From Tikal to The Wall: Sunday Documentary Films

Last night I spent hours watching documentary films on the website of Arte, the German-French broadcaster that was bought by Germany's largest media channels a few years ago and hasn't been as independent-spirited since. That said, the films that I watched, about Mayan cities up to the 17th century, the urban development of New York and London and Amsterdam from the Gold Age or to the present, Mont St. Michel at the border of modern Brittany and Normandy, Nadia Comaneci, and the experiences of border guards at the Berlin Wall from the 1960s to 1989, were all (it seemed) generously funded and broadly researched and interesting.

There are stages in history I thought I knew, but that after watching the documentaries I knew I didn't. The exceedingly gruesome chapter of prisons in 18th and 19th century France, for instance. I had gathered from other reading that cruel and unusual punishment were genuinely and consistently frowned upon in the Revolution, although not during the Terror; and that Napoleon's laws cemented this tolerant attitude in law. Instead, Mont St. Michel in the 1860s was still apparently a place where people were thrown into dark stone cells in awful conditions.

And I knew about the Great Stink that encouraged the British government to embark on building a proper London sewage system in the mid-19th century. But I didn't remember reading anything about the steam ship Princess Alice that sank in the Thames, terribly polluted and the source of the Stink, at the loss of over six hundred lives.

The metamorphosis of Manhattan from a pastoral island of farms and less than four-story-tall brick buildings, modest even when the Brooklyn Bridge was built (when the bridge looked far larger than anything else in sight); a metamorphosis driven especially because of all of the property speculation by e.g. John Jacob Astor; makes me think again of the quotation from Sophocles:

Πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κ' οὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
('Many are the great/terrible things, but none is greater/more terrible than man.')
I'd never seen this line before in Friedrich Hölderlin's translation into German, and I think his whole translation of the passage is worth quoting:

Ungeheuer ist viel. Doch nichts 
ungeheurer als der Mensch. 
Denn der, über die Nacht 
des Meeres, wenn gegen den Winter weht 
der Südwind, fährt er aus 
in geflügelten, wogenumrauschten Häusern. 
Und der Himmlischen erhabene Erde, 
die unverderbliche, unermüdete 
reibt er auf; mit dem strebenden Pfluge, 
von Jahr zu Jahr, 
bricht er sie um mit dem Rossegeschlecht. 
Leichtträumender Vögel Welt 
bestrickt er, und jagt sie, 
und wilder Tiere Zug, 
und des Meeres salzbelebte Natur 
mit gesponnenen Netzen, 
der kundige Mann. 
Und fängt mit Künsten das Wild, 
das auf Bergen übernachtet und schweift. 
Und dem rauhmähnigen Rosse wirft er um 
den Nacken das Joch, und dem Berge 
bewandelnden unbezähmten Stier.*

*From "Liste griechischer Phrasen/Pi" on Wikipedia (DE), here

I think that in the New York-London-Amsterdam documentaries there was a sub-thesis about Industrialization and Capital, carried on mostly through the musical score and contradicting the narration of the documentary itself. The sub-thesis cast these two forces as unfeeling juggernauts that trampled everyone in their path. The way that the lavish art and public philanthropy of Gilded Age New York were all the peculiar fruits of the hardest exploitation of labour and capital and the utter degradation of the tenement-dwelling needy, reminds me (perhaps arbitrarily) of another quotation:

                                                  adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head

I was really in the wrong frame of mind to watch these documentaries, though, as I was on the point of shedding tears every time a new hardship arose. (The lachrymose mood reminded me of the cartoon about an overly empathetic paleontologist who laments, at the sight of a freshly excavated dinosaur skeleton, 'We've arrived too late, again!'.) These hardships are, of course, hard to avoid in history.

But finally I went to sleep in a different mood, i.e. a thoroughly disgusted one, after watching the Berlin Wall documentary. I felt it was an unedifying series of tales about how self-righteously a German individual can betray his fellow citizens, their rights, and every worthwhile ideal that has ever existed. I don't much like the habit of some internet commenters in the US of saying, every time a policeman shoots and kills someone, that this person must have 'not been obeying the instructions.' In their words, impromptu capital punishment is an 'inevitability' in these cases; and any discussion of or resistance to misapplied authority is not a civil right or a duty, but lawlessness and 'stupidity,' for which the dead person is as much to blame as if he had personally requested his own execution. Professionalism and coolheadedness in a police force seems like such an unpatriotic concept that no American citizen should dare to imagine its existence. But it appears that this delightful train of reasoning is by no means present in the US alone; it was also common in East Germany, and it was applied by the government and the propaganda to unarmed Germans who were trying to flee East Berlin.