Confirmed Dead

I've been to Cologne a few times now. Or at least I think I have. I do have crap short term memory. But with a good night's sleep, once it's in long term memory, it's in. Only, I also get insomnia. No sleep, and no in.

Site-seeing after only a couple of hours of sleep, usually bought with a hefty residual dose of temazepam, is unpleasant. Even on the hottest days, it is cold. Colours are washed out, buildings and landscapes flit past as fleeting impressions. And it *hurts*. It is life as a shade. Achilles didn't much enjoy being dead, even being a demi-god and even were he offered kingship of Hades. Being an underemployed demi-Australian, and not even offered concession pricing, it royally sucks. 

So my insomnia-riddled recollections of Cologne were of a dull, muted place. I was rather surprised then when after a solid night's sleep, I travelled into Cologne and found, well, a dull, muted place. It's not necessarily unattractive. Okay, I lie, it *is*. But individual parts can be quite beautiful, only to be lost in the dreariness of a post-war reconstructed whole.

There is the gothic cathedral. Gothic both in architectural style, and in being *precisely* the sort of place goths feel at home. Basically, it is terrifying. If other cathedrals buoy your soul towards heaven, this one just stretches it, and with all the subtlety of a gauntlet around your ankle and fish hook in your mouth. Had the Nazis had more time to develop their theology, this place could have been their Vatican. The stomp of jackboots would have been entirely too fitting (and I know I'm being entirely unfair to Cologne's resistance to the Nazi take-over).

And there are The Two Towers. The south tower can be accessed by a 509 step spiral staircase drilling straight up into the sky in an unrelenting, almost uninterrupted climb. On a previous occasion, Mein Freund's 70 year-old parents had attempted it, with one failing, one succeeding, and both subsequently requiring days of recuperation. I can with some pride that I am now an unstoppable cathedral-climbing machine, and it presented few problems, though with somewhat less pride that is partially due to six weeks of protracted weight loss meaning a strong wind could probably have just blown me to the top.

The view from the top is really rather astonishing. Not so much because it's of Cologne, which, yeah, looks rather shit, but just the sheer bloody height of the tower. At 98m, you are a LONG way above the people milling around on Domplatte. It makes you wonder again how such a structure could be built with medieval technology.

Which is probably because it wasn't. Astonishingly, Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to finish. While the bulk of the structure was completed by 1473 after a mere 200 years, as the Groom later pointed out to me, the towers weren't actually done until 1880. I sometimes complain that the need to complete infrastructure projects within the electoral cycle of whichever politician wants their name scribbled on them can cause problems, but so clearly can an open deadline. I'm struggling to imagine what possible use a citizen of 2615 would find for a 21st century skyscraper. Perhaps whomever of our 30 generations-removed descendants survive global warming, a nuclear war or two and the odd pandemic will be able to squeeze enough power out of their photovoltaics to get up there and enjoy the view...

I don't really know how it survived WW2 either. It would have been ironic had it been shattered into rubble as had so many other cathedrals across Europe, and so soon after such a long gestation. Perhaps it was sheer willpower, a refusal to collapse, in spite of its 18 bomb strikes. Certainly, few other buildings in Cologne managed such obstinacy.

I sometimes volunteer for the WA Aviation Heritage Museum, whose star attraction is an Avro Lancaster, probably the most important bomber of the Second World War, and a technological marvel. But let's be clear - it is Evil. Under the command of Churchill's useful idiot, Butcher Harris, armadas of these Lancasters were sent crewed by incomparably brave, skilful and for 60,000 of them, doomed young men, to slaughter civilians in a gross game of realpolitik - convincing Stalin that Britain was serious about staying in the war without doing anything so distasteful as actually fighting in it (North African side shows aside).

Cologne was the other side of this mass flow equation of falling steel bombs and tumbling aluminium airframes. It was obliterated. In relatively easy range and navigable ability of Bomber Command, it was hammered on no less than 262 separate raids, killing 20,000, smashing up almost the entirety of the housing stock, and causing the evacuation of some 700,000. When the left bank was taken by the Americans on 6 March 2015, it was with only token resistance. Presumably Germanys greatest pile of rubble was no longer worth fighting over...

The Hohenzollern Bridge is the other great tourist attraction in Cologne. Frankly, I have no idea why. It's basically three parallel, three-arched steel truss bridges, spanning the Rhine and bearing a combined total of six railway tracks and two pedestrian paths. Neither aesthetically nor structurally interesting. It does have locks. Lots and lots of locks, each representing a couple's unique [cough] Love. They now completely cover both fences separating the pedestrian paths from the rail tracks, apparently leaving little scope for future generations of Love. One possible solution are the lock chains which have have started to form, in which locks are locked to other locks to form steel dreadlocks. I assume these will continue to grow and grow until first the pedestrian paths are blocked and, finally, the bridge collapses under the burden of all that Love.

The Hohenzollern Bridge is actually now over a hundred years old and survived everything Bomber Command could throw at it, remaining a vital artery of the Wehrmacht, right until they themselves blew it up as they withdrew over the Rhine. As a result the right bank wasn't taken by the Americans until another month after the left. Interesting, that the Rhine posed the same formidable barrier to a mechanised army as it did to those Germanic refugees fleeing into the Roman Empire from the Huns some 1500 years previously.

Cologne was actually an extensive Roman Colonia (hence the name), which was probably news only to me. There's the rather impressive Romano-German Museum testifying to it. Even the charming Dormagen (as charming as the dormitory for a chem park can be, anyway) was the Legio I Germanica encampment of Durnomagus. Seeing all those copies of copies of copies of the ubiquitous Greek sculptures dug up by the side of a river some 2000 km (and for me, one week) from where the originals were chiselled is a poignant reminder of Greece's once titanic cultural hegemony. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair...

The most impressive sites in Cologne though are the smallest. In front of random houses, one finds cobble stones replaced with brass plates engraved with the names of those Jewish Germans who had lived there. It was only later when I managed to Google Translate 'Für tot erklärt'. If there is some truth in Stalin's (alleged, but probably misattributed) quote 'One death is a tragedy, a million, a statistic' then there can be no better memorial than these individual testaments. Here's to Hugo and Lina, and their young son, Richard, whom I met on the streets of Cologne.