Neither Dogs nor Elephants
“It is worthy of remark to begin with that of all the animal world man alone has a passion for pictures. Neither dogs nor elephants ranging nearest to man in point of intelligence show any sensation of pleasure in the presence of the highest work of art.”
—Frederick Douglass
BETWEEN THE going out of the old order and the coming in of a new one, we are in Gramsci’s interregnum of morbid symptoms. Some people in Charleston, South Carolina, didn’t want to honor Denmark Vesey, the accused leader of a planned black uprising in 1822, because he was a terrorist, they said. Nevertheless, a large bronze statue on a granite pedestal was dedicated to Vesey’s memory in 2014. A free black man, Vesey was among the founders of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 1817. A white mob burned it down after Vesey’s execution. It was rebuilt twice after the Civil War. In 2015 a white supremacist massacred the church’s black pastor and eight black parishioners while they were having a Bible class.
New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu began the review of his city’s public monuments in 2015. In the spring of 2017, the imposing statue of Robert E. Lee by Alexander Doyle was taken from its eighty-foot pedestal to an undisclosed location. The statues of others celebrating what Landrieu called “the cult of the Lost Cause” followed. In a city of people descended from many nations, a city that was the country’s largest slave market, the statues were not just stone and metal, Landrieu said. A white politician who would write a book about his decision to remove the Confederate monuments, Landrieu asked why there were no slave ship monuments, no remembrances on public land of the slave block or lynchings. He was emphatic that he held to a careful process of public hearings, city council votes, and review by thirteen federal and state judges. “The monuments in accordance with the law have been removed.”
But in August of 2017 three people died in Charlottesville, Virginia, during Klan protests that started with demonstrations against the removal of a large bronze monument of Lee astride his favorite horse. The city council had voted to take the equestrian monument out of Lee Park, renamed Emancipation Park, but a judge granted a temporary injunction after a “coalition of historians and Confederate supporters” filed an appeal. Torchlight-carrying Klan members faced off with University of Virginia students at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” Paying for the past, correcting the past, eradicating the past, governing the future—comparison to Germany came up during the disturbances in Charlottesville, when people were shocked to find that monuments to Confederate generals spoke to white supremacists.
Germany’s talk with itself had had to wait until the 1970s, when a younger generation asked questions of its parents. In the villages and towns of Germany, there are memorials to the vanquished soldiers of World War I and World War II, as if to say: . The eternal flame in the tomb of the unknown soldier in the classicist Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, kept alight during the life of the German Democratic Republic, was beautiful. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, maintained in a Berlin suburb for the education of homesick Soviet troops, is now the Russian German Museum. Germany after reunification kept the Soviet war memorial in the Tiergarten, minus tanks. It was erected in 1945 with stone from the Reich’s Chancellory. It lies across the path of the Kaiser’s Victory Alley, Wilhem II’s 1903 avenue of three dozen terracotta figures celebrating royal Prussia. A curator rescued and buried them when the Nazis fell. They were discovered in the 1970s and hidden behind a wall at Spandau Citadel. The late-nineteenth-century Bismarck Memorial, with its symbols of German Imperial glory, is still in the spot in the center
