Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of
buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that
domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the
hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the
children’s bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least a semblance of
peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast
edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the
most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of
dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the
shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first
with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a
concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at
which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all,
somewhere as yet undiscovered
industrialists and manufacturers, lawyers
and doctors, rabbis and university professors, singers and composers, bank
managers, businessmen, shorthand typists, housewives, farmers, labourers and
millionaires, people from Prague and the rest of the Protectorate, from Slovakia,
from Denmark and Holland, from Vienna and Munich, Cologne and Berlin, from
the Palatinate, from Lower Franconia and Westphalia—each of whom had to
make do with about two square meters of space in which to exist and all of them,
in so far as they were in any condition to do so or until they were loaded into
trucks and sent on east, obliged to work entirely without remuneration in one of
the primitive factories set up, with a view to generating actual profit, by the
External Trade Section, assigned to the bandage-weaving workshop, to the
handbag and satchel assembly line, the production of horn buttons and other
haberdashery items, the manufacturing of wooden soles for footwear and of
cowhide galoshes; to the charcoal yard, the making of such board games as Nine
Men’s Morris and Catch the Hat, the splitting of mica, the shearing of rabbit fur,
the bottling of ink dust, or the silkworm-breeding station run under the aegis of
the SS
