Document Type
Opinion
Publication Date
10-2020
Department 1
English
Department 2
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Abstract
Beginning with Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" and the recent completion of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on the University of Virginia campus, this essay explores the current monuments controversy by focusing on four Viennese monuments which have much to tell us about how new memorials might contextualize and reframe history. The first Viennese monument, a celebration of a series of fifteenth-century pogroms, was built into the wall of a house opposite the Judenplatz, a square in the center of what was once a thriving Jewish community. Four hundred years later, from 1998 to 2008, three additional memorials were built to emphasize the horror of the Viennese pogrom and others like it. The article ends with a brief mention of a 1955 rememorial in a cathedral in Lincoln, England to address the wrongs perpetrated in 1255 when Jews were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy named Hugh. New monuments talk back to old and bear witness to people’s changing awareness of the significance of past horrors.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Berg, Temma F., "Our Monuments, Our History" (2020). English Faculty Publications. 93.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/engfac/93