ABSTRACT
ALOIS RIEGL PUBLISHED "The Modem Cult of Monuments: Its Form and Origins" in 1903.1In this seminal essay, the Viennese art historian analyzed a desire for monuments that had swept through the world of educated Europeans at the tum of the century. Riegl also laid the basis for the modem concept of monuments, stressing that a broad appreciation of incessant change rather than aesthetic or historical values gave monuments their special appeal to the modem viewer. For Riegl, and for most literate Europeans, monuments included not only those statues, busts, plaques, coins, and other movable or immovable objects designed to commemorate a historical personality or event. They also increasingly encompassed buildings, squares, cityscapes, eventually whole towns and nature-indeed any part of the physical environment that drew attention to the presence of the past. The German term for monument, Denkmal, reinforced this richness (or maddening open-endedness) because it was used so ubiquitously, extending from historic sites and buildings to musical compositions and even great works of literature. Three-quarters of a century after Riegl wrote, the Hessian historic preservationist Reinhard Bentmann published an essay with the suggestive title "The Battle Over Memory.v -He, too, used the term cult ofmonuments (Denkmalkultus), linking it to a wave of nostalgia in the Federal Republic of Germany in the mid-1970s. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the notion of a Denkmalkultus not only persisted but actually gained new life. Preservationists used the term with reference to postrnodernism and other late-millennial concepts. P Given this continuity of terminology in a century that was anything but continuous, is it not worth asking what was behind the term and what its specific meaning was for its users?
