This morning we went with the Meissen Commission to visit the Martin-Luther-Gymnasium in Eisenach. The building tells a story.
Originally a Dominican monastery, it has engaged in education for a thousand years. Apart from a guided tour in which we saw how the building itself has developed and incorporated the philosophies and cultures of its various epochs, we also sat in English and Religious Education lessons in order to get a feel for how these things are taught in a German church school.
The bit that grabbed me was the painting in the assembly hall. During the GDR the painting of Prometheus was underwritten by Karl Marx's ruminations on human value:
“Prometheus, the epitome of a fighter for the happiness of humankind.”
Well, make your own mind up about Marx's limited vision. What interested me was that the church school was not allowed to remove this piece of art on the grounds that it forms part of the 'story' that has formed the children who study here and must be somehow incorporated into their understanding of how they have come to be where they are. Clearly, even though it doesn't immediately strike one as the epitome of Christian iconography, it seems to me right that it has been retained.
I remember the first time I went into the Humboldt University in Berlin and was confronted by the staircase fronted with Marx and his statement from the Communist Manifesto: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” A bit pointed, don't you think… in the entrance hall to a renowned university?
The lecture hall we went to was lined with busts of great Communist thinkers, writers or political leaders – or, at least, those thinkers of the past whom Honecker's boys wanted to retrospectively claim as proto-Marxist-Leninists. I wondered why, sixteen years after the GDR experiment had been discarded, they didn't take away the tacky cultural symbols that epitomised it. I am glad they didn't.
This then fed into the then raging debate in Berlin about whether or not to demolish the grotesque Palast der Republik – the brutalist cultural centre of Socialist Berlin, located opposite the Dom and close to the Museuminsel. In this case the argument was lost and the building came down.
What is going in here is how far we lose something which, however ugly or inconvenient, reminds us of our story. The built environment incorporates memory and ridding ourselves of it is not always the best course of action – even when it is entirely understandable.
I am familiar with two churches in south London which were seriously damaged by fires. In both cases fire-damaged stones and other elements were incorporated in the design of the new church – in order to let the building itself tell an honest story of a community living and worshiping at a particular time in history. I picked up this theme (badly and in a rather rambling way) in a sermon in Hull a few days ago: go around the church where I was a vicar in the 1990s (Rothley, Leicestershire) and the building itself tells a story of change, adaptation, development, suffering, celebration and all the stuff of life there during 1200 years. Baptise in a Norman font and you can't help but be caught up in the mystery of the people who, over a period of 1000 years, were baptised in or witnessed baptism in that same font in that same building.
'Stuff' matters. Christians who spiritualise or dematerialise faith have – literally – lost the plot. Christianity is always materialist – incarnation goes to the heart of it. In Genesis 3 it is God who comes to humanity, seeking him and her out in the Garden; in Jesus God comes to us as one of us; in the colourful and coded imagination of Revelation it is the heavenly city that comes down to earth and not the other way round. Christianity is rooted in stuff and memory and realism: it means not running away from the world or the inconvenient bits of the story that has formed us. It is never escapism, but engagement.
I think Marx actually had a limited view of human value – contrary to the humane passion that drove his economic thinking. Suspicious of fantasy or myth, he went for Prometheus. Maybe the students at the Martin-Luther-Gymnasium will learn to think deeply about an anthropology that does justice to the philosophies that have shaped the world they are growing into, giving them the critical competence to construct a world view that will hold water in a changing and challenging world.
Before spending this afternoon in the wonderful Bachhaus in Eisenach, I noticed this quotation on leaving the school: “Das Geheimnis der Versöhnung ist Erinnerung” (the secret of reconciliation is memory). Discuss…
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September 28, 2012 at 5:38 pm
“Philosophers interpreting the world?” It’s from the Theses on Feuerbach (XI). Which, if you had studied at the LSE, you would’ve known!
September 28, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Brilliant post, thank you!
“The secret of reconciliation is memory” – yes, but only if the memory is a balanced one and one that takes the present into account.
Where it degenerates into jingoistic folk memory it is dangerous and counter productive.
Maybe this sentence can only be said in Germany?
September 28, 2012 at 6:31 pm
Justin, how embarrassing. I had thought the inscription was another one from the Communist Manifesto, then found I had remembered wrongly. The source didn’t get changed. I’ll leave it in in order to show how hopelessly ignorant I am!
September 28, 2012 at 6:50 pm
A friend of mine defined incarnation as ‘being present completely whatever the experience’. Perhaps if we are fully present we can remember why reconciliation is important.
September 28, 2012 at 7:58 pm
The fragments of ancient oak embedded in stone pillars of Exeter Cathedral by a Germany bomb are close to the artefacts celebrating the post war meetings between german and english in reconciliation.
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Memories in substance are wonderful resources, especially in such a setting.
September 29, 2012 at 8:13 am
I quoted Marx on philosophers, as a PhD myself, to a 21-year-old Hungarian student who listed ‘Communism’ as a dislike last week. We had an interesting exchange in which I pointed out that he had never experienced it in practice, even as a child, whereas my wife had, and he pointed out that no-one had. We both agreed that Marx’s ideal state in which the State withered away was very different from the form of communism experienced in ‘the Soviet Bloc’ until 23 years ago this October. I recently visited a primary school where the Head, a history teacher, kept a battered suitcase in his office with a piece of the iron curtain he himself had cut, and a bust of Lenin which I had last seen in a school office in 1988. As a history teacher myself, I agreed that without the bust of ‘the man who changed the world’ in one revolution in the suitcase, it was impossible for pupils to understand the significance of that little piece of barbed wire from the Austrian border! Church schools in Hungary have, mistakenly I feel, removed every last visual vestige of ‘the socialist era’, as they call it, except perhaps the system of education. No change there. Not Russian but Prussian!