Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein
Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to the November Revolution, 1926, a memorial to German political martyrs, is a stark assemblage of brick masses, almost brutal in execution but enigmatic in its composition. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is, a stack of rough brick masses, yet it leads to questions you aren’t sure how to phrase, doubts about any answers. Still, it maintains balance and composure in spite of the ambiguity, or, better, because of its ability to recognize, to negotiate it.
My essay on his Brick Country House, built a few years before, led to curiosity about the monument, and I completed the model during our November election, a way to engage myself, fight despondence. Mood here is dark, merely personal, mindless and oblivious, with deep undercurrents of the vindictive, illuminated only by the brightness of shallow simplicities that can only lead to more conflict. The man who exhausted our capacity for outrage has been given a fresh start. We have every reason to expect the worst.
Assembling bricks laid a century ago and trying to find their order put the past in my hands and moved me to thoughts of the present. There are similarities, ominous familiarity. In both periods a democratic state is stressed, brought to peril by a process that appears to be inexorable. As I built, moved blocks in my mind, looked back, tried to look forward, history felt like nothing more than a series of discontinuous fractures where I could gain no purchase. Now, as then in Germany the last years of its republic, we have been bombarded with toxic nonsense, and it is hard to find the words. Thought, language have degraded past meaning.
A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him.
Timothy Snyder
Making the model itself was difficult for many reasons, and I struggled to comprehend Mies’s decisions and represent them. But I had to involve myself somewhere, do something with my hands, my head. The process was not wholly restorative but at least I gained a measure of commitment and completion, however rough my model, how uncertain I remained about building it throughout. Construction is one proof of our existence that may yet help us look ahead, keep hope in suspension for another time. At the very least we must not put aside, not surrender, not forget, but remember. Remembering is a matter of keeping the past, the present alive.
I was, I am, I will be