Introduction to Memorials and Monuments

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” These opening lines of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between express that we will never actually be part of the past, because we are strangers from the present, and yet, the past is a potent segment of a people’s identity.  We must understand that cultures are not stagnant, and they are constantly reevaluating and remaking themselves and their pasts. One way people remember the past is by building monuments or memorials. Monuments are intentional and purposeful creations designed to provide a bridge to the past, to lives, and to events.  

A memorial helps people understand why an event or person was significant. The creation of a memorial often stimulates public debate, because individuals and groups have different views of the events, people, or ideas to be memorialized. Memorials may take the form of concrete monuments, historic buildings, or even locations. Memorial design reflects the point of view, values and perspectives of the artist, as well as, a society’s collective memory. Traditional monuments focus on courage in war or battle or on an individual who made a difference in society. Since memorials reflect the memorial designer’s own zeitgeist, they have become more abstract over the past few decades. If the purpose of a monument or memorial is to keep memories alive, does the type of public art used, realistic vs. abstract, matter? 

As James Young wrote in the Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History,

Holocaust remembrance does not exist in isolation, but rather within the preexisting contexts of different places and peoples, and, invariably, there is a potential impact on remembrance. 

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germany has seen the construction of many new memorials to the Holocaust. Some are buildings, such as Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial (near Weimar); others are as simple as the rose-colored Litfaß column on Rosenstraße dedicated to the demonstration of the German women protesting the arrest of their Jewish husbands or the bust of Sophie Scholl with a white rose placed each day in a vase in the classroom building at the University of Munich — the memorial to the White Rose Resistance movement. Perhaps the most unique are the Stolpersteine, a decentralized memorial to commemorate individuals who either perished or survived the Holocaust. “To what extent can any memorial help us truly understand the experiences of victims of the Holocaust? How can we symbolize the vast number of victims while still honoring each unique life that was lost—the schoolchild, the aunt, the tailor, the physicist, the sister? Who should decide how the Holocaust is represented and remembered—what symbols are used, what facts are presented, and whose stories are told?”