Monument Against Fascism

In 1983, the local government of Hamburg, Germany, held a design competition for a “Monument Against Fascism, War, and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights.” The German artists who won, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, described their design as a Gegen-Denkmal––a countermonument. They rejected the city’s offer to place their monument in a pleasant park and instead constructed it in pedestrian shopping mall in the working-class suburb of Harburg. It was a pillar, twelve meters high and one meter wide, made of hollow aluminum and plated with a layer of dark lead. An inscription near its base read, in German, French, English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish, “We invite the citizens of Hamburg and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Hamburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”

A steel stylus was attached at each corner by a cable so that people could sign their names onto the pillar. Every time one meter and a half of the pillar was covered with inscriptions, the monument was lowered. Unveiled in 1986, the memorial was lowered six times before sinking completely in 1993, with over 70,000 signatures inscribed onto its surface.

Today at the site, a framed panel explains the evolution of the memorial at its various sinking stages. Visitors can see a portion of the sunken column from a glass door underneath the elevated terrace where it once stood.

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.

Gerz, Jochen. “Monument against Fascism Hamburg-Harburg, Germany 1986.”
External Link

“The Harburg Monument Against Fascism.” Facing History and Ourselves: Memory, History and Memorials.
External Link

Sigel, Paul. “Counter-Monuments: Criticising Traditional Monuments.” Goethe Institute, November 2005.
External Link

Discussions

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;…

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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…

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