Dialogues about national identity: Recent memorials in democratic capitals

The concept Gegendenkmal (counter-monument) emerged in 1980s West Germany to describe critical artistic responses to Germany's difficult history and its persisting Imperial and National-Socialist monuments. Karen Franck, Ruth Fazakerley and I proposed the term 'dialogic memorials' to focus on cases where new commemorative forms and meanings are placed in conscious spatial juxtaposition to existing ones. Three examples we examined emphasize the potential for such dialogue to reflect upon and revise national identity: two in longstanding national capitals, Canberra and Washington, and one in West Germany's largest city, Hamburg. My subsequent research has expanded upon the study of memorials in various capital cities and their role in national identity. In democratic countries, commemorative landscapes evolve through complex negotiations between political parties, social movements, subject experts, and individual mourners. Such dialogue both reflects a nation's democratic traditions and contributes to them. The following discussion of a range of dialogic memorials in capital cities will emphasize three broad points about the continuing political and historical potency of public art. Old memorials and traditional figurative forms have found renewed relevance in dialogues that revisit history and reframe contemporary national identity. Secondly, the contrasts that recent memorials present with past commemorative frameworks may be spatial as well as formal and representational. Thirdly, South Africa presents particularly expansive illustration of new memorials developing a thorough dialogue with the past.