The location of the monument has become increasingly utilized since the early 20th century as a site of cultural, political and social negotiation instead of national pride or unity[1]. Today, artists are using the monument to provoke memories through agonism. Agonism is the political ideology that supports the importance of conflict, believing it may create a positive result. An example of a trend in art practices that engage with agonizing the space and monument is work executed by Krzysztof Wodiczko – an artist known for his counter-monuments through projections. With the intention of ensuring the persistence of memory and history in the present, modern monuments are becoming counter-monuments. Memorialization in Germany was difficult to envision and plagued by questions; Would the traditional monument serve justice to Germany’s histories or does the dialogic of monuments and their certainty of history recall too closely traits of Fascism? Esther Shalev-Gerz & Jochen Gerz’s Monument against Fascism (1986) deals with the issue of representing Germany’s past and how to approach its memorialization and memory politics as well as the polarization of opinions regarding the work’s ability to engage with memory. This counter-monument has been argued by academics such as James E. Young to react against the didactic of the typical monument and its desire to displace/erase histories.

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The intent of the Gerzes’ work was to create a democratic space for memory, yet scholars Thomas Stubblefield and Noam Lupu find a paradoxical issue with its design and execution. Analysis of the Gerzes monument will situate discussion of the counter-monument in relation to Germany’s history, with focus on issues of memory and the intention versus execution of the work. Themes such as these were highlighted in the Wodiczko articles ​Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument​ by Sarah Purcell and ​The Inner Public​ by Wodiczko himself; emphasizing the necessity of understanding the monument’s discourse and didactic as subject to change; the agonizing of site in relation to rhetoric and memory, and participatory monuments. The Gerzes’ counter-monument will be analyzed under Wodiczko and Young’s conceptions of the counter-monument in its design, intent, placement and reception.

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The need to remember comes from the necessity to never forget; “in this way one can recognize memory as a pedagogical tool for understanding society’s current state of identity as well as the means to which future generations will manifest their own selfness”[2]. A traumatic past is never buried for the communities that live in its legacy. Memories will naturally have parts forgotten as they are impossible to be perfectly recreated. Yet, what is chosen to remember is just as important as what is chosen to be forgotten[3]. The monuments in Germany allow for individual and collective memories. Their presence; location, form and intent, are important to scrutinize. Germany’s post-war generation cultivated a deep distrust of monumental forms due to their systematic exploitation by Nazis[4]. As traditionally, monuments were erected by victors to remember heroism and the achievements of a nation – or an ‘official version’ of the past[5]. Monuments were designed to represent a specific view on historical events and for post-war Germans, the Nazi genocide made such memorials impossible to consider. Many perpetrators and victims kept silent about their experiences - a phenomena where trauma defers memory, ultimately creating a collective amnesia. Memorials are often created to commemorate a specific thread of memory; for many, the monument held a ‘demagogical rigidity’ and unquestioning stance of history as Young in his essay The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today, has claimed. These monuments recalled too closely features similar to fascism.

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In 1979, the city of Hamburg, Harburg, Germany saw a rise in Neo-Fascist interests, and fearing a return to the country’s past, the city’s government invited six artists to enter a competition to design a monument against war and violence in favour of peace and human rights[6]. Unlike East Germany (who raised traditional monuments marking their victory), West Germany felt the need to commemorate victims of the Nazi regime. Politicians demanded that “more democracy required more memory and more justice”[7]. Artists in the 1980s began questioning the monument’s suitability as a vehicle for memory in a democratic society. While also criticizing the essence and aesthetic of a monument as a static object – one that fails to disclose the past and encourages the spectator to devoid themselves of the responsibility of remembering. The artists who won the competition, Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz, chose to create a minimal column that relied on public interaction. Unveiled on 10 October 1986, the intent of their monument was to exist as a memory in abstract form. Pierrra Nora’s conceptions on the monument; “the less memory is experienced from the inside, the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs”[8], suggests how the Gerzes’ counter-monument falls in line with Nora’s and Young’s stressing of the need for memory to be forced back into the city, rather than rest on the object. Hamburg, Harburg is a site of importance due to its relation with WWII; raids destroyed 55% of Hamburg’s residential area and killed 55,000 people[9]. It was in the heart of Berlin, a site for Hitler’s Gestapo headquarters[10]. To the artists, a monument against fascism would also be a monument against itself and the work would be a piece that references memories of Germany’s past. As Young explains, the Gerzes’ piece worked against traditionally didactic functions of monuments as well as the authoritarian nature the monument poses in its space (one that reduces the public to passive viewers)[11]. The Gerzes sought to avoid an enormous pillar that told viewers what to think. Their creation would be a ‘self-abnegating’ one, possessing an inscription near its base (and written in seven languages):

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We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours.In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-meter tall lead column it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice[12].

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Aware that memorials often served as substitutes for intervention instead of a call to action, the Gerzes reminded their community that it was the collective, not the monument who would opposed injustice. The Gerze’s work would exercise not a fixed nature, but a changing one; to disappear rather than be everlasting, to demand interaction and to invite its own violation. Most importantly, the work did not accept the ‘burden of memory,’ but reflected it back at the town for their responsibility. These monuments were interpretive forms that strike emotion and agonize the community to consider their past – challenging how one is reminded of, and interprets it[13].

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Although offered a park by the city for their counter-monument, it was refused for a ‘normal uglyish place’[14]. The Gerzes did not want their counter-monument to be tucked away from urban life. They chose a commercial center of Harburg set in a pedestrian shopping mall where the work could not be avoided[15]. The counter-monument was a hollow aluminum pillar – 212 meters high and 1-meter square, plated with a layer of lead[16]. Steel-pointed styluses were attached at the corners of the base, inviting individuals to write their names onto its surface, to stand against fascism. As the face of the column was covered with names and graffiti, it would lower into its chamber. With its burial, the vanishing monument will return the burden of memory to all those who wrote upon it; one day, the only thing left standing here will be the memory-tourists, forced to remember for themselves[17]. The Gerzes’ execution and placement of their monument embodied the important definitions of the counter-monument that both Young and Krzysztof Wodiczko articulated. At the core of their arguments, the need to agonize the space is important for the counter-monument and its engagement with memory. With agonism comes democracy; citing Mouffe and Laclau, Wodiczko reiterates that democracy cannot be organized and is best experienced where there are confrontations and a multitude of voices[18]. For Mouffe, democracy is not about escalating hostilities but to develop a dynamic where individuals can communicate.[19] Cultivating democracy in a space is difficult given that public space is often monopolized by voices of rhetoric. As Wodiczko makes clear, the public space is activated by the antagonizing vehicle (in this case, the Gerzes’ form of the counter-monument), enabling the public to create dialogue and encourage collective memory.

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Although Wodiczko’s projections focus on rhetorical monuments and the Gerzes’ monument was created specifically as a counter-monument, both of their works effect the emotional resonance and agonizing nature of the counter-monument. Both works highlight the didactics of monuments and challenge their surrounding communities to participate in memory appropriation and ownership. Young’s sentiments on the counter-monument also follow suit where he champions agonizing works that choose not to console, “but to provoke”[20]. Just as Wodiczko’s projections serve to expose monumental rhetoric and their changing meanings, the Gerzes’ counter-monument highlights that monuments are the product of multiple perspectives and ideas – all operating on different levels of meaning and memory[21]. Sarah Purcell, on Wodiczko’s work, highlights that the monument’s meaning should never be fixed, for that destroys collective and unique memorialization. In his projections, Wodiczko emphasizes that monuments are to be reinterpreted by individuals and communities, and he does so through the agonizing of the space via the reliance of public participation – for without the public, Wodiczko would have no counter-monumental projections. Similarly, the Gerzes’ Monument against Fascism encouraged public participation: without the public, the Gerzes’ monument would not bury itself, nor would it be able to put the onus of remembrance on the public, to create a collective via agonism. The Gerzes recognized that monuments were to host narratives of heroism, ones that were general and not personal. Like Wodiczko, the Gerzes’ wanted to ‘dramatically transform’ receptions of the monument through the use of the individual and their voice; their personal memory, one that would add to - and change over time - the collective memory.

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For Wodiczko, the counter-monument is meant to deconstruct the traditional monument in order to reveal truths hidden beneath the illusion of its neutral façade; “While the traditional monument often silently validates establishment institutions and state authority, the counter-[monument] opens a dialogue between itself and a traditional monument whose very existence authenticates the entrenched values of its fostering culture”[22]. Wodiczko’s work, although became active much later than the Gerzes piece, sought to address the monumental structure and bring personal conceptions/conflicts of the present, on markers of the past. His interests in exposing and exploring meaning-making echo what the Gerzes’ encouragement of democratic approaches to memory. Young points to Rosalind Krauss when examining the Gerzes’ counter-monument in light of modern architecture; modern architecture invites the perpetuation of life, encouraging renewal and ‘scorns the illusion of permanence’[23]. Krauss finds within the modernist period, that monuments are unable to refer to anything other than themselves as “pure marker or base”[24]. This begs the question as to whether an abstract or self-referential monument can commemorate events outside itself? It should be of note to recognize that when assigning monumental form to memory, we deprive ourselves of obligations to fully remember, resulting in erased histories if the monument is to hold them[25]. In its abstractness, the counter-monument holds viewers accountable for their interpretation of the event they memorialize, at any point on a linear timeline. For the traditional monument, in linear progression, time heaves old meaning into new contexts that can estrange the monument’s memory from past and present. Ultimately holding past truths up against present interests and moments. Wodiczko is also vocal on this differentiation of monument and time, stressing that monument’s meanings cannot remain fixed and that agonism is important when confronting modes of memory. By formalizing the counter-monument’s impermanence and celebrating its altering form over time, works such as the Monument against Fascism refute the “self-defeating premise of the traditional monument”[26]. With its own changing form, the Monument against Fascism not only refers to its own physical impermanence, but to the “contingency of all meaning and memory”[27].   

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For the Gerzes, once the counter-monument stimulates their viewers and encourages them to form ideas, emotions and responses, these reactions come to exist within the viewer independent of the need for monument to supplement them; “By extension, once the monument moves its viewers to memory, it also becomes unnecessary and so may disappear”[28]. The Gerzes explain that there will come a day when anti-fascist memorials will not be necessary due to vigilance kept alive by ‘invisible pictures’ of remembrance[29] – these invisible images, of course, are the individual’s internalized images of the memorial itself, locked in as a source of perpetual memory.  In its egalitarian approach, the wok was created as a performative piece by the artists – one that initiated a dynamic relation between artists, the work and public. By inviting the public to be the reason for its function-value, the democratic platform the work employs, not only commemorates antifascist impulses, but enables the public to enact them; “breaking down the hierarchical relationship between art object and its audience”[30]. The progressive relationship with the counter-monument and its inevitable self-consumption, leaves behind unobjectified memory of the exchange between public and counter-monument. The work in its passivity, “accommodates all memory and response”[31]. Putting the obligation on the individual to add to the art, “it makes artist-rememberers and self-memorializers out of every signatory”[32].

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By 1993, the column was level with the plaza’s surface. Integrated into the plaza reads a sign; “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice”[33]. The location of the counter-monument inevitably accumulated graffiti; scribbles, scratching out other’s signatures and Nazi signs such as swastikas or SS runes[34]. As a result, numerous individuals criticized the counter-monument. Critics such as Noam Lupu, who vocalized against the Gerzes’ monument, consider the work a failure due to its inability to escape representations of Nazism and common vandalism. Lupu’s sees that the Gerz’s monument was no different, less politicized, or less traditional than traditional monuments due to its public treatment: the monument’s lowering was celebrated by officials and the public almost annually. those same memories would be turned into a public and political commitment to action. Lupu asserts that the translocation of one’s private memories into the public realm is problematic in that these memories may not only be displaced, but collectivized, creating a “visually embodied narrative structure,” becoming “symbols not unlike the icons of traditional memorials”[35]. Lupu likens the Harburg monument to having its own meta-narrative: where even the monument’s burial further displaces the collection of memory, silencing itself “by its own disappearance”[36]. The crux of Lupu’s argument rests on her criticism that the Gerzes’ monument failed to eliminate didacticism. Yet the work’s play with didactics (as seen with its own form as to emanate and ultimately ridicule obelisk-like monuments with its own ephemerality) repeats the intention of agonism. The piece got a community involved whether through signature, conversation or forms of media (such as the newspaper) on commemoration and memory. To make an argument for, or against the work was to prompt the individual to recall their own understanding of Germany’s past in order to give reason for their perception of the work. In his essay Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear?, Thomas Stubblefield agrees with Lupu that one did not see a displacement of official narrative in the monument due to the “impossibility of freeing the monument from its Fascistic tendencies”[37]. However, supporters of the monument expressed that the inscriptions that diverged from the desired signature as ideological sentiments against the monument’s meaning[38]. Following these opinions, the fascist attitudes expressed in their graffiti-form, are seen as a necessity of the monument. Critics adopt this perspective stating: “Those who support racism have put the column’s rigidness to the test,” where defending the monument was equal to standing against fascism. Yet doubting the usefulness of the monument was perceived as an indication of repressing the Nazi past[39]. Jochen insists that the swastika is also a signature, posing the question of “why not give that phenomenon free rein, [the Gerzes] suggested, and allow the monument to document the social temperament in that way?”[40]. As a social mirror, the graffiti is argued by Young as “doubly troubling” where it reminds its community of what happened and how these individuals “respond to the memory of this past”[41]. The local newspaper exclaimed that the ‘filth’ of the graffiti’s visibility “brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures”[42]. Where the etchings of hatred and fascist approval “are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column”[43]. By keeping these words, the Gerzes’ counter-monument acknowledges that all monuments ultimately revise their memorial texts; the “monument records the response of today’s visitors for the benefit of tomorrow’s, thus reminding all of their shared responsibility in that the recorded responses of previous visitors at a memorial site become part of one’s own memory”[44].

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Recent scholarship visitation today on the Monument against Fascism focuses on the monument’s enduring ability for memory. Bringing viewers into a boundless realm of historical past via the recollection of memory – where, even individuals who had no personal memories of the experience the monument was created for, a second-hand connection to the past allows future generations to “mourn the misdeeds of their forbearers”[45]. Michelle Leung’s essay The Role of the Counter-Monument Movement in Collective Memory expands the lingering affective value of the work where participants “left a part of themselves to be seen and interpreted by others” – enabling for the sharing and endurance of memory both on an individual and collective scale. Leung recognizes the potential effects memory has with temporal distance and reminds her readers that this monument acknowledges its limitations in creating identity based on the country’s history. As well as the work’s inadequacy to properly recognize and memorialize the atrocities of the Nazi regime, hence the work’s self-referencing. The work’s process of ‘memory-making’ is decentralized to empower the society and generations hereafter the events to decide for themselves how the past will be interpreted. As Leung suggests, future generations my re-interpret the significance of counter-monuments, allowing for memory to exist in its fluid state. Wodiczko shares similar perceptions on the changing nature of the monument’s meaning across time and memory; “exactly how memory takes shape is unimportant besides the fundamental, core issues of remembrance itself”[46]. As a society, it is pertinent to understand and develop cultural and social identities on one’s own terms – based on their own memories and perceptions of their history[47]. In that, one recognizes that the counter-monument cannot document the past as that falls in line with the rhetoric of the traditional monument. But, the counter-monument succeeds in their call for personal interpretations of history, memory and participation, as the Gerzes’ piece has arguably done. Malcolm Miles writes of the Gerzes’ monument from the 21st century perspective in his article A Study of the Harburg Monument Against Fascism, marking that “Today, as members of the generation which participated in fascism have for the most part died, memories of that period are more admissible to public debate”[48]. The distance, as Leung has also noted, allows for renewed attention “safely beyond the scope of living memory”, one that relies on the examination of the few articles written of the time[49]. Upon examining the Gerzes’ Monument against Fascism in the 21st century, the counter-monument’s design, execution and site speak clearly toward its intention: to agonize the space and community in order to engage conversation about, as well as promote democratic rather than didactic memory that persists unto the present with recent articles revisiting the importance of the counter-monument to its site.

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Works Cited:

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Bailey, Stephanie and Mark Woytiuk. “Remembering What Is Not Gone: Towards a Feminist Counter Monument.” THE SITE MAGAZINE, The Site Magazine, 13 June 2018, www.thesitemagazine.com/read/remembering-what-is-not-gone.

Ben-Asher Gitler, Inbal, editor. Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

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Findlay, Angela. “Memorial and Counter Memorial.” Studylib.net, Study Lib, Apr. 2009, studylib.net/doc/8702861/memorial-and-counter-memorial.

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“Harburg.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/place/Harburg.

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Leung, Michelle. “The Role of the Counter-Monument Movement in Germany's Collective Memory: Identity and Justice through Physical Memorialization.” Writing Samples and Works by Michelle Leung, Amanti Pieces, 8 Feb. 2012, amanitapieces.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/the-role-of-the-counter-monument-movement-in-germany’s-collective-memory-identity-and-justice-through-physical-memorialization/.

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Lupu, Noam. “Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s Germany.” History & Memory, vol. 15, no. 2, 2003, pp. 130–164., doi:10.1353/ham.2003.0010.

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Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s Germany

Miles, Malcolm. “A Study of the Harburg Monument Against Fascism : The Characteristics and Publicity of a Counter-Monument.” Journal of the Association of Western Art History, vol. 42, 2015, pp. 63–71., doi:10.16901/jawah.2015.02.42.63.

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Niven, B. Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

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Phillips, Patricia C. “Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko.” Art Journal, vol. 62, no. 4, 2003, p. 32. JStor, doi:10.2307/3558486.

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Popescu, Diana. Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Purcell, Sarah J. “Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument.” The Public Historian, vol. 25, no. 2, 2003, pp. 55–71., doi:10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.55.

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Shaked, Tom. “The Non-Monumental Monument Holocaust Commemoration in the Digital Age.” Toronto, Tel Aviv University, The Yolanda and David Kats Faculty of the Arts David Azrieli School of Architecture, 2016, pp. 1–129. PDF.

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Shalev-Gerz, Esther. “Shalevgerz – Monument Against Fascism.” ShalevGerz, www.shalev-gerz.net/?portfolio=monument-against-fascism.

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Stubblefield, Thomas. “Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear?: The Counter-Monument in Revision.” Future Anterior, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. xii-11., doi:10.1353/fta.2011.0015.

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T, Anca. “Precedent: MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM.” Makeshift, 22 Jan. 2017, makeshiftmemorials.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/precedent-monument-against-fascism/.

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Thea, Carolee. “Jewish Museum Berlin; Monument or Museum.” Carolee Thea, Sculpture Magazine, Nov. 2000, www.caroleethea.com/articles/2000/jewishmuse.html.

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Tyler, Lorena. “Memorials Without Memory.” Zapdoc.tips, ZAPDOC.TIPS, 11AD, zapdoc.tips/memorials-without-memory.html.

Wodiczko, Krzysztof. “The Inner Public.” FIELD, field-journal.com/issue-1/wodiczko.

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Young, James Edward. The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today. 2nd ed., vol. 18, University of Chicago, 1992.

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[1] Lorena Tyler, “Memorials Without Memory.” Zapdoc.tips, 52.

[2] Michelle Leung. The Role of the Counter-Monument Movement in Germany's Collective Memory: Identity and Justice through Physical Memorialization. (Amanti Pieces, 2012).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Diana Popsecu and Tanja Schult, Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 47.

[5] Angela Findlay, Memorial and Counter Memorial. (2009) 1-2.

[6] Ibid, 6.

[7] Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) 17.

[8] Anca T. “Precedent: MONUMENT AGAINST FASCISM.” (Makeshift; 2017).

[9] Encyclopædia Britannica “Harburg.” (Britannica, Inc.)

[10] Ibid.

[11] Diana Popsecu and Tanja Schult, Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 47.

[12] Ibid, 48.

[13] Angela Findlay, Memorial and Counter Memorial. (2009) 2.

[14] Young, 274.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Carolee Thea. “Jewish Museum Berlin; Monument or Museum.” Carolee Thea, Sculpture Magazine.

[17] Young, 276.

[18] Patricia C. Phillips. Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko. (Art Journal; 2003) 34.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Young, 274.

[21] Purcell, 5.

[22] Ibid, 9.

[23] Young, 269.

[24] Ibid, 269 – 270.

[25] Ibid, 270.

[26] Leung.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid, 278.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid, 279.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Stephanie Bailey and Mark Woytiuk. “Remembering What Is Not Gone: Towards a Feminist Counter Monument.” (The Site Magazine; 2018).

[34] B Niven “Memorialization in Germany Since 1945.” (Palgrave MacMillan; 2016) 228.

[35] Ibid, 12.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Thomas Stubblefield “Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear?: The Counter-Monument in Revision.” (Future Anterior; 2011) 6.

[38] Niven, 228.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid, 229.

[41] Ibid, 283.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Leung.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Malcolm Miles “A Study of the Harburg Monument Against Fascism : The Characteristics and Publicity of a Counter-Monument.” (Journal of the Association of Western Art History; 2015) 66.

[49] Ibid, 68.

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