Roger Heacock

by Roger Heacock, Professor of History,
Chair, Graduate Prgram in International Studies
Birzeit University

The greatest author of the western world in the twentieth century, Marcel Proust, explains how, when as a boy he finally managed to write a short literary text, he felt like a chicken which had just laid an egg and wanted to crow for joy. While in no way comparing myself to that universal giant, I too feel delighted with the discovery I made in carrying out the present research. What I discovered, and what I hope to show here, is that the economic, social and political implications of landscape and landscaping are enormous, and that aesthetic conceptions can powerfully affect and over-determine (in French surditerminer), that is to say, add great potency to the forces which shape the history of civilizations. I will try here to show you how this happened in specific cases which can also be seen as constituting general categories of the landscape of glory and the landscape of resignation.

1. The Invention of European Landscape

Landscape emerges in Europe, hundreds of years after China, it must be added, as an autonomous object suitable for imitation in Renaissance painting, notably in the north, and specifically in Flanders, where it reaches heights never since surpassed in the work of Peter Brueghel the Elder, particularly in his descriptions of winter landscapes (mid-sixteenth century). The message embodied in these works would in itself justify a long presentation, because it marks the introduction in Europe of a mode of reasoning and ethical/political criticism which spawned the school of landscape art.

2. Landscapes of Victory: al-Majd

What concerns us here is the fact that landscape, as well, later on, as seascapes, likewise originating in the Low Countries (but in the Spanish as opposed to the Austrian Netherlands, that is to say, in Holland rather than Belgium) became an autonomous actor during the northern Renaissance. Very quickly it passed over into the political domain, and was, in the seventeenth century, appropriated as an instrument by the French monarchy, in the person of Louis XIV. He used landscaping to further his strategy of relying on the propaganda, especially in the absence of the reality, of absolute monarchy. Louis as we know was the Sun (king), his country and its people, the world. Landscape, for Louis XIV, necessarily meant victory, the victory over a feudal system whose dominant pictorial and psychological symbols came from the firmament (the heavens) or the underworld. The defeat of the feudal "fronde" meant the victory of the earth over astral and subterranean forces.

His architects, engineers and gardeners, led by Le Vau, Le Brun and Le Nttre, inspired by this vision, effected a conceptual breakthrough at Versailles, and established the basic principles of the landscaping of glory, which brought together the past, the present and the future in one triumphant swoop. At the same time this internal/external landscape helped Louis 14 finish the job of destroying the political power of the French aristocracy, by making it possible to gather them all in and thus keep them under permanent observation his own and each others. The hall of mirrors symbolizes the mutual monitoring which Versailles entailed. And the gardens, with their various alleys, wooded areas and villas, provided ample opportunities for intimacy, which replaced the void left by political impotence. This inner and outer architectonic model was thereafter imitated all over Europe and America (one need look no further than Nymphenburg in Munich or Schoenbrunn in Vienna, at Windsor castle and Buckingham palace, and also the White House in Washington, which imitates the frontal house of Versailles, without the great counter-reformation and aristocratic wings, but with its equivalent of such rooms as the Hall of Mirrors, in the baroque Oval Office of the president for example).

It is no coincidence, then, that the official creation of the United States of America (1783) and the German Empire (1871) occurred at Versailles. Its bourgeois counterpart in France was the landscape of the Champs-Elysees-place de Etoile in Paris, representing the Napoleonic and republican landscaping of victory. These seek their distant inspiration, no longer in the aristocratic Middle Ages, but in Greco-Roman antiquity. There is a striking resemblance, in particular, to the main alley at Tadmur (Palmyra) in Syria. But the Champs-Elysees model resonates through the ages in such places as the Washington Mall (a kind of parade of monuments and outsized heroes, notably Abraham Lincoln, who is himself modeled after the greatest and biggest statue of all time, that of the Olympian Zeus by Phidias), but also for instance in the Ramallah Manara-Mughtaribeen Squares and connecting avenues.

3. Landscapes of Defeat: As-Sumood

The historical antithesis to this aesthetic-political system found its formulation later on, in the nineteenth century, the period of decline and fall of a variety of empires which had participated in creation of the landscape genre and in its political uses. And the ultimate incarnation of the landscape of defeat model is the Vienna Woods. These woods surround the Austrian capital to the south, west and north all the way to the Danube river. They block Vienna off from its German and Bohemian prolongation, so to speak, and reinforce the exclusive connection with countries to the east and south, Hungary and the Balkans.

The Vienna Woods are a conscious re-creation (whose purpose is precisely recreation) of a European "virgin forest" (a Garden of Eden), executed in the wake of the Habsburgs nakba of 1866, when in a few short weeks, Prussian armies expelled them from Germany, over which as Holy Roman and then Austrian emperors they had assumed "for eternity" the hereditary right to rule.

The fact of the matter is that these woods had been scheduled for piecemeal destruction and replacement by the trappings of modernity: they were to be cut down to make place for the necessary industrial infrastructure around the city of Vienna, capital of one of the most heavily populated countries in Europe (60 million people).

They were saved by a single person, it turns out, and I have carefully mapped the campaign which Joseph Schoessel mounted to preserve and renew the Woods. He succeeded, after years of struggle, having been bothered, opposed, sued and even physically threatened by the developers whose projects he was countering. He was a former military man, an officer who decided to hang up his spurs in the wake of the humiliation of 1866 at the hands of the Prussians. He entered politics and became the mayor of a small town or village in the outskirts of Vienna, Moedling. It is then that progressively the project, or rather the crusade of saving the Vienna woods became his obsession. I will not tell you here all that he had to do, the veritable mountains he had to move, to succeed, save the woods from disappearance, attach them to the Vienna municipality, and see to it that they would never be zoned for building.

The important thing here is the extraordinary link between this model of the landscape of sumood or defeat or resignation, rather, and the future history of Vienna, Austria and the world. This history verifies the dual model I have propounded here, of a landscape of victory or power, versus one of defeat, loss of power, and shows how they are operative at the level of historical events.

The Rousseauist universe of the Vienna woods, as artificial as anything the landscaping of glory had ever come up with, hearkened back (this was, among others, Schoessel's vision) to a pristine world in which the "natural" order of society and of things had prevailed, a lost world which would likely never return except in memory. The purpose of the Vienna Woods then, in their conception and in their use-value down to the present time, is precisely the maintenance of a memory, a nostalgia, a sense of eternity based on he misty, irrecoverable past, lending the strength (through the citizen-wanderers, and they are legion on every weekend of the year) required to endure the eternal limbo to which historical decline has relegated their country. The Woods are dotted with tributes to the historic glories of Habsburg arms, for example the Leopoldsberg, dedicated to the mythical proposition that from here, western civilization was saved and preserved from the Ottoman-Islamic threat in 1683.

This was then Schoessel's work. And he was motivated by that terrible defeat of 1866. And the effect on world history was great. For Vienna, alone among the great capitals of Europe in the later nineteenth century, was unable to modernize in the same way as, for example, London or Paris, by surrounding itself with the kind of industrial suburbs which led to modernity in the other great powers. Vienna, it is well known, remained a pre-industrial city in economic and especially in social terms, and its rich late-nineteenth century culture reflected this fact. And this fact strongly influenced the later history of the region, and the world, which was partly linked to the pre-modern outlook of the Austro-German and Czech parties and individuals, not least among them the young Adolf Hitler, in the years preceding World War one. Landscape, in this momentous case, conditioned the course of history.

Defeat therefore bred a landscape of resignation and endurance. In the Austrian case, this landscape in its turn prefigured a political and also psychological transformation: the inner landscape (thicket or jungle) discovered by Freud's breakthroughs and, finally, the collapse of the existing world order in World War one.

These paradigms, that of Majd and that of Sumood, both find their evident application in the history of Palestinian landscaping, re-landscaping, and landscape perceptions. Sumood has been translated as steadfastness. In the Palestinian context, however, this turned out to be a form of resignation in the face of the aggressive exploitation and settlement policies on the part of the occupier, so that Sumood was dropped in favor of the active resistance of the Intifada. Take the landscape of glory, and these, in the last half-century, have tended to be monopolized in Palestine by the Israelis as they moved forward in their campaign of conquest: Think of the sequence of avenues which symbolically expunge and re-appropriate the former no-mans land, called "Tank street" and "Paratrooper street", which cut like a swathe through East Jerusalem ever since 1967, flanked by the Israeli police academy and interior ministry, as well as futuristic sculptures, and culminating in Ammunition Hill at the left and the first post-1967 Jewish settlement in occupied lands, French hill on the right.

And take the landscape of Sumood, of which there are so many examples in modern Palestine literature, but one prototype of which is the extraordinary book by Mary E Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, published in 1862 after trips in the mid 1850s. She was the sister of the British vice-consul in Haifa, whose successors, one almost feels it already, would some day become Palestinian proconsuls.

In her sublime description, depicting an incredibly rich and flourishing landscape, she projects a profound resignation onto the existing people of the land, the Arab Palestinians, whom she found fascinating, but in every respect decadent, destructive and passive in relation to the great peoples who preceded them on the land thousands of years before, and even more those who, one can literally feel it in her account, are going to follow in the future, the Europeans.

Here is a short excerpt, in which Rogers describes the road from Jaffa towards Jerusalem: "This pleasant sandy path led us for three of four miles between beautiful fruit gardens, where the palm-tree, laden with golden fruit, towered high above all other trees; oranges, lemons, pistachios, apricots, almonds, and mulberries were ripening; the pomegranate-tree showed its thick clusters of scarlet flowers; and acacias, locust-trees, tamarisks, silvery olives, and broad-leaved fig-trees flourished. It was about half-past six when we reached the open country beyond the extensive and well-cultivated gardens of Yafa. The sun was going down. Behind us, over the sea; the far away hills towards which we were journeying (east by south) were crowned with glowing red, while purple night shadows were rising rapidly; we passed through fields of mallows and gardens of cucumbers, with tents of little stone lodges for the gardeners scattered here and there.

The sun went down; vulture and kites were sweeping through the air; and as the darkness increased, our little party, consisting of six muleteers, our servants, and ourselves, assembled together to keep in close company for the rest of the way.

We could distinguish parties of field labourers and oxen at rest by the road-side, and sometimes we came to a rude threshing-floor, where, by the light of a bonfire of weeds and thorns, we saw Rembrandt-like groups of rough-looking, half-clad peasants, some of them sleeping, and others lighting their long pipes with the fragrant embers. Our muleteers were singing monotonous and plaintive songs, only interrupted now and then when the jogging mules disarranged their burdens by jolting against each other, and the drivers would cry out, "Ai-wa! Ai-wa!"