“Every monument will fall” – What can fallen monuments tell us?

Monuments and memory as contested practice

Following his recent engagements with memory cultures and forms of forgetting, theatre-maker and performer Oliver Zahn now documented the ways in which the charges, representational forms, and icons of political systems are dealt with. Steinerne Gäste examines the undead afterlife of banished and vanished statues.
The lecture performance looked at effects of removing public monuments and the social shifts that accompany it: what happens once the first dust has settled, once protesters, counter-protesters, and the media have moved on—and with them the spirit of the times? From here unfolded a discursive danse macabre among secret industrial halls, remote cemeteries, forgotten battlefields, and dark forests. Oliver Zahn examined how toppled statues continue to haunt the societies that toppled them and shed light on current ways of dealing with the specter of the past. This became evident, for example, in the belated recognition of the genocide of the Herero and Nama.

In the discussion, Michael Batz and Dan Thy Nguyen addressed current questions surrounding the handling of monuments in Hamburg and perspectives for a more open, post-migrant memory culture. It became clear: monuments are not neutral objects, but products of power, attribution, and negotiation. While Hamburg hardly hesitates to demolish its own historical building fabric, the city struggles with critiquing colonial heroizations. Activist iconoclasm of state-sanctioned monuments is often scandalized, whereas the state-led removal of monuments once appropriated by activists is frequently regarded as legitimate.

Michael Batz and Dan Thy Nguyen countered this with a multi-perspectival memory culture that understands remembrance as a living social practice: capable of conflict, diverse, and carried by people. Monuments thus become dynamic social sculptures. This also includes making space for the victims of right-wing terror—such as in Rostock-Lichtenhagen or on Cologne’s Keupstraße—where solidaristic communities, together with the bereaved, stand up against forgetting and for an open society.