ICTJ in the News

November 19, 2007

Monuments and memory

International Herald Tribune

By Louis Bickford

Demolishing memorials associated with an abusive regime is often an enduring image of revolutions, democratic transitions and military interventions, familiar to anyone who watched the fall of the Berlin Wall or the invasion of Baghdad.

Some images, such as swastikas or portraits of dictators, may be so reprehensible that they ought to be removed quickly and permanently. But if we think of some of these symbols as opportunities to learn from the past, they become educational tools in the pursuit of democratic citizenship.

Around the world, in contexts as diverse as Bosnia, Cambodia, Chile and Sierra Leone, imaginative thinking is emerging about how best to deal with the symbols and monuments of past regimes.

A debate about how to deal with old symbols is now stirring in Spain, where the Parliament recently passed, and the Senate must soon approve, the "Law of Historical Memory," a remarkable and multifaceted effort to deal with the legacies of war and dictatorship of the Franco era.
The law, an important step towards confronting the past, is complex. It includes the annulment of prior legislation, reparations to victims and efforts to find clandestine graves. One part of the law calls on the government to remove certain statues, symbols, and monuments of the Franco period.

However, eliminating monuments altogether can create problems of its own. International experience suggests that there are often constructive ways to engage with offensive public symbols of the past.

For example, the colossal Voortrekker Monument, on a hill overlooking Pretoria, South Africa, a memorial to Afrikaner pioneers, is especially associated with the Battle of Blood River of Dec. 16, 1838, at which the Boers defeated a Zulu army.

The monument's associations with the apartheid regime made it a candidate for destruction. Instead, the government of Nelson Mandela decided to leave it standing and, in 1994, proclaimed Dec. 16 the "Day of Reconciliation."

Today, black tour guides lead visitors through the site and concerts by black musicians are held at there. Though still controversial, the decision to let the Voortrekker Monument stand was also a decision to mark the past, to learn from it and to integrate it into a new and democratic South Africa.

In addition, a civic space called Freedom Park is being constructed on an adjacent hill to commemorate the struggle against apartheid. The two hills, side by side, thus provide visitors a lesson on two different ways of viewing the same history.

One very elegant example of engaging with past symbols is the Baum memorial in Berlin. This small memorial was commissioned by the city council of East Berlin in 1981 to commemorate an anti-fascist resistance group, the Herbert Baum Group. In 1942, some 25 members of the group were arrested, tortured and either killed or sent to concentration camps.

The original text on the memorial described this incident, and then, almost as an afterthought, proclaimed the "eternal friendship between the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union." After German reunification in 1990, designers added a transparent piece of plastic on which they inscribed a new narrative, while the old can still be seen under the cover.

The new narrative says the memorial "documents the brave act of resistance in 1942, the conception of history in 1981, and our continuous remembrance of resistance to the Nazi."

There are other examples, such as the ways in which some statues of Stalin have been rearranged in sculpture parks in both Budapest and Moscow. Instead of being eliminated, they have been put in a new civic space, reinterpreted as objects of art and history.

The full effect of the Spanish Law of Historical Memory will only become clear over time. But Spain is one of many countries grappling with the legacies of a traumatic past, a struggle in which dealing with old symbols is a small but critical part of the puzzle.

Erasing representations of the past may be one way for a society to break with an ugly history. But if one of the goals is to learn from that past, it makes sense sometimes to devise ways to engage constructively with the symbols of fallen dictatorships.

Louis Bickford manages the Monuments Museums, and Memorials program at the International Center for Transitional Justice.