Keith Lowe On Historical Monuments In 2020 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘If there are enough people who genuinely hate what it represents, then whether we like it or not, some kind of reckoning is on its way. Not everyone in Warsaw wanted to have this monument come down. In fact, according to the opinion polls, most people wanted it to remain. But enough people hated it, that it they eventually got their way. And since then, hundreds more statues have come down all across Poland.
In 2017, the Polish government announced that they wanted to take down every Soviet monument in the country, including those devoted to the war. The legacy of communism was to be completely erased. Now, I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. What worries me is the monuments like this represented an important part of Poland's history. So by tearing them down, Poles will no longer be confronted with that history on a day to day level. And they won't be confronted with all the discomfort which comes along with that history. And for me, that discomfort is important. Know, history is not supposed to be something cozy. If you're serious about your history, is essential that you confront the darker sides of your past as well as the glorious sides.
But on the other hand, it's easy to get carried away with this idea of history. In many ways, monuments are not really about history at all. They're about our communal values. The whole reason why they’re put up in the first place is to act as symbols for those communal values. When those values change over time, or when they become not nearly so communal, as they once were, well, then a monument is living on borrowed time…
Colston was revered for centuries because he gave away a fortune to help the poor in Bristol. He helped build the hospital. He supported several schools and churches…
On the same day that the Colston statue came down, this happened in London. Another group of Black Lives Matter protesters spray painted these words, on Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square. This was 1945 and 1968 colliding in a single image. Twitter went berserk. The international press also went a little bit crazy. This image was broadcast and printed in newspapers all over the world. And it inspired at least one piece of copycat vandalism in another country. Prague in the in the Czech Republic also has a statue of Winston Churchill, which stands outside the University of Economics. And this too was spray painted with the words, he was racist, and Black Lives Matter…
A gulf seem to be opening up between those who supported the spirit of 1968, who were happy to deface these monuments, and those who supported the spirit of 1945, who were horrified by it. So what happened next? Well, the next day this happened, this protester climbed up onto the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and tried to set fire to the British flag...
The Cenotaph is the monument that was erected in London after the First World War, to honour the soldiers who have died for the country. It actually has the dates of both the Second World War and the First World War carved into its sides. So in some ways, this is an even more potent symbol. This is 1918, 1945, and 1968, all rolled into one. This is what happens when emotions run high. Everything gets jumbled up until nobody can see straight anymore.
This protester thinks that she's protesting against racism. But she's standing on a monument that's devoted to people of all races, and all classes. Half the people commemorated by this monument died fighting against Hitler. So you know, if she wanted a target, she's really chosen the wrong one...
Now, I would like to say that historians kept their heads throughout all this, right? I'd like to say that we poured oil on troubled waters with our calm, incisive commentary. But historians are human and, you know, we can get just as emotional and muddled up as everyone else...
‘A review might give us a chance to be a little bit more creative, about how we deal with some of our problematic monuments. I think we can learn a lot from the Germans in this respect, who have also had to learn, how to deal with a difficult past. Much more difficult, in fact, than anything we've had to deal with here in Britain. I've got another monument for you to see.
This, is a monument in Hamburg, to the soldiers who died in the First World War. Now, World War One is, of course, not nearly as sensitive a subject as World War Two in Germany. Germany suffered millions of casualties in this war. And, you know, it's only right that they should be allowed to mourn their dead. There's just one problem. This monument was built in 1936, at the height of Nazi power, so, you know, it's, it's also a relic of Nazi values. You look at all those marching soldiers in their coal scuttle helmets. This is not just a memorial to the dead. It's also a homily to the Nazi values of glory and conquest.
In the early 1980s, the people of Hamburg were faced with the same questions that we're facing today. Should this monument stay, or should it go? In the end, the Hamburg senate decided that rather than tear it down, like lots of people wanted, they would build a second Memorial next to it, this time, a monument to the Second World War. This is what it looks like. Where's all the martial glory here? What's happened to all those neat and tidy dreams of conquest? This monument shows where those rows of marching soldiers ended up. In a landscape of horror, brutality, and pain.
If you go to Hamburg today, you can see these two monuments standing side by side on the Dammtordamm. The ideas of the 1930s and the ideas of the 1980s are displayed together in dialogue with one another. History has been honored, but so have the values of a penitent Germany. Now, Germany is not the only place where things like this have been done. Protesters in Hungary have done something similar.
This is in Hungary. It's called the monument to the victims of the German occupation, was put up just a few years ago in Budapest. As you can see, it depicts an angel being attacked from behind by an eagle. The angel is of course, Hungary, and the eagle represents Germany. Historians everywhere hate this monument because of course, Hungary was no angel during the war. For most of the war Hungary was an ally of Germany, and the Hungarian government was deeply complicit in their crimes, including the Holocaust. Lots of ordinary people in Hungary were also very uncomfortable about this monument. They actually started protesting against it even before the monument was was erected.
But rather than trying to tear it down, which is probably not possible in the political atmosphere in Hungary, they decided they were going to build their own counter monument instead. So they did, they did this this, they made this sort of a counter monument which is sitting in front of the, of that monument, which is dedicated not to this sort of mythological version of history that you can see there, but to what they consider a more nuanced and more painful version of history. And you can't really see it here but in front of the statue, there is a display of objects, you can see some of them strung out on the on the fence that's there. These are objects which have been brought to the site by ordinary Budapest citizens. Photos, letters, and Jewish stars, suitcases belonging to Holocaust survivors, that kind of thing. The display changes every day, as different people bring different objects to add to it. It's what the organizers call a living memorial.
And so once again, you have a dialogue here between two different versions of history, Hungary as victim, and Hungary as perpetrator. You also have a dialogue between the mythological version of history up above. And the more sort of down to earth view of history below’...
‘This is a statue of Stalin that I came across in a park in Lithuania. Now, Stalin is of course, an extremely controversial figure, not only in Lithuania. It was even controversial in the days of the Soviet Union. This particular statue was originally torn down in the 1950s. But about 20 years ago, it was resurrected and put in this Monument Park. As you can imagine, lots of people in Lithuania were horrified. This man was a, he was a monster. He was responsible for denying Lithuania its nationhood for more than 40 years. He was responsible for deporting hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians to gulags. So how can anyone justify taking him out of storage and putting him on display?
But the owner of this park points out that here, Stalin is not standing on a plinth above a city. He's hidden among the trees like some kind of fairy tale troll. Squirrels come and sit on his head. Birds poo on him. You know, this is not a place where Stalin is respected. In the same park, I came across this bust of Lenin, another monster from history. Now, what could be a better way of undermining men like this, then putting them in a field full of llamas? Never underestimate the power of ridicule.’...
‘Now people on the left can blame the right for this [a new monument without much of their input] as much as they like, but if they want to have more of a say in our monuments, they have to get involved. No good just waiting until afterwards and then criticizing the results’"
The dictatorship of the minority
