Perhaps we need humble monuments to mark massive events

I like to think that in South Africa, we’re past our phase of trying to defend exploiters, slavers and killers through statues.

The discomfort among many white people felt over #RhodesMustFall seems to have dissipated as we come to understand the pain caused by monuments we took for granted. One doesn’t detect as much attachment to other statues lately. If Queen Victoria’s statue outside the Port Elizabeth Library had to fall, and that one of Louis Botha on his horse outside parliament, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for me.

The legacy of those individuals – colonialism and Afrikaner nationalism – has been complicated at best, bloody and murderous at worst. Honouring such legacies through public memorials insults the victims of these systems, so it makes sense to remove them if and when the time comes.

The United States and Britain appear to be going through this process as well, with statues of exponents of slavery and the confederacy being removed, if not outright toppled.

These systems were also a blight on humanity, so it makes sense to remove the statues, due to the hurtful memories they evoke, and the current shifts in what society values and respects. Slavery and exploitation are not prized social values, and they never should be.

However, while we ought not to honour the evildoers, we do still need to remember the evil they have done. In this context, it’s interesting to look at a particular form of memorial being used in Germany.

Nazi Germany, of course, was responsible for the most horrific genocide in modern history, when millions of Jewish people, Roma, homosexuals, dissidents, the disabled, black people, communists and others were murdered in the years up to 1945, when World War II ended.

Adolf Hitler was the dictator who directed these atrocities, including the Holocaust, which killed more than 6 million Jewish people. There are no statues of him in Germany.

However, it is imperative that the true horror of his acts never be forgotten by humanity. How then to remember, if not through a statue? Well, there are in fact thousands of ways to remind people of something besides erecting a statue. Artist Gunter Demnig has been busy with one method since 1992.

Called the Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Stones”) project, his initiative involves commemorating people who lost their lives to the Nazis, by laying paving stones, inscribed with the names of people killed, on the street outside the place where they lived.

To date, he has laid more than 75,000 of these Stolpersteine. If you visit German cities, you are likely to stumble upon them. They bear a bright brass plate, with the names of those killed and a short account of what happened. “Here lived Ida Arensberg. Born 1870. Deported 1942. Murdered 19.8.1942,” as does one depicted on Wikipedia.

Stolpersteine have been laid in cities across Europe, in many of the countries where the Nazis committed the atrocities. You come across them everywhere in the centre of certain towns, which brings home the sheer scale of what was done during this genocide, if not the true horror.

Most importantly, these stones intrude into your life. You stumble upon them, and they remind you. Of the Holocaust, perhaps humanity’s most shameful episode, of mass killing, torture and extermination.

They also shift the focus to the people impacted, the victims of the genocide. These memorials are small, but significant. They carry more of a human message than they ostentatious statues honouring Big White Men.

One wonders whether Gunter Demnig’s idea could be applied in other parts of the world, to commemorate other people. Similar memorials could serve to remind us of the victims of apartheid, of slavery, of colonial atrocities.

They require research, sensitivity and the intimate involvement of the communities affected. History can be remembered physically. However, when that history has been a story of dominance of one group by another, there is no need for memorials in turn to dominate the space they occupy.

Why should the memorial of life be so large, when life itself is so small? The true beauty of life is in its detail, its subtlety, its unexpected power to surprise. Perhaps we should try to capture that, when we leave monuments for future generations.

Perhaps we can keep history alive more humbly. Perhaps it might help us aspire to humility, instead of greatness.

Hagen Engler. Picture: Supplied

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