L’uso delle rovine

As he razes Carthage to the ground, Scipio Aemilianus recalls the words of Heraclitus: ‘A heap of rubble thrown together at random is the most beautiful order in the world.’ Scipio is convinced that every warrior is the architect of a new universal harmony. Yet, according to Albert Speer and Victor Hugo, not all ruins are created equal, and creating them well is an art. The former shapes buildings destined to produce beautiful ruins; the latter, a ‘martial arts critic’, is so struck by the sight of a gutted tower that he makes it the template for the new Romantic aesthetic. Ruins provide models for art, but the reverse also occurs, if it is true that the Allied bombs drew inspiration from the Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche, painted by Bernardo Bellotto in 1765, to determine the face Dresden would have on the morning of 15 February 1945.
Not even a promise of destruction can interrupt the spectacle of war. Thus, in the midst of an air raid, the manager of a German cinema clears away the rubble preventing the screening of a Nazi propaganda film. A few kilometres away, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau has returned to its original state of debris scattered across the city streets, from where the artist had gathered it years earlier to elevate it to a work of art.
What Jean-Yves Jouannais presents to us in these pages is an exclusive circle of heroes obsessed with sieges – that is, obsessed with sieges – who, without renouncing their commitment to the war effort, have amended its laws, feeling more inclined towards art. From antiquity to the present day, they inhabit spectral spaces, strewn with debris that the author describes with hallucinatory realism, so much so that the reader will feel as though they are touching the incandescent matter of the ruins of Berlin, Ebla, Halberstadt, Luoyping, Hamburg, Dura Europos or Stalingrad.