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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Museum Where Racist and Oppressive Statues Go to Die
The Museum Where Racist and Oppressive Statues Go to Die
Germany has found ways to display problematic monuments without elevating them.
by Daniela Blei August 14, 2020
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/museum-of-toxic-statues-berlin
Last year, Urte Evert received a 400-pound church bell imprinted with a small but unmistakable swastika, and she faced a conundrum. Evert is the director of the Citadel Museum in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, and the bronze bellcast in 1934 for the ascendant Nazi regimehung at the nearby Evangelical Church of Hakenfelde until the astonishingly recent date of 2017. Evert hoped to add the Nazi artifact to the museums permanent collection of toxic monuments: busts of militaristic Prussian rulers; statues of Aryan athletes and warriors; and an eight-ton granite head of Vladimir Lenin, which took two years of political and bureaucratic wrangling to dig out of the ground. But first, Evert had to weigh the risks of exhibiting a church bell installed during the Nazi period. What would the bell represent, and what could visitors learn from it? And could it become a kind of shrine for members of far-right or neo-Nazi groups?
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Inside the museum, visitors confront at eye level statues and monuments that used to represent power, Evert says. You can touch everything. Nothing is put on a pedestal. You can talk about what makes you mad. Since December, the Nazi church bell has been on permanent loan. It inspired a special exhibition on Spandaus churches under National Socialism, a collaboration between college students and the museum.
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We need to de-heroize these monuments to take away the heroic appeal, says Jürgen Zimmerer, a professor of global history at Hamburg University and an expert on Germanys colonial past. Rather than erasing all monuments, he suggests using them to critically examine history. This can be done by laying them down, or placing them upside down, explains Zimmerer. That way, everyone passing by would be forced to engage with the monument in question.
For Neiman, many of Berlins historical sites hold potential lessons for Americans. Nearly every single Berlin monument erected in the last 30 years was the subject of debate, often lasting for years, over what to put up, what to take down, and what to put in its place, Neiman says. The citys scholars, politicians, and citizens regularly clash over designs for new memorials and plans to update museums. While Neiman hasnt always agreed with the outcomes, that is democracy, and that is how we learn, she says.
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The Museum Where Racist and Oppressive Statues Go to Die (Original Post)
marble falls
Jul 2021
OP
Anywhere it won't benefit from a setting except to be cautionary, invite discussion, not reverence.
marble falls
Jul 2021
#3
Bernardo de La Paz
(48,790 posts)1. They could be placed in the Nixon Monument
ck4829
(34,981 posts)2. We can have a museum to put all the ugly things
Last edited Wed Jul 21, 2021, 12:04 PM - Edit history (1)
Put confederate monuments and history on the same floor as history of American serial killers, the molasses flood, and moral panics.
marble falls
(56,371 posts)3. Anywhere it won't benefit from a setting except to be cautionary, invite discussion, not reverence.