4 - Erasing or Replacing Symbols

Summary

This chapter uses monuments as heritage, and a means to create new symbols to cement an oppressive regime. As these regimes fall, these symbols are erased or replaced. Monuments are known in cultural heritage jargon as movable cultural heritage or cultural objects. The chapter focuses primarily on efforts to remove or relocate statues and other monuments that are associated with oppressive periods in a nation’s history. It examines tensions around monuments and symbols in the controversies around statue removals in the United States (US Civil War), and Eastern Europe (Soviet Regime). Particularly with respect to the latter, it also investigates in-depth the creation of Memento Park in Budapest, a park that houses Soviet monuments removed from Hungary’s capital after the end of the Soviet regime.