Dolmen Megalith, East Netherlands
It had been raining when we drove out from Amsterdam, because it rains all the time on the North Sea that time of year—late November—but we drove out of the rain just as we arrived at the megalith and the sun appeared in the tattered shreds of cloud even as it began to set down over the further unseen sea. Everything was wet, the grassy lawn boggy.
The Megaliths, or Dolmen, are prehistoric tomb structures from the neolithic. There are counted 54 of them in the surrounding region. Archeology dates them to between 4500 and 5000 years old; older than Stonehenge. They are low long structures of stacked boulders built to hold the bodies of dead kings and their treasures. They were monuments to the dead and made to last.
The architects of this megalith thought perhaps that they were making a monument to their dead king, while it obvious to us now that they were making a monument to death itself: a durable built structure to signify for all time that we are going to die. As Lacan has it, the tomb is the first symbol. Much of the architecture of antiquity functions this way; the Egyptian pyramids, the Etruscan tombs, the lower chambers of Aztec ziggurats; each memorialize in stone the powers of death. This fear of death is attached to all monumental architecture and probably to any architecture at all; it is why any empty house can become uncanny. Architecture, by its nature, is haunted.
We stood in the sopping grass and as the sun turned the clouds rainbow. Gusts of rain came out of the trees. The builders of this particular megalith had assumed that no power on earth could move these structures without a great deal of men and mechanical advantage—wedges, fulcrums, scaffold, rope, levers. They had not anticipated Nazi war-power. The Germans had bull-dozed this structure into a pit in less than an hour in the war years. It had lately been dug out of the pit and meticulously rebuilt, according to photographs and the available descriptive evidence.
Walking on through the park we came to a 10 meter-high level berm of grass. We thought at first that it was a dyke to keep out the sea, but the sea was 45 kilometers away. We soon discovered that it was the earthworks for a secret Nazi air-plane hanger built to dispatch planes to maintain the blitzkrieg bombing runs of England and the North Sea. It had been discovered by allied intelligence and bombed out of existence before any planes could take off.
Nazi Architect Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production, envisioned that the long-term project of the Third Reich was the creation of their own giant ruins; they achieved their wish. But though the heaps of earth that make the hanger dwarfs the megalith in size, it is no match for the psychic power of the far older structure; the recoil of death that haunted the psyche of that ancient culture is still pulsing from out of that low tomb.
The woods nearby were filled with a radiant blaze-orange light of the setting sun making the fallen leaves glow. We walked out there only to discover tangles of barb wire and great pits in the earth: craters from allied bombs.
