The Manufacture of Memory

 

 

From the entrance lobby of the museum, I climbed a short stairwell and then had to pause for a moment to let my eyes adjust. Not to the light or the dark, but to the grandeur. Without fanfare, I was suddenly on one of the great processional ways in history and to my right rose the great north gate of Babylon.

The walls of the gateway are blue-glazed and decorated with flower motifs and processions of animals. Above the ranks of bulls, which are the symbol of the Babylonian god Adad, are rows of less recognisable beasts.   These are the Mushhushshu. This mythical chimaera is dragon-like with the head and body of a serpent, the forelegs of a lion, the hind legs and talons of an eagle and the sting of a scorpion in its tail. It too symbolises a Babylonian god, Marduk, and looks like an animal to be reckoned with.

For the most part, the animals are original and they are made not just of glazed and coloured bricks, but are also moulded in low relief. Standing proud of the wall they are composed of mostly original bricks. Their colours are slightly faded and many are cracked and chipped. Between the animals there are slightly brighter blue glazed bricks whose crack-free surfaces suggest they are 20th century additions. This mixture of old and new recreates the great northern gateway of ancient Babylon. This Ishtar Gate is named after the Babylonian goddess of love and war—how appropriate to pair those two in one deity—and, along with the great processional way, now stands in the Pergammon Museum in Berlin.

Painstakingly excavated, catalogued, washed, and pieced back together, German archeologists brought their prize find home to their capital after the First World War where it was rebuilt brick by brick and has been delighting open-mouthed visitors ever since.

But what has been created is not necessarily a vision of an ancient reality. Visitors to the museum are invited to enter a time warp — to walk down the great processional way, lined with snarling lions, and through the Ishtar Gate into the mighty citadel of Babylon, as they would have done in around 600 BCE. The imagined middle eastern sun might be shining on blue, white and yellow glazed bricks and there is noise and excitement in foreign tongues along the path, as there probably always was,  as new visitors to the city approach the entrance. It is certainly true that as you walk along the bustling corridor of the Pergammon museum, past the beautiful tiled walls in their jewel like colours and on into the room where the front section of the northern gate has been reconstructed, that you are experiencing as close as possible to the vision set out above, but it is not quite what it seems.

In the museum we find ourselves in a world more of manufactured memory than recreated past. There are many literally missing pieces to this particular jigsaw and the gaps have been filled with reproductions, designed to blend almost seamlessly with the originals. There is a lot of educated guesswork at play here and what has been recreated is, we are told quite openly, largely dictated by the dimensions of the original museum building. The processional way is around a third of its real width and the height of the glazed crenellations is set by the height of the roof rather than any archeological estimation. The gate itself is only the front section, and the larger rear section would have required a museum twice the height to recreate and presumably a great deal more newly-fired tiles.

So, what we see today is a scaled down and touched up image of what it might have been. The grandeur and beauty, already admittedly overwhelming, would have been at least twice as great again and the missing tiles have been replaced to complete the glazed facades. Is this deception or is this a justified fabrication? What we are shown today in the museum is clearly a version of what might have been, but to talk of deception is unfair. The archeology is at best sketchy, and there has been no deliberate intent to create something that never was, but rather to present a reasonable and practicable approximation. And the result is wondrous.

A recreated past; a manufactured memory; a best attempt: these are what the Pergammon Museum offers. The lions, bulls and serpent-headed dragons of the processional way and the Ishtar Gate were built to impress and intimidate visitors more than 2,500 years ago. If what has been recreated today still makes the visitor stop and gasp, isn’t that the intent? Even if the dimensions have been adjusted and the configuration of the bricks is nothing more than an estimate, perhaps it is the emotion that is authentic. Visitors to ancient Babylon were awe-struck. So too are visitors to the Pergammon Museum in Berlin and I suspect they always will be.

© Allan Gaw 2016

 

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Testing the Waters

Lessons from the History of Drug Research

What can we learn from the past that may be relevant to modern drug research?

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Dachshunds and Roller Blades

“No sausage dogs” the sign outside KaDeWe appears to say. I expect it’s really ‘no dogs’ but the picture in the red circle is unmistakably a dachshund. It is Germany, so why wouldn’t it be, but I think they have to be careful in being so specific. For a department store that boasts of ‘luxury boulevards’ of fashion I suppose dogs, sausage or otherwise, are simply out of the question.

The clientele of Chanel and Longchamps and Prada, to name but three of the high end concessions, who patronise this exclusive Berlin department store could hardly be blamed for wanting to spend their money free of barking and dog hair, but I wonder if they have expressed a special concern for sausage dogs.

The list of what is forbidden in the store is eclectic to say the least. No smoking is the least obscure, but as well as no photography, and of course no sausage dogs, there is also no roller blading. Now, I can’t help thinking the list of likely annoyances might have extended to a broader range of misdemeanours. But, no, roller blading and sausage dogs are up there with smoking and snapping, and the list ends at just those four. Eating, drinking, folk dancing and the riding of unicycles appear to be quite acceptable.

All of which makes you think about ethics, or at least it made me think about ethics, while I was waiting for my wife and daughter to emerge from the cut throat world of the sale rails.

If we choose to follow an ethical code composed of rules, as many do, then the nature of those rules bear some scrutiny. The most obvious set of ethical rules are the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament, but other contenders are the Hippocratic Oath and the so-called Golden Rule, which usually takes the form from the Christian bible of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. The latter exists in variants in just about every world religion and is often talked of as the closest thing to a universal morality.

Rules, however, are not without their problems. The more specific they are, the easier they are to interpret, but ultimately the less useful they become. If rules are very specific with regard to circumstances they can only be applied in those circumstances, but if they are framed in the form of more general principles then they have much broader application. But, also broader and more varied interpretation.

The very specific prohibitions of KaDeWe leave little room for interpretation when it comes to their intentions, but they are also open to mischievous misinterpretation, especially by pedants such as myself. The management of the department store clearly want their beautiful shop uncluttered by pets and snapping tourists and teenagers with no intention of making a purchase, which is why, perhaps, they have focussed in on roller blades. But maybe they are also responding to a precedent. Perhaps one day when someone was roller blading merrily through the store, past the Mont Blanc counter and through Dior, they were able to state that there was no sign to forbid them. The management may have responded accordingly to make sure the rules would be on their side in the future. One wonders how they might now respond to pogo-sticks.

Steering clear of specifics might have been better. Rather than ‘no roller blades,’ how about ‘no behaviour that we and/or our clientele will find annoying’. Worded like that, however, the rule becomes difficult, if not impossible, to follow. How am I to know what others will find annoying? Perhaps, we need to resort to ‘no behaviour that any reasonable person would find annoying’. Again, assumptions are being made upon which the prohibition is founded. Who’s reasonable? Probably not anyone who might think it acceptable to walk their sausage dog through the food hall.

So, where does this leave us in the field of such practical ethics? What ought we to do when visiting KaDeWe with our fistfuls of euros? How about the golden rule—only behaving in the way that we would like others to behave around us? Not very specific, or at least not obviously so, but in fact a simple principle that encompasses a whole raft of dos and don’ts. By asking individuals to weigh up every decision—every ought or ought not— against a standard of their own expected behaviour, we can dispense with the specifics and can avoid the pitfalls of overlooking prohibitions that we have never even thought of. No need to consider modes of personal transport the youth of Berlin will come up with next, or to restrict your concerns to dogs—all animal life will surely be covered.

Then again, some would say the rules are there to be broken. Perhaps it was simple perversity that made me want to break the rule in the first place and take a picture of the very sign that forbade me to use my camera, but whether I also did so while roller blading my dachshund through the store, I shall leave to your imagination.

© Allan Gaw 2014

If you want to read more about Ethics, particularly in relation to Clinical Research, have a look at my book, ‘On Moral Grounds’.

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