“Debates about statues are often posed in simplistic primary colours”
ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST
Matt Elton: Over the past 18 months, debates about historical statues have reached fever pitch. Why are they so divisive?
Alex von Tunzelmann: Statues are obviously only one form of commemoration of history and our past, but I think they have become so controversial because they’re so visible. Even quite small towns often have some kind of memorial. And people tend to get quite emotionally invested in them because they look like people.
There’s another factor, too. In many European countries, and the United States, a lot of the statues are from the era of colonialism, so they tap directly into current “culture war” debates about the kind of direction we’re going in as a society and how our past plays into that.
Is it revealing that all the statues your book explores are of men?
I deliberately picked 12 men for this book. Most of them are white, too, although there are a few exceptions: [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was Arab, and Rafael Trujillo, the former Dominican dictator, was mixed race despite defining himself as white. The reason for that selection is that the statues erected over the past few hundred years have overwhelmingly been of white men. As I mentioned, they’re contentious partly because many of them date from the high period of colonialism, which for me really ties into the fashionable Victorian idea that history was made by great men. Statues were a visible form of that concept: there was even a period in the late 19th century during which a phenomenon known as “statuemania” saw huge numbers of statues going up all over the world at an incredible rate. The artist Edgar Degas joked that, in Paris, they had to put fences around parks to stop artists from depositing statues, as if they were dogs going to the lavatory.
How hard was it
