Fallen Idols

September 6, 2021
Historian von Tunzelmann (Blood and Sand) takes a brisk and informative look at “how societies around the world have put up, loved, hated and pulled down statues in order to make statements about themselves.” She traces the rise and fall of a dozen statues over the past 250 years, including a sculpture of King George III torn down by an “excited crowd” of Continental Army soldiers and American patriots in New York in 1776, and a bronze statue of Saddam Hussein toppled by American soldiers and a small group of Iraqi civilians in 2003. According to von Tunzelmann, Egyptian pharaohs routinely destroyed statues of their “rivals and predecessors,” while the late 19th century saw the height of “statuemania” as a “visual expression of Great Man history.” She also delves into the “wave of iconoclasm” that swept the world in 2020, drawing a connection between George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer and the tearing down, 13 days later, of a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England. Contending that traditional statues are “didactic, haughty and uninvolving,” von Tunzelmann advocates for festivals, performances, and other “forms of commemoration” that “engage people” and “bring history to life.” Enriched by accessible history lessons and trenchant analysis of contemporary politics and culture, this is a persuasive call for a “much wider and more mature engagement with the past.”

October 15, 2021
Black Lives Matter protesters began toppling statues around the world in 2020. As historian von Tunzelmann (Blood and Sand, 2016) notes, this action is not new; the forcible removal of statues occurred during the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the fall of the Soviet Union. Activists around the world have defaced, set on fire, or brought down statues of slaveholders, generals, imperialists, and dictators. She notes that not all statues have equal cultural and artistic worth and asks plenty of questions. What do they symbolize? Who removed them, and why? And, perhaps most important, who is allowed to decide which stories get told in the public space? "Statues are not neutral, and do not exist in vacuums," von Tunzelmann writes. Public reactions depend on not only whom a statue commemorates but also who defends them. The dozen statues she focuses on include depictions of George III, George Washington, Joseph Stalin, Rafael Trujillo, Lenin, Saddam Hussein, and Robert E. Lee. History records the past, but the memory of history, she notes, is always "contested." A vital and relevant study.

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