Köln
The stories people tell their children… Lockhart’s mother always had a thing for this gorgeous cathedral in the heart of Cologne. She could sit for hours in its long, dark nave, while her children shivered around her in the chill and dreamed of pea soup and sausages in warmer German beer halls. And maybe it was the fact that we lived just north of Coventry in England at the time, but she always tied together the fates of the two architectural wonders in her stories about World War II.
According to Mom, the British struck here first, and Adolf Hitler was so incensed, or at least embarrassed, by the unnecessary destruction of this church that he ordered the demolishing of the cathedral in Coventry. The facts are a little murky, but the deadly German Blitz on Coventry of 14 November, 1940, was preceded by a relatively small British attack on Cologne on the night of 12 May in the same year. Doesn’t sound like much of a connection.
The main source of Mom’s indignation that has been conclusively proven as factual was the utter pointlessness of the World War II raids on populations and architectural icons worldwide. For six years, the most sophisticated planetary leadership in history went bezerk with the full support of their populations in wreaking the most maniacal havoc on each other from the air. To put it in some sort of perspective, this cathedral took 632 years and two months (and billions in today’s money) to build, but just hours to nearly demolish. And with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, national borders were reset to pretty much the same outlines they had traced before the madness began.
Today, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral still stand next to their replacement as a stark and spooky reminder of what the American Hopi Indians have called Koyaanisqatsi, or World Gone Crazy. The cathedral in Cologne, on the other hand, shows no evidence whatsoever of the war. This probably says as much as anything about the British and German views of both the past and the future.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Germany, Travel
