On Sunday protesters toppled a bronze statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England. It was thrown into a river. Some had tried for years to get rid of the monument but others had rejected that as Colston had also donated a lot for various local social purposes. Some of the institutions he had supported still exist.
In the U.S. there are many discussions about removing memorials and statues of people who had fought in support of slavery during the civil war.
But when and where is it right to remove the memorials our ancestors erected?
When the Taliban destroyed a large Buddha statue figure in Bamyan, Afghanistan, there was a global outrage. The U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein statues in Baghdad to some applause but also as an act of propaganda. After the Nazi-led Maidan putsch the Ukraine removed many statues of Lenin and erected some new ones which glorify fascists. Czechia is currently in a struggle with Russia over the potential removal of a memorial that hails Soviet troops for liberating the country from the fascist German occupation.
Which of these removals were right or wrong? To whom?
What about statues of George Washington, the slave owner, or of Winston Churchill, the mass murderer and utter racist. Should they all be taken down? What about John Stuart Mill?
How will future children learn about the bad sides of those men if they go down the memory holes of history?
Where does such iconoclasm end?
Here is a concept that may help to avoid conflicts over such memorials.
The German language has two different words for memorials:
- A 'Denkmal' is a memorial of a historic incident, period or figure. It is generally seen as honorific. Its linguistic root is the verb 'denken' which means 'to think' combined with the noun 'Mal' which means 'mark'.
- A 'Mahnmal' is also a memorial of a historic incident, period or figure. But its purpose is to serve as a lesson or warning. Its linguistic root is 'mahnen' which means 'to urge' 'to exhort' 'to admonish' again combined with 'Mal' which means "mark".
A memorial that was once erected as a 'think-mark' can be turned into an 'exhort-mark' by changing its context.
A famous example is the memorial for the 76th Infantry Regiment in Hamburg, Germany. During the first world war the 76th had been recruited in Hamburg and fought with great losses at the western front. A memorial for its soldiers was only built in 1936 when the Nazis ruled in Germany.
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The memorial shows marching soldiers. The inscription above the soldiers means "Germany must live even if we must die".
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The main purpose of the memorial at the time of its creation was obviously not to remember the soldiers of the 76th but to propagandize for the new wars the Nazis were planing and preparing for.
After the second world war there were many discussions if the memorial should be removed or not. One side saw it as glorifying war while the other side saw it as a honorable reminder of the soldiers of the 76th who were children of the city. Both sides were objectively right.
In the early 1980s a compromise was found. The memorial would stay but it would be amended with a second one a few steps away. This would turn the whole ensemble from a 'Denkmal' into a 'Mahnmal'.
The Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka was hired to create a counterpoint to the war glorifying memorial. His work depicts the horrors of war and includes a reference to the Operation Gomorrah bombing in July 1943 which had killed some 35,000 civilians in Hamburg.
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There have been other conversions from 'Denkmal' to 'Mahnmal' in several places. Sometimes by just adding a bronze plaque with words that describe the historic context of the original 'Denkmal' or which explains that the good man depicted also had quite bad sides.
Artists will come up with better ideas for such purposes. Ask them to do so.
The controversial monuments should be reminders that we must learn and teach history in a way that is not one sided or glorifying. Setting them into context or countering them with new art is a better way to do that than to just throw them aside.
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