The structural history of Europe in 100 words or less
June 13th 2008 08:47
Cologne's Dom and Luke
Cologne is a big cathedral called the Dom with a town around it, the town split in half by the Rhine. This is how it has been since the Romans. This is how it will always be. Dom and Rhine.
And really there’s not all that much more you need. Standard European city formula is one times large river and one times centre point of the town, usually town hall or cathedral or palace. If you want to really stand out from the crowd you go Scandinavian and perch yourself on the edge of the sea on a series of islands. Only Venice has really embraced that one south of Copenhagen. In general though you’re looking for a large river and an ornate building. It was historically necessary. If you were a European in 500 AD deciding on building a city there were only two pre-requisites.
Firstly, you needed a navigable body of water because the roman road system had virtually unusable. The rats and pox weren’t going to carry themselves from pestilence to pestilence.
Location sorted, you needed some sort of elaborate building to give the peasants the illusion that there was something better than stale bread and black death once the mortal coil had unravelled. People tended not to be too motivated to trade and slave away if this was as good as it got. In addition to this, the churches were also built tall and grand because prevailing Catholic wisdom was that building elaborate churches was a great way to wipe the marble clean of all those mortal sins. The protestants blew that one out of the water but got more out of their peasants by telling them the harder they worked, the better the chances of getting on St Peter’s guest list.
So by the start of the twentieth century you had your cathedral or your town hall on the edge of a river surrounded either by huddled medieval lanes, slums, or grand renaissance boulevards. Everything was coming up gravy for the Europeans. Then industrial technology overreached itself. While the human brain laboured back in previous centuries where three day gentlemanly battles ended with a handshake and an exiling, the human hands played with weapons that could severe a millions of limbs. These ornate buildings on which the whole European social system were based got the living shits bombed out of them and if they didn’t get bombed and gutted, the pollution the byproduct of creating billions of tonnes of steel often used for the bombs, was doing its work slowly and savagely.
Cathedrals no longer exist today, instead you get a huge sheet of scaffolding with advertisements on the side and a peek at the occasional piece of blackened stone. Internet porn and reality TV are the new saviour of the working class. Also, while he was deviously inventing blitzkriegs, a German made the river irrelevant by creating 10 lane motorways. The question which presents itself then is: what is the use of these centre points? Are they consigned to ill-considered and hastily written histories, nothing more than curiosities? The answer is of course yes because now we have postcards so once a decade on a sunny day they can remove the scaffolding, reel off some snaps, sell them for 60 cents and that’s the only function the cathedral need serve.
Cologne’s a little different. It may have a river and a cathedral like every other city in Europe but remarkably, both actually function. There is no scaffolding on the oversized towers poking their heads over the entire region; the only thing it was draped in was a light dusting of snow. Postcard sellers must’ve been doing it hard. And the river actually had commercial traffic on it. Low slung barges were carrying sausage that no German would eat to be sold as salami in Italy; wine a Frenchman would turn up his nose at was being shipped in from the west to be retailed at horrendous prices in Cologne; cheeses that someone forgot about and were about to throw away w
Luke and Dom
It was heartening to see that after the destruction of the twentieth century that had left so many European cities with little use for their traditional stalwarts, the powers that be had finally latched on to the incontrovertable fact that the way to foster economic and social unity was to ship your rejected crap to other countries
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