1. We know for
certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an
instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly
one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the
whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered
with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the
letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see
them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo
da Vinci
Among Leo Steinberg’s great monographs, the one entitled Leonardo’s
Incessant Last Supper holds its place as one of the controversial art
historical pamphlets, as it were, after The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance
Art and in Modern Oblivion. Modern oblivion might be Steinberg’s great theme as
an art historian, and how he links up to the modern – to the Heidegerian sense
that Being is forgotten. The forgotten is what was all around us, all before us
– was in a sense our instinct and our habitus. This is both an essentially
reactionary response to the modern and a New Leftist way of understanding
marginality and its imposition. The
Leonardo text is about forgetting a certain interpretation of one of the most
famous paintings, which, with convenient symbolism, really doesn’t exist
anymore – rather, its “restorations” have taken the place of Leonardo’s
painting. Steinberg tells of meeting the woman who undertook the last
restoration, Dr Brambilla:
“The campaign was well under way the first time I climbed
the scaffolding in front of the picture (1983). Bram-billa had me peer through
a microscope while she aimed her scalpel at scattered flakes of original
pigment. She would point to a chip, the size of your smallest fingernail,
saying, “here’s a bit of Leonardo.” Then the scalpel would inch away to
pinpoint another. It was these vestiges she was saving, using watercolor infill
to join them. What we now see, if we look close, are aits of original pigment
afloat in flat washes of pale, removable watercolor.”
I am reminded of Barthes reference to Argo: ““ A frequent
image: that of the ship, the Argo (bright and white), which the Argonauts
replaced piece by piece, little by little, so that in the end they had an
entirely new vessel, without having to change either its name or its form.”
No change of name, conceded, but form certainly doesn’t
capture content in the case of the Last Supper. It is an image we can all
recall, and it certainly started with Leonardo, but after 20 restorations,
after the very chapel that held it was
bombed in WWII and the wall painting was moved,
Leonardo’s Last Supper becomes a very corporate entity.
Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the
splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last
Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow,
inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration
does look like the end page fold-out - and we
have no doubt it does – I suspect that this scene
depicting the sacramental event and the announcement of the coming betray –
themes that Steinberg braids – are attempts to reach a Last Supper that has
been physically obliviated. One has only
to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ’s
left, as he has been “restored” to
earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting,
and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree
with Jacques
Franck: "Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact
that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."
This is not, I think, Steinberg's opinion.
But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg’s essay was the
comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the
eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The
moment portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus’s revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Although
Steinberg does not draw out this aspect, surely the drama here goes back to the
Machiavellian effect on European culture, in which power and betrayal became a
crisis duo, from Shakespeare to Hugo. Goethe was one of the great institutors
of this secular (and political) interpretation although, as a dissident pointed
out in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael
Morghen that left the wine out of the painting - the wine in the glass before Jesus’s upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular
reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:
19: And the disciples did as Jesus had
appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall
betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto
him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the
same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom
the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been
born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said
unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it,
and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye
all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the
remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine,
until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.
Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit
of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic
interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact
about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples
register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks
preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that
Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus’s
pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered,
by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor, while the disciples,
human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial
question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can’t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But
this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been
normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think
Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man
who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this
bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I
want you to eat these things in order to remember me.
This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it
releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It
goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves,
there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the
person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh
is the world - that we live in a fully carnal
world. The cannibal’s speech is that the mouth that
speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into
words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:
51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this
bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh,
which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give
us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat
the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will
raise him up at the last day.
The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an
hard saying; who can hear it?
So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel
happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a
synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the
conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples
cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in
amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian
sense, of these two events, a
Verdichtung.
So what is the connection between the Last Supper and the
Panorama? Both, I think, explore ways of making an image that, in human terms,
doesn’t move – however much the light it reflects is a moving thing – but thatstills
shows something moving. Some event. In the Last Supper, the Gospel texts act as
a control, and the “moment” in the painting is embedded in, and embeds, a narrative,
something that moves “through”: “The story line coils and recoils, weaving duration
into simultaneity.” A perspective that awaits its technological moment. That
moment, of course, came in the form of the motion of the railroad train, which
moves through a landscape that, unmoved, moves in relationship to the passenger.
Unlike the carriage or the horse, it is a landscape in which the human is
always and only all too human – taken from animal life and placed in the
mechanical. In Leonardo’s time, the only thing like this was the boat. But the moving
water it moved through did not have the human density, the organic density, of
the land.
2. Taine’s
introduction to his history of English literature became famous as soon as the
first volume was published, in 1864. Its fame has dwindled, as fame does, into
an exercise in memorization for grad students in comparative literature: Q:
what was Taine’s thesis? A: History is about race, milieu and the moment. Which
you can know without ever reading Taine – it is the kind of knowledge you get
in an overview written by someone who may, perhaps, have acquired his or her
knowledge of Taine from another overview.
This is not to bitch – Taine’s intro begins with set pieces
in a Believe it or Not diorama style that has aged as badly as the American
Natural History museum’s Culture Halls, with their celebration of how the
Peoples of the World live in their natural setting. The diorama style is not
just Taine’s, of course – he is writing in the wake of fifty years of
ethnographic shows and exhibits, including the great Crystal Palace one in 1851
(in which the U.S. was represented by our amazing gunsmiths – the Colt rifles
and revolvers, and the way they were made of standard parts in factories in
which, it was rumored, machines made machines, so shook the British that they
sent a special mission to the U.S. to observe and report on U.S.
manufacturers).
But Taine intellectualized this hybrid of scholarship and
entertainment. So, he urges the historian to act much like the visitor to one
of these shows – to view the country and culture, instead of merely drawing
philosophical conclusions from the logic of texts its might produce:
“In order to understand an Indian Purana, begin by imaging
the father of a family who, having seen a son on the knees of his son, retires,
according to the law, into a solitary state, with a vase and an axe, under a
banana tree on the edge of a stream, ceasing to speak, multiplying his fasts,
standing nude between four fires, and under the fifth fire, the terrible sun
that devours and incessantly renews all living things; who, by stages, during
entire weeks, keeps his imagination fixed on the foot of Brahma, then on his
knee, and then on his thigh, and then on his belly button, and so on, until,
under the pressure of that intense meditation, hallucinations appear,
presenting all the forms of being, transformed confusedly one into the other,
oscillating inside that head carried away by its vertigo, up to the point that
the man, perfectly still, breathing once again, his eyes still fixed, sees the
univers vanish smoke above the universal and empty Being, in which he aspires,
himself, to plunge.”
This kind of speech cries out for a showman’s cane – and in
fact was quickly absorbed into popular literature and then into films. From
Taine to Tarzan and back - this is one way of going around the world of
kultcha.
While Taine’s prose is a little, well, funny, his point is
interesting – he wants the historian to begin his own meditation by way of
starting with the novel, or the drama. To make a history is to visualize the
settings and persons in the history. Thus, Taine counts, among those who have
put history on the right track in the 19th century (the track of science),
Walter Scott.
‘This is the first step in history: we have made it in
Europe thanks to the renaissance of the imagination produced, at the end of the
last century, with Lessing, Walter Scott; a little later in France, with
Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, M. Michelet and so many others.”
Taine's instinct makes sense to me, for the novelist, when
working at his or her strongest, does stand naked between four fires, and does
meditate about the foot of the protagonist, the knee of the sidekick, the thigh
of the love interest, and the belly buttons, outie or innie, distributed
amongst the lot of characters, not that they necessarily show them to the
reader. Who amongst us can claim to have seen the back of David Copperfield's
head? And at the end of it, this imagining his characters into a world, we get
some dizzy glimpse if we are lucky.
3. The culpable relation between the story line and the
pictorial is one of the themes in Dolf Sternberger’s work, Panorama: Views of
the 19th century. The Frankfurt School exiles tended to see this
work as one by a collabo – myself, I see it as a work of internal exile, in which
the current of European liberalism confronts both the dialectics of the Frankfurt
school and the utter smash of liberalism embodied in Naziism.
Sternberger means the Ansicht – the Views – in the title to
be taken non-tritely. Views in Sternberger’s schema are a very nineteenth
century affect. It is the kind of thing Stephen Daedalus draws out to the
newspaper crowd in Ulysses, with a story about two Dublin “vestals” who decide
to “see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson’s pillar.” In so doing, the
vestals body forth one of the senses of Dublin in 1904 – one of the senses that
is sensed. The ineluctable modality of Dublin from atop the Nelson pillar turns
out to be sensitive to heights and hunger and curiosity and boredom.
But the urge for the view in Ulysses, a view that becomes
more kaleidoscopic than panoramic, brings us back to the panoramic urge as
Sternberger describes it. There is a sense that all the literature on panoramas
– still a fashionable topic – go back to the passage in Walter Benjamin’s One
Way street about visiting the Kaiserpanorama when he was a kid. There is was,
on Unter den Lindon, and there the little boy went to see a series of pictures that
allow the seated visitor to visit the exotic world outside of Berlin. These, at
least, are the pictures that Benjamin remembers. The details of the Norwegian
fjords, or of the dust in the park of the city of Aix-en-Provence. The
Panorama, here, is close in spirit, is clasped by the first strophe of Baudelaire’s
Le Voyage:
Pour l’enfant,
amoureux de cartes et d’estampes,
L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah ! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes !
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit !
From that mixture of dialectics and nostalgia, Benjamin
could only receive Sternberger’s book as a theft, a plagiarism. That is,
however, a very false charge. Sternberger is, in fact, taking Benjamin’s
program in a different direction. Against Benjamin’s collagist view of reference
and affect, Sternberger joins documentation to another vein of essay – going back
to Simmel – and even, I’d content, a long submerged tradition of the anatomy of
errors – books that gave themselves the licence to sprawl as errors sprawl. The
larger themes in Sternberger – for instance, the way the mechanical becomes the
trope by which the modern bourgeois human interprets himself – collect around
the notion of the panorama as both a technique of vision and a sort of cult of
objectivity.
The panorama at the center of Sternberger’s attention is not
the Kaiserpanorama, but the Sedanpanorama. Instead of views captured on a trip –
protoselfies of the European vacationer – Anton Werner’s 1883 spectacle was concerned
with a battle that, in a strong sense, made Germany – and hence, made the
political culture in the the panorama was mounted.
I’m following Sternberger in naming Werner as the author of
the panorama, but of course, like a movie or a county fair, the panorama was,
at best, directed by Werner. In actuality, the panorama was housed in a
building that was produced by an architect (Hanke) working with the firm of Ende
and Böckmann.
Werner had conceived of the scene and painted many of the figures. It was quite
the sensation in Berlin when it opened on September 1, 1883. The Kaiser himself
visited it between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m., according to the correspondant from
the Hamburger Correspondant.
Such minutia in the matter of the Kaiser’s entrance was breathed
by the entire enterprise, which prided itself on given the spectator the
minutia of a moment in the battle. “For the price of two Groschen at the entrance,
the spectator could enjoy those minutes between one thirty and two o’clock P.M.
[in the battle] during which the French army – in particular the 7th
French army division – was surrounded by the left wing of the Prussian army and
driven back to Plateau de Floing-Illy, and made a last desperate attempt to break
through the Prussian line and gain a withdrawal route.”
Sternberger quotes from the account of the panorama left by
Werner: “Stepping on the platform, the viewer gazes over the lovely valley of
Maas where in the depths before him lies the village of Floing, which since
12:30 p.m. was completely occupied by the Germans. Before the church, from the
depths emerges the 2nd company of the 82 Infantry…”
Sternberger, unlike Benjamin, is not enjoying a memory of the
Panorama, which was torn down in 1904. Unlike the experience of the photograph
of dust and trees in a park in Aix, Sternberger’s experience has receded, so to
speak, to the illustrations and newspaper stories and memoirs that he can see
and read.
This account of the battle is, in 1938, a prefiguration – it was
easy to imagine, at this point, the Sedans ahead. It is also as a battle a site
of the model event, the event of events, the secular sacrament as it were,
where the blood and body of the soldier was turned into the state. Here, in all
the novels in which the hero comes to fight with a vision of glory, the hero is
undone – the participant observer finds that the battle can’t be found, just as
Fabrice never experienced the battle of Waterloo even as he was in, bodily in,
the battle of Waterloo.
One is reminded of a passage in Steinberg’s work on Leonardo: “Our
task is to declare how the work looks to an eye that no longer insists on
Seeing the Renaissance as a movement of triumphant secularism; how it appears
in a climate that is no longer averse to reading pictorial symbols and
multiplex signs. The word ambiguity, Cicero’s latin translation of amphiboolia,
originally referred to a martial predicament: it means being attacked from two
sides at once.”
4. In 1941, an 18 year old fresh out of school, Reinhart
Koselleck, volunteered for the army and was sent to the Eastern front. On May
1, 1945, the war “ended for him” in Oderberg in Mahren, which is now called Bohumín
and is now located in the Czech Republic. On May 8, V-E day, Kosellek was in a giant group
of prisoners, 10 rows across, marching towards Auschwitz. There he encountered
some survivors, including women, “whose fates were written in their eyes”. The
POWs were there to disassemble the IG Farben factory and send the parts back to
the Soviet Union. Later, to add a little context, some of the chief scientists,
including a man named Blome, who experimented on prisoners at Auschwitz with
Sarin, would be extracted from Germany and taken to the U.S., where they would
help the U.S. Army develop its own germ and chemical weapons. But to return to
Kosellek – in an interview, he was asked about how much he knew, as a 22 year
old soldier, about Auschwitz:
When I came to the front in the summer of 1941, as a replacement
after the battle of Kiew, I heard that behind us in a stone quarry, 10,000 Jews
had been murdered, which I took to the the unambiguous truth. I can’t remember if we discussed it much. Thus I knew it
theoretically. But in Auschwitz I was not thinking of it, actually out of
self-defense, out of fear: If I told that story, I would surely be caught in
the mills of the GPU.” And he further remembered:
The scene, for me, was unforgettable. We had to peel potatoes –
for which we only got a thin watery soup – and were guarded by a one time
concentration camp prisoner. He demanded that we peel the potatoes quick, and
became enraged. He took one private slowpoke, lifted him high up and slammed
him, full of anger, in the corner, breaking his leg. And then he said, I should
crush your skull, you people gassed millions. And I thought: he could not have
made that up.”
It is of interest that this man became one of Germany’s most
influential intellectual historians. This man, with this past.
At the beginning of the
first essay of Kosellek’s collection, Futures Past – Modernity and the Planes
of Historicity – this former prisoner of war takes up a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer
from 1529, the Alexanderschlacht. “Alterdorfer reveals to us upon a canvas
of one and a half square meters the cosmic panorama of a decisive battle of
world historical significance, the battle of Issus, which in 335 B.C. opened
the epoch of Hellenism.”
Why this battle at this date? The answer is inscribed, materially,
in the depiction of Alexander’s army as a collection of European knights and
peasant infantrymen against a turbaned army of Persians – much like the armies
that struggled, in 1529, at the siege of Vienna by the forces of the Ottoman
empire. The battle scene on such length and breadth of canvas cannot be taken
in by the eye in a momentary glance – it demands scanning. The banners held by some of the soldiers tell
us certain things about the battle – for instance, the number of troops. But
neither the year of the painting, 1529, nor the year of the represented battle,
335 B.C. – a date that would be meaningless to anyone in 335 B.C. – are shown. The
panoramic style, the extended moment, and the ideal contemporaneity of the scene
are not foreign to Altdorfer’s intention and are impressed, as well, on the
spectator. For Kosellek, the painting serves as what Benjamin named a “dialectical
image” – an image that exceeds the possibilities in which it was produced, in
as much as Kosellek centers it in a schema of the layers of expectation of that
time, and of our time. Expectations that change the past and the future, and
that hypothesize endings that revise our sense of beginnings. Kosellek is not
content to reproduce the trope that modernity is bound up with the acceleration
of time – but points out that it is also bound up with the disassembling of the
end of time, a Christian trope. And just as Steinberg’s interpretation of the
Last Supper depends on a full history of the reception of the Last Supper, Altdorfer’s
painting, as Koselleck shows, has a certain canonical reception history,
starting with Schlegel’s writing about the painting in 1800 – a year in which
the French troops under Napoleon were starting their mission of “liberating”
Europe. Schlegel called it ‘the highest
adventure of the old knighthood”, essentially recognizing the conflation of two
separate time planes. For Kosellek, Schlegel’s remark helps us put this
painting in a gallery, so to speak – a conceptual gallery, one in which politics
and religion, or theology, were coming apart. Kosellek takes the painting to
prefigure, in some weird way, using some prophetic vibe emanating from the
aesthetic sphere, of the coming breakdown of the cosmic order – ratified in the
treaty of Augsburg in 1551:
“Religious Peace of Augsburg was
signed so
that “this praiseworthy nation be
secured against an ever-threatening ruin,”
as it says in paragraph 25. The Stände
agreed that a “stable, secure, unconditional,
and eternally lasting peace was to be
created.”7 This was to hold even
if (and while disputed, this was
conclusive) the religious parties should
arrive at no settlement and find no
unity. Henceforth peace and religious
duty were no longer identical: peace
meant that the fronts of religious civil
war were to be shut down, frozen in
situ. Today we can only with great difficulty
gain a sense of quite how monstrous
this imposition seemed at that
time. The compromise, born of
necessity, concealed within itself a new
principle, that of “politics,” which
was to set itself in motion in the following
century.”
For a former POW in Auschwitz and the Soviet camps, these
impositions have, perhaps, a different sound than they do to my ear.
5. In 1885(we are told in an entry in the Margaret Mitchell Encyclopedia,
by Anita Price Davis), the American Panorama Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin
received a commission to produce a “Battle of Atlanta”.
German artists supervised the production. Two in particular, F.W.
Heine and August Lohr. Heine had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, out of
which the German state, and, incidentally, the panorama of the battle of Sedan arose.
The artists came to Atlanta in 1885 to scope out the landscape. They consulted
with veterans of the battle, including one Theodore Davis, who had followed the
Union troops as an illustrator for Harper’s magazine.
The chain of title to the completed work, which is 52 feet high
and weighs nine tons, is complex. Upon completion, it was exhibited in various
cities before being stored in Atlanta in a facility on Edgewood Road. It was a
for profit venture – at this time in the post-Civil war hinterlands, many cycloramas
were being commissioned for many battles. The Battle of Atlanta was first sold
to a Mr. H.H. Harrison of Florida, who originally intended to exhibit it at the
Colombian exposition in Chicago in 1893. It proved to be too expensive to move
and house. It was then sold to Ernest Woodruf (presumably of the Coca Cola
Woodrufs), who sold it to two businessmen who proposed to move it to one of
Atlanta’s parks. Thus, it came to Grant Park. As every Atlantan knows, Grant Park
is also where the zoo is. Foreigners might think naming a park for Ulysses
Grant is an act of reconciliation – but the park was not named for Ulysses, but
for Lemuel Grant, a railroad engineer who designed Atlanta’s fortification for
the Confederates. In its new quarters it was visited often by the young Margaret
Mitchell Mitchell was also a great admirer of Grant’s mansion, one of the few
that escaped the burning of Atlanta.
About sixty years after the young MM visited the Cyclorama, it was
visited by a group of Jolly School elementary students from the fifth grade,
who made the scary trip into the big city on a schoolbus. I was one of them. I
don’t remember the school bus and the faces of my classmates have fallen from into
the underchambers of my memory and I don’t even remember the name of my history
teacher – Miss Waters? – but I do remember loving the exhibit. A spotlight
would shine down on a particular scene and the P.A. would describe it, naming
the battalions and the officers and, accompanied by some sound effects, impress
upon the visitor the awfulness and significance of the struggle. It was most
thrilling to me. Some thirty years later, these Cyclorama effects showed their
durability in Ken Burns tv documentary, the Civil War, where pictures and
photos and drawings of men in battle, accompanied by sound tracks heaving with
whizzing bullets and bugles, would hypnotize the tv viewer.
I must have visited the Cyclorama many times when I was a kid, as
we liked to show Civil War things to our visiting Northern relatives. We all
had come to the metro area from the North in the spring of Atlanta’s post war
expansion. So I, as a nine year old, spoke different from my Southern
classmates. I was sometimes asked if I was British. This was long before such
provincialism would vanish under immigration and media. These kids had simply
never heard a Yankee speak.
In the early days of the Cyclorama at Grant Park, the job of
narrating the battle fell to one Charles W. Hubner, who had served as the chief
of staff of the telegraph division of General Joseph Johnson – Sherman’s
opponent in 1864. Hubner’s was not, in
that era of panoramas and cycloramas, that unusual – many civil war veterans
found work as cicerones to the battles they’d survived. And then the movies
came.
The survival of the Atlanta cyclorama owed much to Franklin
Roosevelt’s WPA, which helped restore it. And it owed much to Gone with the
Wind, which permanently enshrined the Battle of Atlanta in American popular
culture.
In 1939, Clark Gable came to Atlanta for the opening of Gone with
the Wind. He went to the Cyclorama, and remarked that none of the soldiers
looked like him. Mayor Hartsfeld then commissioned a WPA artist to paint a
figure like Clark Gable in the battle scene.
Later, in the 90s, I worked for a while in a bookstore patronized
by Margaret Mitchell’s nephew. He would come into the store followed by an old
black woman, who would carry the books he picked out. His valet. Or nanny. It was
absurd. There was an old Southern voiced clerk who always served him. Others
made jokes.
Atlanta burning is an exemplary instance of layered expectations a
la Kosellek. For my Southern classmates it meant defeat. For me, it meant
victory. And I’ve come to think that it represents what happens when commerce
and slavery are concentrated as a reactionary power. And I’ve come to think
that Atlanta burning must happen in the soul of every generation that has to
fight that reactionary power.
And yet, the history of Atlanta is such that it is now a city
governed by an African-American political machine. The white reactionary
politicians have seceded - making Buckhead,
once Atlanta’s white rich plantationed section, into a separate city. So what should
burn?
Let Buckhead burn, I guess. Not as resonant a motto.
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