Zprávy památkové péče 2016, 76(3):251-264

Actors in a play of destruction. The demolition of old Most and the role of heritage conservation

Matěj Spurný

The unique story of the liquidation of the old city and the construction of the new city of Most has a number of layers that also characterize it as a typical story of state socialism and the transformation of post-war European modernity as such. This study deals with only one of these layers: society's changing relationship to historical heritage.
During the 19th century, the city of Most, in particular the industrial city, became a representative for all the deepening problems of its time: extreme inequality, economic exploitation, homelessness, social divisions, an absence of basic hygiene, and environmental devastation. These were precisely the problems in both a European and Czech environment that gave rise to the utopias and specific plans for the radical transformation of urban areas, including the targeted demolition of historic neighborhoods. The radical programs of modern urbanism before the Second World War, but most of all during the twenty or thirty years after the War, saw both widespread acclaim and practical implementation, even transformation, into the universally binding rules, regulations, and other standards that were mandatory in modern town planning, architecture, and engineering. At the same time, these programs served as justification to demolish historic areas of cities.
From this point of view, the old city of Most was only one of the many dilapidated old cities where the dire conditions of the past could be demonstrated. The poor condition of the city was moreover compounded by a reluctance to invest into it, a phenomenon that could be followed in association with the coal mining beneath its streets from the early 20th century.
Specific proposals, but above all the relentless pressure to "extract the pillar of coal below Most" or in other words, to demolish the entire city or at least most of it, came particularly from the North Bohemian coal mines in the second half of the 1940's and 50's. Regardless of the political upheavals shortly after the war, the engineers in the service of the mining enterprises counted on the demolition of not only the smaller towns, but also the entire city of Most, which was to succumb to their interests. Even though the entire plan was primarily directed by economic rationale, the desperate condition of the old city was of course one of the key arguments which, from the economic measures of the mining industry, ultimately amounted to an acceptable solution for the social situation of thousands of people.
By the mid-sixties, the hitherto consensus held among the cultural elite stating that old buildings and unnecessary monuments should yield to industry and the modern city, gradually began to disintegrate. This was true not only in socialist Czechoslovakia, but globally as well. General enthusiasm for technological progress, fueled by mining and the destruction of land, were increasingly interrupted by calls to heed the death of nature and polluted air as well as the loss of historical values. At the same time, a consideration for the treasures of the past in Czechoslovakia could have been interpreted as a socialist value. A discourse emphasizing non-material values, beauty, and a sense of humility towards the work of past generations began to emerge from philosophers, writers, historians, and art historians into mainstream journalism, beginning to dramatically transform the general global perspective. Voices that had been previously marginal were now being heard, and this perspective was gathering a following.
This of course affected the planned liquidation of the historic old town of Most; the generally accepted standpoint on which all considerations on the region's future had been based, including the most critical ideas, were becoming increasingly challenged, firstly through suggestion but gradually through more unambiguous judgements. It was at this time (in the late sixties) that representatives of the conservation community began to speak up, albeit very carefully at first. Now, when part of the public began to share, or at the least, reflect their perspective, they attempted to take advantage of the situation to rescue at least a part of the old town. Under pressure from the mines and local politicians, however, proposals to completely revise plans for the liquidation of the old town were rejected. Ultimately, conservationists failed to realize even their appeasement option, i.e. a plan to rescue the most valuable set of Gothic buildings without preserving the spatial relationships between them. Having failed in its effort to fundamentally revise the plans for the city's total demolition, the heritage preservation community primarily focused on detailed documentation. The dying city became simply a unique subject upon which the humanities and social sciences could attempt a technique previously specific to biology and medicine: an autopsy. As for the large salvage projects, by the beginning of the 1970's there was only one which survived from all those originally planned: moving the city's most valuable historical property, the deanery church.
Even during the late sixties, the salvage of this Catholic church (moved nearly a kilometer along specially built tracks), ultimately requiring an investment of almost one hundred million crowns, was a risky step not only technically but also politically; the project, while satisfying the wishes of heritage preservation experts and personalities from the circles of humanitarian intelligentsia, still represented a potential threat to the legitimacy of the Communist Party as a vanguard of progress. This radically changed, however, in the late sixties and especially in the first part of the seventies. Regardless of the political upheaval and dramatic oscillations of the social atmosphere, the event received continuous and increasing attention in the years 1967-1975. The age had changed dramatically. It became obvious that the mission of saving the church was no longer the subject of internal agreement between the ministries and national committees, but was now an event being viewed by large segments of the public. The threat of outrage no longer loomed so much from the expensive transfer, but rather from the possibility that the government would decide to sell or demolish the church. The salvage of the church was by no means cheap, but the political elite who represented the advancing normalization understood that the money spent for the church's physical transfer was simultaneously being used to purchase and strengthen the legitimacy of the system that they represented.
In the era of normalization, the civilizing achievement upon which state socialism had built its own legitimacy could no longer be reduced to millions of tons of mined coal and kilowatt hours of electricity, nor to the replacement of old shanty towns with a clean and modern city providing comfortable housing for everyone. The political elite of the normalization process endorsed the conservative ethos of protecting heritage much more than their predecessors had, gradually realizing that merely replacing the historic city of Most for the coal beneath its streets could be, in terms of the legitimacy of the socialist domination, quite the risky affair. At least on the basis of the image that actual socialism had created of itself, its civilizing benefits had to consist of a synthesis of economic productivity and self-sufficiency, utopian visions of a sunny city together with a cultivation of historical awareness.
Such respect, or the ability to undo some of the destructive manifestations of a technological and economic exploitation of the world, however, did not make a lasting impression in the era of "reflexive modernity", like the members of the normalization elite had imagined, as a supplemental agenda that could be tacked on to an otherwise unchanged ideological construction and political practice. The discourse of normalization and political practice, striving for a synthesis of material vs. aesthetic interests, economic growth vs. respect for the work of its predecessors, progress vs. memory, provided only a superficial response to the challenges of the new face of modernity. Even after most people had already recognized that the relationship between economic and technological development and a degree of freedom was much more complicated than a direct proportionality, the socialist state domination was unable to fully acknowledge this fact, let alone be radically transformed in this regard. Unlike the communist elites (to their detriment), the dynamics of the modern era did not stagnate in the age of technocratic planning for the future. The belligerent completion of the Most experiment to its bitter end, as well as its increasingly implausible justification in the second half of the eighties, were just one of many pervasive symptoms of the fundamental crisis of legitimation. Blasted homes, dredged streets, millions of tons of extracted cheap coal, the concrete panel housing estates of the new Most, and a moved church - just a few years ago a pride and symbol of the extraordinary civilization achievement of socialist Czechoslovakia - had now become its disgrace.

Keywords: Most; state socialism; modernity; heritage conservation

Published: September 1, 2016  Show citation