Die Löffelfamilie, Leipzig
For several weeks, I’ve been trying to formulate a post on the Confederate monument issue, but I’ve had a hard time formulating my thoughts. But Tim’s recent, thoughtful post on the issue made me feel that I should just put my thoughts down, however imperfectly.
To cut to the chase: I am less convinced than Tim that simply eliminating Confederate monuments is the right course of action. I sympathize with Tim’s view that these monuments constitute bad history, that bad history, in general, deserves to be corrected, and that these monuments are continuing sources of pain, especially for African American citizens of the states in which they appear. This last point I take particularly seriously. And yet…
As Tim says, it’s a dubious proposition that we learn our history from our monuments…though these particularly monuments reflected a larger, false narrative about the Civil War and Reconstruction that recurred in textbooks, speeches, and other narratives that are more likely sources of citizens’ ideas about the past. But that is, in fact, why I remain unconvinced that simply removing them is the right course of action.
For although these monuments represent a racist and false interpretation of the American past, that Neo-Confederate story has itself been a central ideological pillar of white supremacy since at least 1877. And remembering that story and the damage it has caused is nearly as important a task for public history as understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction themselves.
Americans love to comfortably forget the difficult parts of our past. And when those difficult parts are simply too obvious to entirely forget, we tend to minimize their importance. For example, everyone knows that slavery existed in this country before 1865. And nearly everyone will acknowledge that it was a Bad Thing. But there are all kinds of ways of minimizing its harm or its importance, from John Crowe Ransom’s claim in I’ll Take My Stand that slavery was “monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice,” to all the old arguments that Southern states’ attempted secession in 1860-61 was about something other than slavery. Even D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which presents an extraordinarily racist, false narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction, suggests that slavery was an evil, though it blames slavery on New England slave traders and suggests that it was the least bad system for an (unfortunately) multiracial society.
Those who argue that the Confederate battle flag is “heritage, not hate,” are half right. While it is certainly a symbol of hate, it also part of an unfortunate heritage. And there’s some danger that, once we all acknowledge it as a symbol of hate, we will forget what a central role it played in a consequential understanding of white, Southern identity, especially in the decades after the Brown decision.
And that is my concern about simply removing Confederate monuments, that doing so will encourage another round of self-interested forgetting. And since we are nowhere near conquering the poisonous legacy of white supremacy in this country, that forgetting is particularly dangerous.
But having said that, I’m not prepared to argue that we should preserve all Confederate monuments, because their bad history retains a cultural purchase and their presence is an ongoing source of pain and a symbol of ongoing oppression.
Toward the end of his piece, Tim raises – as many have before – the example of “postwar Germans and former Soviet citizens correct[ing] their own public memory by toppling monuments to hate.” But this is not an entirely accurate account of what happened in 1945 or 1989-91. To begin with, the toppling of Nazi monuments was an explicit policy of the Allies, who were understandably unwilling to leave it to the Germans to determine what their future relationship to Nazism would be. At least initially, this destruction of most of the monuments of Nazism helped underwrite a certain forgetting in West Germany in the two decades or so after the War. Starting in the 1960s, however, the process that has come to be known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) began to take hold, in part because a younger generation of Germans started to hold their parents’ generation to account.[1] Though Vergangenheitsbewältigung took place in a world without Nazi monuments, the physical remains of Nazism that were still standing – from concentration camps whose grounds had been preserved for the purposes of memory to the sites of various important Nazi buildings, such as the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, which is now the site of an exhibit called the Topography of Terror – have played a crucial role in the process of public remembering in late 20th- and early 21st-century Germany.
The case of Soviet and Communist monuments and public art in the former territory of the USSR and the old Eastern Bloc is more complicated. For while many works were destroyed, many others remain. And their continuing presence has, I think, helped enrich the public dialog about how, for example, 21st-century Germans in the former East should relate to the history of the DDR.
One of the big differences between Germany in 1945 and reunified Germany after 1989 is that while the Allies feared the revival of Nazism in the immediate aftermath of the War, few believed that a revival of state socialism was a threat after the fall of the Wall and the subsequent collapse of the SED (the DDR’s governing party) and, in short order, the DDR itself. In fact, the relationship of Germans to the DDR past is complicated. One of contemporary Leipzig’s iconic sights is the Löffelfamilie (“Spoon Family”). A large neon sign that stands behind what is now a beer garden, the Löffelfamilie originally appeared in 1973 advertising VEB Feinkost Leipzig (roughly “Nationally-owned Gourmet Foods Leipzig”). VEB Feinkost was a DDR institution, founded in the early 1950s and surviving for a few years after the fall of the Wall. Today, only the name (which now refers to a kind of cultural complex where the old food store was) and the neon sign remain. The Löffelfamilie is considered a Kulturdenkmal (“cultural memorial”). But what exactly is it memorializing? The sign itself is delightful, especially when lit up at night. It’s a colorful, kitschy piece of commercial art. It’s also an example of Ostalgie, as the German’s call nostalgia for the lost world of East Germany. And yet it seems to exist today much more for its immediate aesthetic effect than for its historical referent. Leipzig has a number of other prominent, old DDR-era signs that have been left up, such as this one advertising the Volkseigene Möbel Kombinate der DDR (“National Furniture Combines of the GDR”). At any rate, such Ostalgie exists alongside a strong sense of the evils of the DDR regime, which are on display in two of Leipzig’s other major attractions: the museum dedicated to the Stasi at its old headquarters (die Runde Ecke) and the Forum for Contemporary History. It is in fact not necessary to erase all signs of a disagreeable or even evil past regime in order for a society to think critically about its past.
So here’s my bottom line: our understandable desire to rid the Southern landscape of celebrations of the Confederate past erected in the service of post-Reconstruction white supremacy needs to be balanced by an awareness that forgetting about uncomfortable parts of the American past is a bad national habit. Now that more and more Americans have grown properly uncomfortable with the long-dominant Southern understanding of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, we need to avoid simply sweeping the history of that understanding under the rug. And I suspect that means we ought to at least selectively preserve and repurpose some of those Confederate monuments as a reminder of the power and significance of this particular brand of bad history.
[1] The story in the DDR was somewhat different, as a limited kind of official remembering and acceptance of guilt for the evils of Nazism underwrote the new regime.
13 Thoughts on this Post
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This is something I’ve been thinking about too, and I appreciate your careful thoughtfulness. My short-form response, which jives with yours, is that what we really need to do is not destroy all the monuments, but to work hard to contextualize them. Unfortunately, context is much more difficult to mount than your average Confederate monument. But that just means there is lots of work for historians!
Ben: I appreciate the transnational nuance, or addition, that you’re bringing to the conversation. It helps.
For my part, to be clear, I in *no way* advocated for the removal of *all* public displays that remember the Confederacy. That would, in fact, constitute a less-than-useful erasure or minimization of a serious object of U.S. history. The Confederacy must never be forgotten.
That said, I was careful in my post to say those memorials and monuments that glorify or heroicize the Confederacy must go. If one is to take arguments about civil religion seriously (and I do), I am advocating for the removal/correction of memorials and monuments that are less about conveying public history than providing idols and altars to white supremacy. Most all monuments (say 95 percent) that are neither uncorrected nor unrevised ought to be removed or altered to respect the horrors of slavery. I want fewer pilgrimage sites for neo-Confederates.
In sum, I think our arguments are similar, but I am perhaps advocating for a higher number of corrections (i.e. fewer unaltered altars/idols). -TL
I’m concercerned not oniy with forgetfulness about the Confederacy, but also with forgetfulness about the neo-Confederate uses of the Confederacy in the nearly century and a half since the collapse of Reconstruction. And it is the heroic monuments, built and maintained long after the 1870s, that remind us of the power of those neo-Confederate myths.
But your concern with eliminating sites of neo-Confederate pilgrimage is absolutely on the mark. Obviously the simplest way to do that is through monument removal. But, at least in some cases, repurposing and reframing monuments might allow us to preserve the memory of the neo-Confederate myths while robbing those myths of their currency.
But this is no doubt a tricky matter. How does one get rid of Stone Mountain as a pilgrimage site without ever letting Georgians (and the rest of us) forget that it _was_ a pilgrimage site?
On your last question, Ben, you set me up. THIS is how you modify Stone Mountain!
And this story, from yesterday’s WSJ, might be a reason that Stone Mountain needs the most consideration.
Beyond the obvious need of communicating contextualizing Confederate and neo-Confederate history to a mainstream (white) public, the central issue at hand, which is mentioned but undeveloped, is the affective and cognitive effects of these monuments on communities of color, how, as Ben states, they “are continuing sources of pain, especially for African American citizens of the states in which they appear.” I don’t think we can analyze these historical markers without taking this into account, as critics of monumentality–Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space comes to mind–monumental sites are not so much about articulating rational discourses–historical lessons–but about reaffirming ideology through affect and sentimentality. In the case of the “altars of white supremacy”–love that phrasing, Tim!–they inevitably serve to inflate white Southern pride and the Confederate tradition. And although unmeasurable because of its intangible character, the impact such altars have on people of color is profound, their existence resurrects continually the narrative of the black “other” as a thing. To teach the historical lessons of white supremacy in the US–a lesson African Americans know deeply, needless to say–we do not require the reproduction of this pain. The pain is never erased.
Interesting post, esp. (to me) the reference to Ostalgie. I don’t think I’d heard this word (a clever coinage) nor really been aware that there was/is nostalgia on the part of some Germans for aspects of the East German past.
My hometown is Pekin, Illinois. For those who are not familiar with that town’s history, it is infamous for being a “sundown town,” where African Americans were “strongly encouraged” to move along. The local newspaper was owned by the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. Last, but not least the high school mascot from the 1930s until the August 1980 was a racial epithet describing the ethnic Chinese. Even thirty five years later, there are those who remain “unreconstructed” in regards to the mascot being a dragon.
Since this is a blog on intellectual history, I wonder exactly what theories of persuasion motivate racial reformers and whether defenders of the status quo hold different ones. I am curious if anyone has done any work on cognitive dissonance, elaboration likelihood models, inoculation theory, etc and how they apply to matters such as race, the culture wars, etc.
Brian: My interest in all matters of ignorance and anti-intellectualism, broadly conceived, is strong. I think your invocation of “theories of persuasion” relates to intersections of ‘sensibility’ (as conceived and promoted by Dan Wickberg), cognitive structures, rationalism, emotion, and change/conversion. I don’t have a firm answer to the questions implied in your comments, but I think Proctor’s work on agnotology matters, as does Sehat’s work on American myths and the work of many of us on ideologies. I think all the recent work in USIH points to trying to understand how ideologies interfere with openness to lines of thinking, or shared culture, or how issues of justice (or the prevention of individual/community ‘flourishing’, a la Rawls) matter in the history of thought.
My two cents. – TL
The participants of this conversation might be way above my former pay grade (retired teacher), but I would like to offer some humble observations. In 2004, while teaching in a majority Africa American Baton Rouge elementary school, I was a chaperone on a trip to Atlanta. I was the only Caucasion on either bus as we toured many sites. Our last evening, we went to Stone Mountain. After watching the show and returning to our hotel, some of the other chaperones came to me and asked what I thought about our visit to that site. I had thought it inappropriate, but sadly I had not considered how offensive it must have been to my colleagues. Raised in Pennsylvania by the children of recent (late 1890s early 1900s) Swedish immigrants, I KNEW who won the Civil War, but I was never affected so deeply by its consequences until that evening! Are these monuments and a traitorous flag the only way southern whites can register a win? I don’t know if they should be torn down. I saw how hurtful they can be. I think the hurt they cause might be the primary reason that southern whites want them, more than heritage. It is indeed hate!
Perfect anecdote—a needed real life example. Thanks Violet.
I fear your answer to the following, but tell me more about this “show” you saw at Stone Mountain. They do shows there? – TL
Yes, they have a laser light show and play an assortment of music, including Dixie. The show probably isn’t as offensive as the monument itself is. My colleagues were offended mainly because we were there given the ethnicity of our group. Teaching in the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida) after having grown up in my relatively cloistered part of Pennsyvania, was so eye opening. After my welcome from a white gentleman in Georgia in 1978……Do you know the difference between a Yankee and a damn Yankee?……No, I replied…….Yankees go home! I have had an unusual window into southern life. My husband’s job (troubles shooter for a hotel chain) took me to a lot of small market cities and as an average Yankee teacher, I was always placed in majority African American schools. Used textbooks from white schools, broken down equipment were the rule. It’s hard to watch the revolting behavior of the young confederate sympathizers. My colleagues generally didn’t and don’t complain about the blatant racism. I guess they are used to it. I’m not and I doubt I ever will get used to it. Sorry if I went beyond answering your question.
Violet: Going beyond my question—are you kidding? This is great. Thanks so much for elaborating. I *love* hearing from K-12 professionals. Your work (all aspects of it) is appreciated by me more than you know. It’s too bad we don’t have a history of heartfelt feedback from Af-Am Southern K-12 students, or from their parents. That’s where the money is, in terms of acquiescence, resistance, and insightful commentary. Surely there’s an EdD diss out there, somewhere, on student reactions to white supremacy embedded in the curriculum. – TL