Monuments and Collective Memory
Last autumn, Chad Bryant, my friend and colleague who teaches at UNC, asked me if I’d zoom with some of his students about a monument, a street sign, or some other part of the built environment that tells us something about a moment in time in Prague’s history. And so I did. No surprise that …
Continue reading “Postscript to My Favorite Statue in Prague — Podcast Is Linked Below!”
I’ve long been fascinated by the baroque Plague Columns (Pestsaule/Morový sloup/Kolumna dżumy) that dot Habsburg Central Europe, many of which are at the same time either Marian Columns or Holy Trinity Columns. They often incorporate various plague saints, among them Saints Roch, Rosalie, and Sebastian. These columns are my absolute favorite form of baroque art. …
Continue reading “What will Our Twenty-First Century Plague Columns Look like?”
I’ve never much liked Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory), dating back to when I spent time reading my parents’ copy of an illustrated lives of presidents. You know, I was at that age when you memorize all the presidents’ names in order of when they served. I’m not even sure what it was I didn’t like. …
I’d been thinking about recent cases of statues in the United States being graffitied, removed, drowned, and/or having their heads cut off when I awakened one recent morning to a message from my friend and colleague, Dr. John Paul Newman. Did I know that Prague’s Marian Column had recently been resurrected? No, I didn’t. I …
Continue reading “Prague’s Marian Column Arises from the Dust Heap of History”
There was plenty of snow on the ground one Saturday in early December 2010 when my friends, Oksana and Viktor, and I decided we needed to go to Kosiv, a town in the Carpathians some fifty miles away from Chernivtsi. This small town on the Rybnytsya River in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is well known as …
Continue reading “Remembering the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in Western Ukraine”
I saw my first Soviet war memorial in Vienna when I was a grad student. I’d wandered onto Schwarzenbergplatz and, lo and behold, there it was: in front of a semi-circular white marble colonnade was a tall column topped by the figure of a Red Army soldier. He was wearing a gold helmet and had …
I first visited Gorizia/Gorica, which is located just on the Italian side of the Italian-Slovenian border, when my Slovenian colleagues agreed to take me to try to find an historic brothel building near the military barracks. (I’d written about the brothel in book on prostitution during the Habsburg Monarchy and wanted to see if it was …
Prague has plenty of statues, some of which I like (the Pomník vojákům Rudé armády, the Red Army Soldiers Monument, near the front entrance of the main train station), some of which annoy me (I mean you, Jan Hus in Old Town Square), and some of which I simply ignore (pretty much anything later than …
The aftermath of the First World War, with its appalling body count and wholesale devastation, was a period of great memorial construction. In this “democracy of death,” there were attempts across the former belligerent states, with the exception of Soviet Russia, to honor all the war dead, irrespective of rank, and including the unknown dead. …
Of Monuments and Memory