World Heritage in Context

(This post was originally intended to be published the week of February 14.)

So why did Jeff and I go to Cologne? To see the Cathedral, of course.

The Dom of Koln is not a difficult site to see: Cologne's main train station is located immediately next to the Cathedral, so even a thirty-minute lay over provides enough time for a Chevy Chase-style "uh huh, uh huh" surveillance of the site. But with a full weekend in Cologne, Jeff and I studied the Cathedral from every angle: we toured it, climbed it, photographed it, prayed in it, inspected its art, and admired it at night. What interested me most, however, is the Cathedral's historical and political context.*

Here's how UNESCO pitches the Cathedral:

"Begun in 1248, the construction of this Gothic masterpiece took place in several stages and was not completed until 1880. Over seven centuries, successive builders were inspired by the same faith and a spirit of absolute fidelity to the original plans. Apart from its exceptional intrinsic value and the artistic masterpieces it contains, Cologne Cathedral testifies to the enduring strength of European Christianity."

Here is my version: Construction of the Cathedral began in 1248, but pilgrims' donations dried up by the 1500s and construction halted for three centuries. Then, in 1815, Cologne came under the rule of Prussia, and the unfinished Cathedral was seen as an opportunity to demonstrate the strength and majesty of a newly unifying German state. (Recall that Germany as we know it did not exist until 1871.) The new German State funded much of the construction, which was completed in 1880: thus the Cologne Cathedral of today is as much about German nationalism as it is about medieval religious fervor.

View looking west from the Dom towers, over the rest of the Dom,
the train bridge, and where the "eyesores" would have been.

In what seems like a rather arbitrary crisis to me, UNESCO put the Cathedral on its "World Heritage in Danger" list between 2004 and 2006 because of plans to construct high-rise buildings on the other side of the Rhine. The dispute was resolved after a new buffer zone including the west bank was designated (I love that the German word is "Pufferzone"), which restricts what can be constructed in a large swath of central Cologne.

There is an obvious tension between conservation and the natural evolution of a community - I personally disfavor the inclusion of cities or towns as such on the World Heritage list because the result is often a Disney-fication as buildings are "restored", long-time residents are displaced, and cultural evolution is halted. UNESCO has a 2005 memorandum that tries to address this issue, but it is nearly impossible to understand. I think the memo agrees with me that "historic" places must still be allowed to change over time. I like, for example, this passage:

"[U]rban planning, contemporary architecture and preservation of the historic urban landscape should avoid all forms of pseudo-historical design, as they constitute a denial of both the historical and the contemporary alike. [Eat it, Epcot Center.] One historical view should not supplant others, as history must remain readable [no idea what that means], while continuity of culture through quality interventions [meaning new construction projects must be pretty?] is the ultimate goal."

UNESCO didn't follow this advice in 2009, however, when it actually delisted another site in Germany, the Dresden Elbe Valley, because of a four-lane bridge that Dresden built across the Elbe river smack in the middle of the protected "cultural landscape". It is one of only two World Heritage sites ever delisted. I find this amusing because UNESCO largely based its original inscription of the site on the area's functional structures dating from the Industrial Revolution, including a steel bridge, a funicular, and a shipyard. And I quote, "The Dresden Elbe Valley contains exceptional testimonies of [...] industrial heritage representing European urban development into the modern industrial era." Today's "modern industrial era" required a new bridge - but under the UNESCO regime (as implemented), there was no room for new industrial history that might displace old industrial history. (I guess it was a really ugly bridge.)

On the train bridge leading straight to the Dom.

These are difficult issues, and I don't know enough about the Cologne controversy to have a strong opinion on it. But it does interest me that the site was inscribed despite the location of a massive (and busy) train station and train bridge right next door, the construction of which was controversial back in the 1850s but which today greatly benefit the nine million annual visitors to the Cathedral and are so often included in pictures of the Cathedral that they have become part of the iconic image. If we stop all construction in the broad vicinity of a historic site, do we miss out on changes that could improve our visual or practical enjoyment of what we thought was so worth preserving and sharing in the first place?

When do developments evolve from "recent" (meaning "bad") to "historic" (meaning "better")? Would it really have ruined the Cologne Cathedral if some buildings were constructed across the river from it? More broadly, how do we decide which moments of an ever-evolving cultural landscape to freeze in time?

* (When I was a history student in college, a teaching fellow pointed out that we are all prone to viewing the world through the lens of our favorite speciality: I see the world as a historian does - an engineer or an artist or a physicist would conceivably have taken away very different lessons from the Cologne Cathedral.)