Hi Joanna.
Hello Sam.
Hi, I'm here with Joanna Warsza,
who's a curator
specializing in public art,
an educator who runs a curatorial program in Sweden.
And we're here to speak about monuments and memorials
in Berlin.
In relation to your new project, Iconoclasm.
What is the relation between iconoclasm, monuments,
and memorials?
(laughs) That's a good question.
It's an interesting, complicated,
discussion and argument that really should never end.
[Joanna] I thought it would be a good place to start,
here at the memorial for Roma and Sinti victims,
of Holocaust and National Socialism.
And so we are in Berlin.
We both live in Berlin.
And of course, Berlin is a good place to speak
of memorial culture in Germany.
And just to situate where we are,
three monuments here,
Memorial of the Jewish victims of National Socialism
and the homosexual victims,
and this is the Roma and Sinti.
The importance of remembering,
each generation must remember this is the program,
the project, the postwar project of making sure that
the German people never forget the past.
And one of the things for me that's interesting
as an American is that both Jewish,
and other victims, Roma, Sinti and so forth.
Artists and architects must be involved in making
the monuments.
But also non-Jewish.
And this question of remembering is important.
Remembering for who?
In the United States, the Confederate monuments
that were put up after the Civil War,
most of them put up in the early 20th century
during segregation,
were put up to tell African Americans not to forget,
that whites are in charge.
So that's a kind of remembering that is,
we could say a very negative one.
And so the response in America and in Great Britain
and many other places, South Africa is to pull
those monuments down.
I know there's a lot of debate about it.
I mean, I agree with it.
I think that kind of remembering is something we don't need.
In Germany it's very different, right?
It's telling the dominant population,
let's say the descendants of the perpetrators of Nazism,
that they must remember what happened.
What their forefathers did to the victims.
That's also part of the difference between a monument
and a memorial.
I mean, I know this is a big discussion in Germany
and they're two different words, right?
The Mahnmal and the Denkmal.
Right. Something actually I draw from your book.
That, when you think of the statues,
you think they are there forever.
But actually what their project shows is also there...
They have a expiry dates.
Hmm
Because the world goes on, the ideas go on and perhaps,
they are embedded in...
There is a counter-monumentality in it.
In terms of resistance that will come
and pull them down at one point.
[Sam] One of the things that the work,
my project, the Iconoclasm project tries to show also
is that these symbols are very powerful.
And they can go for a hundred years or more,
without really causing disruption in social relations.
And then suddenly something happens in culture,
and they're no longer tolerable.
And they're ripped down.
Moments when all of a sudden this emotion and this,
this meaning comes to the surface.
Humans have always needed to destroy,
symbols, images, and likely we always will.
We're emotional creatures.
The reasons for putting something up can turn into
the reasons for taking it down.
[Joanna] So in erecting any statue,
there can potentially one day,
be a counter violence to it.
[Sam] So Joanna, where are we now?
Where are we, Sam? (both laugh)
Well, we moved to East Berlin now.
And maybe one of the main important squares in East Berlin,
the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
And we are sitting in front of Volksbühne,
the theater of the people,
built by the workers for the workers in 1914.
But this square has been one of the places
of a permanent ideological struggle of the left
and the right throughout the history.
It's very interesting in Berlin because you have
in addition to the Nazi past,
you have the country divided in half between the East
and the West.
And after '89, the question of,
what to do about all of the communist history.
And the idea of changing the names of streets, of places,
of taking down statues or leaving them up.
And there's a debate right now, around a street
in central Berlin called MohrenstraBe,
which the word Mohr comes from the word Moor,
which means African.
And it's a, a kind of derogatory term.
There's a movement to rename it,
and I understand that they're gonna rename the street
after the first known Afro-German philosophers and scholars.
I happened to be at the wonderful event of the celebration
of the renaming of the street.
After Anton Wilhelm Amo.
That was organized by various organizations
that they colonized Berlin and others.
It has not yet been there as a plaque.
However some celebration was there.
And I have to say it was really touching,
and humbling experience to see how many people
have been involved in the serious work, pointing
to the systemic violence,
and racist derogatory street naming.
This is Stolpersteine.
Like the stones that you stumble upon.
So this was something that I was really interested
to talk to you about.
An example of a memorial that's really dispersed throughout
the city, the country, and even the world now.
What I like about this is that it's a counter-memorial,
which now found it's embedded place,
in the memorial culture in Germany.
And it's really bottom-up.
Because when you speak about Iconoclasm,
of course you show the moments in which there is
a Naples from bottom-up.
For example to commemorate,
a neighbor you have never met
and you possibly could not meet.
But still to live with this person in a way.
And every victim,
who is identified gets her or his name.
And I think this is such an incredible...
it's a very quiet way of saying the name,
but the name is always there.
I find this one of the most moving and powerful memorials
I've ever experienced.
I mean, you're walking down the street somewhere in Germany,
and you look down and you see the names of people
who were dragged out of their home,
and taken away to a concentration camp and murdered.
And this is just, it's so immediate,
and so visceral.
It's such a powerful reminder,
of the incredible inhumanity and cruelty and violence
of that moment.
Here we are,
at an Ernst Thälmann Monument.
It's actually good always to put a human scale,
next to such a big Soviet blown up figures.
But I think what is really important here,
at this monument is that the local inhabitants
of this whole state,
voted after the reunification of Germany,
to keep the monument and to keep the name.
And they had a say.
I find it interesting and actually powerful and vulnerable,
that the history grows in layers.
So, of course, there is Ernst Thälmann,
but there are also skaters, and there is kind of
a coexistence and cohabitation of different layers.
This is an interesting example of that where,
for so many people in the former communist countries,
they wanted to get rid of the reminders of that,
that passed.
Because it was so traumatic.
But here, they felt it was something they could overcome.
And I think that's an interesting thing about Iconoclasm
where people can act out their aggressive impulses,
without harming a real person.
If the statue or the representation becomes the place
of reception of the violence, of the mob of the individual.
In that way, maybe you could say
it is a kind of de-escalation.
Taking the violence down to a symbolic level.