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Robert Jan van Pelt, "The Barrack, 1572-1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture" (Park Books, 2024)
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A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Wells, one of your hosts on the network. And today I'm delighted to be speaking with Robert Jan Van Pelt about his book the Barrack, 1572-1914 Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture. Published by Park Books in 2024. The barrack tells the history of a very specific building type. A barrack is mostly a lightweight construction, a hybrid between heart to tent and traditional vernacular buildings. It is a highly efficient structure that sometimes proves to be extremely durable. Easy to erect, the barrack became a mass produced utility of military and civilian mobilization in the 18th and 19th century, providing immediate shelter for soldiers as well as for displaced people, disaster victims and even prisoners. The central argument of the book is that the barrack played a decisive role in shaping the political space of modernity. Robert Young, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
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C
I'm delighted to be with you, even if it is transatlantic, but I guess that is life today.
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B
Absolutely. Would you mind starting by just telling us how you came to write this book? What was the kind of the genesis of it?
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C
Yeah, now I have been basically studying the history of German concentration camps, specifically Auschwitz, since the late 1980s and after the wall came down, both archives in Russia or That time still the Soviet Union and in Poland opened. And one of the archives that was particularly useful for me was that of the Central Bauleitung, the architectural, the construction office of Auschwitz. It's the only major architectural archive that survived the destruction of papers in 1945 by the SS. And they're all kind of contingent reasons why this particular archive survived. And so I started to study the history of Auschwitz. And this archive, you know, it's like 300 boxes of material, had basically a lot of information about all of the buildings that were specifically designed for the Auschwitz concentration camp. So this would be the commandantur the commandant's office. It would be the fire station. There was a fire station. It would be water treatment plants. It would be also of course, the crematoria and gas chambers. These were purposefully built there and designed. However, the barracks, or as in England, they call them quite often huts or we can call them barrack huts because English of course, has this strange kind of habit, very different from other languages that normally you refer to barracks to stone, big, you know, permanent buildings in England. But, okay, we talk about what you would call a hut, that these were bought off the shelf in the time that these concentration camps were created and expanded. So there was actually very little archival evidence about their production. Typically what would happen is that the only kind of files that existed in the camp construction office archive would be surveys of the barracks after they had been installed in the camp. But there were no kind of design modifications. All of that stuff really wasn't recorded because it didn't need to be. As I said, they were bought off the shelf. They were produced elsewhere, many different places in Europe, but all coordinated by a factory in Niski right now on the German Polish border on the Neisse River. So in some way, while I try to account in the book that I then published in 1996, Auschwitz 1270 to the present, I always have these dates in my titles for the barracks. And I had some interesting examples of them, especially a file which fascinated me, which was basically 50 barrack designs to build your typical perfect concentration camp. This was a model concentration camp design issued by the SS headquarters in Berlin. If you were out in the field and you had to build a concentration camp, your design was already there for 5,000 people. So I was quite fascinated by that kind of almost dystopian planning. But for the rest, I didn't paid too much attention to the barracks simply also because I found the crematoria and gas chambers much more interesting. And so what happened was that nobody ever took me to task on the fact that I had kind of ignored the barracks until 2012 when I found myself as a group of European scholars who were all involved in what we called the Terrascape project. Landscape, urban scape. This is Terrascape. These were all people who were looking at the way that human rights violations, severe human rights violations, massacres, genocide had affected the landscape in Europe and how this was being memorialized or not. And these were people from Norway and from Italy and Netherlands and Germany and even Ireland. And so we did basically a forensic site visit to Auschwitz, which I had organized. We were there for around 10 days, 12 days with this group. And the idea was that I would do a kind of in depth review of what was there, what was not there, what was edited out of the museialization of the site and so on. I mean, it's very much a highly edited environment when you go to the Auschwitz State Museum. And so after we had spent a few days in the official museum grounds, we went to the village of Monowicze, which had been the site of the camp where Primo Levi had lived for or suffered for over a. A little under a year, was 11 months, whatever, 14 days. And of course became very famous because of Primo Levi's standing as a writer, as a witness. And we discussed there why of that camp, there's really nothing left until a cab driver said, you know, actually there is something left. And we went to a farmhouse in the village itself. And at the back of the farmhouse was a barrack. And I mean it was literally attached to the farmhouse. And even the farmhouse showed that there were pieces there, the basically standard panel of 1 meter 10 by around 2 meter 20 of the Reichsalbeitstinzberake. There are different dimensions, but this was the panel that was used for this particular barrack type that was produced en masse in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. And so we broke into this farmhouse. I mean you could get in. The owner wasn't there, but Driver said that he was a friend and so we could do this. And we ended up in this room which had been something of a sanitary facility because it had big. It was a very standard kind of barrack design from the late 1930s, but it had painted still on it, you should keep yourself clean. And these were the standard kind of inscriptions in the washrooms of the German concentration camps, all in gothic writing. And so we were standing there and one of my colleagues said, okay Robert, start talking. What are we looking at? And I actually realized I didn't know that much about it. That I had been talking and talking and talking in the Auschwitz site about crematorium two and three. I mean, I can give a tour there for a day in crematorium two. But I was now in this structure which was completely enveloping us. It was tact. And I must say that I thought that I didn't perform that well. So I talked about the fact this is an off the shelf product. That they were produced in the 1930s, that they had been designed for the Reich Labor Service. That was a big kind of nation building project for young men and also women between, let's say, school and going into the army, et cetera, et cetera. And that these have been designed to be put up in areas where there was no housing. Because typically these Labor Service battalions were working in swamps or they were working along the seashore or in forests. And so there was really no accommodation there for these battalions of young men who were sent there to cut trees, et cetera. I basically made it all up, in a sense, and then came home and then decided, okay, this was not at a level that I expect of myself. And I thought, I'm just going to look into this topic. And so this was 2014, 2015, and I really started to read up on the history of the barracks. And of course, there were already. There had been some work done in Germany around a decade earlier by a few young scholars who had been very interested in the use of barracks originally in the gdr, in the German Democratic Republic, especially in the city of Leipzig. Leipzig, where barracks, World War II barracks were reused because of a lack of material resources after the war. And these barracks had survived in the gdr, unlike in the Federal Republic to the west, because the GDR was much poorer until the 1990s. And so when they finally were pulled down in the early 1990s, after reunification, there was some interest in these structures that had survived despite the fact that they were only designed for 5 or 10 years use maximum. But for the rest of us, really very little on it, except that there is a general, let's call it an argument about modernity. The camps, Agamben, you get this whole idea, spaces of exception. And of course, the basic building block of a camp, if it's not a tent, is the barrack. So I thought, okay, I would like to go deeper into this. But there was one thing, and this is very interesting. I teach architecture, professor of cultural history in an architecture school. And I had been in Germany, I had been on the board of a major Holocaust institution in Austria. And one day it was about basically my work. And an architectural historian from a Austrian university said, okay, Juvent Pelt, what you're doing is okay, but it's not architectural history. Whatever you're doing, it's not architectural history. I was specifically referring also to my work on Auschwitz. And I thought, yeah, I mean, it's kind of hybrid what I do. I'm a political historian, I'm an architectural historian, I'm a kind of urban historian, I'm whatever, Holocaust historian. But I thought I will show you. This was really kind of going back into my 16 year old self trying, okay, everyone realizes that I'm really a fake. And I thought, okay, for once before I turn 70, I will actually, I will write a traditional architectural history. And I really thought it's time I do this. My whole career is one of I always see something interesting somewhere to the left or the right in my lateral vision. And I followed that trail. But ultimately I was educated as an architectural historian in the 1970s before I did a PhD on a different topic. I thought, okay, let me at least to myself, let me prove that I actually can do it. So I know it sounds very needy and unnecessary at the age of 70. I think it published now 15 books or so, but still there you have it, so it doesn't disappear. So, okay, I thought I'm actually going to write an architectural history for once. And so, yeah, so that's how the whole thing began. And so this was, you know, it was a project that had to find space between many other projects. I mean, I have, you know, a couple of exhibitions in between. One was the Evidence Room that started in Venice, which was about basically the Irving trial, the architectural evidence in the Irving trial, the gas chambers and so on. Then a very big traveling exhibition on Auschwitz that started in, reopened in 2017, it's now in Cincinnati, but it has been on the road continuously, you know, 2,000 square meters, 750 artifacts. So all of that I needed to maintain and my normal teaching. So it was difficult to find time for it. But then Covid came, of course, and Covid was the ideal circumstance in some way to actually really finish this book. And I must say that one of the reasons that it was possible to write it, of course, is because of the Internet, that the enormous digitization of material in the 19th century that's out of copyright actually allowed me to move actually relatively efficiently even in the conditions of lockdown. We had a very lockdown, long lockdown in Canada, I mean for basically almost two years and that we couldn't travel and even it was difficult to leave your house for a long time. And so while I had done a lot of work on the 20th century before COVID and I had visited archives and so on, the COVID conditions really, of having to do everything long distance really in some way forced me to focus on the 19th century. And then, of course, it became possible also, because of digitization, to really.
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B
Order.
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C
Amazing kind of images from all of these archives in Europe that ultimately allowed me to complete the book as the world opened again. I mean, the text was completed in around late 2022, and that was literally as we started traveling again and so on. So, yeah, the beginnings is basically an admission of my own ignorance and the need to prove myself to my fellow architectural historians.
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B
Thank you for that. I mean, in terms of this rebuttal to this Austrian architecture historian, who are the main actors in this story? Are they famous architects that you've drawn up?
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C
No, of course. And that is, the story is really one that is in the margins of architecture, but it is actually, I think, quite central to the question of what architecture means. Very few architects of any real reputation before 1914 were involved in this. You have a number of architects. When we come especially to the War of 1870, 1871, the Franco Prussian War, at that time, the barrack. Well, it's a very interesting story for the history of the barrack, because this is the first big, let's call it War of Nations fighting nations in Europe, really, with an incredibly high mortality, a relative high mortality because of the new Krupp guns and so on. It was quite a bloody war. And also at that time, just four years earlier, before the war had started, the Red Cross had come into being. And the Red Cross became a kind of hobby for basically countesses, marquesses, duchesses and royalty. The female, of course, always, who in time of war would basically organize hobby hospitals. And what made very interestingly in Germany, that You had around 40 states in Germany and each of them had its own royal house. And in this war, all of these tiny little armies got involved in the kind of larger, under the umbrella of the Prussian army were fighting in France. But in every little state, basically, the women of the royal house organized military hospitals. And these military hospitals were barrack hospitals. And that meant then that local architects in these various states or statelets would then get to commission and sometimes prominent architects. I mean, we don't know their names anymore, but they were prominent in their time. They would be invited by Her Royal Highness Dis or her Dutch whatever grace debt to basically develop a prototype architect barrack for a prototype type hospital that actually would be built and run for some time mostly on the palace grounds or at some prominent place to show the beneficence of the royal family. But in general, the leading role in this story are actually physicians. So for example, the American Civil War is very important. That is the first major war in which fewer people died of disease than of gun wounds in the battle. You know, it used to be that before the Civil War, as a result of the hygienic conditions in the armies, most soldiers died actually of infectious diseases and not as a result of gunshots or wounds. In the Civil War that was reversed. And part of that was an excellent medical service that was inspired by the medical service of the British army in the Crimean War. And of course Florence Nightingale is central in that story and also central in the development of the modern 19th century medical hospital barrack. But the American Civil War really everything was organized according to a general principle. And it was really the Surgeon General at the time of the US army of the US government who basically set guidelines. And it was military doctors who were taking the leadership also because there was really no architectural culture in North America. I mean there was no architecture, architectural profession at the time, with a few exceptions. You see, what's very interesting is if we get the physicians who take the role of designers, they set principles of the number of cubic or cubic feet or cubic meters per patient and so on, all based on the theory of miasms. The idea is that natural ventilation is the key to create a healthy environment. This was pre virus and pre bacteria kind of medicine. Everything is based on the emanations from the soil and that makes you ill. A theory that was proved to be wrong in the end of the 19th century. If we go for example to Russia, Imperial Russia After 1870, the Russian government sent in 1870 doctors to France and to Germany to observe what was happening there. What were the developments both in the use of arms, but also in the use of military medicine. And it were doctors from St. Petersburg who basically said, okay, there are these military hospitals, they're all barrack based. They felt their inner amateur architect kind of stimulated to do their own version, but then in Russian style because the barrack, the wooden barrack of course relates nicely to the Russian vernacular of the peasant hut. And so suddenly all these doctors are making drawings and they are starting their own hospitals. And so for me it was very interesting that we get this story is really a story of non architects getting involved in the production of architectural designs, which actually at the time itself, I mean, there's really no discussion on aesthetics or anything like they're not interested in it, but they are extremely focused on ultimately outcomes, health outcomes, and they use a lot of. They generate a lot of data about how a particular design is functioning when it is, you know, when you have 100 patients in it. These results were published in numerous publications. And so there is, for a 30 year period, a real debate. And most of that material comes out medical magazines, especially public health magazines, especially from Germany. So I would say that probably 50% of material used is German. But then of course, Russia also, that had much of the literature on medicine in Russia, was actually published in German because these were all doctors from Latvia and Estonia, I mean, from the Baltic provinces. And they were all German speaking. So that made it easier for me to access them. But so, I mean, I was kind of surprised that having studied architectural history, but that was in the 70s, that I'd never even thought about that this could be actually a part of the story. And of course we are more interested in vernaculars, but this is not really vernacular. That was of course also the interesting thing that the hut is a vernacular. The hut is a vernacular structure, but this is actually an industrial. An industrial structure. So is industrial vernacular. Do those two words come together? I don't really know. So it was great fun because I was really forced to rethink everything I ever thought about architecture doing this project.
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B
It sounds like quite a revelation. And to me, you said you always like dates in your books. Why did you settle on 1572 as the, as the first beginning?
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C
You know, you can take the boy out of Holland, but you cannot take the Netherlands out of the boy. I'm born in Haarlem and I'm a very proud native of the city of Haarlem. In 1572, Haarlem suffered a siege by the. By the Spanish army during the Dutch War of Independence. Or it's a 19th century concept, of course, you know, projected back on the 16th century. And you know, the Catholic Spanish, Spanish armies, which were of course all Belgians by the way, they all came from the southern Netherlands, tried to suppress the Protestant rebellion. And Haarlem was a major Protestant town. And it ended up with the defeat. The siege was successful and Haarlem was basically, it was taken. And many of my ancestors were murdered or killed there or executed, whatever you call it. In any case, the first, the oldest draw that I have of a camp of huts, of military huts, that is the Precursor to the barrack. The idea of the kind of standardized hut in which soldiers are going to be housed for the duration of a siege. The oldest drawing of that oldest visual record is from Haarlem. It was a master goldsmith from Haarlem who actually left the city before the siege. And he was making drawings of the Spanish army as it settled around Haarlem. Just to go one little step back. What you have in the Middle Ages is basically that typically armies use tents or they are in bivouac, they're sleeping outside. And the fighting season is relatively short. That means it starts in March or April and it ends in September, October. It was very, very unusual to have a siege that would last over the winter. Simply the logistics didn't exist for it at the time. What happens in the 16th century is that as a result of new fortifications, bastions and so on, the ability, and also as a result of the new organization, the logistical organization of the first standing armies. And of course, the Spanish have the real first standing army in Europe. It now becomes possible to, first of all, to keep the army, army in being over the winter. So it's not anymore that soldiers are hired in March or April and are then sent back to their homes in September, October. But now the army is going to be a standing army over the year. And so it needs winter quarters. But it also can basically be used for sieges over the winter instead. That basically, if the city or town hasn't been conquered by October, you give up and you start again in April. And so the siege of Haarlem is very important because this was basically a siege that lasted for more than a year, which meant that the winter. They had to have accommodation for the winter season. And you couldn't bivouk in the Netherlands in the winter, especially not it was a small ice age or in a tent, you needed to have a hut. So what you get is that now, because the armies get organized more strictly, which is that, you know, when you have a standing army, it needs to have a real kind of. Kind of clear kind of organization and battalions and companies and platoons or whatever like that, and clear, hierarchical, permanent structures of command, then basically also the idea of putting soldiers even in a town where three will be in one family and 15 in another one, and they all end up in the pub and get drunk. The idea was that now basically the soldiers needed to be organized according to their unit in a spatial, kind of spatial organization that reflected the military organization based on Roman treatises which were being translated at the time. So we Go back now to Polybius and so on. They are now seen as models of how you organize an army. The Roman. The Roman camp is now seen as a model for modern camps. So it is in the first in the 80 Years War that starts in 1568, and then in the 30 Years War starting in 1618, both ending in 1648 in the Peace of Munster, that you get all of these architectural treatises of how do you organize an army that is a standing army? And the spatial organization of the camp, which basically needs to maintain the order of the army when it is seemingly at rest or in a time of siege, becomes a key concern. And so we get the first treatises now, and that means now also that we get standardized designs for huts. And so the first one is a treatise from 1630s, and there are engravings of these huts, how to build it, how many soldiers does it need, how much material you need, what are the dimensions of it. And then you have 100 of them in this arrangement. And you have now your standard camp for a regiment, and then you have a larger one for the sergeants, and then you get a tenth for the lieutenants, and you get five tents for the captains, and the general has a whole compound. And all of this is this idea of allowing something as kind of chaotic as war to become, to allow that to in some way become subject to theory. And it takes some time. Then what we don't have at that time in the 17th century is the, let's say, the capability to produce these identical units. The identical units now exist in theory in these military handbooks, but still they have to be cobbled together in the field. This then brings us basically to the Napoleonic War, where Napoleon itself is very important in the story, because Napoleon does believe in tents. One of the success of Napoleon as a general is that he believed that armies that carry their tents with them, their own shelter with them, basically are too slow because all of that stuff needs to be loaded on carts and horses. And the roads were not that good. So that basically an army has to operate in the field independent of its baggage. And soldiers need to be able to survive in the field. Which means that in the French army, the Revolutionary army and the Napoleonic army, the bivouk, that means sleeping outside, was the standard kind of way of surviving in the field for most of the year. And Napoleon himself always basically set an example in that he would sleep in the bivouk. He wouldn't be typically in a tent. He wanted to show his man. He still remembered what it was to be a Corporal. And that inspired, of course, loyalty. But then when it really gets cold, you need to have huts. And so the Napoleonic army now started to basically creating standard rules for how do you build those hubbetted camps. What you get then 40 years later in the Crimean War, is that you get now for the first time, the industrial capacity, in this case of Britain and France, that can back this sense of organization up with ready made prefabricated huts produced in Gloucester in England or in France, that can be shipped with steamships at relatively short notice to the battlefield. And so that is then an enormous dividing line in the story, where now the idea is that the logistical system of empire, the industrial production of mid 19th century Britain plus military necessity all come together. And the military necessity of course, creates a motive, motivation to spend money. And everyone gets very concerned about it. And the most important thing in the Crimean War is also the fact that of course there's a telegraph line that runs from the Crimea to London, which means there's a correspondent of the Times in the Crimea. And when soldiers are getting really cold and they don't have any shelter in the Crimean winter and gets very cold there, then basically the public in London knows it within 24 hours and people say, we must do something about it. This means that now how do we get the soldier shelter? It's not out of sight, out of mind. Thanks to modern communication, this now becomes a political crisis. And in a political crisis, people take the initiative to find a solution. And that means prefabricated barracks.
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B
And were there other building types that kind of developed like functions? Were these prefabricated buildings used to address particular issues beyond shell for the French and the British armies in the Crimea?
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C
Now you have of course in the army you got hospitals. So that becomes very important. Is that as a result of Florence Nightingale's work in Scutari, in the big hospital in Scutari, where of course they have a improvised hospital in a very large permanent barrack buildings, stone barrack buildings along the Bosporus Dardanelles that you have that you get that what they start realizing is that actually soldiers are doing better in these kind of flimsy shelters originally. It's actually in 18th century already that some British naval doctors realized that these navy ships of course, were death traps for disease. But then when you basically take the six soldiers and put them on the beach somewhere, you put them in a hut to do much better. From that comes a whole discourse about the use of these kind of very airy, well ventilated huts as shelters for sick soldiers than internally sick people in general. And of course, you have big epidemics in the middle of the 19th century, the smallpox epidemics, cholera. They're all new. People don't know what to do. They create an enormous moral panic in Europe. And then suddenly the barrack hospital becomes for that, Both because of ventilation, but also because they can be built in isolated places. So you can create an instant hospital, foul, away from the populated areas, which you cannot find a big structure necessarily, except when it's an abandoned monastery in the middle of nowhere. But you can create a hospital like that. So all of this comes together, that you get a great interest in the medical field for this. And then, of course, we got, for the first time in the american civil war, the invention of the prison camp. And that is a result of a very specific development in the american civil war which has to do with, if we talk before the american civil war, normally, when you become a prisoner of war, when One side had 100 prisoners of war, let's say all soldiers, and the other side had 100 prisoners of war, they would be exchanged. There would be a temporary ceasefire, and they would be exchanged. And if you have 100 prisoners of war, these are all soldiers. You have one general, then one general would be sent over for 100 ordinary soldiers. They were set exchange rates, depending on the rank. During the napoleonic war, for the first time, that failed when basically Britain, at a certain moment and France, couldn't agree on the exchange rate, the french revolutionary government didn't recognize that in general, might be worth 100 soldiers. And so both sides remained stuck with POWs in Britain. They were put on hulks. They were put on kind of decommissioned naval ships in the harbor of portsmouth and whatever they were all out there. And then a couple of camps on the mainland, the most important being dartmoor later became the prison and a camp near peterborough. But they had huts, but we know very little about about them. But during the american civil war, the system of these exchanges of soldiers failed when the union, that is, the north, insisted that black soldiers that were in the union army would deserve full protection under international law as regular combatants, While the confederacy considered them to be runaway soldiers, slaves. And so when a black union soldier was captured by the confederation, the south would basically enslave this person. And that basically meant that the principle of equality also in treatment of the combatants was violated. And the union then basically suspended all prisoner exchanges. So suddenly, both the union and the confederacy got these enormous amounts of POWs, and they didn't know what to do with Them so they have to create out of nothing these very large POW camps. Now in the south they had no industrial infrastructure. So these camps basically became, you know, they basically are areas surrounded by palisades and there's no accommodation whatsoever. Andersonville, the most infamous of them. Them there were maybe a few tents in there, but for the rest people lived in the open and died in the open. But in the north you had an industrial infrastructure. You had a vernacular architecture, of course, of wood frame buildings. And so now we get suddenly the development of these very large POW camps which are going to be made with prefabricated wooden barracks. And so that is now the origin of what then becomes the real reason I'm interested in this topic, which are the concentration camp in the 20th century. And that of course is where many the people in the Agamben corner of the intellectual world of course are interested in this building type. Because this is not anymore the hospitals or the military camp. The military camp still belongs to civil society in a sense. But then these are these camps, these places of exception, in the words of Agamben, that are outside of the regular legal order of civil order. And then you see there in the 1860s in North America for the first time, these kind of places that don't really exist in the legal civil sphere and they're holding pens for in some ways superfluous people, as Hannah Arendt would call it. Except these are soldiers nobody knows what to do with because they cannot be extreme changed. And then it's only after that in the later the Hague Conventions that we get a clear sense of what status of POWs might be. And that's going to be codified in the Hague and then the Geneva Conventions decades later. But there is really then a kind of pioneering role of this building type in establishing this most unfortunate of 20th century building types, that is the internment camp and the concentration.
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B
And is this, we've talked about Europe and modern day Turkey and North America as well. Is this a story that is the story of the barrack confined to just these regions, or does it relate to European colonial expansion as well?
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C
Certainly European colonial expansion is a place of it. So for example, Germany becomes a leader in the prefabricated portable barrack production in the late 19th century. Specifically one model, the so called Duker model, becomes very important, very successful as a barrack, that it's not simply how to produce it in pieces in the factory, how to transport that either on a wagon or within a railway freight car and then on a wagon to where it needs to be built. But the key performance criteria of these barracks was what happens when you take it apart, part, transport it again and rebuilt it in another site. How many times can you do that? And because that's where the value really comes in. It's not a one time use, it is five times use or 10 years, 10 times use. And there the Ducker Barrack, you know, they, that was their brand, that's what. And they were tested for that especially also, even on a bad road, you put it on a cart and everything is shaking and rattling. What actually is the quality of the wooden panel channel when you are at the end of the road and you have to rebuild it again? So the Germans used these prefabricated barracks in their colonial empire. It was of course very late in coming Tanzania or German southwest Africa. They use it also in China and Tsangtao because basically they had to create a German presence almost instantaneously. They didn't have the long lead time that the English had had or the French had had. So they were somewhat important there. They are important also, for example in French Guiana, I mean Swiftmont, when you want to create prisoner camps again. But in general, the cost of transport of course was high at the time, still high, but not so high in generally. It didn't make sense if you needed to start, basically put financial considerations in play. Especially because labor of course in the non European world is very cheap. So if you basically have very cheap labor, you have local resources, then why don't you basically adapt a local building technique, mostly the hut, to make a barrack hut. There are exceptions, for example, in Japan, in the Russian Japanese war. Suddenly we got that both on the Russian side in Manchuria, where there are major battles, the battle of Mukden, one of the most lethal battles in the beginning, in the century, the 20th century and in Japan that again we get these German barracks. These prefabricated barracks are shipped both to the Russian side, used by the Russian Red Cross and they're shipped to Japan to the Japanese side to create instant hospitals. But in this case, economically it doesn't make any sense, but it's basically flying the flag showing the Kaiser, so to speak, the German technology at the service of humankind. And that is the same what happens, for example, after the. The earthquake in Palermo and in Calabria in 1907, or when an earthquake destroys a city in northern or town in northern Norway, where again each time the kaiser basically sends 15 barracks, German barracks to Norway and 40 German barracks to Italy to basically soft power, German soft power before 19 and I make then very clear, since I mentioned 1914, I make a clear break. The book ends in 1914, looking a little bit forward into the 20th century. And the reason for that is very simple, is that with the outbreak of the First World War, the story of the barrack radically changes. If this were a children's story because in some way the plot of the story is the little engine that coot, that is the barrack hut. But in 1914 the barrack hut comes in really, really bad company. It gets the girlfriend to boyfriend its parents really didn't want to see to have a relationship. And that's barbed wire that before 1914, while barbed wire is around of course in the American west and so on. But it hasn't really been combined yet with the Bear Cut to create the prison camp as we know know it. The American prisoners camp of which I just talked all were palisaded camps. So there was a high palisade around it and on the outside were then the guard towers. But that's still quite expensive, that's still quite an investment. But once you get barbed wire used first on the Western Front and then used also now for instant fences to fencing people or fence out people and then you have have the mass produced bar, then you have basically now a new, let's call it urban or territorial kind of model and in a time of mass dislocation, mass refugees, mass internment, mass everything. And then of course the creating of mass armies and in the case of Britain, particularly Lord Kitchener, who Of course in 1914 there's no British army, effectively in 1914 when Britain starts, joins the declares war in Germany and then of course he builds up in southern England basically training grounds for what becomes the British expeditionary force in 14, 15, 16. And significant parts of southern England now are going to be covered with these enormous training camps. It's a fascinating story, but I think the First World War really needs almost a book by itself. And so in a sense this book is then I would say almost like a prelude to that story. I don't know if I'm going to do it. I've done a lot of work on it, but in some way I also think, you know, a younger person might want to do that in Britain. It's for me quite an effort to go over to the. I've done some work in Kew in the National Archives, but. But in any case, I think some of the big themes are set in the book that I wrote. And then we get of course the 1920s and the 1940s, the story really ends in 1945, as far as I'm concerned. I run seminars with students to look at the post 45 period. But of course, there are two developments that in some way mark the end of the Bearcat as we know, know it. Even when, you know, we now have Ikea producing, you know, prefabricated huts for use in refugee camps and so on. And the first thing is, of course, is that we get now larger trucks. You know, once you have a truck that's large enough that a whole portable dwelling unit can be brought to site on a truck, you don't need to have any more. A hut that exists of prefabricated parts of, let's say, 1 meter, 10 by 2 meters or something like that. That is always a piece that can. Four men can carry. Now you have a truck and you have cranes. And once that infrastructure can be brought to any particular building site, you can have your porter cabins, you can have your prefab. You can have your containers. You can have big pieces that can be put in place. And as far as I'm concerned, that really isn't part of the story. It's a different story. Yeah, because this is all about buildings that are prefabricated in ultimately, parts that are, you know, of a certain limited size related to the human body, to what, you know, four men typically can move, carry, put in place without any special tools or special cranes or something like that. So that's where I see the end of the story clearly.
- [49:22]
B
Super. Thank you so much. That's a perfect place to finish. And it's an extraordinary book, and you explained it so clearly. Thank you so much for your. For your time.
- [49:31]
C
Okay. Thanks very much for discovering it.