerous ways. In many places the destruction of war, like destruction wrought by natural disaster, creates opportunities for social engineering: slums have been swept away, and now slum-dwellers, vulnerable and transient communities can be exiled or further marginalised through the redevelopment of their former homes.
Archaeologists have long treated redevelopments as keyhole views into deep urban pasts, and the development of bombsites is no exception. In post–Second World War London archaeologists such as W.F. Grimes, Ivor Noël Hume, and their teams worked in advance of the construction crews to retrieve and record the traces of prehistoric, Roman and medieval London before they once again disappeared from view beneath office blocks and homes: Rose Macauley referred to these diggers as ‘a civilised intelligence … at work among the ruins’ (quoted in Mellor 2004: 86). These buried pasts mean little to developers and planners with ambition and a vision of the future, for whom the opportunities embodied in a bombsite are endless. In the ruins of the Second World War, Britain planners such as Patrick Abercrombie saw the foundations of a modernist future urbanism, a harmonious and humane creation, rational and totalising, built on the ruins of the messy, palimpsest city of the past (Tiratsoo 2000). Abercrombie’s plans for London, Greater London, Plymouth, and other cities are astonishingly detailed, grand, beautiful, and cold. Only the poverty of post-war Britain kept them from reality, and the absence of these grand modernist reconstructions becomes just another absence haunting the bombsites until their eventual redevelopment.
Memorials
A small subset of bombsites are destined not for redevelopment but for preservation in situ: the Neues Museum mentioned earlier is a rare example of compromise between these two forces. The use of bomb ruins as war memorials was discussed in Britain as early as 1943, when detailed plans were put in place to preserve the ruins of Christ Church Greyfriars as a memorial to the victims of the Blitz (Casson 1944). The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin is one such structure, preserved in a state of ruin as a reminder of the horrors of war, and accompanied by a memorial hall with interpretation materials, and a new church building next to it constructed in the 1960s. Bombed churches and cathedrals left in ruins as war memorials can be found in Liverpool, Hanover, Bristol, Cologne, Coventry, and other cities.
One of the notable things about bombsites used as war memorials is that their preservation puts them outside the timeframes of entropy and decay that other bombsites must obey. These memorial ruins are cleared of rubble and weeds and fitted with flower gardens or sombre plain stone interiors. Their crumbling walls are propped with beams and capped with cement to prevent collapse, while moss, ivy, and other signs of romantic, abandoned, gothic ruin are periodically purged (Moshenska 2015). They are not allowed to fade or mellow or slowly collapse over the centuries, like a ruined monastery, until only a few lumps and bumps of stone can be seen amid the grass and weeds and bushes. The bombsite preserved as a war memorial is a sterile space, its fuzzy edges made hard again by cement and a heritage management plan. But despite their sterility these managed ruins still maintain an atmosphere of abjection and disorder, particularly as modern buildings of glass and metal rise around them, and the sense of being frozen and unchanging in time cuts both ways.
Representations
Bombsites are culturally generative spaces. Scholars and writers including W.G. Sebald, Leo Mellor, Rose Macauley, and others have queried this richness and examined the legacies of film, literature, and art that thrived in the ruins (Dillon 2014; Mellor 2011). In post-1945 Germany, ‘Rubble Films’ portrayed life in the broken cities with an unflinching realism, and are now recognised as a distinct genre of the post-war years. Mellor has argued that literary modernism in Britain, including the works of T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, and Louis MacNeice, were strongly influenced by the idea and the reality of bombsites, and that similar influences can be found in the works of British surrealist artists (Mellor 2011). In different media, bombsites serve different purposes: they set the scene of stories set in wartime, they signify violence in their burned, jagged imagery, they provide a glimpse or possibility of social chaos amidst physical urban order, or they offer a stage for a story to play out on the margins of society. As Mellor notes, ‘Reading – and writing – the ruins of war requires the material spaces cut violently into the city fabric to be acknowledged and understood’ (2011: 203).
Conclusion
Urban bombsites are conceptually and culturally rich places that are good to think with. The tearing open of the domestic sphere and exposing it to the outside world is unheimlich in the full Freudian sense: uncanny, unhomely, unsettling, obscene, fascinating. As material traces of extreme violence, bombsites sit uncomfortably in civilised society, and where possible they are razed, turfed over, or developed into oblivion. Those that remain are domesticated and sacralised into clean and tidy memorial spaces. But the sense of uncanniness lingers. Bombsites are haunted by absences: of the building that is gone, the dead, the absent living, and of buildings unbuilt in its footprint.
Perhaps the most famous bombsite in Europe was the ruined Frauenkirche in Dresden, shattered by fire in the infamous bombing of the city in February 1945. For decades the blackened ruins of the church, surrounded by rubble, were the subject of political tensions between the East German government and the population of Dresden. Variously inscribed as a memorial of the Western Allies’ aggression against Germany or as a focus for anti-regime peace protests, from the 1980s the ruins of the Frauenkirche were also the focus of a growing reconstruction campaign (James 2006; Moshenska 2015). Following German reunification this campaign grew rapidly, and an international fundraising campaign focused in the UK and the United States raised the necessary amount. In 2005 the reconstructed church re-opened: like the Neues Museum in Berlin a few years later, it integrated burned and broken structural elements into its reconstruction, so as to preserve in its walls the form, fabric, and intangible heritage of the iconic bombsite it had been.
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