Memory and Justice: www.memoryandjustice.org

Discussion for the Monument Against Fascism

As the scholar James Young puts it, this monument “flouts any number of cherished memorial conventions.” It was designed “not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passersby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desanctification; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet.”

The town had mixed feelings about living with this provocation. Some citizens objected to the monument’s unruly scrawl of graffiti, which included swastikas. Some anti-fascist groups opposed the monument because it did not explicitly honor victims of fascism. Others saw the ugly graffiti as the essence of the monument. “The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures,” a local newspaper wrote. “The inscriptions, a conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column.”

In one sense, the invisibility of the Monument against Fascism is a commentary on the invisibility of all monuments. After all, many monuments are ignored by passersby soon after they are unveiled – think of the man on horseback in the park, covered with pigeons. By calling attention to their monument’s disappearance, the Gerzes are pointing out that monuments disappear all the time.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Monument Against Fascism

References

Young, James. “The Countermonument: Memory against itself in Germany.” In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 27-48. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Crownshaw, Richard. “The German Countermonument: Conceptual Indeterminacies and the Retheorisation of the Arts of Vicarious Memory.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no. 2 (2008): 212-227.
External Link