Crackpots #93: Monuments to Defeat (Patreon)

This week's entry comes from Jordan Brown. Jordan is a photographer living in Flatbush Brooklyn. He is on Instagram at @Imurhucklejordy and is available for private engagements, events, and personal portraiture on commission. He previously contributed Crackpots #53.

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Where there is victory, they build monuments to it. Where there is defeat, they build monuments to it. 

Berlin was the convergence point of the rupture of the 20th century. From the failure of the German revolution through Weimar, the daggering out by the Nazis across the continent in pursuit of a thousand-year reich, the pivot of Stalingrad, and the torturous march back to the city to settle the ledger of the barbarism whose regime it seated, Berlin was an apparent origin and return.

In the wake of it all, Berlin is a city of memory, or of monumental remembrance. Across the municipality there are more than 8,000 registered monuments, something like a third of which refer to the 20th century. Berliner Gedenktafeln plaques marking a building or site’s significance, more than 5,000 Stolpersteine—brass ‘stumbling blocks’  the size of cobblestones are placed into sidewalks and doorways commemorating persecuted and murdered individuals during the Nazi regime. Moving across Berlin, it feels as though every public space you pass through doubles in some function of remembrance. 

This act of remembering is more than a German pastime, or even an obsession, it structures the staatsräson of the nation. Much as an ‘indebtedness’ to Israel has so psychologically bound German society to Israel in the course of its genocide, the same motivating causes for the philosemitism constructing that relationship are the drives to remember everything about itself with such institutional breadth and force. It is a terrain of intense political contestation, as parties and factions fight to impose their selection of memory, which is the apparent aspect of the city’s vernacular, the aesthetic language of the state in its monumental form.

Traversing these monuments, from the perspective of the left, as you accumulate their implied meaning and popular narrative of history, makes the city feel like an edifice to our failure. It is written in through the Stasimuseum and on the placards around Checkpoint Charlie. Sold on tables covered in touristenkitsch and ostalgieprodukt, in the funereal litany of every revolutionary whose life and often death is marked across town, traversable like a map to the stars whose sky you’re reminded throughout was foolish and perhaps evil to have ever been charted. 

In his ‘Draft for Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel’ Jeff Wall, in an attempt to periodize the rise and place of conceptual art, reads from Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin to determine the cause of the end of the avant gardes as the receding of the possibility of revolution, and the failure of the communist alternative which ‘disappeared into silence’. In its place stood ‘the repressive and estranging effects of the culture industry’ and the critical theory doomed to pessimism, or perhaps mourning for the future. 

“With the specter of the passing away into history of the Marxist concept of the unity of theory and practice in social revolution, this newer critique sees the circle of domination and even extinction closing about it.”

If all we have of the memory of our tradition and its works are melancholy shaped by shame and regret, the sadness of lost futures, written in narratives produced for cultural consumption by states entirely hostile to the dreams transmitted by every revolutionary act of the past, what is the outlook for our work today?

It is these conditions which cause so many to call to discard the memory. Reaching for the past is solipsism or LARP, endless bookworship by busybox pseuds wearing their father’s shoes and distressing everyone else who aptly remembers the failure of communism. But would a pseud ask you to turn to Benjamin, that perhaps in his dual relationship to the Frankfurt School, both in and against, he offers a way out of the melancholy of failure into redemption?

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

And so even in the image a monument projects, stood present before it or perhaps even better captured to map in context, what Benjamin calls a ‘point of departure’ where rather than taking in a linear story of progress and retreat, the historian, “...grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. [establishing] a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Memory is mutable, the past has a potency recomposed by younger hands.

In the opening section of Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance Vol. 1 the protagonist and his young comrades walk the Pergamon Altar in Berlin, discussing the frieze that depicts the Olympian slaughter of the giants who rose up against their rule. Their discussion, which takes place across much of the first third of the book, woven between establishing the historical situation in late Weimar, the book’s ever expanding retinue of characters who all besides the narrator are historical figures, and the lifeworld of communist and socialist political culture of the time, is an extended historicising of the monumental sculpture. 

Heilmann explained to us the meaning of this dance round, in which the entire host of deities, led by Zeus, were striding toward victory over a race of giants and fabulous creatures. The Giants, the sons of the lamenting Gaea, in front of whose torso we were now standing, had blasphemously mutinied against the gods; but other struggles that had passed across the kingdom of Pergamum were concealed under this depiction. The regents in the dynasty of the Attalids had ordered their master sculptors to translate the swift transience, paid for with thousands of lives, to a level of timeless permanence, thereby putting up a monument to their own grandeur and immortality. The subjugation of the Gallic tribes invading from the north had turned into a triumph of aristocratic purity over wild and base forces, and the chisels and mallets of the stone carvers and their assistants had displayed a picture of incontestable order to make the subjects bow in awe. 

This first of many encounters with significant art works across Weiss’ work begins the practice of the novel that Fredric Jameson describes in the introduction as an ‘aesthetic pedagogy’, the bildungsroman of a young communist stepping out into history and learning in its course how to make sense of art so that he can make sense of the world and his own subjectivity in it. So that the great and terrible events of the period he is living through can be reckoned and transmuted into both political action and individual expression in his own work.

‘Great and terrible’ undersells the full extent of the traumatic histories that Weiss collects in the novel, the arc of which is the collective experience of the retreats, missteps, defeats, disunity, and consequent disasters—some as sacrifice, others in the mosaic charnal brutality that is the experience of those present in a total continental war. Weiss’s characters attempt to grasp at events, hold a narrative together, achieve some kind of clarity necessary for taking the actions they are all so rigorously committed to. The cause of true social revolution in the face of ascendant fascism carries them through the collective distress and melancholy that marks the left, as the subject of his work. On this focus of melancholy Jameson goes as far as to state that Weiss’s novel can only be understood in its depiction of, “...the ways in which such experience (politically termed the experience of defeat”) can also constitute an energizing precondition for action.”

The reader must somehow restore the impossible aesthetic imperative of this experiment in collectivity and must grasp every moment of the irresolvable conflicts as a movement of absolutes. This is to say that in these obsessive rehearsals of the past—mistakes, missed opportunities, necessary crimes, or accidental miscalculations—and in the anxiety-laden, fearful, and hopeful prognoses of the future that accompany them in the form of strategies and tactics, assessments and the helplessness of sheer lack of knowledge or information, throughout these exchanges in which language itself seems discredited by the facts of the past and the unpredictability of the future, the reader must at every point reconstitute a present.

How does anyone move under the weight of history? When we’re surrounded by it, and the overwhelming pace and violence it carries up threatens all sense of intention or dream. How do you hope when the forces and capacities of the enemy are all oriented against even the possibility? 

On top of a mountain, above the town of Bad Frankenhausen sits the ruins of Kyffhausen castle,  and above the ruined castle stands a towering monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I and Frederick I Barbarossa. The Kyffhäuserdenkmal was built in 1896 to commemorate the death of Wilhelm I eight years prior, and the unification of Germany in 1871 [] . Atop a towering plinth is Wilhelm the first, seated triumphally on a great horse. He is flanked on one side by a warrior with a winged helm, a symbol of germanic martial prowess, and on the other is a woman holding a writing implement and a laurel, symbol of the record of German history. 

Below is Frederick Barbarossa, seated on a wide throne, his long beard trailing down into his lap which is dappled in bird shit. He is seen awakening, left hand grasping at his chest, the right pulling up the sword from his side. The platform of his throne is held up by a host of mythic creatures and ancient warriors. 

If on the landing from which you view these two figures, you turned your back to them and walked to the railing to look out over the vista where you see the lines of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia joined, just to your right, out over a smaller ridge blanketed in deep green pine, you would be facing the field where the German Peasant’s War of 1525 was brutally ended—Müntzer’s forces scattered and run down by the princes’ Landsknecht, and where stands today the Panorama museum that houses Werner Tübke’s monumental circular painting, a tremendous allegorical depiction Müntzer’s rebellion, commissioned by the GDR on the occasion of its 450th anniversary.

I saw both of these monuments the day after the AfD blew out the elections of Saxony-Anhalt. Ulrich Siegmund had ridden to the polls on election Sunday with his wife, both tightly mounted onto a Simson moped, a 50cc two-stroke bike built by a company that had been founded by Jewish brothers, seized by the Nazi’s, and post-war became a state owned enterprise of the GDR where it produced what would become a cult-vehicle of personal mobility within the socialist republic. 

We made it to town by car. My wife and I had driven out from Berlin to see the Panorama and to stay at the restored Thüringen lodge beneath the Kyffhäuserdenkmal. It was nominally a three hour drive from Kreuzberg to Bad Frankenhausen, but we took a long loop around to Mühlhausen, the site where Müntzer was beheaded after a days of torture in Heldrungen fortress. 

When we arrived at Burghof Kyffhäuser, the light was already deepening into dusk and the brightest object seen from the large parking lot shared by the hotel and the monument was the Kaiser above. We ate a quiet dinner on the large and nearly empty patio, munching schnitzel and reading about the couple who’d moved from Berlin to refurbish the site to its original glory in 2003. It had been an East German recreation home, and sat unused for years after reunification when the couple saw it on a motorcycle trip and decided to pick up sticks and take it over.

‘Crazy,’ said our friends; ‘mad,’ said our children and parents. The state of the place was pitiful. All the timber, ceilings, windows, doors, all the pipes – water, drainage, heating,

Strom – over there. In spring 2004, we opened our beer garden, complete with a barbecue, beer garden furniture and portable toilets. By autumn, the kitchen and toilet facilities were ready.

The first rooms have been available since 2007. They are named after German emperors – in the correct chronological order, of course. It was my husband’s idea.

That evening, while ‘Star Trek’ (2009) played in dubbed German on the room’s television, I read a bit about the site to find out how it sat in such peculiar relationship to the contradictory historical celebration at work in Bad Frankenhausen. 

In the German east, while Siegmund’s AfD makes use of ideologically subverted GDR-era nostalgia in the form of a kitsch völkisch socialism, there is an especially energetic relationship to ideas of German restoration made material by the Kyffhäuserdenkmal. Neo Nazis and the ‘grey-right’ umbrellas of conservative-to-far right groups have fixated on the site for decades as a physical pole of Kyffhäusergeist, the spirit of a revived völkisch nationalism channeled through the grandeur of imperial Prussian aesthetics. 

AfD’s (now banned) ‘Der Flügel’ current held a Kyffhäuser-Treffen gathering there from 2015 to 2017 until enough local resistance was able to push them off-site from the mountain itself for the annual event. Party members and the wider far right would come dressed in traditional costume for a day of speeches, electioneering, and invigoration in the face of a physical raison d’etre for their cause. Per Björn Höcke, AfD Saxony-Anhalt leader, Der Flügel ‘member’, and founder of the Treffen gathering:

"Wir als Der Flügel und Unterzeichner der Erfurter Resolution treffen uns einmal im Jahr, bisher am Fuße des Kyffhäuserdenkmals, um uns daran zu erinnern, wer wir sind und wo wir herkommen. Der Flügel als Rückversicherung innerhalb der AfD ist ein Garant für den Zusammenhalt."

"We as Der Flügel and signatories of the Erfurter Resolution meet once a year, so far at the foot of the Kyffhäuser Monument, to remind ourselves who we are and where we come from. Der Flügel as a safeguard within the AfD is a guarantor of cohesion."

This is, in so many words, what I was told by an AfD voter I met in Berlin, sitting at a cafe table outside a busy späti near Mehringdamm. He needed a seat and I had one open, we got talking and went on long. I’d just been to the Stasimuseum and he wanted to share stories about taking 24hr passes over to East Berlin, flush on the exchange rate he and his friends would buy handles of liquor and find girls to go home with. He was a retired clown and mime, and when we finally got around to the question of the city’s upcoming election, he told me the reason he was voting for AfD was that ‘they were the only party trying to restore Germany’. 

Down in the valley near Bad Frankenhausen, where Müntzer and the awakened peasants took a final stand against the princes and their armies, the Panorama Museum sits on a shallow hill at the edge of town. Its serene courtyard opens out over the valley, giving a view of where the final encounter would have played out. As you enter the viewing room inside, stepping up past signs forbidding photography (you can tour it digitally at the museum’s website, you emerge into a large, dark, circular hall. It is difficult to see at first but there is an archipelago of small bench seats around the room, allowing you to move towards successive portions of the massive painting. 

It encircles you from on high, stretching over forty feet tall and more than four hundred feet in circumference, it depicts the moment of the revolt’s destruction. Müntzer stands stark as he lowers his flag in defeat, centered beneath the arc of a rainbow that crosses the entirety of the battle scene. The princes’ calvary is sweeping the field, devastating the masses of peasant soldiers. An angel is present, watching (or perhaps falling) into the circled barricade of wagons arranged for defense from the charge. Below the battle and separated from the chaos by a hedge, a collection of significant figures gather around a well from which is blossoming a pomegranate. 

the symbolic source of life for a new era – artists, reformers, humanists, scientists, physicians, explorers, and merchants are gathered (from left to right): Hans Hut and Melchior Rinck, Müntzer's comrades, then Hans Sachs, Peter Vischer, Veit Stoß, Tilman Riemenschneider, Jörg Ratgeb, Albrecht Dürer, Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Sebastian Brant, Philipp Melanchthon, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ulrich von Hutten, and – on the next panel – Nicolaus Copernicus, Paracelsus, Columbus, Johannes Gutenberg, Bartholomäus Welser, and Jakob Fugger. 

The array, from Müntzer's radical successors (Hut / Rinck), his betrayer (Luther), through these significant figures who shaped the era, down to the Fuggers whose banking concern would finance the empire, all gather at a symbol of renewal. This description represents a fragment of the the monumental work, which depicts over 3000 figures in total across a structure of four seasons, each panel made up of many allegorical arrangements and ideas, some built as references to other works of the era, some accounting for stories or histories of the day, others from pamphlets or theological literature—references culled by Tübke from over three years of research and planning. 

Seeing it in person is entirely overwhelming, you immediately have the sense of a conjuncture, this synoptic cataclysm of concept and act, record and dream, the nightmare and delirium of attempting to hold everything in your mind all at once. It surrounds you and walking the room, panel by panel as we did, beginning with the long audio tour and then on our own only leaves you with greater need of time to assess the density of its offering. This circular, eternal return is assessed by some critics as the general outlook of Tübke, whose painting was not entirely well regarded by the GDR that commissioned it, and whose Ministry of Culture was in tension with the artist throughout the painting’s eleven-year production. 

It is not in any sense a sterile heroic image, no chauvinistic glory or fantasy of binary opposition in clean resolve, and so in that sense it is rich for the marxist, as a piece of already abundantly historicised art. Even if Tübke may fall where Blanqui did, at the end of his life, where in ‘Eternity According to the Stars’ he wrote:

What a noisy humanity, infatuated with its greatness, believing itself to be the universe and living in its prison as in the vast immensity, only to soon sink along with the globe that, in the most profound disdain, has carried the burden of its pride. The same monotony and the same apathy, even in the foreign stars. The universe is repeated without end; it’s stomping its hoofs in the same place [piaffe sur place]. Eternity imperturbably plays the same representations over and over, ad infinitum.

That is their melancholy, and hard earned in the course of their trials. Tübke struggled principally in the pursuit of his own expression, always claiming loyalty to the socialist project, always in doubt by detractors, Blanqui whose life was a relentless attack on the state of order to realize the project in revolution. Points of reference, and points of departure. 

I came to Europe to face failure and defeat. I turned forty this past July, carrying a minor melancholy for cresting the hill, what Enzo Traverso said the ancients marked as a traversal between ‘youth and senility. I’d had a longer and more ill-nursed condition formed by an assessment of the left. It was a melancholy resistant enough to new developments, the successive waves of socialist electoral wins, heroic rearguard defenses in Minnesota and elsewhere against the ICE surge, that I determined I had to do something about it and myself. I would make an endeavor of a photographic project, to see sites of the left’s victories and defeat in Europe, to meet people currently engaged in struggles, and to reconcile in that what I could of my assessment.

I am blessed in life to be surrounded by purposeful, intelligent, skilled, and dedicated comrades whose work is genuinely an inspiration not just personally, but artistically in how I shaped the direction of this endeavor. I wanted to know how they did it, the communists and socialists of the past. How they kept meaning cohered, maintained faith, continued on at all in moments of profound and terrible defeat. 

Because that is how I feel, in my body, about what is happening. A taut thrum of ever vibrating anxiety that Barbarism looks a far better organized faction contesting the future than any of the other contenders going. In fact the enemy is oriented to the future with a confidence and specificity of programme, and it is a revolutionary one. We are told that artificial superintelligence is going to change literally every single thing about our lives, sometimes they go through it in partitioned lists of sectors and jobs and entertainments that will be ruptured, but more often they articulate a total restructuring of society by and around their technologies, offering that if we don’t they’ll kill us all all. The machines they mean. 

Where the left has a programme, it is currently articulated as defense of prior arrangements, restoring the promise of our society rather than calls to remake it. The rhetoric of return to New Deal promises of full employment and affordability, the positioning of our younger, brighter, and energetic leaders as more capable than the alternatives in delivering on the plenty these arrangements have the capacity to allow. This is a critical read that has room for understanding, that even this version of a left is a necessary step for one only knew decades of defeat and retreat to build muscle and confidence in mounting a successful defense at all. The ability to organize a redoubt and hold it deep in unchosen territory is perhaps a prerequisite ability to rally a call for even greater more comprehensive ambitions.

Our forebears stormed heaven, and took it. The evidence was all around the city, sometimes in its original state of triumphalism, other times its prior assertions of glory reversed the discarded or museal. 

The great Leninplatz Lenin statue was erected in 1970 on the 100th anniversary of the leader’s birth and standing 26 meters high it was greeted on arrival by massive crowds. In 1991 as reunification of the city and the nation was underway the district council voted to remove it in the face of protests, and the thing was dismantled, trucked off to be dumped into a sandpit in the Köpenick forest to the city’s southeast. Lenin lay there in pieces for years as souvenir hunters came periodically to hack a piece off his face. So it was decided he should be buried, and he was, in an unmarked spot in the forest where he remained for over a decade. 

When the cultural director of the Zitadelle Spandau decided the head should be included in their standing exhibition collecting monuments across historical regimes in Berlin, it took years of political wrangling, some conservation issues to do with lizards, and the initial claim by the state to have forgotten where they buried him, Lenin’s head was dug up and brought to the old citadel to sit in the final room of the exhibition. Cheek resting on its platform, the red granite of his face difficult to gain an expression from. Falling from sanctification to damnation, decapitated and buried, exhumed into museum work as an article of semi-fascination, this dislocated lion, kept in part in a retired fortress prison. 

A little east of Spandau in Charlottenburg-Nord stands another prison. Plötzensee makes up the eastern nose of the district’s island, separated from the social housing estates and large commercial tracts by a wide band of shedded garden allotments that go from 19th century shantytowns to post-war survival plots, and are now coveted personal greenspace for the leisure gardener. There’s four main sites I could make of the prison—the juvenile facility, JVA Plötzensee proper, a prison hospital, and the sectioned-off Gedenkstätte Plötzensee memorial. 

In a room there, the size of a spacious two car garage, nearly 3,000 political prisoners and petty criminals were executed by the Nazi regime. Most were Germans, along with many Czechs, Poles, and French, with most other victims from across the continent. The guillotine was the primary method of execution, but eventually a beam was installed with meathooks to serve as gallows at which eight prisoners could be simultaneously killed by hanging.  

It was there at Plötzensee that so many of the members of Die Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra) were imprisoned, tortured and put to death. The work of the Harnack / Schulze-Boysen circle is depicted at length in Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance, Hans Coppi and Horst Heilmann are the two young comrades the protagonist walks the Pergamon with at the start of the novel. He leaves for the Spanish Civil War and in Weiss’ narrative the two others remain in Berlin, on the course their actual lives took, as members in an underground resistance whose work circulating antifascist literature, organizing forced laborers in the reich, and gathering and transmitting intelligence to the Soviets led to a years-long pursuit by the Gestapo, who eventually captured and killed a significant portion of the group. 

In the most harrowing section of Weiss’ novel, he depicts the imprisonment and torture of the captured members, and their final moments leading to the guillotine and gallows at length. Some of this is told in a letter by Heilmann which could be to the protagonist or perhaps the reader. 

The letter narrates the wrenching scene of Hans Coppi meeting his newborn son for the first time after imprisonment. Hilde Coppi, who was also captured, was allowed a brief stay of execution to nurse their new child, before she was beheaded. Hans suffered the gallows, which Hitler had personally ordered installed, as the rope was seen as a more dishonorable death, in part due to the much elongated duration of the act. 

Hans Coppi Jr. grew up with his grandparents in the GDR, and after studying economics at university, spent the rest of his career researching the Red Orchestra and resistance under the Nazi regime. At an event commemorating the 65th anniversary of the arrests of members of the Brussels faction of the Orchestra, Coppi Jr. stated, “After 1945, the members of the Abwehr, Gestapo and Reichskriegsgericht were never held accountable for their crimes against humanity. On the contrary, they were in demand as interlocutors for western intelligence agencies and made sure that those they had sentenced to death and killed in detention were once again defamed as spies and traitors.”

He was speaking of the campaign, primarily in West Germany, by unreconstructed Nazis absorbed into the western state, to ensure that many of the resistance networks against the regime were understood as spies and traitors to Germany. A continuous line of anti-communism that structures the relationship to the memory of resistance and the total inadequacy of justice that was ever meted out to the perpetrators of such vast brutality. 

Pertinent that opposite the Red Orchestra in the small museum room you walk before entering the execution chamber is the large and grand treatment to the plotters of the July 20th, 1944 assassination and coup plot against Hitler. The complex attempt joined dissident military officers, noblemen, conservative leaders, social democrats and socialists, intellectuals, judges, and clergy around the Kreisau Circle. On the basis of moral disgust with the regime’s conduct for how it tarnished Germany’s esteem and literal fortunes as the war turned, the group orchestrated an assassination and coup attempt that would see a takeover of the military and a submission of terms to the western (non-Soviet) allied powers for cessation of the war. Those terms included the maintenance of a ‘Greater Germany’ which would include Poland and other Sudetan conquests by the Nazis since the start of the war. 

The plot, led by Claus von Stauffenberg, stylishly depicted by Tom Cruise in the Bryan Singer directed Valkyrie, failed. The bomb left by von Stauffenberg under the meeting table at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ Eastern Front headquarters was moved at the last moment to make space for participants, leaving a weakened blast that only injured and enraged Hitler. The coup failed and thousands were arrested and executed. 

Von Stauffenberg himself was executed by a makeshift firing squad. Years earlier, at the outbreak of war, he stated, “It is essential that we begin systematic colonization in Poland. But I have no fear that this will not occur.” He wrote to his wife, “The population is an unbelievable rabble, very many Jews and very much mixed people. A people that only feels at ease under the whip. The thousands of prisoners will do our agriculture a lot of good. In Germany they'll surely be useful: hard-working, willing and undemanding.” He never saw the inside of Plötzensee.

The execution room was dark and spare, the gallows hooks, a rear dual window, and memorial flowers faced you as you entered. Tall black curtains draped on either side of the room, and a black velvet rope dipped across to mark the space that visitors should not cross. So little light, I had to push my film two stops, and ask the information attendant to open the second entrance gate so that I could capture the entirety of the space. 

As I was leaving, I looked across the yard to the prison proper where the watchtower loomed out over the memorial. I had emailed the historical ministry to find out about the regulations and policies related to photography at Plötzensee, they responded that personal photography was allowed, so long as it was done with the utmost care and respect to the solemnity of the space, and that also no photographs were made of the adjacent correctional facility. That facility currently houses around 600 inmates, a third of whom are imprisoned as a consequence of unpaid transit fines. 

On my last full day in the city I went to see the end of the war. The Berlin-Karlshorst museum is the site of capitulation of the Nazi regime. It was a Wehrmacht Pioneer school under the Nazis, and then as the Soviets closed the vice on Berlin it was taken to be a military headquarters and was where the German high command all trudged, stone faced but furious at having to surrender on any terms to the communists. Hitler had committed suicide leaving a final order to fight to the last, which held longer than you would expect given absurdity of that double act, but eventually they all came, to wait.

They got in early enough to be done by a reasonable hour, they were trucked in from Tempelhofer airfield across the ruins of their capital city, only to cool their heels as the signing of surrender could not continue until a French flag was procured. One could not and so one had to be made, which meant finding cloth, sewing etc. while everyone waited until after midnight for a happily staged room. There was a consciousness of the eternal nature of the moment, how it would appear on screens and in photography. The final prerogative for its arrangement for viewing, on terms that met the competing interests of all involved held up the end of the war. 

The room where they finally signed is kept as a tableau of empty readiness. All the settings are placed, the tables for leaders and adjutants, each chair in perfect distance from each other. The small flags of each allied power mark a front across the main table, overlooking the scene were the final subjugation of the war will occur. There are no mannequin frozen players or audio narration kiosks, the only figuration of the scene as it happened is a video screen hanging above playing a continuous loop of the recorded event, French flag included. 

The rest of the building is a museum of the war, from before breakout and the conditions that lead to it all the way through post-war settlement. In a section on the prevalence of photography, as the massification of the hand camera coincided with the war, it noted the rise of this new kind of document—the personal memory taken en scene. Not merely by specialist military or journalist photographers, but the participants and subjects of the everyday experience of the war. Many of the most direct images we have of the Nazi genocide are from the personal photos made by both perpetrator and victims. 

Karlshorst is a bi-national endeavor, or was primarily until some disruption in that arrangement in the past few years. It was a site managed and maintained by both German and Russian members of a board, with annual events and educational programs, books and collateral all coming from its shared operation. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine though, and given this bound national character of the facility, the museum became a particular site of angst. It had been named ‘German-Russian Museum Karlshorst’, but the German director Jörg Morré changed it to ‘Berlin-Karlshorst’ in 2022. Since then, various placards and curatorial messages throughout the exhibits announce that due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, changes inevitably had to be made to the history presented there, new contextualisation given in light of these new contemporaneous events. 

It was difficult to tell looking through, as individual updates to the material were not marked, and so I was left to guess as I circulated, has this section on the experience of German soldiers on the eastern front been changed in any way since the announcements? What about the portion on the eastern front civilians, or the battle for Berlin, or the hall of war propaganda? 

In the afternoon I went to Treptower to see the Soviet War Memorial, another site whose controversy rose in the wake of the Russian invasion. It suffered graffiti attacks directed at Russia, and has been a source of debate on whether Soviet monuments should be dismantled or at least come with intervening narratives that contest the original content of the monuments. A tall order, as the memorial at Treptower is one of the most totally engrossing sites I visited in Berlin. The effectiveness of its projected monumentality, the sense of scale—the deep length of the field of friezes narrativizing the war that lead up to the great mound and soldier’s statue at the far end. The tragic pose of the rows of weeping willows that lead up to the initial powerful view of the space, shouldered on each side by the sweeping angular plinths each with a kneeling warrior. 

It is hard to see just what kind of plaque or series of kiosks might do to complete with the absolute focus of the construction. Some 5,000 Red Army soldiers are interred there, of the 80,000 who died taking Berlin. The effectiveness of the space is such that you feel the weight of the total 27 million soviet dead in the vast quiet and solemnity of the place. Without the turn at Stalingrad the monument may have had a reversal and sat in Moscow, in a very different world. It is impossible to leave there without that knowledge. And it is impossible to be alive today and not know that the Soviet Union collapsed, its project came to ruin, that it was privatised, looted, and whatever reference made by Vladimir Putin to the glory of the Soviet advancements, they are as vulgar and distorted as Siegmund riding on his Simson 

Treptower is also then a monument to a dead world historical project. Made in its prime and left now to the fate of municipal bickerings, the herculean collective endeavors of its participants are historical fact and curiosity at best, and at worst the leftover markings of an insidious totalitarian regime, the absurd utopian failure of malign ideologues. 

Many of these monuments tend to say that in some register or another—that history is a warning. Let these memories ward you from the excesses of desire that irrationalized a continuity of progress. Place these things firmly in the past, in fact the monument itself is a result of excessive feeling which is to be managed. We don’t often make statues anymore, and when statues are cast of someone their undershoot of the aura is the common case—the Fulham Michael Jackson Statue, the Ronaldo, the Times Square Charlie Kirk—whatever your regard for these people they have world renown, and yet their fixed representation, even the most skillful of them, only inspire irony and scorn. 

In his book Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Enzo Traverso attempts to make historical failures of the left, and their consequent melancholy, the possible ferment of a productive orientation back into action. He assesses the state we begin to move from:

The dialectical tension between past and future is broken in a world withdrawn into the present. Once capitalism is naturalized, to think of a different future becomes impossible and the past appears as a warning against such a dangerous temptation. Pushed forward by the French and Russian Revolutions, the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries projected themselves into a future identified with “Progress” (industrial, technical, democratic, socialist). The twenty-first century, on the contrary, opens in a world without utopias, paralyzed by the historical defeats of communist revolutions. Abandoned by the “principle of hope,” our age of post-totalitarian, neoliberal humanitarianism does not perceive the past as a time of revolutions, but rather as an era of violence.

This characterization of the past as purely nightmare, whose recovery and redemption are blocked by the form of memory that the popular memorial offers, leads you to a brick wall. There is nowhere you can take a story of human history that cannot metabolize the dialectic of victory and defeat, success and failure, glorious act and terrible crime, not as pure isolations of some sequence of events, but in attempting to grasp whole constellations of acts and consequences, conditions and events, all together. 

Leaving Tübke’s painting behind after about three hours of continuous scanning was necessary after the fatigue fully set in, but the immediate next feeling was one of great enrichment, of wider outlook and new questions. New lines of inquiry to take on, and an immediate refinement of my own visual index, the scale of the piece exploding my sense of the possible and desirable in both personal expression and its task towards the aestheticisation of history. 

The monument, its projected memory, enervates you. It should, it should make you feel like sprinting into the wall until it breaks down before you. It should make you know that there will be great costs associated with great dreams, and that tasks come with obligations. It is not hubris to walk towards history as a redeemer, it is what history is begging us to do.

At the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin’s east, at the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (memorial of the socialists), the many significant comrades who struggle to found and realize German socialism were memorialized by the GDR. The center ring, around a massive stone are marked to the greatest names—Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Thälmann, Franz Mehring, John Schehr. Flowers are laid by visitors on all, many on Rosa. It was misting that morning when I rode there, so I was pleased that the sun was coming through, drying me out. Up at the top of the central stone are mounted letters that read: DIE TOTEN MAHNEN UNS - THE DEAD EXHORT US.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Jameson, Fredric. Foreword to The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I: A Novel, by Peter Weiss, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, vii–xliii. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Traverso, Enzo. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Wall, Jeff. "Draft for Dan Graham's Kammerspiel" (1981). In Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Peter Galassi. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007.

Weiss, Peter. The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I: A Novel. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Weiss, Peter. The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II: A Novel. Translated by Joel Scott. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Weiss, Peter. The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume III: A Novel. Translated by Joel Scott. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.