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.
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.
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Design of Monument Against Fascism
Countermonuments are meant not only to commemorate, but also to reflect the memorial’s unfitting nature and memory’s inevitable limitations. The Gerzes felt that monuments themselves tend to have fascistic qualities. Therefore, their monument against fascism would have to be a monument against monuments.
“It is much better to have people talk about a work than to simply do a work yourself, because then the work is part of a public discourse,” Jochen Gerz said in an interview. “A classical work tends to put discussion to rest, whereas if you do works like mine––monuments against fascism or racism in countries like Germany where the issues are so tensely felt––what is important is to keep the discussion going.”
As Esther Shalev-Gerz noted, “During the public existence of the column above the surface, history also altered the situation in Germany: the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification and the resurgence of neo-nazis, had an effect on political awareness which transformed people's relationship and responses to the column. As a foreign object, perceived by some as an almost aggressive element, the status of the monument changed, becoming a kind of public forum.”
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.
Wright, Stephen. Interview with Jochen Gerz. Third Text 18, no. 6 (2004).
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Shalev-Gerz, Esther. “Reflecting spaces / deflecting spaces.”
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