Booktalk

   

Earlier this school year, I participated in a workshop conducted by John Lee & and David Hicks called ”It’s all about the evidence” during which they demonstrated classroom techniques for exploring and getting at the meaning of artifacts: documents, photos, things; their premise being that the discipline of evaluating primary source evidence is a powerful tool for research and for creating meaning.

    About two weeks ago, I read an article in the NYRB that reviewed a new book by Neil MacGregor: Germany, Memories of a Nation. I was intrigued to read that MacGregor, director of the British Museum, shaped his chapters “around particular images and artifacts.” So I reserved a copy through the 4-County Library System. I was not disappointed.

    Although I snagged the book for the technique, I was quickly drawn into its content; perhaps by the compelling power of the the method. MacGregor explores the nature of Germany’s unique fractured past, how the idea and reality of a German nation was even able to coalesce, and how the memory of a German past, unlike most other European countries, points it necessarily to the future.

    He builds our understanding and the arguments for his premise with a masterful inquiry of evidence: right before our eyes. The photographs are not rest-stops within our reading, they are the reasons for our reading.

    He establishes the potpourri of kingdoms, states, and principalities that was the Holy Roman Empire with suites of images that illustrate the range of coins, beers, and even sausages that reinforced their disparateness. Similarly, he demonstrates forces of unity with the work of Durer, Goethe, and the Hanseatic League. I especially enjoyed how he brings us to the intersection of Gutenberg, Luther, skilled tradesmen, and language to witness why the perfect-storm of the Reformation happened when and how it did. In each chapter, the complexity of an unfamiliar and knotted history is untangled by following a humble artifact: an amber tankard, an iron cross, a wooden handcart.

    The unique ability of an artifact to carry us into history and be its witness is demonstrated over and over in this book. I will close with this one. McGregor includes a photograph of the gate at the Buchenwald prison camp. There is a motto on it, lettered in iron, facing the the prisoners inside that reads in German, ”To each what they are due;” an oppressing reminder to the imprisoned, each day, of their cruel incarceration.

    Yet MacGregor pursues the image further to point out that, knowingly or not, the Nazis had selected an artist from the legendary Bauhaus school of design to fashion the letters. In doing so, he used a modern example of Bauhaus typography. “The motto was intended to assert the right of the SS to brutalize and murder whom they chose. But the lettering, inspired by the Bauhaus, which the Nazis loathed as left-wing and cosmopolitan, was a subtle coded protest against this monstrous assumption. It can be read as an assertion of dignity, eloquent and powerful, against everything the camp - and all in the camps - stood for.”

    So too this book and its method: eloquent and powerful.