Monument Against Fascism
Mahnmal gegen Faschismus
Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz
CR 89. Year 1986
- INT
We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the city, to add their names here to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre tall lead ...
When a graffiti appears on its surface which claims that "Erich loves Kirsten" it is not necessarily a trivialization of the enormity of the political legacy but perhaps a manifestation of banality, of the oversaturation of culture or possibly of the anxiety of those who come into contact and are faced with the need to respond without having a discourse of response. However we may understand this response we need to see that it is a form of active engagement rather than the expected one of a pious genuflection.
Irit Rogoff 1993
Thus the monument in Hamburg-Harburg is perhaps the first memorial in history that does not want to be better than the society by which it is erected.
Walter Grasskamp 1994. Translated by e_CR editors
With audacious simplicity, the Gerzes' countermonument flouted any number of cherished memorial conventions: its aim was not to console but to provoke, not to remain fixed but to change, not to be everlasting but to disappear, not to be ignored by its passerby but to demand interaction, not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desanctification, not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town's feet. By defining itself in opposition to the traditional memorial's task, the Gerzes' Harburg monument illustrated concisely the possibilities and limitations of all memorials elsewhere... The Harburg monument denaturalised what the Gerzes felt was an artificial distance between artist and public generated by the holy glorification of art. Ultimately, such a monument would undermine its own authority by inviting and then incorporating the authority of the passerby... In this way, the memorial has not only returned the burden of memory to those who come looking for it but has changed the way a generation of artists and the public have come to regard the very idea of the memorial.
James E. Young 2000
… audiences have always acted around, in response to, and with monuments. The innovation of 1980s countermonuments was to recognise and codify this audience reaction as part of what the monument itself sought to achieve. The most prominent example is Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument against Fascism in Harburg, a suburb of the city of Hamburg. … I would like to reconsider the Monument against Fascism as social practice rather than as Countermonument. … The vandalism was neither welcome nor unexpected. In his first proposal, Gerz already anticipated uninvited reactions: "Of course it can happen that citizens and visitors write other things on the column than their names, for example pro-fascist slogans. This does not bother me, the monument is a Relevator, not a false piety, a photograph of the city as it really is, not how it imagines itself or in its Sunday best. Contemporary sculptures often provoke only graffiti, why not turn the tables and make use of the writing as testimony." ... (text in German in project file: “Bezirk Harburg—Mahnmal gegen Faschismus Rathausmarkt Harburg,” file number 32-075.85/14.1, received February 1, 1984.) … The column, imagined as a “photograph” of its social surrounding… Indeed, the Harburg Memorial can be regarded as a document written and read by the public: whether as photograph revealing the city we have stopped seeing… the monument is no longer propaganda but a political lightning rod making inarticulate tensions visible. It is... not a neutral recording of public opinion but a critical survey: one that, declaring its own stance, takes stock of the agreement and disagreement it provokes. (The prominence of the documentary function, treated as provocation, connects this project to Gerz’s EXIT—The Dachau Project, ten years earlier. There, Gerz used the bureaucratic language of the museum of the Dachau concentration camp to argue that the language shows a continuation of authoritative ideology.) … The "invitation to desecration" is thus by no means a refusal of authority, but rather a form of ‘vigilance’, a monument to the hostilities it documents. … Commemoration is always an act, a call to remembrance, a public gesture carried out, not a feeling or internal representation… It is this public nature of commemoration that makes it politically relevant. The commemorator shows others that she commemorates. This does not make it a politics of presence, or of direct revolutionary action: for commemorative action, consisting of speech acts, is symbolic, it conveys commitment rather than changing reality in one go.
Mechtild Widrich 2014
While this monument served to interrupt and now displace memory from its traditional mode of representation and site of construction, it also interrupted everyday lives. The memorial forced people to live with a memorial for roughly 10 years and then to live with its absence. Memory is placed within an intentional relationship with the memorial, which places one in the context of living with and the context of living without at the same time in reference to the same thing. And it is this interplay that positions our living relations within a context and traditions of violence.
Alfred Franlowski 2015
Between 1986 and 1993, the Monument Against Fascism in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg in northern Germany, disappeared from sight. Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz designed the 12-meter-tall lead column to be gradually lowered into the ground, allowing visitors to etch into its entire surface as it sunk within reach. While most people wrote their names or drew hearts, this monument, like any other of its kind, also attracted animosity and hateful defacement. But where other Mahnmale are fervently purified – much as Libeskind planned to purify the soil at Sachsenhausen – no such attempt was made to save the Harburg column from disgrace. A history as ugly and ambivalent as the present moment scars its surface, now conserved for posterity underground. Today the column is a flat square, an insistent Mahnmal that refuses to console or celebrate imagined progress. A sign reads: “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”
Kristian Vistrup Madsen 2017
Categories
Keywords
Work in public space
Four-sided stele made of galvanized steel with a fine lead mantle, 1200 x 100 x 100 cm, weight approx. 7 t, underground shaft with viewing window, depth = 14 m, concrete footing, 4 steel pins for inscribing the surface (approx. 60,000 inscriptions), text panels
Location: Hamburg-Harburg at the corner of Harburger Ring and Hölertwiete/Sand at the Harburg-Rathaus S-Bahn station (tube S3, stop to Harburg Rathaus, exit Sand)
After four years of discussion, the district council of Hamburg-Harburg resolves in 1983 to realize a Monument against Fascism. Five proposals are selected from a limited number of competition entries. Following discussion and a public hearing, the project by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz is proposed. Residents and visitors of Hamburg are invited in seven different languages to inscribe their names on the lead mantle of a 12-meter-tall stele erected as a warning against fascism. When the accessible portion of the surface is covered with inscriptions, the stele is lowered by 140 cm into the ground. The monument is inaugurated on October 10, 1986. After having been lowered eight times, the stele disappears on November 19, 1993. Its cover plate lies flush with the pavement. Next to it is a text panel showing the chronological history of the erection, inscription and lowering of the stele. Part of the stele can be viewed through a viewing window from an underground passage.
Collection Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg.
Documentation
b/w and color photographs. Project-book (Stuttgart 1994)
Exhibitions of the documentation
New York 1993 (Berlin 1994. München 1994 u.a.O./a.o.p. 1995). Périgueux 1996. Bolzano 1999. Nuremberg 2021. Lyon 2023-2024
Bibliography
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