DIARY
JOHN WELLS In the middle of last summer I was in East Germany making a programme for the BBC. We had just finished filming in a community centre dedicated to the mem- ory of a young East German border guard who had been shot dead by a fellow- countryman on his way to the West. As we were sitting in the village pub having lunch, the communist mayor saw a tractor turn in to a newly-built barn on the other side of the road, and said I might be interested in talking to the driver. He said he ran his own private cider factory. We took some wonderful pictures of a brand-new room full of empty glass jars with the sun shining through them, but the acoustics were bad and we didn't in the end include the interview. What was fascinating was that the cider-maker looked and talked like a West German: blazing blue confident eyes, a tough handshake and not a moment's thought before he spoke. Collective far- mers were allowed to breed pigs and keep the profits, and that was how he'd made his money. All his equipment he had bought second-hand from the government, there was nothing else available, and he had reconditioned it himself. When he said on camera that he'd always wanted to run his own business the mayor and Karlheinz, the Stasi man, smiled like proud parents at a prize-giving. Their favourite new word was privat, private enterprise. Little businesses like that are clearly going to be trampled flat by the suddenness of Reunification, the rolling in of the West German econo- mic Blitzkrieg. The extent of the old DDR's total and unconditional surrender only really struck me when I watched television pictures of the Volksarmee handing in their kit. Having for nearly 30 years trembled inwardly at the approach of those jackboots, flat hats and green Rus- sian epaulettes, I found the sight of troops taking them off and putting on West German Nato berets and Camouflage fati- gues somehow more humiliating than if they'd come in under guard with their hands on their heads.
What will be destroyed is not simply a 30-year experiment in a rather grim Ger- manic brand of socialism, but a kind of authentic German-ness that no longer ex- ists in the West. One of the most surprising conversations I had there was on the beach near the island of Poehl on the Baltic Coast, when I asked an old lady in a deck chair whether she had lived there all her life. No, she came from Lithuania, and had returned to the Reich in 1942 `auf Fiihrers Befehl' — on the Fiihrers's orders. The tone of matter-of-fact respect in which she talked about her old leader made me realise that there had been a continuum in the East: the Russians looted any machin- ery that was still working and dynamited the old Royal Palace at the end of Unter den Linden, but they hadn't the money to debauch German architecture and amer- icanise the German soul in the way that happened in the West. It was ironic under the circumstances that the West Germans should have continued to see every ancient building in what was the DDR as part of the (West) German heritage, always in danger of being vandalised or neglected by the natives. In many cases their concern was justified: wonderful old German build- ings that had survived the war were allowed to collapse in the East for lack of money to preserve them, but more damage had been done to old Germany by spend- ing money in the West than by making do and mend with limited funds in the East. And the constant tacit, and sometimes loudly expressed, assumption that such things are better left in the hands of West Germans has been part of a general sneer of condescension that Easterners will take a long time to forgive. In the circum- stances, I'm not sure reunification is the right word for what has happened and I'm not sure there's a good English translation for Anschluss.
he cause of conservation in this coun- try has taken a severe blow in the past few months with a disastrous victory for what used to be called the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, which Lord Montagu has re-christened English Heritage. The organisation repre- sents an amalgam of the old Minstry of Works, the Historic Buildings Commis- sion, and in London, the old GLC planning department. Its officers, some of them expert in some particular field of architecture, are sent to pass judgment on alterations to listed buildings, and have a way of being heavily pedantic about the repositioning of doorstops in a way they themselves might not tolerate if you or I were to lay down the law about where they should put their intimate tissue dispenser. ' Their latest victim is one of the few men of real originality and genius of the present century, the creator of the Landmark Trust, knighted two years ago but until then plain John Smith of Smith Square. For nearly 30 years he has roved about the country, discovering and rescuing buildings in distress: never great buildings, but weav- ers' and fishermen's cottages, small manor houses, follies, hunting lodges, martello towers and forts, which he considered architecturally interesting and important to the preservation of the landscape in which they stood. To buy them and to pay for their restoration he borrowed £5 in 1962 from Pat Gibson, another seriously under- sung hero, and by typically judicious in- vestment turned it into a fund of several million pounds. They are now available to rent as holiday cottages, every one with a small library of books about the house, its history and surroundings. His masterpiece was the restoration of HMS Warrior, the first iron battleship. He discovered it as a hulk being used for target practice off the Welsh coast: it is now moored at Ports- mouth, not far from the Victory, the Captain's uniform coat hanging over the back of a chair in his cabin, every crew musket stacked in place, a chain through the trigger guards. Few individuals alive have greater knowledge of old buildings or a surer eye; even fewer a more convincing record of irreproachable restoration. But John Smith has been so badgered and niggled by the 'experts' of English Heritage he has now decided to throw in the sponge. I hope English Heritage are proud of themselves.
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