The Musée des Arts et Métiers is one of my favorite museums in Paris. And, I like lots of museums in Paris. Its collections include models of classic French cars and a recreation of French chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s laboratory. There are also models showing different phases of construction of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s “Liberty Enlightening the World” (the Statue of Liberty).
Models in the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France ( 2006)
Liberty in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris (2011)
Elsewhere in Paris, at Pont de Grenelle on the Seine, is a quarter-scale working model for the statue unveiled on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. No surprise there: After all, Bartholdi was French. That particular statue was an 1889 gift from the American community in Paris to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution. Then there is the Statue/s of Liberty in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The scale version that Bartholdi created for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 and later gave to the Musée du Luxembourg long stood in the gardens there, together with many other figurative monuments. In 2014 it was moved into the Musée d’Orsay. A new bronze replica, also the gift from the Americans, now stands in the earlier statue’s place in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Statues of Liberty can be found elsewhere in France, including one in Colmar, Bartholdi’s birthplace.
Liberty on the Corner of the Courthouse Lawn, Lexington, Missouri, USA (2017)
But, a random scale model in the small town of Lexington, Missouri? I simply thought someone the Lafayette County Courthouse wanted a statue on the lawn to balance the historical marker about the 1861 Civil War Battle of Lexington. Nope, it turns out I was wrong, as we shall see.
Liberty on the Corner of the Courthouse Lawn, Leavenworth, Kansas, USA (2019)
That was when I ran into the second scale model of the Statue of Liberty. It stands on the courthouse lawn in Leavenworth, Kansas, some fifty miles away across the state line from Lexington as the crow flies. That was one random scale model too many. So, I did what any good researcher does today: I began by googling it. It turns out these Statues of Liberty weren’t random at all.
Statue of Liberty, Shawnee Mission North High School Campus, Mission, Kansas, USA (2019)
There were other Statues of Liberty in the Kansas City area, including one on the northwest corner of the Shawnee Mission North High School campus in suburban Mission, Kansas. Why is this you might ask? And, what do their inscriptions say?
Well, they are part of a program of scale models of the statue unveiled across the United States in the early 1950s, the brainchild of a Kansas City Boy Scout council commissioner. These statues were meant to help promote the Boy Scouts of America’s fortieth-anniversary theme, “Strengthen the Arm of Liberty,” whatever that may mean. I’m pretty sure it’s not a reference to Emma Lazarus’ “…A mighty woman with a torch…” For one thing, the sentiments in the inscription were male, giving thanks to “forefathers,” rather than to the gender neutral “forebearers,” but, hey, it’s the Boy Scouts.
Inscription on the Boy Scouts’ Statues of Liberty (2019)
How have these particular Statues of Liberty fared over time? Apparently, some have been moved indoors or taken down and altogether. I also wonder if today’s Boy Scouts think contemporary US immigration policies, like not granting temporary protected status to people from the Bahamas displaced by Hurricane Dorian, are helping strengthen that arm of liberty.
Statues of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, that is. I’m not sure when I first became interested in Joseph II, the statue, not Joseph II, the man. It was sometime in the early-to-mid 1990s, and I suspect in Cheb, formerly Eger, in far western Bohemia. I have a vague memory of seeing him, one armed and lying in the mud in the back garden of the district archive there, when I was in graduate school. When I returned to Cheb in the mid-1990s, I returned to the back garden. There he stood on a make-shift pedestal, joined by a bunch of stray communists, until 2003, when members of the local Rotary Club had him repaired and moved to Františkovy Lázně, where he now stands on a very nice pedestal before one of the local spas, Dvoranou Glauberových. His right arm has yet to be replaced. More on that arm later.
At the University of Vienna (June 2019)
I’ve written about Joseph II more times than I can count. Well, maybe not more than I can count, but often enough. And, while I may be sick of the reforming enlightened absolutist, the “People’s Emperor” who ruled alone for only a decade in the late eighteenth century, and who couldn’t mind his own business, I’m not sick of running into statues of him. I only noticed the Joseph II who stands in one of the courtyards of the University of Vienna campus last June. That he’s there makes sense: it’s the site of the former Vienna General Hospital that the Emperor founded in 1784. The inscription is simple enough: “Josef II.” No idea how long he’s been there.
Joseph II busts and statues still dot the Lower Austrian countryside. They sprang up throughout the Bohemian Lands and Lower Austria beginning in the 1880s as part of the informal, liberal “Joseph II Movement,” and were meant to commemorate the centenary of abolition of serfdom in November 1881. No other Habsburg figure became such a ubiquitous part of the built landscape and so much a part of collective memory as Joseph II. The statues, often holding one or another of the Emperor’s modernizing patents in their right hands, quickly became political flashpoints in Czech-German battles for control of public space in the Bohemian Lands. German nationalists made increasingly explicit “German” claims on the people’s emperor in various ceremonies and commemorations, sometimes, even, protests at the statues. Joseph II became a “site of memory” of a mythic golden German past in the Monarchy.
This past June, I met Dacia, my Czech partner in crime, in Gmünd on the Austrian side of the border. We couldn’t leave Austria for České Velenice, which was taken from Lower Austria under the Treaty of Saint Germain in 1919, until we’d visited the Joseph II bust in the Schlosspark, where the inscription lauds him as the “Esteemer of Humanity.” Then we drove about ten feet to cross the border…
Joseph II Bust at the Schloss Park, Gmünd, Austria (June 2019)
Many of the early Joseph II statues looked very much alike. Why was this, you might ask? Like many American Civil War monuments, they were products of the nascent monument industry. Designed by an engineer and available by catalogue, they could be scaled down, metal clad, or otherwise modified. So many of them were unveiled in the early 1880s that their production was something of a sideline for the Fürstlich Salm’sche Eisenwerke in Blansko, Moravia, which was better known for producing award-winning steam engines.
Like the monuments themselves, their inscriptions were also similar, often lauding Joseph II as the “esteemer of humanity.” The Germans who unveiled them in the Bohemian Lands, however, more often lauded him as the “esteemer of Germandom,” in their speeches. The inscriptions on some later monuments reflected this attitude. Nationalist Germans used the statues, where they often met before going off to do battle with Czechs, to lay exclusive claims to increasingly ethnically mixed territory. The Czechs sometimes responded by attacking Joseph II statues during times of Czech-German tension.
After more than a generation of increasing Germanization of Joseph II, it’s no surprise that many statues fell victim to Czech nationalists in the so-called Statue War of autumn 1920. Their pent-up anger over years of German nationalist deployment of Joseph II monuments boiled over shortly after the second anniversary of Czechoslovak independence on 28 October 1920. Although it wasn’t the first volley in the Statue War—that was fired in Teplice—the Czech attack on the Joseph II statue in overwhelmingly German Cheb and the residents’ response had repercussions across the Bohemian Lands.
The Emperor Overlooking Market Square in Eger/Cheb around the Turn of the Century (Postcard in the Author’s Collection)
In the wake of the First World War, local Czechs had sporadically attempted to vandalize the statue, which stood in Market Square. Their attacks had been foiled, but had proven such a nuisance that the central authorities in Prague suggested that city council members move the statue to the local museum. This didn’t happen. What happened was a series of skirmishes beginning on November 13, two days after the events in Teplice. It started when a Czechoslovak military band marched through Cheb disrupting German residents who were protesting government taxes on food. The Germans hurled insults at the band members, most of whom quietly retreated. Back in their barracks, however, the soldiers resolved to retaliate. Sometime after midnight on November 14, some 200 armed soldiers stealthily moved into the empty square, overpowered the watchman, and knocked Joseph II off his pedestal, breaking his right arm. The courageous watch still sounded the alarm and within minutes the square was filled with Germans coming to rescue “their” emperor. Although unrest, including violence on both sides, continued throughout the night and into the following day, by dawn, Joseph II, now one armed, had been restored to his pedestal. (You can find images of the restored emperor in all his glory at http://encyklopedie.cheb.cz/cz/encyklopedie/pomnik-josefa-ii.).
The Emperor’s Empty Pedestal, Refurbished as a Memorial Teplice, Northern Bohemia (Late 1990s)
The fate of the Joseph II statues was finally settled in the mid-1920s, after the Czechoslovak parliament passed the Law for the Defense of the Republic. It called, among other things, for the removal from public view of statues, inscriptions, and memorials of anti-state character or of members of the Habsburg family. Some of the statues were hauled off to museums. The statue in northern Bohemian Ústí and Labem survived the Czech nationalists of the First Republic, but not Nazis of the Sudetenlands, who had it melted down for the war effort. What of the Teplice statue, whose removal had started the whole Statue War? It was moved from its pedestal before the city hall to the courtyard of the museum. It is said to have survived the Second World War, after which time the statue went missing. All that remains of the five-meter Emperor is the base, which shortly after 1989 was turned a memorial honoring the “executed, imprisoned, and oppressed under the communists.”
Joseph II at Josefov Fortress, today in Jaroměř, Eastern Bohemia (2016)
Since the Velvet Revolution, Czechs have thought better of the wholesale banishment of Joseph II and re-instated some of the surviving statues, if in a different context, and with new inscriptions. He is most often designated an “enlightened absolutist,” although the inscription on the statue at Josefov honors him as founder of the fortress that bears his name.
Local German speakers unveiled a large monument of Joseph II in Brno, the capital of Moravia, in 1913. It stood in the square before the imposing German House (Deutsches Haus). Local Czechs dispatched it, even before the Statue War, in September 1919.
Postcard of Joseph II Monument standing before the Deutsche Haus (German House), Brno (public domain)
Although the stone portions of the Brno monument were sold off or otherwise disappeared, the bronze figures survived. They were found in the old slaughterhouse shortly after the Second World War. Since 1988, Joseph II himself has stood in the garden of the Psychiatric Hospital in Brno-Černovice, while the two life-sized allegorical figures representing trade and tolerance that flanked him long sat in a green area near St. Peter and Paul Cathedral. They were moved in 2003 to Lužánky, the oldest public park in the Czech lands. The Emperor had donated the land for the park, formerly belonging to the Jesuits, after the abolition of the order in 1783.
Allegorical Figures from the Joseph II Monument in Brno (late 1990s)
So, what is it about these statues that interests me so much? Joseph II, contrarian busy body that he was, played a vital role in increasing rights of his subjects and modernizing the Habsburg Monarchy. I like the challenge of finding remnants of his memory in the Czech Republic. In the days before there were images of almost everything on the internet, so, before the early 2000s, the search for his remains was dependent not only on my own sleuthing, but also on practicing my Czech on poor, unsuspecting locals, most of whom were happy enough to help.
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 David Černý’s wonderful upside-down horse, “Kůň,” from 1999). Then there’s the statue after my own heart: the one I have photographed regularly, the one that doesn’t always let me get good images of it, the one that has upset some Czechs—and some Russians—in the twenty-first century.
Other Statues in Central Prague
Yes, I’m talking to you, Ivan Stepanovich Konev, Marshal and Hero of the Soviet Union, standing as you do on náměstí Interbrigády in Prague 6, Bubeneč. I often passed you in the late afternoon and early evening as I walked down Jugoslávských partyzánů from the Dejvická (formerly Leninova) subway stop.
Beneath the name of the square, signage explaining the role of the interbrigády, International Brigades, in the Spanish Civil War (2012)
There you were, standing high atop your pedestal wearing your great coat, your left arm raised in what I assumed was a friendly greeting. In the spring the scent of lilacs, or bez, wafted through the air. Those were flowers that Prague residents presented their Red Army “liberators,” and you hold a bouquet of them in your right hand. I did wonder about that great coat. It was May, after all, when you and your troops arrived in Prague. As it turns out, a cold May.
Prague Lilacs (May 2013); Figure of Konev (May 2013)
Local sculptors Zdeněk Krybus and Vratislav Růžička produced the Konev statue during the Communist era. Unveiled in 1980, it included a laudatory commemorative plaque on the right-hand side of the base referring to “Major Commander Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Stepanovich Konev, Double Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front.” I never paid much attention to the inscription. Although I’ve long been agnostic on the question of a Prague uprising that began on May 5, versus a Nazi German retreat, or some combination of the two, Konev did lead the Soviet troops who marched into Prague on the 9th.
I also didn’t pay much attention to the anomaly of a statue of the Soviet Marshal still standing in a city and a country that had consigned so many communist-era statues, if not to the dustbin of history, to disused airplane hangers and back gardens of district archives. Among the banished are Bohumír Šmeral, Jan Šverma, Vladimir Lenin, and Julius Fučík, below.
Various Communist-Era Statues Removed from Public View after 1989
I have always thought of the Konev statue in terms similar to Russian-/Czech-language plaques I’d seen elsewhere in Prague. They honored the Red Army for liberating the Czechoslovak people in 1945 and I considered the Konev statue more anti-Nazi than philo-Communist.
Wall Plaque in Prague’s Old Town (Mid-1990s)
Certainly, various Czech/Czechoslovak governmental and popular organizations had long laid wreaths at the base of the statue every May honoring Konev’s role in liberating Prague.
The Base of the Konev Statue decorated with wreaths (May 2013)
Local interpretations of the statue’s significance vary widely, and some Prague residents don’t like what they believe it represents at all. In November 2014, someone doused the good marshal with pink paint, recalling Černý’s splattering pink paint on Soviet Tank No. 23, (aka the pink tank), a monument Konev helped dedicate in 1945. I personally thought the color became him. The following year, “Heil, Putin” appeared on the statue’s pedestal. A local petition drive, also in 2015, saved Konev from wholesale removal, the fate of so many of his fellow communists after 1989. The statue was again vandalized in late November 2017 when someone painted the years 1956, 1961, 1968, and 2017 on it in red paint. Many Czechs consider the Soviet commander’s behavior to have been something less than heroic in the first three of those years. Rather than remove the statue, the mayor of Prague 6 promised to provide additional signage to help set straight the record about Konev’s post-1945 actions.
All of this attention to Konev caused a minor diplomatic row. The Russians were not amused. As they did in the matter of the removal of a statue of a Russian soldier from the center of Tallinn, Estonia in 2007, the Russians sought to intervene to control the narrative of the Red Army’s role in the Second World War. Joined by the ambassadors of four other post-Soviet states, the Russians sent an open letter to the Czech Foreign Ministry to protest plans for Konev. If I were Czech, I wouldn’t want the Russians telling me what to think about this statue or how to commemorate Czechoslovakia’s liberation from the Nazis.
Yet More Graffiti (August 2019)
On August 21, 2018, sixtieth anniversary of the Russian invasion during the Prague Spring, new, more accurate, inscriptions in Czech, Russian and English were unveiled on the base of the statue. They included information on Konev’s role in both the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring. I’m glad the plaques have been added. Not everyone has accepted this solution to the Konev legacy, however. As I write this in late August 2019, the statue’s pedestal has been splashed with red paint on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s August 21, 1968 invasion of Prague and someone has painted the words “No bloody Marshal” and “We will not forget” on its base.
I don’t mind that someone has again vandalized Konev as long as the damage isn’t permanent. I just like him there because I’m used to him. And, the marshal can be a good teaching aid, if passersby bother to read the information about this historic figure. Sadly, I seem to be in the minority, along with some Czech Communists. The elected officials of Prague 6 seem to have had enough Konev drama and voted to remove him. The Russians are not amused.
Empty Space Encased (April 4, 2020)
Note: So, this morning, April 3, I got a message from a Slovenian friend, the historian Rok Stergar, this morning with the header, “Isn’t this your statue?” And, indeed it was. Under the cover of the pandemic, the perfidious Czech authorities had sneaked in and taken Konev down, just as they had various Joseph II monuments between the wars. All that remains of the statue is a wooden box around the stone pedestal on which he used to stand. Stay tuned for a picture of the empty space.
Empty Space Encased, with Graffiti (May 12, 2020)
But, soon enough, although Konev has been carted off to spend his days in oblivion, or at least, some stray communist museum, graffiti appeared on the wooden sarcophagus entombing the space my friend formerly occupied. Someone/someones put a toilet, quickly removed, atop the sarcophagus. And, still more graffiti has appeared. All this, despite the on-going corona virus lockdown. Check here for the further adventures of Konev, the statue.
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. Monuments to these men incorporated multiple, broadly symbolic, sometimes, opposing meanings: sacred or non-sacred, fallen or victorious, victims or heroes. Many of the war memorials employed the figure of a rank-and-file soldier, erect and unwounded, to honor and to overcome the memory of those bodies that had been damaged or destroyed in more than four years of ferocious fighting. In addition to the soldier-statues, simple obelisks, as well as more ambitious monuments, were constructed. The last-named sometimes incorporated figural groupings in which the females performed the function of mourners. With their ubiquitous lists of the dead, the memorials constituted a silent reminder to passersby of the horrors of war and the equality of male sacrifice.
Heston in London, England (2012)
First World War memorials honoring the local dead dot the European landscape from the British Isles in the west across the continent to Romania in the southeast. The monuments are for the most part the product of local civic undertakings. They reflect a pattern of popular, secular initiatives dating from the nineteenth century that have left their mark on public space. Although the construction of memorials began in some locations already during war, the vast majority of them were unveiled during the early-to-mid 1920s. They stand on town squares, as well as in front of churches, civic buildings, and cemeteries. Sometimes monuments can even be found at forks in little-traveled roads. They are easily identified, despite many local variations.
Honoring mass casualties of war was a new practice in the first decades of the twentieth century. Among the belligerents, solely the United States, which entered the war only in 1917, had any tradition of this kind. In the late nineteenth century, the US had begun commemorating the great number of dead from its bloody mid-century Civil War. Some of the artistic conventions employed in these Civil War monuments can also be found in the First World War monuments, especially the larger-than-life-sized common soldier atop a pedestal.
The 4th of July, Sycamore, Illinois , USA (2007); Oakley, Kansas, USA (2017)
Although there had been some memorialization of the war dead in Europe even as hostilities were ongoing, many of those markers were temporary. After 1918, small towns and villages, or those with limited funds to commemorate their war dead, constructed obelisks or other easily produced forms. Such monuments, like the one in Le Croisic, on the Breton coast in France, might include national symbols, in this case, the Gallic rooster (le coq), the unofficial symbol of the country; the croix de guerre, and the palm of peace. Others were simply inscribed with the dates of the war.
Reichenau a.d. Rax, Austria (2015); Le Croissic/Ar Groazig, France (2005); Bradford-on-Avon, England (2013)
When there was sufficient interest in and/or money to put up a statue of a soldier, it was sometimes designed by a local or regional artist, and often rendered in bronze or stone. The soldiers are usually at ease, although some stand with fixed bayonets. My personal favorites are the occasional monuments in which soldiers appear to be armed with hand grenades.
Porto, Portugal (2014); Victoria, Vancouver, Canada (2004); Sciacca, Italy (2005)
Inverray, Scotland (2011)
Reflecting the democracy of death, First World War monuments, unlike American Civil War monuments, almost always incorporated the names of the local war dead, in general, or the named dead from particular work categories, for example, police, postal, or railway employees. Their names appear in alphabetical or chronological order of death. It is one of several Scottish monuments on which the dead or missing are listed by rank and regiment. This particular memorial was unveiled in 1922 in Inveraray, a royal burgh on Loch Fyne, Scotland, and contained seventy names. That monument’s soldier is at ease with a rifle in his right hand standing atop a high stone plinth. He is wearing the kilt standard in Scots war memorials and a tam o’shanter, rather than the more common “Tommy helmet.”
Inverness, Scotland (2011)
A second pattern of war memorials in the British Isles, the Celtic Cross, can be found throughout Scotland, Cornwall, Northern Ireland, Wales, and sometimes, elsewhere. One of the tallest Celtic cross memorials in Scotland is in Inverness. The 33-foot high red sandstone monument is part of a larger memorial located in the Edith Cavell Gardens on the bank of the Ness River. The gardens themselves honor Edith Louisa Cavell, the English nurse who the Germans court-martialed for helping some 200 allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium during the war’s first year. She was found guilty and executed in October 1915.
St. Andrews, Scotland (1997); Dundee, Scotland (1997); Bala Cynwyd, Wales (2015)
A sixteenth-century Celtic cross from Brittany was transplanted to Belgium after the war to serve as a Breton Memorial to the French 87th and 45th Divisions. Standing at the Carrefour de la Rose (the Rose Crossroads) north of Ypres, it honors the French troops wounded and killed in a German gas cloud attack in April 1915 and those who fought in the Second Battle of Ypres.
Another—and much less common—subject of First World War memorials is the female mourner. Sometimes, she is comforting a child, reminding the observer of the damaged families—mothers, wives, children—the wartime slaughter left behind.
Saint Malo, France (2004); Trhové Sviny, Czech Republic (2019); Ullapool, Scotland (2015)
First World War monuments have broadly similar appearances and are recognizable by their lists of the local war dead. Their inscriptions also often, but not always, express similar sentiments honoring, sometimes, glorifying, the war dead. Many British memorials are dedicated to the “Glory of God” and the “Honoured Memory” of the glorious war dead who gave their lives “For King and Country” between 1914 and 1918. French and Italian memorials bear inscriptions honoring those who died for in the war, for example, Ases enfants morts pour la patrie (To our children who died for the country) or ai suoi morti per la patria (to those who died for the country). Many inscriptions on American monuments recognize the men who “served their country” in 1917 and 1918. The Austrians, the Germans, and the German speakers of nascent Czechoslovakia (so-called “Sudeten” Germans)—among the war’s defeated—both honored and mourned the Helden der Heimat, that is, the heroes of the homeland. The monuments Czech speakers unveiled in Czechoslovakia rarely include the figure of a soldier and the sentiments expressed in their inscriptions are ambivalent. They often remember the oběti světové války (victims of the world war), reflecting the popular interwar interpretation that many Czechs didn’t want to fight in the Habsburg Army, and, some were, indeed, disloyal. This is a topic I discuss in another blog post on the Battle of Zborov.
Between the wars, these local monuments were regular sites of organized and spontaneous commemorations of the war and the soldiers who died in it. Wreathes from groups and individuals might be left at their bases for Armistice/Remembrance Day on November 11, or on April 25, Anzac Day, in Australia and New Zealand. As veterans and their families grew old and died, some of the memorials played a more limited role in people’s daily lives and grieving, some even ceasing to be a lieu de memoire (site of memory). In most cases, however, the monuments remained in public consciousness, as the wreaths that still decorate some of them on patriotic days attest. This owes, in part, to the decision to add to them lists of the names of the dead from subsequent hostilities, most famously, the Second World War.
I am sharing Dr. Theodora Dragostinova’s fascinating article, “Empty Fountains: Communist-Era Monuments Revisited.” The images are spectacular. For those of you who don’t know her, Dr. Dragostinova is associate professor of history at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on nation-building, refugee movements, and minority politics in eastern Europe, particularly the Balkans.
An obelisk honoring the “fallen military heroes” of the US Army’s First Infantry Division—the Big Red One, the army’s oldest—during the Second World War was unveiled outside Cheb, a small Western Bohemian town, on October 26, 1946 in connection with Czechoslovakia’s annual October 28 independence day activities. It is one of five that commemorates the Big Red One’s Second World War battle dead. All are located on the territory of American wartime allies, reflecting a failure to recognize the shifting political fortunes of wartime alliances. Indeed, it is one of few—if not the only—memorials that honored the American armies’ sacrifice in the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe unveiled after 1945 in countries that would become part of the Warsaw Pact.
The hexagonal granite shaft, adorned with a red on
olive-drab stone division insignia, stands more than twenty-five feet tall. Soldiers from the division paid the
monuments’ cost by popular subscription. This particular obelisk honors
soldiers of the division who died in the fighting across much of Germany and in
Cheb, where their campaign ended. It
contains the inscription, “Here Ended the Victorious March of the First United
States Infantry Division.” The obelisk stands some three miles outside Cheb at a
crossing in the Bohemian countryside marking the route to the spa towns Karlovy
Vary and Mariánské Lázně. While it once
towered over neighboring fields, by the late 1990s, the trees planted around
the monument had grown, partially obscuring it.
The Monument (Late 1990s)
Post-1948 attempts by the ruling Czechoslovak
Communists to remove this memorial proved fruitless because the head of the
local regional government had donated the land on which the memorial stands to
the US government in 1945. Moreover, when lightning badly damaged the division
insignia in the mid-1960s, Czechoslovakia’s communist government arranged for
the repairs.
Perhaps apocryphal,
but in the late 1990s, the locals who showed me the monument claimed that residents
had avoided it during the communist era because the police left track of anyone
who visited the monument. It remains
little visited today, and, probably forgotten by many, owing to having been cut
off from local commemorations of the Second World War after 1948, which focused
on the communist role in liberating Czechoslovakia, and from interested
American veterans and their families, who couldn’t easily travel to Western
Bohemia. Indeed, as many realtors insist,
it is an issue of location, location, location.
Czechoslovakia’s political elites attempted to shape national memory after the Second World War by creating a popular narrative linking an “acceptable” past with the reconstructed state. Naming and commemorating helped establish a Czech national-historical version of the events of the interwar era and the war as they revised the character of private and public spaces in the western and northern border regions starting in spring 1945.
Spas lining the Ohře/Eger River at the turn of the Twentieth Century (Postcard in the author’s collection)
The primarily Czech political leadership, increasingly communist party functionaries and sympathizers, employed both socially organized forgetting—exclusion, suppression, and repression—and socially organized remembering—the deliberate invention, emphasis, and popularization of elements of consciousness. The memory of recently expelled Germans (“Sudeten”) who had long lived in the Bohemian Lands was among their chief targets.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), the world-famous spa town on Czechoslovakia’s western border, had counted as its guests the aristocratic, wealthy, and well-known, including Habsburg Emperors and Russian Tsars, as well as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Construction during the nineteenth century gave predominantly German-speaking Karlsbad, located on the western border of the Bohemian Lands/Habsburg Monarchy its art nouveau character. Many hotels, spas, and streets were named for important German historic and cultural figures, and the gardens filled with statues of them.
Following Austria-Hungary’s loss in the First World War, Karlsbad became part of nascent Czechoslovakia. It, however, retained its German character, despite the Czechoslovak government’s removal of Habsburg and Hohenzollern place names, the increased use of the Czech-language on public signage, and other efforts to give the city a greater Czech identity. After 1945, local Czech government proved extremely vigilant in its attempts to erase the German past of this world-famous spa town on Czechoslovakia’s far western border. In addition to removing German-language signs and symbols, Czech residents, often recently arrived, spontaneously removed some monuments, especially those the Nazis erected during the Second World War, in the wake of liberation in 1945. Municipal officials evaluated their national and class content. Recommendations for the future of these statues included their removal, placement in the city museum, and substitution of the German-language inscriptions with Czech.
Adolf von Donndorf’s Goethe Bust from 1883 (1990s)
The Karlsbad authorities did not question the genius of nineteenth-century poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who have visited the city numerous times, but they did condemn him as representative of the Germans. Someone knocked the marble Goethe bust from its pedestal in the Goethe Garden at the beginning of Goethe Weg, which had been newly renamed Puškin Stezka, after Alexander Pushkin, whom many consider Russia’s greatest poet. The Goethe bust was moved to a nearby park in 1952 and mounted on a new pedestal with an inscription containing only his name and dates.
Karlsbad Sculptor Hugo Uher’s 1929 Beethoven Monument (late 1990s)
A larger-than-life-size bronze statue of Beethoven remained in its place on what is today called Goethova stezka before the Richmond Hotel, but the bronze reliefs and German-language text that had flanked the German composer were removed. Peculiar to Karlsbad, with its myriad international visitors, were memorial tablets that grateful guests had dedicated to the town. Containing a stanza of poetry or an eloquent thank you for the cure of an illness, these tablets were affixed to stone walls lining the footpaths leading to the hills above the city. Many of the German-language tablets were taken down following the war, leaving ghosts of German past among the remaining memorial plaques in other languages. After 1945, many of Karlsbad’s renamed streets and squares were initially likely to commemorate bourgeois local and national Czech figures from the interwar era or wartime heroes. Following their 1948 coup, the victorious Communists continued these anti-German naming policies, which meshed well with the rhetoric of Slavic Brotherhood that accompanied Czechoslovakia’s ever-closer ties to the Soviet Union. The Communists continued the erasure of Karlsbad’s predominantly German past, including that of historic figures that did not fit well with the historic past they were constructing for the city—and the country—which also reflected gratitude to the Soviet wartime ally.
“Oh, home of tears, but let her bear this blazoned to the end of time: No nation rose so white and fair, none fell so pure of crime.” So reads an inscription on a Confederate soldier statue unveiled in 1911 on the lawn of the Cooke County courthouse in Gainesville, Texas. It is among many Confederate monuments that remain in public spaces across the United States, sometimes with little local debate, despite their white-supremacist inscriptions.
Protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and elsewhere, in summer 2017 reflected tension over the meaning of statues in public places and who determines their continued presence.
Front Royal, Virginia (May 2009); Luray, Virginia (May 2009)
In response to the protests, some Confederate statues, which are to be found mainly in the South, were boarded up, vandalized, or taken down in the dead of night. In some cases, locals called for statues of other less divisive figures to replace these monuments; in others, the pedestals remain empty. The public drama over Confederate statues is not a new problem, as those familiar with the post-1918 battles over the fate of statues of the reforming, enlightened-absolutist Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (r. 1780-1790) in nascent Czechoslovakia know.
Empty Pedestal, formerly the site of Equestrian Statue of Confederate General P.G. Beauregard, New Orleans, Louisiana (April 2018); Empty pedestal that formerly held a statue of Jefferson Davis, Memphis, Tennessee (March 2018) The pedestal itself was removed to a “secure location” in late July 2018. A boarded up, later removed, Confederate memorial at 59th and Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Missouri (August 2017).
Like the Confederate memorials, most of which were unveiled in the early 1900s, in the era of Jim Crow and rising popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, or in the 1950s and 1960s, a time of increasing demands for equal rights, many of the Joseph II monuments were put up long after the events they commemorated in an era of tension. Yet again like the Confederate monuments, they were often the gift of private organizations to towns and cities. The Joseph II statues, like monuments to Confederate soldiers, possessed potential political power that was unleashed in an era of Czech-German national conflict.
The exclusive claims German speakers made on the memory of Joseph II are apparent in the solely German-language inscriptions on the statues, even in areas of mixed Czech-German population. The Germans of the Bohemian Lands overcame other, earlier interpretations of Joseph II, transforming him from the “Esteemer of Humanity” to the “Esteemer of Germandom.” Claiming his memory exclusively for the German people served to nationalize not only the Emperor, but also the Habsburg dynasty, thus weakening this important centripetal force of the Monarchy.
Turn-of-the-Century Postcard View of Eger, today Cheb, Czech Republic (Collection of the Author)
Joseph II statues became flashpoints across the border regions of the Bohemian Lands soon after the foundation of Czechoslovakia following Austria-Hungary’s dissolution in late 1918. Czech-German conflict over the Joseph statues beginning in summer 1920, and continuing into the autumn, culminated in the so-called “Statue War” during late October, when most remaining statues of the Emperor in the borderlands were toppled. Assaults on the statues occurred in a time of economic, political, and social strife in Czechoslovakia and reflected the myriad problems its leaders faced in consolidating power, especially in the nationally mixed border regions. In addition to their anti-German/anti-Habsburg component, these popular attacks demonstrated local Czechs impatience with the regional and national authorities who had heretofore primarily limited themselves to suggesting that statues be boarded up or moved to museums.
The initial volleys in the “Statue War” were fired in predominantly German northern Bohemia. Owing to the alleged mistreatment of local German army recruits, national passions were already high in Teplice/Teplitz on October 28, 1920, the second anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. Following patriotic celebrations that day, local Czechs demanded the removal of the city’s bronze statue within three days. Rather than meet Czech demands to clear away the statue, district political officials simply boarded it up. The city’s German residents became increasingly angry the longer the statue remained encased. In early November, an unknown person or persons removed the covering. Fearing conflict, the Prague government sent in troops to maintain the peace. On November 11, local Czechs pulled down the statue, which city officials then moved to the city museum, where it remained throughout the interwar era. The statue’s removal reverberated throughout the Bohemian Lands. On the Czech side, there were anti-German protests and attacks on other statues of Joseph II. From the Germans came loud complaints about the government’s failure to stop “lawless” (Czech) behavior.
Czech residents, sometimes accompanied by Legionnaires (those Czechs who fought on the side of the Allies during wartime), attacked Joseph II statues across the Bohemian borderlands. While most statues were removed, covered up, or simply destroyed with only minor casualties, there were exceptions. Indeed, violence in connection with the statues resulted in several deaths. Some local German officials put their Joseph II statues under guard, while others convinced residents to set aside plans to re-erect local statues of the Emperor in the interest of peace and order. Elsewhere, German residents spontaneously, and, usually, peacefully, restored their towns’ statues.
Czech reactions to the attacks on the statues were varied and complicated. Czech intellectuals had long debated the effects of the Josephinian reforms. While recognizing the Emperor’s positive contributions in some areas, Czechs stressed the emotional and psychological significance German nationalists had invested in them. Many Czech politicians advocated the removal of the statues under government auspices. In late November 1920, they supported a parliamentary motion to remove all Habsburg monuments. The issue of the Joseph II statues’ future, which had in some cases been taken to court, was settled in the mid-1920s. The legal basis for the decisions was Paragraph 23 of the Law for the Defense of the Republic, which called for the removal from public view of statues, inscriptions, and memorials of anti-state character or of members of the Habsburg or the Hohenzollern dynasty. Virtually all of Joseph II statues would be taken down, although at least one obelisk remained, its inscription removed.
Joseph II obelisk near Teplice/Teplitz in Northern Bohemia (Mid-1990s); Cheb’s/Eger’s Joseph II in the Back Courtyard of the Státní okresní archiv Cheb (Mid-1990s)
A few monuments, their inscriptions removed, survived otherwise intact through the interwar period, even World War II, when the occupying Nazis melted down many for the war effort; and beyond, even as Czechoslovakia’s Germans were expelled after 1945. Some seventy years after the “Statue War,” and the fall of the Communism in 1989, statues of Joseph II began reappearing in the Czechoslovak/Czech landscape. Their Czech-language inscriptions are primarily variations on “Enlightened ruler and reformer,” although in eastern Bohemian Josefov, the statue’s inscription hails the Emperor as the “founder of the Josefov Fortress.” In the twenty-first century, he has occasionally been the subject of popular festivities.
Joseph II Statue at the Josefov Fortress (June 2016); Restored Pedestal, which formerly held a Joseph II Bust in Brno/Brünn (Late-1990s); Restored Joseph II Statue in Trutnov/Trautenau (June 2016); Garishly painted Joseph II Statue standing before a Restaurant in Northern Bohemia (Mid-1990s)
Another statue has been repurposed as a kind of brightly painted garden gnome in front of someone’s country house, while yet another stood—and, perhaps, still stands—near a roadside restaurant in northern Bohemia. These new—more benign—interpretations of the Joseph II statues, however, reveal the limitations of parallels between them and Confederate statues. Although some Confederate monuments may in the future occupy space in museums as part of the historic past, it seems unlikely that their presence will soon lose the ability to offend passersby.
Of Monuments and Memory 