54 CONTEXT 175 : MARCH 2023 examples may help us to do that. The Garrison Church in Potsdam, Germany, ‘its baroque tower covered in carvings or guns and swords, was a primary site for the celebration of Prussian militarism’, and later the Nazis celebrated it as the venue of an important meeting between Hitler and President von Hindenburg that was a milestone in Hitler’s rise to power. Badly damaged by bombing in the second world war, the church was later demolished and is now being rebuilt. To Bevan, that heritage is not worthy of celebration. The rebuilding gives out the wrong messages, he argues, as does the rebuilding of Dresden’s Frauenkirche from a pile of wartime rubble. Although many see the Frauenkirche’s reconstruction as a symbol of reconciliation, others, on the political far right, remember the building as a notable symbol of the National Socialist German Christian church, as it was under Hitler. In recent years the rebuilt church has sometimes been the focus of neo-Nazi marches. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, among other places, Unesco has tied itself in knots over the politics of restoration, in Bevan’s view. For example, ‘while it may be justified to rebuild old Mostar and its symbolic bridge in the face of ethnic cleansers and genocidaires intent on eradicating Ottoman culture, when Unesco then declares the results to be an authentic world heritage site, it is undermining truth and the facts of history.’ Bevan describes how the 19th-century remodelling of St Albans Cathedral by Sir George Gilbert Scott involved recreating a shrine to St Amphibalus from stone fragments gathered from around the building. Where parts of the shrine were missing, Gilbert Scott filled the gaps with brick – an inelegant solution, but truthful in a way of which William Morris would have approved. Recently (in 2021) the shrine has been reconstructed once more. This time, Bevan writes, ‘skilful stone masons have created an approximation of the medieval shrine, substituting new stone carvings for Scott’s bricks and smoothing over the gaps between old and new stone. It now takes a practiced eye to tell the difference.’ The effect, he suggests, is to erase the aesthetic and religious history that had been told by Gilbert Scott’s version of the shrine. He notes that nearby information panels tell visitors (falsely, he claims) that the shrine was ‘not a museum piece or a historical item’. Whatever the shrine was not, it seems (although Bevan does not note this) that the church has revived it for sacred purposes, as is evidenced by a video onYouTube showing the shrine having incense wafted over it on completion of the recent restoration. Was the church justified in undoing Gilbert Scott’s work? Such questions are what Bevan’s book helps us to think about. An example of an approach to restoration of which Bevan does approve is the ‘hugely successful collaged reworking’ by David Chipperfield and Julian Harrap of the once-ruined Neues Museum in Berlin, ‘restoring post-war ruins in ways that incorporate the scars of past conflict in line with the Venice Charter and the SPAB manifesto’. As for problematic statues, such as those of Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes, Bevan’s advice is: ‘do not entirely obliterate the original, but instead allow it to be simultaneously understood and undermined’. In the case of the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, he suggests turning it to face its niche, ‘shamed in the full view of the city’s High Street shoppers’, as one option. But generally he regards statues, whether of worthy or now-reviled subjects, as more trouble than they are worth. Monumental Lies is at heart a polemic about the need to ensure that the lessons we learn from historic monuments – statues, buildings and places – reinforce humane values. Bevan sums up that message most cogently in quoting the historian Yosef Yerushalmi. ‘The ‘antonym of “forgetting” is not “remembering”,Yerushalmi wrote, ‘but “justice”.’ Rob Cowan is editor of Context. A gentler modernism Mid-Century Britain: modern architecture 1938–1963 Elain Harwood, Batsford, 2021, 288 pages, 145 colour illustrations, ISBN 978 1 849946 86 5, hardback, £25 As historian and listing inspector for Historic England (and formerly English Heritage) over many years, Elain Harwood has been instrumental in raising the appreciation of post-war British architecture, notably in an evergrowing series of books. The term ‘Mid-Century Modern’ that she uses for the period 1938-63, originated in the USA, where it was adopted to describe the flashy
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