ABSTRACT
Once erected in public spaces, many monuments become passive objects, which are mostly unnoticed. Routine wreath-laying ceremonies and conventional speeches made by state or municipal functionaries during remembrance days rarely evoke communal interest or capture the younger generation’s imagination. The radical decline in numbers of ex-servicemen and members of war associations also impacts negatively on the significance of these ceremonies. For some time now, the ability of traditional monuments to sustain social engagement with the past has been contested by memory studies scholars. As far back as the 1980s, Pierre Nora detected a growing scepticism towards traditional memorialisations and observed that ‘[m]emory has been wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstitution’. 1 James Young suggested, in his perceptive study on commemoration culture in Germany, that ‘once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. In shouldering the memory-work, monuments may relieve viewers of their memory-burden’. 2 And Andreas Huyssen’s discussion on contemporary monumentalisation pointed out that:
Monuments articulate official memory, and their fate inevitably is to be toppled or to become invisible. Lived memory, on the other hand, is always located in individual bodies, their experience and their pain, even when it involves collective, political, or generational memory. 3
