The drive to Cologne on an interstate was disquieting. These serpentine ribbons of sameness now seem to crisscross the whole of the world that is not covered by water. Germany was a surprise to me in some ways. It is often a curse to feel a place so easily. It did not feel good. This may have something to do with the immense convulsions Germany has experienced in the past century. The region we were in was and is the industrial epicenter of the country and was often in the range finders of the Norton Bomb sites used by the allies in the second war to reduce the war machinery of the Third Reich into ferrous rubble.
It must produce a lot of anger to see waves of planes come and destroy your cathedrals, museums, gardens, and cities, even in the process of stomping out a genocidal monster. I found it stunning just how much graffiti was on every single overpass, bridge support, noise abatement wall, ad infinitum. It was like visual cancer that had metastasized from another era when the cancer of anti-Semitism was so rampant. I was taken by the absolute absence of any floral plantings anywhere in Cologne. Fields and strips of unattended dandelion stems were instead the norm. An extravagance of billboards and graffiti added the color that no longer was offered by botanical delights. It didn’t work.
The density of life in the shopping districts surrounding the vast Cologne cathedral was overwhelming. The number of people crammed into a square mile must defy the laws of physics. It certainly defies the laws of mental sanity. It was equally stunning to see how hard the people looked. I long ago learned when moving to the American South that the pain and anger that comes with war does not go away when the dust settles after the last cannon shot has been fired. The pain and anger last for decades, if not centuries. The pain and anger is still here in Cologne. It is so very different than what I have sensed in the Netherlands. Somehow, the Dutch people seem to have found a way to progress further in the resolution of their traumas. The Dutch also had the advantage of 150 years without war, prior to the Second World War. Germany did not.
Given my mission for the day was to photograph the great cathedral known locally as the Kolner Dom, I got on with it. With mixed feelings I found significant parts of the exterior to be quite shrouded in vast scaffolding works making exterior filming of it hit and miss at best. Another twenty years of ebony industrial accretions have been added to the exterior since I last saw it, making the overall sense of the exterior muddy and unfocused. I was heartened to see that a large-scale restoration of the exterior is taking place, even if it meant my not taking fine photos of it.
I was rather surprised to find that no turnstile or cash register had been installed at the door. The thousands of people pouring into the place were freely admitted. The only attempt at revenue enhancement was for a forlorn priest, or a look-alike, to walk about the vast sanctuary with a plywood box around his neck and a money slot cut into the top of it. Sadly, the vast, once luminous interior was dark and morose, much of the window glass covered with scaffolding. Written material said that one could not expect to see the cathedral free of scaffolding in our lifetimes. The once numinous space felt more like a relic from another era, now nothing but a museum attraction. I suspect the loudest statement of the cathedral’s secular status was to be found in the gift shop. Inquiry proved that it was not possible to buy a cross, chalice, icon, or religious book of any kind. I did have a choice of designer watches and tourist guides of the city – not much of a consolation prize. I did, however, have the good fortune to find that the shop still had a box of 35 mm transparencies put away in a cabinet behind the counter and I was able to buy thirty magnificent images at a very fair price which salvaged my photographic mission.
After the disquieting experience of visiting this transmogrified cathedral, Hans, Yne, and I did a decidedly secular thing – we had a fine German beer and a bowl of soup in a pleasant outdoor café on the plaza facing the seven-hundred-year old west front of the cathedral. This proved a good antidote, with pleasant side effects, to the sometimes-oppressive introspection I find myself in.
As is often the case, the great finds of life are remnants of Paradise that wash up on our shores. They can’t be sought out. My friendship with Hans and Yne is only a result of their miraculous survival of the Holocaust and the surreal way in which we met in the Canadian Rockies years ago. Even here in Cologne we were to have such an experience – of a remnant washing up on our shores.
From where the cathedral is situated, one can just see the top of a tower over the shopping district we took to be a medieval city hall that had somehow miraculously survived the war. The tower in the distance reminded me of the magnificent Rathaus in Vienna. We walked a distance along the Rhine River and wandered up towards what we still thought to be the city hall, figuring only to get a couple images of its exterior.
What we found instead was a magnificent rose that had been brought back to life from the ashes of a man-made hell. The ‘city hall’ turned out to be an 850-year-old Romanesque church that was reduced to rubble by the Allied bombings of the industrial heart of Germany. Photographs showed the destruction of the St. Martins Church to be complete. Where the crossing tower had risen for eight centuries, there was nothing but open sky.
We went into this church and did not enter a museum relic; rather we entered a place of serenity that suffused love and peace. In fact, Hans fell soundly asleep as I wandered about this monument to the possibilities that love makes imaginable. For one who’s father had to wear a yellow star, it did my heart good to see him at such peace.
Incredibly, during an era when money, food, industrial capacity, and life itself had been nearly extirpated, there were sentient beings with the vision and will to lovingly gather together the piles of rubble that once constituted the magnificent St Martins Church and over a period of twenty years make it live and rise again. As it was, the solid Romanesque arches withstood the bombings and the immense crossing tower was rebuilt above these, and the chancel and nave reconstructed with the very stones cut eight hundred and fifty years earlier. I simply could not assimilate that the ancient structure I was now standing in had, in fact, been a pile of dead rock under an open sky. With love all things are possible.
Love really does outlast all things. Sometimes you can literally touch it.
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