Urban Monuments, Irreducible Identities

In 2004, a proposal was approved by Berlin’s city council to memorialize the Berlin Wall, absent from Berlin’s landscape for fifteen years. Unlike other, more familiar approaches to memorialization, by which past events and figures are merely portrayed, the new Berlin Wall memorial at the Checkpoint Charlie museum attempts to recreate the experience of life in the shadow of the wall itself. This has been accomplished by the actual rebuilding of a section of the wall. I would like to suggest that such an attempt at remembrance is radical, but that it fails to escape the double-headed irony of all attempts at memorialization through monumentality. Put simply, the building of monuments is an attempt to solidify cultural identity. Identity, however, is an entity never solid, and so always escapes from any monumental framing. Identity is not the only aspect of culture that resists memorialization in stone. A culture’s monuments, themselves, also shift physically, aesthetically, and symbolically through the progression of time.

Writing a century ago, Alois Riegl proposed a varied set of perspectives by which we might understand monuments.[i] Riegl anticipated that the twentieth century would be marked by a desire that the monuments of history display their age-value. Age value is that particular value attached to a monument in virtue of its visible ruination. Crumbling structures, Riegl proposed, appealed to the observer because they served to be a reminder of impermanence. Cracks and fissures, faded patinas, and scattered detritus all were to make one powerfully aware of the endless crush of days. An important further distinction detailed by Riegl is that between intentional and unintentional monuments. Most relics displaying age-value are unintentional monuments. They were built not to be landmarks of remembrance, but for purposes now forgotten. They were not constructed as memorials, but, rather, became memorials as they aged and their appearance gradually shifted from mundane to sublime.[ii]

With a century’s retrospection, we can see that Riegl’s prediction was wildly off the mark. Our current age does not favor age-value, but, rather, what Riegl called historical-value. Historical value is that value placed upon an object or structure because it serves to be a reminder for a particular moment in time. Those who search for historical value lament the passage of time, and seek to cease it, even if momentarily, through preservation. Riegl recognized the nineteenth century to be an age of historical value, in which there was a tremendous increase in both preservation of structures and erection of memorials. Walter Benjamin would later write, “there is hardly a square in Europe whose secret structure was not profaned and impaired over the course of the 19th century by the introduction of a monument.”[iii] Benjamin and Riegl both recognized that this movement toward preservation or monumentalization, which occurred during the nineteenth century, was a reaction against modernity. If modernity is, as Baudelaire suggested, “the fleeting, the transient, the contingent,”[iv] then the preservation of a locus of historical value, it was hoped, could provide longed-for stability.
What Riegl recognized as characteristic of the nineteenth century has come to be characteristic of the twentieth century also, and the desire for all things historically- valuable show no signs of abating any time soon. It is, in fact, the entire span of modernity that is marked by the desire to preserve and to commemorate. We should not think, however, that there has been no change in attitudes toward the past in the years since the nineteenth century. As the reconstruction of the Berlin Wall demonstrates vividly, we often no longer desire to commemorate history, as through the construction of monuments, or even to preserve it, as through the rehabilitation of derelict architecture. Instead, we are now witnessing the desire to re-construct what has already been destroyed. Our age endeavors to make the disappeared apparent again.

This shift is notable, for while there is still a desire to recognize historical-value, there is increasingly a desire to remove the historically valuable from the progression of history itself. Projects such as the Berlin Wall reconstruction indicate a desire to witness and experience the historical event itself, perpetually. We seek in our monuments not to revisit the memory of a past event, but to relive the event itself, in as much of its richness as may be recreated. The Berlin Wall project is not alone in this regard. After the incidents of September 11, 2001, in which New York’s World Trade Center towers were incinerated[v], there was a significant call for the rebuilding of the towers to the exact specifications of their toppled predecessors. This suggests a desire to deny that the attacks happened at all, to instead re-make the world as it was previously. This is idealization of the past is remarkable in that it seeks to regenerate a state which existed so very recently.

I call the memorialization-through-reconstruction of the Berlin Wall radical, though not simply because it stands opposed to the march of time, or fights against the passing of fleeting moments. All historic preservation attempts this. Historical preservation proceeds on the premise that an audience is provided with a kind of snapshot, an instant of frozen time. This preserved parcel becomes a segment in a constructed narrative. The narrative is visited by its audience, who in so doing re-visits the past moments of which that narrative is constructed. Taking a step back from the present moment one may observe the historical thread, which provides life with narrative continuity. The importance of seeing this historical thread as narrated is to see that it is a created entity. We do not experience the flow of history as narrative in the moments that it passes us by; a narrative is projected, in this case backwards.

Nietzsche warned in his The Use and Abuse of History against the momumentalizing of history.[vi] The creation of monuments, particularly monuments of the past, is necessarily a selective process. Individual moments are raised to significance, while others are forgotten and quickly pass away. One danger, then, is that the past is not entirely knowable. Giving all the events of the past equal due is an impossibility. This much, however, is an obvious ill accompanying any work in history. The more significant danger of the monumental approach to history is that it works to reduce the events of the past. It is not simply that some events are left out, but that even those included undergo a reduction, a simplification. The creation of a historical narrative, in its way of making sense out of a myriad of events, often works to facilitate such a reduction.

We should not think, however, that all narratives of history are to be condemned. Nietzsche advocated a critical approach to history. Such an approach contains within it something of the monumental, and, also, something of it’s opposite, the antiquarian approach to history. The antiquarian casts his net widely, preserving everything he comes across. Indeed, Europe has witnessed a tremendous boom in rate of memorializing, such that one wonders what could be left out. Whereas monumental history creates identity through the selection of an historical narrative, the antiquarian worries about all possible narratives, and strives to maintain them all. The critical historian is aware of both attitudes toward history. From the monumental, we can see the benefit in idealization. Around such idealization, identity can be constructed. The danger is that idealized identity can become hegemonic, such that a particular narrative becomes dominant over all others. From the antiquarian comes the importance of minority narratives, and the acceptance of a pluralistic attitude toward history.

All intentional momumentalizing works by attempting to solidify (and, in fact, to create) identity. This is true whether the group in question is a nation, or a small community of voices within a larger society. It is in this solidification of identity that the first irony of monumentalization resides. Intentional monuments, for which I have characterized our age as having a particular fondness, are erected in opposition to time itself. In preserving individual moments or events, monuments seek to shore against history and its destructive force. The end of this defense against time is to safeguard identity, to give a culture or nation’s identity a solid surface upon which to cling. By shielding that solid surface, which may be the actual solidity of an architectural creation, it is hoped that the identity which has coalesced around such a built entity will likewise be solid and lasting.

Identity, however, is, by its nature, not a solid entity. Cultural identity, like the city itself, is always an entity in flux. Identity is in continual process of becoming manifest, which it does in and around the environments people pass through. However, this process is never closed. The architectural repositories constructed for identities can never ultimately contain them. Always shifting, narratives find placement only to be displaced again. So, the heritage crusades which have become ever more popular in the last few decades, may actually be active in arresting the lived identities which they wish to maintain.
Monumentalization is always a political act. It seeks to make the concerns of one group, or set of groups, prominent, in competition with completing claims. As this is the case, there can often be a need for monuments, inasmuch as they aid the work of memory. To have a place within the collective memory of a city is valuable, particularly for those disenfranchised groups that seek to safeguard against the hegemony of the majority. However, as Nietzsche warned, monumentality often reduces identity to a façade, an appearance which can only reflect the surface of a group’s lived experience. The past of any culture’s identity is, ultimately, irreducible to an anachronistic museum-piece. The irony of preservation is that while groups seek and, indeed, need, to define themselves in order to become politically potent, such definition is necessarily limiting, compromising the messy vitality from which all idenities spring.

The United Nations’ World Heritage Site designation attempts to embrace this irony. On the one hand, sites are honored with designation due to their cultural or aesthetic uniqueness. In this way, World Heritage seeks to give voice to threatened groups and structures, which may be largely forgotten in their own countries. On the other hand, the preservation of individual sites is part of a larger program of cataloguing and categorization, through which a new global identity is constructed.

We should not think, however, that this dynamism resides solely in a community’s inhabitants. The city, itself, resists reduction to anachronism. Once again, the intentional monuments described by Riegl are attempts to defend against the ravages of time. As a second irony, however, monuments are themselves not immune to the peculiarities of time. Unintentional monuments exist in direct contradiction to memorialization. Checkered streetscapes retaining the memory of several historical footprints are monuments not to the solidity of cultural identity, but to its fragility. But, intentional monuments, also, have unpredictable lived histories once they have been erected. Monuments, even when cast in stone, are not truly immobile. They are altered, moved, hidden, vandalized, forgotten, and are frequently rallied around by new causes, new groups, and new identities.

Riegl predicted that we will seek out age-value because it “triggers in the beholder a sense of the life cycle, of the emergence of the particular from the general and its gradual but inevitable dissolution back into the general.”[vii] It is this effort to distinguish the particular event, the particular identity from an undifferentiated generality that intentional monumentality attempts. However, our lived experience occurs in the chaotic generality of a fragile world. Once an identity is drawn out, removed from its context, the identity is no longer the same, and no longer participates in the lived experiences which generate the on-going process of identity formation.

This attempt at particularization is never ultimately successful, as Riegl saw in privileging unintentional architectural remainders. Benjamin saw this too, as is apparent in his reference to the “secret structure” of spaces. Our urban spaces are not reducible; they cannot be contained by a monument. For Benjamin, the secret structure, or aura, or a place may be witnessed, but is ultimately ungraspable. The particularity of a place exists enmeshed within the generality of its context. Once that particularity is mediated, as memorialization attempts to do, the meaning of the site changes. It is, in fact, no longer the same site.

The Berlin Wall reconstruction is radical because it seeks not historic preservation of a defunct historical remnant, but seeks the actual recreation of that remnant. The lived experience, then, can stay alive. Similar recreations are becoming popular. The appeal is that such attempts are imagined to bring one closer to reality than was possible with the soon-to-be-antiquated reduction of a site to a memorial. A memorial describing Berlin during the division would only narrate to visitors the now absent experience. The reconstruction, however, attempts to make that experience alive again, physically and concretely manifest, albeit in a contained state. Narration would no longer be needed.
The irony, however, is still intact. The experience can never truly live again, and the installation of the experience into a museum succeeds only in creating a frame, which the Berliner identity has long since vacated. It is itself significant that the wall, which became an unintentional monument to fear and isolationism, should be intentionally reformed as a monument to democracy. Once again, this shows that monuments are themselves transitory.

I have suggested that the erection of monuments is an act of resistance against modernity, an attempt to make the world more stable. It should also be seen as a peculiarly modern endeavor. It is an effort to organize the world, to categorize experiences, and thus make sense out of them. This act of making the world smaller displays a modern mindset. Thus, when Riegl anticipated a century of age-value, he was anticipating the maturity of modernity, and the emergence of the postmodern.

Age-value recognizes the faded, incomplete, and crumbling as potent. Decaying monuments are inevitably monuments to frailty and unpredictability, precisely what those who wish to solidify identity don’t want to expose. However, if we can recognize identity as something continually in flux, dying and re-emerging, then we can see it more accurately embodied by the unintentional than the intentional. Slavoj Zizek has noted that insistence is the opposite of reality.[viii] Rather than accepting transitory reality, intentional monuments insist that a permanent reality can be made manifest. It is this insistence which mediates a monument, and moves it away from real lived experience to a space of isolation.
Memorializing mourns the perceived inauthenticity of the current age, and hopes that the recollection of the past will help redefine identity in a carefully selected way. Once memorials become enmeshed in the ever-changing urban fabric, however, they do become part of the authenticity that is the current age. The double irony consists in the attempt to grasp the authentic, to ensure its permanence. Such an attempt ultimately misses the mark, exacerbating the slippery ambiguity of authentic identity.


Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays New York and London: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.130.
Benjamin, Walter. “Moscow Diary,” October 35 (Winter 1985): 65.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History trans. Adrian Collins, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.
Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51.
Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates New York and London: Verso, 2002.


[i] Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-51.
[ii] An exception is Shelley’s Ozymandius, whose intentional monument lies a derelict ruin.
[iii] Benjamin, Walter. “Moscow Diary,” October 35 (Winter 1985): 65.
[iv] Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays New York and London: Da Capo Press, 1986, p.130.
[v] It is significant in itself that the debate of how best to memorialize the towers was taken up by the press so immediately after their collapse.
[vi] Nietszche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History trans. Adrian Collins, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957.
[vii] Riegl, p.24.
[viii] Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates New York and London: Verso, 2002.

This essay was originally prepared for a lecture at the Rocky Mountain European Scholars Consortium Annual Meeting in Provo, Utah, 2004.