Interlude on the Rhine: Cologne

In August, in the terrific heat, we went to a wedding in southwest Germany. Pleasant days at a little country hotel; at night people simply left the doors of their rooms open while they slept or while they were out dancing, to let it cool out. (Hard to imagine doing this in the US, but maybe I just move in the wrong circles there?) Supper out on the edge of a meadow the first night, at tables under little fruit trees, with leaves rustling against the swelling fruit--pears? apples? Hard to tell which, in the country summer dark. Wedding in the middle of the next day in the Rathaus, in an overfilled room in the blasting noon heat. (Lots of fun watching the formally dressed guests standing against the walls, trying not to sweat too horribly onto the baroque gilt paneling.)

Since we were going to be over on the west side of Germany anyway, Archangel and I decided to spend several days in Cologne (Köln) along the way; I hadn't been there for decades, and he hadn't been there except for the kind of one- or two-day visit in which you see nothing but meeting rooms. 

Cologne is a little over four hours from Berlin on the train, and it's in a quasi-different universe. We're back in Western Civ here. When our part of Germany was still trackless swamp, in 100 A.D. or so, Cologne was the biggest city in northern Europe. Fresh water piped in, indoor heating, mosaic-floored dining rooms with correctly drawn motifs from classical mythology. (For friends old enough to be I, Claudius fans: Claudius' wife Agrippina, Nero's mother, was born in Cologne.)

Fllor mosaic, Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Köln.  Photo, M. Seadle, Aug. 2015

Plaques in the sidewalk mark where the Roman city wall was, and provide a sketch map of the Roman city:

Sidewalk plaque, map of Roman Köln. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

All this gives the city a very different feel from Berlin, which does not have so long a past as a city and does not feel so rooted in what past it has; Berlin is more like an American city in this way. 

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Attitudes toward the past make a bit of a US-European divide. I remember sitting at a conference breakfast one morning between European and American colleagues; one of the Europeans said, half-ironic and half-appalled, "I have seen the end of history and it is California. People in California don't have the faintest idea what was happening fifty years ago in the place where they live." You could see the little wheels going around in the minds of the Americans on the other side of the table, with some of them thinking, "Well, that isn't really true, you know," and some of them thinking, "Good God, why should anyone care what happened fifty years ago?" (And neither group was quite willing to say what they thought.)

Why does this seem to matter? I don't know, I'm from the American West, we don't do pasts there. And yet ...

In some places in Cologne the Roman wall is still there, edging a shopping center or blocking a churchyard, or standing like this second-century tower, now tucked under the balcony of the neighboring apartment house and serving as a temporary bicycle stand.

Roman tower, Köln. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

How small the tower is; how small the city walls and their defensive towers often were in Roman and medieval times. Before the age of artillery, it didn't take much to make a town defensible. What could you do against a really thick two-story wall like this, before artillery? If you put ladders up against it, the people on top would push the ladders over or pour down boiling oil on you; if you threw stones at it with a catapult, they were likely to bounce off. It's the big guns of the later sixteenth and seventeenth century that gradually put an end to the age of city-republics and hasten the arrival of the territorial states that we grew up thinking were the only natural way to divide up the world. 

The prosperous city-republics that were a dominant political life-form in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were richer on a per capita basis than princely territorial states like France or England or Spain; but they didn't have nearly as many capita, and in the end it wasn't enough to finance the fantastic expenses of casting the big guns and hauling them around the countryside and training people to operate them. A bit like nuclear weapons, later: it drastically raised the ante for being an international power.

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So, money ... One of the uses of history, in a place like Cologne, is that it has always made money. Total tourist revenues for the city these days are something on the order of seven billion euros a year, and mostly people come to see what the past has left behind, the cathedral and the museums. (Annual maintenance costs of the cathedral, which is the main attraction, are about five million; it's cheap at the price.) 

I had forgotten what an astonishing object the cathedral is. So many of the great urban Gothic churches are hemmed in by their neighborhoods, just poking their heads up above the neighboring rooflines; but in Cologne the neighborhood doesn't even come up to the cathedral's knees. 

Cologne cathedral, Rhine.  Photo, Wiki Commons. 

What shall we call this: the world's greatest monument to mixed feelings? Our Lady of Perpetual Politics? It's often been a site for fierce church-state divisions and for attempts to deal with them. If you look at photos of the festivities at the completion of the cathedral in 1880, it's conspicuous that this was a state event and the church wasn't taking much part. The Berlin government had given some of the impetus and some of the funds for completing the building, and Kaiser Wilhelm was there to see the results--but the Berlin government was interested in the cathedral as a German cultural monument (look, we can do Gothic too, just like the French, but bigger!); they weren't so happy with its function as a working church. 

In fact the Archbishop of Cologne was in exile at the time the cathedral was finished, because the Berlin government saw Catholicism as a danger to the state.  (Or possibly it could not distinguish between things that were dangers to the state and things that just seemed icky (foreign!)--as Rhenish catholicism, with its riotous carnivals and its armies of improbable saints, undoubtedly did seem to rational-Protestant Berlin. Berlin does not do carnival, and--as I noticed when I was out shopping the other day--its attempt at Oktoberfest is pathetic. The stereotype, not entirely untrue, is that Protestants just don't have the hang of riotous feasts; it's like being white folks and not having rhythm.) 

The Kulturkampf--the culture war, Prussia's attempt to reduce the influence of Roman Catholicism in the new Germany of the nineteenth century--was one of the last (considerably diminished) rounds of the intra-Christian religious battles--church versus state, church versus church versus state--that had torn up Europe for almost as long as there was a (post-Roman) Europe. (The long violent wrestling with church-state problems--which puts a big injection of ideology into warfare--is one of the things that makes the western world into what it is; so far as I know, there's no real equivalent in other great civilizations like China and India, which tend to more pacific religions.)

By the end of the seventeenth century a common solution was to enforce religious uniformity within a country (translate: burn the heretics) and to keep the chosen church fairly firmly under the control of the state. To the princely heads of state it seemed inevitable, logical, natural, that you couldn't have multiple allegiances in a single state--it just wasn't going to work. Either you have someone in charge who is really in charge--the prince--or you have anarchy, the war of all against all; and the seventeenth century gives everyone a well-founded horror of this latter outcome. (Either you have the Assad family, or you have the Syrian civil war, in effect. Not really true, but it seemed convincing at the time.)

The treaty that ended the first round of Catholic-Protestant wars in Central Europe in the 1550s established the rule that the prince determines the religion of his state, and if you don't like it you had better pack your bags. But what if there is no prince? In the 1550s there are still a lot of free imperial cities (for most practical purposes city-republics) in central Europe; and the rule established for cities in the treaty (a detail that does not always get into the history books) is that multiple forms of religion had to be tolerated within the city boundaries. And so they were, and it often worked, for a long time when it didn't work in the princely territorial states.

(This tradition strikes deep roots. There is a nice example from Lübeck, that classic North-German merchant-republic. In the not-so-distant past there was a move from the upper levels of the Catholic church to canonize some of its Lübeck priests who had been executed for resisting the Nazis. Some of the relevant Catholic parties in Lübeck politely withheld cooperation in the canonization process (which I think therefore did not go forward), on the following grounds: The clerical resistance to the Nazis in Lübeck was a joint Catholic-Protestant project. And okay, we completely understand that you can't canonize Protestants, but ... if not them, then not us either. The common loyalties of the city trump ideological divisions.)

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We could run the church-state conflict movie backward several centuries and we would land in Cologne again, where the then archbishop was hammering out new ideas about church-state relations in the mid-twelfth century. --Or no, probably he wasn't doing it here, because he wasn't here very much. He had been given the office of archbishop because it was a good office, it gave him funds and status; he was a confidant and principal advisor of the emperor, who was happy to give him good things. He wasn't even a priest. He was a leader of troops in battle, an able manager, a patron of edgy satirical poets, a well-read man with ideas about how the world should run. (Eventually, several years after becoming archbishop, he was finally ordained a priest, to avoid the nuisance of the complaints that he wasn't one.)

This was Rainald of Dassell--on the right below; the man on the left is a goldsmith who did some spectacular work for Rainald and the cathedral. 

Rainald of Dassel (r) and Nicholas of Verdun, Kölner Rathaus.
Photo, Raimond Spekking, Wiki Commons.

Rainald is almost an exact contemporary of Thomas à Becket in England, and they seem, initially, to be much the same sort of person: the clever ambitious operator in bureaucracies; the king's confidant, the witty, persuasive, educated public man. The King of England and the Emperor in Germany (who were some remote sort of cousins) were both having trouble with the church at the time, and both had the same idea: I will put my best friend and most able adviser in charge of the church in my territory--surely that will solve the problem? (Becket also, like Rainald, was not yet a priest when he was made Archbishop of Canterbury; but he remedied this situation much more quickly than Rainald did.) 

Becket was in the grip of ideas, of given categories: I am a priest now, this makes everything different. He resigned his job as the king's chancellor, opposed the king fiercely in church-state conflicts, and ended up murdered.

For Rainald, who did not resign his job as chancellor and was not murdered, ideas were servants not masters. If our ideas make trouble for us, he thought, then let us create new ideas. (Which will perhaps make new troubles--what are ideas for, if not to make troubles?--but that will come later.) Rainald knew something of the Roman tradition of the emperor as a god; perhaps he knew something also of the quasi-magical aura surrounding the Frankish kings. The way to think about this, he concluded, is that the imperium, the secular power held by the emperor, is itself sacred. If this is so, if the state as well as the church is something holy, then what gives the church priority over the state? Perhaps nothing. The state is supreme. To run the empire well and expand its reach (whacking Saxons or Arabs or whoever the prevailing border-enemy is) is then as good a claim to sainthood (with all the magical privileges appertaining thereto) as converting the heathen or feeding the poor or solving theological puzzles.

To underline this point, Rainald wanted Charlemagne--that sturdy whacker of enemies and begetter of illegitimate children--to be declared a saint. (Standard reference works will tell you that Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor, but this is not quite right, since the Holy Roman Empire, as a term, appears to be Rainald's invention.) When the pope of the time would not cooperate, Rainald--a master of organizational maneuvering--got an anti-pope elected who did the job. 

Rainald and his emperor did not fall out, unlike Becket and his king. In the interests of cementing the holy-empire idea (and putting down some uppity Italian city-republics along the way), they undertook an Italian campaign, in which Rainald led his portion of the imperial army against the much larger forces of the Roman commune. And like Napoleon in Russia, he beat the local army but not the local weather. In the hot Roman summer, the northern soldiers dropped like flies (malaria, dysentery, some kind of plague). Rainald died in Rome, not yet fifty years old; the imperial army melted northward, with the nascent city-republics in the north snapping at the remains. The emperor ended up fleeing for his life, alone, in the un-godlike disguise of a servant who looked after horses.

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The lower part of the present Cologne cathedral was built in the later middle ages, after Rainald's time. (The builders didn't finish it then; there wasn't enough money when tourist revenues dried up after the Reformation, and it was left for the Protestant Prussians in the nineteenth century to put the top on the building, in the interests of the glory of the national state.) During much of the medieval building campaign, Cologne was for most practical purposes a city-republic run by merchants and craftsmen. The archbishops, who would have liked to make a princely state out of Cologne and the environs, had been effectively booted out. They could come into town for services at the cathedral, but they couldn't try to run the place. 

There's a fine late-medieval relief sculpture in the Cologne historical museum, showing the city militia defeating an attack by the soldiers of an archbishop who was still hoping to run the place. The city's patron saints appear in the sky overhead, backing up the city troops and taking occasional whacks at the archbishop's men. The city expects its patron saints to stand with the city council, not with the church.  

But the city is under no illusions that the power of the council is holy or that the mayor is a god. 

**

Ah, but these patron saints: how omnipresent they are in Cologne--and there are a lot of them. Already in the middle ages, before the present version of the cathedral was begun, Cologne was one of the three biggest pilgrimage (tourist, if you like) centers in Europe, along with Rome and Santiago de Compostela; and most of the relics that made up the pilgrim attractions were ... oh, fakes isn't the right word. They were acquired and displayed, I imagine, in that kind of hopeful sincerity that results in the issue of nonfraudulent but implausible mortgages.

Because Cologne had been a big Roman city, it had substantial Roman cemeteries; and because it had been a capital of sorts for the Frankish kingdoms that succeeded the Romans, there were noble Frankish burials in the city as well. So when the population and the economy picked up, and people started building larger buildings and therefore digging deeper foundations, they tended to come across impressive-looking burials. (Nowadays you would probably come across unexploded bombs.) And, in let us say the eleventh or twelfth century, what would you suppose these burials to be? Not what they actually were, like some Roman slave merchant ...

Slave merchant, Roman tombstone from Cologne, Römisch-Germanisches Museum.
Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

... or thuggish Frankish nobleman, but instead a martyred saint. There were so many burials, Roman Cologne had been such a big city; it seemed to fit with stories of very large numbers of saints.

So the great ring of Romanesque churches around medieval Cologne had relics of saints by the the bushelful, saints by the hundreds and thousands. St. Gereon and the Theban Legion. St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins .... There is a somewhat peculiar room in the church of St. Ursula called the Golden Chamber, in which the walls are decorated with a kind of mosaic of gilded and geometrically arranged human bones. Ancient Roman citizens, mistaken for Christian virgins, presumably: stacked arm-bones, crossed leg-bones, heaped-up--what are those, kneecaps? The golden bones go on and on above the busts of what I take to be a random sample of the eleven thousand virgins.

Goldene Kammer, St. Ursula, Cologne. Photo, Hans Peter Schaefer, Wiki Commons. 

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We were staying not far from St. Gereon, renting a little penthouse apartment just outside the ring boulevard where the medieval city walls had once been. I had been a little concerned that we were going to be steamed like lobsters, up in a top-floor place with big south windows in the central European heat wave. 

View from the living room, Bismarckstrasse, Cologne.
Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015

And we did steam a little, but the place had a fine cross-draft and a little rooftop terrace in the back; and it's surprising (to an American) how well you can get along without air conditioning when the temperatures are in the upper 90s, as long as you're in a place that's solidly built and well ventilated. As in our Berlin apartment, the place didn't really get hot until the end of the day, when the sun had been blazing at it for hours. So then we would go out and have dinner at the Afghani restautant down the street, or the Burmese restaurant down the street, sitting outdoors where it was pleasant, in the shade of the narrow street; and then we would come back and throw all the doors and windows open and sit up on the roof with a glass of wine until the place cooled out. Life could be much worse.

From roof terrace, Bismarckstrasse, Cologne. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

I do love this kind of place. Everyone's out, on the summer nights: the street is full of pedestrians and bicyclists. The restaurant tables make the sidewalks almost impassable, but people thread through. Here is a tall young German man pushing a baby carriage with a very small baby in it; he stops for a while in front of the Burmese restaurant, to talk with the shuffling, down-at-heel old Burmese waiter, who is evidently a friend. Both men coo over the baby, in a discreet male sort of way; business comes to a stop. Someone on an apartment balcony across the street is playing sixties pop music: Will you still love me tomorrow? This is okay. 

There are people out everywhere, young people sitting on the windowsills in a bar in Brüsseler Strasse, young people sitting in doorways, older people at the couple of tables belonging to the bar by our front door. The older lot is there every night drinking Kölsch (the local beer), speaking Kölsch (the local dialect), being kölsch, that is, people from Köln. (I was trying to come up with an English equivalent for kölsch and was tempted by colognial, but thought better of it.) Why do I think that everyone who drinks in front of our door is related? They look like it. People whose families have been living here since the Bronze Age. Or at least since Agrippina's time. One evening the bar's customers are cooking their own chicken and sausages on a tiny grill perched perilously at the edge of the sidewalk.... Can we get to our front door without knocking their bratwurst into the gutter? Yes, we can. Well done, all. 

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One day we went over to have a look at St. Gereon's church. When I was last in Köln, in 1978, it was still under repair for war damage. They didn't finish putting it back together until the mid-80s, I think. Parts of it had come through the war all right, as they had come through the fall of the Roman Empire and every catastrophe since, patched together differently after each disaster, built up and built out again in every good time. The buildings sort of accrete around people here, like shells accreting around shellfish.

The oldest part of St. Gereon dates from the fourth century. The building wasn't a church originally; it's not clear that anyone knows what it was, but it was sizable. It was eventually churchified, and from time to time other pieces were built onto the Roman core: one biggish chunk late in the eleventh century, a bigger chunk in the mid-twelfth, and then this terrific thing around 1220, the so-called decagon, which sweeps up the original fourth-century oval into an immense piece of daring, the biggest dome that Europe put up between Hagia Sophia in sixth-century Constantinople and the cathedral in fifteenth-century Florence. it takes the dark heavy Roman buiding and stretches it into this tremendous space that flies up, full of light. You could just stand there and stand there, feeling the space and the light.

St. Gereon interior (decagon).  Photo, Hans Peter Schaefer, Wiki Commons.

The decagon took some bomb hits in WW II, and it was touch and go for several years whether it would fall in--but it didn't, and good engineering and construction work have stabilized it again.

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Center city, the old city, in Cologne was approximately 90% destroyed in the Second World War. There was some discussion, at the war's end, about whether the city should be abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere. After all, a greenfield rebuild could go faster, and then people would have some shelter in the coming winters, instead of freezing to death in the wreckage. Trying to rebuild on the old site would be slower because the ruins would have to be cleared away first--and the overwhelming question was, how can you clear this vast wreckage away, here, now, with no equipment, no fuel, no anything? 

The answer, here as in the rest of Germany, was: by hand, with little wagons, stone by stone. They rebuilt here.  A lot of postwar Cologne is plug-ugly--it was put up in haste, with limited funds--but it's here.

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Most major European art museums began as princely collections (here is what the Hapsburgs looted from Italy, here is what Napoleon looted from the Habsburgs, etc., etc.). The Wallraff-Richartz Museum, which is the big pre-modern painting collection in Cologne, is of course not a princely collection, as the city preferred princes to keep their noses out of city affairs. 

The core of the collection is a bequest from the rector of the university in the 1820s. He had acquired a big lot of northern medieval and Renaissance art when the Rhenish monasteries were secularized in the 1790s, and stacks of altarpieces and loads of sculpture were dumped on a market that was not yet sure if this old stuff was worth having. (The eighteenth century had believed in progress and had found older art barbarous and probably worthless; how fortunate we are that the eighteenth century did not have bulldozers.) If you like North European art from the 14th-16th century, the Wallraff-Richartz is a fine place. 

One of the things you have to come to terms with in this art, however, is the Middle Ages' over-developed taste for gory martyrdoms. Here's a detail from a medieval Cologne painting of the "martyrdom of the ten thousand:" like the Theban Legion, the ten thousand were Roman soldiers who were allegedly killed en masse for their Christianity in the third century. (None of the local churches claimed to have found these bones, but then the ten thousand were supposed to have met their end in Armenia.)

Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, Köln, 1325. 
Wallraf-Richartz Musum. Photo, M. Seadle.

It's hard to know how to respond to this kind of thing in quantity. I remember puzzling over this years ago, sitting in Freiburg cathedral, enjoying a little shade and cool on a blazing summer afternoon. (Freiburg does sort of stop you in your tracks; like some other big churches on the upper Rhine, it's red--in some lights almost purple--and if your art-history courses focus, as they used to, on French gothic, which is typically off-white, then deep purple Gothic comes as a bit of startlement.) Freiburg has a very fine set of windows that show torture and murder in beautiful sunlit color, row on row, higher than you can see. Was this entertainment, the medieval version of Grand Theft Auto or one of those movies that is nothing but shoot-em-'ups and car chases, piling up corpses right and left? Or was it there because the artistic programs in places like this aimed to show everything?--Here is the beginning of the world carved on one portal and the end of it on another portal; here are virtues and vices, here are kings and peasants, here is love, here is thuggish cruelty, here is everything.

I don't know. But the taste didn't last. By the time Cologne bought its big altarpiece for the cathedral, Renaissance prettiness had set in. On one wing of the altarpiece is St. Gereon with a subset of the Theban Legion--extremely well dressed and with good haircuts--before bad things start happening. Death has been discreetly deported from the painting.

Stefan Lochner, St. Gereon.
Photo, Yorck Project, Wiki Commons. 

On the other wing of the altarpiece is St. Ursula with a subset of the eleven thousand virgins, also extremely well dressed and with good haircuts. Pride of place in the big center panel of the altarpiece goes to the Magi, the three wise men, whose alleged relics were in the cathedral itself.

Tradition says that the bones of the Magi were kept in Constantinople (and how did they get there, one may ask?) until the mid-fourth century, when they were given to Eustorgius, the bishop of Milan, who carted them home to Milan, much to the benefit of Milan's pilgrimage industry. The sarcophagus where the bones were housed still sits in the church of Sant'Eustorgio in Milan, though without the bones in it now. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa, having looted them from Milan, gave them to Rainald of Dassell as a princely gift, and Rainald gave them to the cathedral in Cologne. (Much much later--somewhre around 1900?--the Germans gave some of them back, but Cologne kept most of the set, and the Milanese didn't put their share back in the sarcophagus, which is perhaps not very secure.)

Sarcophagus of the Magi, Sant-Eustorgio, Milan.
Photo, G. dall'Orto, Wiki Commons (cropped).

Several years ago Archangel and I were in Milan in a blazing August, traveling with the young friends to whose wedding we are now on the way. The heat was rolling through Milan that summer like a kind of natural disaster; our friends went through twenty-two liters of acqua minerale in a week. (They counted; I gave up. A shirt that you wore for half a day had salt lines on it like high-tide marks from the sea of sweat.) It was sweltering even underground, fathoms down: the Milan Metro was a hell of heat and noise. But the church of Sant' Eustorgio, dark as a cave, with that monstrous Roman sarcophagus wedged in one particularly dark corner, was not warm. There was a kind of permanent dank cold in that corner, a breath of gravestones (another reminder of the historic weight of death, different from the sunlit murders in the windows of Freiburg).

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It's a curious thing: the patron saints of Cologne are foreigners. In so many places the local patron saint is a local: the first big-time bishop in the place, or the missionary who converted the region.  The Magi are from the (Middle) East and were never anywhere near Cologne in their lives. St. Ursula and her companions are Brits; the Theban Legion was probably from all over, but heavily eastern-Mediterranean--and allegedly St. Ursula and a portion of the Theban legion died here on the Rhine, but it was only in passing, so to speak. 

Cologne, as a trading city, a city on a big river, has often been full of foreigners. A very large portion of the population now is of non-German origin, and I believe I have read that the city takes in more refugees per capita than anywhere else in Germany. Much of the current non-German population goes back to the days of the post-World-War-II economic miracle, when Germany was bringing in workers from Italy and Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia, in enormous numbers, and a lot of the demand for labor was here in the heavy-industry Rhineland. 

I read an interview with an Italian priest who was sent up to Cologne a few decades ago to look after the southern Italians who had migrated to the city. He says, I have colleagues who are sent to America, and after three years there, they're Americans. I've been here twenty years, and I'm not a German. (He will probably never be a German.) He thinks about it a little longer.  But I'm certainly kölsch.  I'll bet any number of Italian Germans and Turkish Germans and what-have-you Germans here would say the same. Bin kölsch aber nicht deutsch. The common loyalties of the city trump ethnic divisions and national citizenship, up to a point.

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According to the legend of the Theban Legion, St. Gereon was beheaded.

St. Gereon.  Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

This head, lying somewhat alarmingly in the churchyard, is by Iskender Yediler, a Turkish-born German sculptor who lives in Berlin and has a successful line in sculptures of Christian saints for clienteles in the Catholic parts of Germany.  Bismarck would probably be spinning in his grave (and it would serve him right). 

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The Walraff-Richartz Museum's medieval collection would have been truly astonishing if the other big collectors of this art in the early nineteenth century besides the university rector, the sons of a Cologne merchant named Boisserée, had also left their paintings to the city. However, they turned down a Prussian bid and later sold the paintings to Bavaria, so the goods are in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.... Not that the Boisserées didn't do a lot for the home town. They did leave a good deal of medieval sculpture to the city; and they were principal activists in the Cologne portion of the movement to finish the cathedral, which around 1800 was an awkward half-built hulk that stood in some danger of being torn down. 

One of the spurs for finishing the building was that a fairly detailed medieval plan for the facade was discovered in Darmstadt in 1814. To be more exact, half of the original plan was discovered in Darmstadt. Someone had divided the plan in two, at some point between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, and the other half had drifted away into who knows what eddies of historical destruction. But let us not underestimate the determination of the children of the city ... Sulpiz Boisserée found the other half in a shop in Paris and brought it home. 

This meant that it would be possible to complete the building as intended--not only steering around modern divisions of opinion about how to complete it, which might have delayed the project indefinitely, but also providing a fine sense of authenticity. (Which was of course totally inauthentic, since a medieval architect would never have stuck so slavishly to his predecessor's plans if styles and techniques had changed in the meantime.)

So Cologne, finely rooted in its historical identity, reminds us not to take this sort of thing too seriously. It's a fine thing to have a history, but (think of the eleven thousand virgins) surely we always manage to get the history wrong? 
A little nose-thumbing at the grand things is always in order.  

Cologne, Rose Monday parade.  Photo by Slick, Wiki Commons. 

**

So we went to the wedding and had a lovely time, and then I was sad, reading in the newspaper on the train home: it is expected that the linden trees in the German cities will not survive many more hot summers like this. What will Germany be without linden trees? (Think of the Schlosslinde at Augustusburg, whose crown was so large in its prime that they could put 120 dinner-tables under its branches. It's geriatric and somewhat disintegrating now, but if it lives another five or six years it will be eight hundred years old, on good documentation.)

The association of German city foresters is working on choosing replacements for the lindens and other trees that are likely not to make it through the next decades. (The chestnuts in Berlin looked like death this summer.) Gingkos are high on the list of replacement trees.  Gingkos are fine, but ... Would the grand promenade of Berlin (now hopelessly constructon-choked) be the same if it was not Unter den Linden but Unter den Gingkobäumen?  

Well, we'll see.