An Archive of German Cities

A recent article in the paper about a large archive of photographs of German cities, taken on Hitler's orders in 1942/43. They show the centres of many German cities, ancient medieval streets clustered around town hall or cathedral, essentially landscapes three or four centuries old in cities that are a thousand years old. The idea was to document how the cities appeared so that after Germany won the war they could be rebuilt as they were. The photographs show Leipzig, Stuttgart etc - and most poignantly Dresden - as they were after a 'small' amount of bombing. They show cities with cleared districts, small 'patches' of streetscape near to the centre having been flattened and then cleared. They show a city landscape and a country at a time of transition, when German cities were being bombed but the authorities could still assemble gangs - often slave labourers of course - to clear the rubble and the streets. The photographs are snapshots, slices of history, landscapes in the process of being transformed. They are photographs of a present looking back into a past, as if (because the assumption is they are doomed) they are already slipping irrterievably backwards into history. Hitler tried to record the present already becoming the past.



They reminded me of a similar German book I bought many years ago, a collection of photographs of German cities before the First World War, another time of enormous civilian upheaval and change. They show elegant men and women promenading on the wide empty boulevards of Munich or Berlin, the dusty streets next to them only occupied by a few horse-drawn carriages and wagons. The text is in German and written in Gothic, which I think was banned for a time after 1945.



These images of essentially vanished landscapes remind me of similar images I have seen many ties of Liverpool; lost streets and horse-carriages, Victorian and Edwardian street scenes, commonplace city-memory. This seems like a Sebaldian curiosity, this awareness of history and time, especially with regard to the melancholy history of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. I found looking at the 1942 photographs a sad experience, fraught with the knowledge of immediate destruction. We bring too much weight to landscapes and they can seem to produce all sorts of emotion.