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Memorial services
A call to require less from our public monuments
has much to recommend it, writes Daniel Trilling
Monumental Lies: Culture Wars
and the Truth about the Past
Robert Bevan
Verso Books, £20
ISBN 9781839761874
The frieze adorning the municipal offices on
Piazza del Tribunale in Bolzano in northern
Italy, lays claim to being Europe’s largest sur-
viving fascist artwork. The 198-square-metre
bas-relief depicts, in cod-Roman style, the
highlights of Mussolini’s pre-war political
career. At its centre is an image of the dictator
himself, mounted on horseback, above the
Fascist Party slogan credere, obbedire, com-
battere – believe, obey, fight.
The work survived Italy’s partial post-
war purge of fascist imagery (in fact, it was
only fully finished in the 1950s) and even
today, amid heated debate, Bolzano’s current
administration has chosen to preserve it. Yet
rather than allowing its objectionable political
content to go unchallenged, Bolzano has now
overlaid its frieze with a new artwork, a set
of illuminated letters that spell out a gnomic
phrase from Hannah Arendt: ‘No one has the
right to obey.’ In this context, it undercuts the
pomposity of the original message.
For the writer and heritage consultant
Robert Bevan, this stands as an exemplary
approach to a controversial monument. The
subversive addition does not obscure the his-
tory of the original – instead, it highlights it,
transforming the meaning of the artwork in
the process. As Bevan puts it, a monument
glorifying a dictator has become what Ger-
mans call a Mahnmal, a reminder of events
never to be repeated.
Bevan believes this kind of imaginative,
yet honest approach to public space is urgently
needed today. ‘When our cities are reshaped
as fantasies about the past, when monuments
and statues tell lies about who or what events
deserve immortalisation, the historical record
is being manipulated,’ he writes in his new
book, Monumental Lies.
As he sees it, the built environment is under
attack from two directions. A ‘resurgent and
reactionary architectural traditionalism’ has
emerged at the same time as new technology
enables architects and designers to make digital
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copies of lost or destroyed structures. In Britain
and the United States, there is a conservative
backlash against demands to remove or recon-
textualise monuments to slavers, colonialists
and other historical villains. In Germany,
a craze for ersatz reconstruction of pre-20th-
century city landmarks (the Humboldt Forum
in Berlin being the most prominent – and gro-
tesque – example; see January 2022 issue of
Apollo) has nationalist undertones. Even in the
sensitive field of protecting heritage in wartime,
conservationists have been lured by the prom-
ise of superficial reconstruction – after ISIS
destroyed much of Palmyra in the last decade,
UNESCO announced plans to rebuild before
it had even been able to survey the damage.
Instead, Bevan argues, we need to revive
the spirit of authenticity in the built environ-
ment and ‘forge a clearer understanding of the
past while safeguarding evidence of the reality
of historical wrongdoing’. Our monuments,
after all, are part of the historical record – and
‘if we fake or destroy that record, how can we
ever learn from it or guard it against those
who would use an absence of facts against us?’
The authenticity he favours is not politically
neutral. Rather, Bevan wants to recover the
original spirit that animated William Morris’s
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings
and institutions such as the National Trust – ‘a
socialist resistance to capitalist spoilation and
not Little Englandism and country house tours’.
The argument in Monumental Lies is
aimed primarily at the cultural left. Bevan
is sympathetic to calls to rethink our public
architecture so that it more fully acknowledges
past injustice, or becomes more representative
of the society that surrounds it – London, he
points out, has more statues of animals than
of named women. But he also cautions against
placing too much importance on symbols
as agents of social change, questioning ‘the
degree to which changing the built environ-
ment genuinely alters our lives and values’.
This may seem at odds with his insistence
that we take heritage seriously, but Bevan
would rather we saw t5 he less salutary of pub-
lic architecture as ‘a crucial witness to dark
events’. Removing a monument may some-
times be justified, but Bevan believes it’s more
important we remain alert to ways in which
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‘critical layering’ can keep us in dialogue with
history. In Bolzano, for instance, Italy’s fascist
heritage is not denied – but neither is the fact
that people opposed fascism.
Although Bevan insists at the outset that
Monumental Lies won’t simply be a retelling of
famous recent controversies, much of the book
does in fact tread that somewhat familiar terri-
tory. What’s more, his insistence on ‘evidence’
as the guiding principle for good approaches
to heritage, in contrast to ‘the more unreliable
and problematic idea of memory’, is some-
thing of a false opposition. The revision of
Bolzano’s fascist monument works precisely
because it plays with memory – rather than
simply dismissing an emotionally-driven
story (the myth of Mussolini), it introduces
a rival one, about resistance.
But Bevan makes a knowledgeable and
thought-provoking intervention into what
has become an overheated yet also frequently
boring debate. The most interesting parts of
the book are where he talks about alternative
approaches to memorialisation. Aside from
Bolzano, there are unofficial interventions,
like those of the artist Rachel Reid, who placed
branding irons in the hands of the central
London statues of Charles II and James II to
draw attention to royal involvement in the
transatlantic slave trade (Fig. 1). Or there can
be pointed expressions of collective disgust,
like the statue of Paraguay’s former dictator
Alfredo Stroessner, whose broken-up frag-
ments were reassembled in a new monument
to his victims.
Taking this flexible attitude to monumen-
tal architecture is an acknowledgement that
since our societies change over time, our ways
of remembering should reflect that. In ancient
Greece, Bevan points out, battlefield trophies
were built from timber rather than stone, so
that they would decay over a generation to
avoid enmity between Greeks, or hubris in
victory. Repairing them was forbidden. Per-
haps, he wonders, ‘we should be allowing our
monuments to fall into ruin, let them fade from 1. Grinling Gibbons’s statue of James II in Trafalgar Square as
history in their own time’. Now, there’s an idea. it appeared in Rachel Reid’s Royal Slavery installation of 2020
Photo: David Gill
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights
in the Distance: Exile and Distance
at the Borders of Europe (Picador).
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