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 …
Tag Archives: Statues
“The Doughboy he went over the top”
Like the three-quarter-size Statues-of-Liberty that the Boy Scouts unveiled in the 1950s, and many of the Joseph II statues unveiled across the Bohemian Lands and Lower Austria in the 1880s, sculptor Ernest Moore Viquesney’s First World War statues, “The Spirit of the American Doughboy,” that dot the American landscape are production-line products. The sculptor carefully …
My On-Going Affair with Joseph II
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 …
Of Monuments and Memory 