Allowed to Stand

I arrived in Germany in 2014 and spent the first two years going to look at the things this country has decided to keep.

Every structure in these photographs has been decided about. Some were rebuilt exactly as they had been, down to the stones that were in the fire. Some are held up and deliberately never repaired — no reconstruction, no restoration, and explicitly no beautification. Some have had nothing whatever done to them. One was handed over to be painted on by anybody who turns up. What none of them has been is erased, and, with a single exception — a ruin restored because democracy was declared there — what none of them has been is celebrated. They are the same decision taken at very different budgets.

German has a single word for a monument that warns rather than honours: a Mahnmal, from mahnen, to admonish. English has no equivalent, and living here you notice the gap, because the thing the word describes is everywhere — in what gets rebuilt, in what is held up but never repaired, in what is simply left, in a legal code that bans the symbols and protects the depiction of them in the same statute. It is an enormous, sustained effort to acknowledge something without validating it.

Cobbled baroque street at night between carved stone facades, lit archway and church tower in mist ahead — Katholische Hofkirche Dresden, Germany

Empty cobbled street at night running toward the lit dome of the Frauenkirche, tiled Fürstenzug mural at right — Frauenkirche Dresden, Germany

Weathered stone grandstand with pilastered colonnade seen along its broken tiered steps under flat grey sky — Zeppelin Stadium 1 Nuremberg, Germany

Graffiti-covered section of the Berlin Wall receding along a paved path, tower cranes over building work beyond — Berlin Wall Berlin, Germany

Empty open-air amphitheatre of stone terraces rising symmetrically to bare woods under heavy clouds — Thingstätte Heidelberg, Germany

Sunlit sandstone castle keep with arched windows, broken tower above and ivy spilling over a lower wall — Hambacher Schloss Hambach, Germany

Ruined stone keep and rubble in an empty castle courtyard, cloud drawn out by a long exposure — Hambacher Schloss 2 Hambach, Germany