When dealing with confederate statues and monuments, the United States should look to how Germany has since dealt with its injustices after the Holocaust, according to professors who spoke in an online event on Monday.
Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to “coping with the past,” refers to how the country has handled remembering the atrocities of the past. Most memorials emerged since the country’s reunification in 1990, according to The Local. Boston University post-doctoral fellow Sultan Doughan said that Germany still has some remnants of the Holocaust in the country, but that these are not monuments held in public spaces. She thinks that confederate statues in the United States should be taken down with a conversation about why the monuments are obsolete.
A confederate statue, “At Ready,” which was near the site of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, was removed on Saturday, according to The New York TImes. The monument was 111 years old.
University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Max Page said that he used to feel that confederate statues shouldn’t be removed because he thought that history should be confronted, not erased. He said that he has since changed his perspective and thinks that monuments and memorials are believed to be powerful because of how much has been invested in them. He said that those monuments weren’t memorials to the fallen dead—rather they were built as a reestablishment of white supremacy in the south and a tool in maintaining white supremacy.
“At the moment, when I look at the U.S., I find the conversation to be very polarized,” said Doughan. “It’s hard to have that conversation partly because there are recent developments that hit into the same wound, and that wound is that a certain justice was not really delivered to the African American community. And this delivery of justice, this idea of life for a community coming out of injustice, they need a certain repair. And that repair in a very symbolic manner, is to have a public space that does speak about these issues.”
Doughan is a post-doctoral fellow at Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center. She was trained as an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Doughan’s work inquires what citizenship can be for religiously differentiated minorities in a secular nation-state, especially after genocide, according to her biography on BU’s post-doctoral fellow website.
Page is a professor of architecture, and director of historic preservation initiatives at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, according to his university biography. He is the director of the Master of Design in Historic Preservation Program. He received his bachelor’s education at Yale University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on cities and architecture.
The conversation was moderated by Emmett Williams. Williams is an award-winning producer and multimedia artist. He started his own international production company, Mission Man Media, which uses “media as a lens for activism,” according to the event website.
“His goal is to educate and inspire audiences about the intersection of social, racial and environmental justice,” reads the website.
The event was co-hosted by the Center for German and European Studies and the Department of Fine Arts.
