Carolingian discourse and Rhineland pacification
Michael Loriaux
The Roman roads that once led south from Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium to Moguntiacum , and west Augusta Treverorum still meet at the intersection of Hohe Strasse Schildergasse, in Cologne's “Old Town.” Trains rumble across nearby Hohenzollern Bridge, above which rise magnificent cathedral striking Romisch-Germanisches Museum, a testament brilliance. German troops marched this bridge 1936 occupy left bank defiance Versailles settlement. Six years later, 1942, Royal Air Force launched first more than thirty bombing raids utterly devastated most emblematic Greater Rhineland cities (see plate 8.1). was rebuilt. city's dozen or so Romanesque churches were painstakingly restored. But many Old Town's historic buildings survived only as bits pieces masonry embedded, precarious geopolitics, metal glass surfaces industrial-age offspring. ruin culminated disruption western Europe's core regional economy by frontier geopolitics collision mythical nations. As argued previous chapters, fact an aesthetic project, conceived poets eighteenth century imposed on populations state action nineteenth. That project did not bring light “authentic peoples,” it claimed.
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