Between memory and oblivion: the Holiday Inn, Beirut

To understand the impact of the imminent destruction of the Holiday Inn, I have to take a closer look at the building's position in the city today. Its iconic existence is established, as discussed above, through its meanings as a political and ideological signifier in different periods in Beirut's contemporary history. As an icon it generalizes these meanings for the entire city. It represents the city in different stages of its history. But behind this purely visual landmark, however, lies a more subjective relation to the city, its past and its present. The way the building is remembered largely falls within the framework of Lebanon's fragmented memory.

There are hardly any written nor material references of the building's presence in the city, except for its iconic depictions in postcards, media and propaganda. The building has suffered an apparent physical death and subsequent absence from the past and present of the recorded urban environment. Its wartime legacy was supposedly removed along with the last remains of its hotel legacy when the building was cleansed in the 1990's. As if the building has never been a hotel, or a war landmark, it has been left for dead, an empty carcass in the city. The historical non-existence of the building is materialized today by its relative inconspicuous presence in contemporary Beirut. Although it still is an icon in the city, it manifests itself not necessarily in the physical landscape of the city. Its long presence as a ruin just outside of the reconstructed city centre, amidst the city's renowned hotels and shops, has made it an accepted site in the city. Only an outsider's eye can spot the building on the skyline of modern Beirut. And even then, the distraction of the urban spectacle that Beirut is today, annihilates the Holiday Inn from its canvas. As Mazjoub rightfully points out in LOG (2009), from the street level the building is hardly noticeable. Not only is it all fenced-in, the pavements surrounding it are small and hardly accessible [45] . The entire neighbourhood is in a state of construction, pushing pedestrians out, and making way for cars. The street separating the Holiday Inn site from the Phoenicia Hotel is a private entrance for a building material workshop next to the hotel. The west side, flanked by the ring way around the BCD, is surrounded by a fence. The steep slope of the ring way and the tiny sidewalk offers little comfort for pedestrians. From the car, the Holiday Inn building is too massive in size to be perceived in its totality. Hence it does not stand out between the rest of the buildings filling the window frame. From the side of its main entrance, on Omar Daouk Street, the view on the building is blocked by the 2,5 metre high fence, and the fact that the building is situated about 20 metres away from the street. To the west of the site, a construction workshop, equally surrounded by a high wall, blocks the view on the Holiday Inn. It is only on top of Amir Omar Street, perpendicular to Omar Daouk Street, that the concrete structure becomes perceivable in its sheer size. From this point, the building blocks the sea view, like a massive concrete wall rising 25 floors high at the end of the street (Figures 22 & 23).

The myth of history

The post-war urge to forget and the simultaneous reconstruction of the city immaterializing the contemporary past of Beirut has developed a large blind spot in its history. Remembering has got no unifying historical or archival reference, nor a physical reference in terms of monuments, or remnants of the war in the city. The image of the city was cleaned up, removing the damage, dislocating the war's memory from the city. The absence of an archive of contemporary Lebanon, and hence the absence of a common narrative of history, has therefore shifted much of its events and stories to the level of the mythical. The myth is this space-in-between, where imagination encounters the realm of reality. It is a space between fiction and reality, between a blurred past and its relevance in the present. It holds a certain account of reality, or truth, from the past and the present. Yet, it is not an attempt to find truth. Instead, it is a place of memory, albeit on an immaterial level. It therefore carries something of a mystery within it, an unknown, or unpronounced aspect of the past. It is a means to represent felt feelings, emotions, fears and hopes. As such, the myth creates a symbolic framework through which we can read constellations of different world views of a society.

But the myth also holds a certain relation to history. In Myth as Archive Vanda Zajko notes that this relationship is established through what Derrida calls 'the metaphors of time and space' [46] . These metaphors are what exteriorizes the past, and its memory, into a historic framework of a society. History can thus also be seen as a collection of stories, anecdotes, and legends, each in their own communitarian context of the war, and each giving a different reading to the past events. Lebanon's contemporary history is a matter of grasping these different stories all together, of knowing the different stories, as Monika Borgmann-Slim [47] explains. The former Holiday Inn plays an ambiguous role in this mythic approach to history. Because of its reasonably short existence as a hotel in the city has been largely undocumented, it mainly exists in the mythical level of the city's memory, where it assumes a prominent place.

The myth is a recurrent theme when discussing Lebanon's contemporary history. It seems to be a bridge between the personal and the collective memory. Staging these memories through metaphors seems to create a historic framework that does not judge. Instead, it creates a space of commonly felt emotions, questions and experiences which are shared amongst all Lebanese. Several artists have developed works based on the stories and objects left by the war. Representing an unknown history, these objects became the basis of fictionalized narratives of a possible, yet uncertain history. These works are not meant as a critique on the Civil War and those involved. They are a direct critique on the way the Civil War is remembered and forgotten. The non-judgemental spaces they hereby create are small, often temporary, spaces within which the history of Lebanon takes shape.

In 1997 photographers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige started the publication of a series of negatives of old postcards of Beirut, entitled Wonder Beirut (Figures 24-27). The negatives were burnt on purpose by their photographer, Abdallah Farah [48] , during the Civil War. The deformed images, otherwise catering to the naïveté of the tourist gaze, uncover an otherwise hidden layer of the city. As much as they tell us of the trauma of destruction, fire and war, these images carry with them a notion of the myth. They confront us with the mythic space where the imaginary world of the postcard interferes in an awkwardly uncanny way with the equally imaginary world of a non-existing history of war and violence: each residing however in an anecdotal space. Each of these anecdotes only exists in the memory of the city, constructing the myth of Beirut.

'The anecdotal is the possibility of approaching our history. If we consider official history as written by the winners, there is another unofficial and subversive space governed by the anecdotal, "the thing kept secret", which perforates that official frame. Latency is about affirming a presence. The anecdotal is the story and development of that presence.' [49]

Both artists point out an important aspect of Beirut's past: it resides in the private space of individual memory, rather than a collective realm of history. Such is, after all, also the origin of the images. The images of Wonder Beirut were taken, and mutilated, by the same photographer who took the photographs for the postcards of Beirut in the 1970's (see chapter 3, figures 2-6). He created the artefacts of the city's history: the postcards of Beirut's Golden Age, the mutilation of the city transposed onto the postcards, and the re-emergence of the memory as an artefact. These images do not show the history of the city. They represent it, like a monument, providing a non-confronting space for memories to emerge.

Apart from existing in the city's mythical memory, the former Holiday Inn building provides a space for the city's memories and stories to emerge, and for the myth of Beirut to take shape. Because of the ongoing destruction of the traces of war the city has few sites which exist both as a physical landmark and as a mythical figure in the city's memory. The Holiday Inn is such a space, where the different stories and memories find a place to develop, to grow out of their immaterial existence and take residence in the city. It materializes the immaterial memory of the city. The building is an anchor for the city's memory, locating it in the city. It is a canvas on which these memories are projected. The conflation of different memories and stories this one space construct a metaphorical world which frames the pieces of past events in a society as a whole, and create a sense of history. These memories and stories are not necessarily directly related to the building itself. But the location of the Holiday Inn, its iconic and mythic presence in the city and its memory, and its unclear role in present-day Beirut, create a place which is strong enough to relocate these memories, disregarding of what part of the city they resided in. Memory is reoriented towards such spaces which provide physical access to the mythic level of the city. Like a gateway from the real world into the mythological one, the building draws up a historical framework for these myths. It reminds us that there is a relevance in the stories and memories. It locates them, reorienting them back towards the city, towards a place where memory collides with the present, where it 'crystallizes and secretes itself' [50] .

This process can only take place with time. As Derrida notices, the archive is a matter of the present and the future [51] . Only the future can reveal the meaning and value of the past. So there is a distance in time needed for the past to emerge. This time value is embodied in the Holiday Inn, as it has been empty and unused ever since the end of the war. It's a ruin in the city. It disappeared from the modernizing city, but re-emerged in the city's memory, like a ruin, or a monument. It might be the reason why now, for the first time, people reflect on the building, its role in the city, and the consequences its renovation or destruction might have on the city and its memory.

"My father has told me stories of the few nights he spent on the top floor of this hotel. While enjoying 5-star quality meals, the visitor could see all corners of the city from the slowly revolving restaurant. 'You could see all of Beirut?', I ask my dad astonished. 'You could see Chweifat and Kfarchima, the Ouza'ï beach and the bay of Jounieh, in one night. My whole city was in front of me as I dined.' I wonder if I envy him for having been there before it got raped by militias and it became a sniper hotel. No, no I don't envy him. He has got his memories of the place and I have mine. I have to admit that my memories are of my own imagination. In my imagination, the Holiday Inn can only be a destroyed hotel, that turned into a fighter's playground, from room to room and floor to floor. The [battle's] loser fell from the [roof]top of the hotel, from the restaurant where my dad sat, falling... falling, to the ground. I see them fighting and throwing their enemies down. I don't want my dad's memory of the Holiday Inn. I want this image, the image of years of slaughter and killing. I want the destroyed Holiday Inn that contains the Civil War ghosts. I want a tangible piece of my country's contemporary history that they want me to forget.” [52]

However hard Beirut tries to forget, some have noticed the importance of the city as a space which helps to forget. The rumour of the planned destruction of the former Holiday Inn hotel has sparked modest interest among young voices in the city to reflect on the building and the possible alternatives to its destruction. Raafat Mazjoub proposes an archiving machine by building a structure around the building which documents its decay. Maxime Hourani on the other hand, sees an Archigram-like amusement park arising from the war ruin. The final plans for the building, however, remain unknown and the owners of the building are not keen on revealing their plans. Only the rumour of its imminent destruction persists. When I walked around the neighbourhood in April 2009, I couldn't but notice a big red poster on the wall around the building (Figure 28). Entitled Civil War Museum, it showed a map of central Beirut, along with the text above. On the map, several sites were marked with red and yellow dots. The dots referred to a set of subjective monuments of the Civil War. It was a cognitive map of war memories. The poster called for people to mark their own sites of memory with little red squares on the same map. I contacted the e-mail address shown on the poster. The Civil War Museum turned out to be the graduation project of Mirna N. Hamadi.

Mirna's and her father's memories, and the conscious choice she makes when remembering the Holiday Inn illustrate the politics of remembering and forgetting. It illustrates how both processes are conscious, and not necessarily apt to consider a general truth. It illustrates what this conscious choice of remembering and forgetting emerges from. For instance, the gap between two generations: one that consciously lived the war, and one that was too young to remember it. It also illustrates where memory and imagination intersect, contributing to the myth of an impossible history.

In The New Berlin (2005) Karen E. Till uses the metaphor of the ghost to refer to the stories and imagination awakened by the haunting memories of Germany's recent past. They represent the unsettledness of Germany's history, and the uncertainty of its meaning in the present. Such ghosts have been inhabiting post-war Berlin, and gave shape to specific sites to deal with these hauntings. Such sites, or places of memory, embody the haunting memory of society. They are 'created by groups or individuals who give a shape to felt absences, fears and desires that haunt contemporary society' [53] . Other than archaeological sites, places of memory do not try to engage in truth-finding or giving a spatial form to the past. They are subjective spaces of experience, spaces of contested historical and social meanings in the city. Such is, for instance, the Topography of Terror documentation centre on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. A place of memory is an anchor for memory, it draws memory towards this physical location, the landscape, which carries within it the secrets and stories, memories and imagination of a recent past. History and memory come together in these places. For Pierre Nora they are places 'where [cultural] memory crystallizes and secretes itself' [54] . Such a place is the former Holiday Inn. Memory has taken root in its concrete structure, its mythical legacy, its iconic existence, in the city. As I explained in the previous chapter, the building's iconic role in the city's history and its long presence as a war ruin in the city have allowed it to become an anchor for memory throughout the city. This relation between the building and memory works in particular ways. It strengthens the mythical and iconic character of the building. Although it remains an inaccessible physical space, it awakens from its apparent historical death in the memory of the city and its citizens. These memories are the ghosts who have taken up residence inside the building, creating an imaginary space of the past around a physical structure in the present.

The concrete carcass of the Holiday Inn is like a maze. It holds these memories and stories like ghosts, inside the building. They haunt the city. They silently ask the questions nobody asks out loud. They carry with them the fears and desires of an unsettled past. They reside in these stories bringing together the memorial and the imagined past of Beirut. The Holiday Inn is therefore much more a monument than it is a simple war ruin, or a hotel, or anything else. It allows to remember in order to forget.

In 1903 Alois Riegl wrote an essay with the title On the Modern Cult of Monuments. In this essay Riegl becomes concerned about the notion of the unintended monument, buildings and structures which became meaningful throughout time, but which were not built to be monuments. Riegl notices how once the value of these unintentional monuments is acknowledged, the very process that gave them this value is abruptly reversed: decay. Restoration of old castles and churches, and other unintentional monuments all focus on preserving it the way it was at a certain period in time. The value of these monuments is therefore annihilated, unless we accept the decay that make them meaningful in the first place. Raafat Mazjoub proposes in his research LOG (2009) for the ruin of the Holiday Inn to be turned into an archiving machine, turning the natural decay of the building into a spectacle, a documentation of the passage time, and ultimately, its destruction not by sledgehammers, but by the forces of natural decay. Michel de Certeau notes that once memory is fixed to objects, such as a monument, it can no longer alter, and thus, it is in decay [55] . This decay, says Forty, is the process of forgetting [56] . If the haunted memory of Beirut finds a space to secrete itself into the city, then the decay of that space would allow these haunting memories to be forgotten, and the ghosts to be allowed to their eternal rest.

Displaced memories

But what will happen if the building is demolished, after all? What could be the consequences of displacing these ghosts once again? This problem has arisen, for instance, in Dresden, Germany. Adrian Forty describes in his introduction to The Art of Forgetting how after the Second World War the city of Dresden lay in complete ruins. The city was rebuilt, except for the destroyed cathedral, the Frauenkirche. The ruins of the cathedral became, what Riegl would call, an unintended monument. 'By default, if not by intention, it became one of the most potent memorials anywhere of the Second World War' [57] . The ruins were a signifier for the memories of the city, and created a space within which each citizen could remember and commemorate in his or her own way. For some it signified the regime of the GDR, as the ruins became the site of silent protests against the GDR in the 1980's. After the reunification of Germany in 1989, the cathedral was rebuilt. 'This was clearly an attempt to erase the memory of the GDR [and its negligence in rebuilding the city, sic], but at the same time it deprived the city of its best memorial to the other cataclysmic event of the century. In this bizarre piece of counter-iconoclasm –remaking something in order to forget what its absence signified- the result is to suppress one memory (the GDR) and at the same time to exclude another (the Second World War)' [58] .

Earlier this year I collaborated on Holiday Inn Apologue, an installation project by Ely Dagher [59] . The installation consisted of a series of slides depicting toy ants fighting each other in the Holiday Inn building in Beirut (Figure 29). The slides were accompanied by an audiotrack retelling the memories of an alleged fighter inside the building. The slides and the memories were supposedly found in a box inside the building. The installation plays with the notion of fiction and history to point out the fragile character of the memory of the Civil War, and the Holiday Inn. By using toy ants instead of real fighters, the scenes become metaphors of distant memories, but at the same time also represent the imaginary level of remembering once the historical framework is uprooted. The battle of the Holiday Inn is thus presented a past that might have happened. But nothing indicated that these stories are in fact fading memories of a recent past.

The displaced memory becomes a haunting once again, unless it finds a space to converge, to be remembered, without being repressed. The imminent destruction of the Holiday Inn will displace the memories it accommodates once again into the city of Beirut, where the number of buildings with a similar historical, memorial and iconic legacy as that of the former Holiday Inn hotel is vanishing. At the same time, it is clear that the destruction of the Holiday Inn will not at any point ease the process of forgetting the country's recent past. Nor will it remove the site-specific memories from its surface. It will only deepen the gap between the present and the past, or at least the past that is remembered in some ways, dating back to before the country's independence.

The former Holiday Inn is a peculiar place: tall, concrete, yet commonly ignored in the city; loaded with reminders of the Civil War, yet situated in the emerging tourist and luxury shopping district of the city; and arguably it could be an historical landmark in the city, yet completely inaccessible. For an outsider it is a gateway to an imaginary city in the past. But for many in Beirut it is a gateway to a set of memories, personal experiences and retold stories, about the city's recent past. There is relatively little empirical evidence supporting these observations. The building's present meaning in the city can only be understood by placing it in the wider historical context of Lebanon's contemporary history. This approach is to some extent contradictory, as I question the very processes at the basis of history. But at the same time it this correlation between different archives, history and memory, that shapes the relevance of the former Holiday Inn in its contemporary setting of Beirut.

Pierre Nora notes that 'modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy, of the recording, the visibility of the image' [60]. The archive exteriorizes memory, and allows a society to forget. As we saw previously, there is no archive of contemporary Lebanon. But there is a place which helps to remember. The Holiday Inn is a place of memory. Where the rest of the city is being developed in order not to refer to the contemporary history of Lebanon, the Holiday Inn allows this repressed memory to be remembered, and forgotten. As a place containing these memories, it is also an archive. It does not eternalize the past, but represents the traces of a past through its subjective readings.

The Holiday Inn is also a monument. As it has outgrown its intended function, it serves as an artefact to remember, as an unintended monument. It is a remnant of contemporary history, which does not only remember, but it also forgets. It is in absolute decay. It has nothing to tell us. But it harbours the untold stories of the city. As such it is also an archive. It does not hold one single truth, but a wide array of truths, each as honest as the other. It contains the different pieces of the past, not through its own physical relation to the past, but through its meaningless presence, its physical death, providing the space needed for these ghosts, or stories, to be dreamt or imagined. The Holiday Inn is therefore not just a building. Its role is vital for the city to forget, instead of repress. The building is in this sense unique in the city.

Alois Riegl warns for the risk involved in dealing with such unintentional monuments. As the reconstruction of Beirut's city centre has shown, reversing time does not lead to forgetting. So does the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in Dresden. The unintentional monument can, in the end, be the strongest commemoration of a society: that which allows the individual and the collective remembering of the past to coincide in one place.

How, then, should the site be approached? The example of the reconstruction of Dresden's Frauenkirche might serve as a warning. But it is equally doubtful that the destruction of the building will rid the site of its complex relation to the past. For now it seems that preservation is the only solution. But can the need to preserve be translated into an urban strategy? Real estate developers are the kings of Beirut. Nevertheless, several buildings have been preserved from destruction in the past years. The Egg, also dubbed the Dome [61] , an old theatre in the city centre, was saved after popular protest against its planned demolition. The Barakat building [62] , too, was protected from demolition. But these buildings were not saved because of their historic and memorial function in the city. They were saved because of their architectural particularities, which by all means, could never be the case for the concrete carcass of the Holiday Inn.

The problem with the Holiday Inn is not so much that the building itself might disappear. Rather, a great deal of the memory of the city is at stake. Once the building is gone, its ghosts are unleashed, vanished into the city, the free domain of oblivion It is the challenge for a modernizing city to find ways to include the processes of the past in the present. But what these ways might be in the city with the most expensive land on the Eastern Mediterranean, is not very clear at this point.