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 …
Tag Archives: sochy
The Politics of Memory: The Czechification of an International Spa Town after 1945
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 …
Historic Monuments as Sites of Nationalist Tension
“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 …
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Of Monuments and Memory 