Monuments to Dead Empires

By Matthew Piasecki

What makes a structure into a monument? Does it become a monument when people celebrate it as a symbol of their culture or accomplishments? Does this happen when someone wants to make a statement, to make people remember some great tragedy or sacrifice? What happens to these monuments when all the builders are dust, and their languages are forgotten? How do we understand the meaning of their buildings, the importance of their architecture? In a place such as Central Europe that has seen the rise and fall of countless kingdoms, empires, and nations, monuments cover the land from centuries of shifting borders and waring peoples. Throughout my time in Poland and Central Europe, understanding these monuments to “dead empires” has become a focal point of my studies. To most people, when you say the word “dead empire”, the immediate thought is usually something from antiquity, like the ruins of Rome or Egypt; and when it comes to landmarks, people think of the Colosseum, or the Pyramids of Giza. These structures are landmarks as they have withstood the sands of time, yet they have lost their original lustre due to centuries of neglect, and their immediate impact in their respective cultures can now only be guessed at through historical context and literature. While there are castles and statues that have survived since the Middle Ages in Central Europe, to me the most fascinating monuments that still stand are those built by dead empires within the last century.

Before even arriving in Wrocław, I had heard stories from my father of its greatest landmark, Hala Stulecia, or Centennial Hall. Built as a monument to the Prussian Empire’s 100th anniversary of its victory over Napoleon, Centennial Hall’s story started as a feat to German engineering at the turn of the century. Built in 1913 in the German city of Breslau, Centennial Hall would end up changing hands multiple times. In its relatively short 111-year existence, Centennial Hall was claimed by six regimes, starting from its origin under the German Empire, the short-lived Weimar Republic, the National Socialists, and eventually into the hands of the Soviets, and later Poles after the war. The site was even modified after its conquest by the Soviets and Poles, who erected a large metal spire taller than Centennial Hall to show their dominance over Germany. Yet, when I first heard about Centennial Hall, I did not even know that Wrocław wasn’t always Polish. My dad, who grew up in the city, had always told me it was a movie theatre during the communist era, and I was surprised to learn when I visited that it even held festivals and concerts. Although Centennial Hall may have been built to celebrate a long-forgotten victory, its continued use over the last 100 years has built memoires for generations of people and continues to make memoires for the citizens of Wrocław today.

Roughly 345 km West of Wrocław in a gloomy park in the Treptow borough of Berlin, stands a very different monument to soldiers from a not so forgotten victory. This place is not a site of festivals and concerts, but rather a gloomy and looming graveyard. The Soviet War Memorial is a monument dedicated to the fallen Soviet soldiers of the Battle of Berlin and stands as a distant memory for the once divided city, a memory of pain and of lost glory. Grand and imposing, the monument makes a person feel small and humbled by the towering figures that stand guard over the bodies of more than 5,000 lost souls. Set in an artificial valley of trees, the monument makes you feel as if you’ve left both Berlin and the 21st century, with rows of murals carved out of stone showing the story of Soviet liberation, told by comrade Stalin. At the apex of the burial ground, beneath a towering statue of a valiant soldier with a sword, is its innermost sanctuary – a tomb to the unknown soldier.  This mausoleum is decorated with an Eastern Orthodox inspired mosaic dedicated to the Friendship of Peoples, who united, managed to defeat fascism. The Soviet War Memorial is frozen in time, a monument to both the triumph of Socialism over fascism and the far-reaching arm of the Soviet empire at the very edge of its “sphere of influence”. Although the city today is reunited, and the West has democratized the East, this moment stands out like a sore thumb. Today, people visit the site for a brisk morning jog in a place as tonally cold as Berlin’s weather, or for a moment of quiet and reprieve in an otherwise always bustling city. The Soviet War Memorial is no longer tied to a living memory, the ideology that built it died along with its regime. Its iconography tells a story about the glory of a once seemingly unstoppable force, one of the world’s greatest superpowers, a superpower that managed to collapse itself overnight and was reduced into a laughingstock with a drunk clown for a president. I think that it is hard for people in the West who grew up during the Cold War to imagine the Soviet Union as a dead empire, yet for many people from my generation, the Soviet Union is as almost as ancient to us as Napoleon’s France. For many of my peers these empires are just names on an old map, and I think part of my fascination with studying the USSR and the Eastern Bloc has been how something as seemingly unyielding as the Soviet Union could just implode.

While the Soviet War memorial was a celebration of the Soviets winning over fascism, it was not a celebration of the people of Berlin. The road to building back postwar Berlin was a long and tense saga that saw the beginning of the tensions between East and West Europe, with Germany being the dividing line and literally split down the centre. Due to the intense fighting during the war, many sites were destroyed or demolished or downplayed due to their connections to the Nazi period. East Berlin did not have many monuments for its citizens to be proud of. One of East Berlin’s first “monuments” was the Berlin Wall, an unwelcome state construction built to “keep people safe” from the imperialists in the western half of the city. The Berlin Wall would become a symbol of both the horrific government of the GDR and of oppression under communist regimes in their totality. The Berlin TV Tower in 1969 was a major monument, which helped establish East Berlin’s skyline and gave people something to look up at and feel proud of. Its construction gave the façade that society was starting to return to a somewhat normal place, and that the people of East Berlin were as industrious and competitive as their Western neighbours. However, the crown jewel of the GDR was its Palace of the Republic. Constructed on the remains of The City Palace of the Prussian nobility, The Palace of the Republic was the GDR’s shining golden beacon. The site was a masterclass in socialist design, an elaborate and slightly ostentatious building, featuring an exquisite interior with impressive glass light fixtures that floated on the ceiling. The building featured a bar for the party members that was fancy enough to meet their tastes, yet not too bourgeoisie, an arcade, a bowling alley and even a discothèque. Its centrepiece however was its impressive theatre hall which doubled as both the seat of parliament, and as a venue for performances. Although the building was only in use for around 14 years, it quickly became one of the most famous symbols of East Berlin. Like Centennial Hall, the Palace of the Republic gave a lot of East Berliners many bright memories that they could share with their children after the wall came down. But unlike in Wrocław, the Palace of the Republic is no longer standing and can no longer build memories. Since the Palace of the Republic was the seat of power for the GDR and East Berlin, it had to be sacrificed in the name of reunification.  Like the Soviet War Memorial so intrinsically connected to Soviet ideology, the palace died once the Soviet empire collapsed.

In today’s Berlin, the place where the Palace of the Republic once stood is now the site of a new building, a supposed synthesis of Western ideology and Eastern ingenuity. The Humboldt Forum, a new “palace of the people” is an exhibition space and museum, stylized after the original design of the Prussian Palace of the City. The palace is no longer a seat of government yet is styled after the autocracy.  The controversial reconstruction of Humboldt’s façade invokes images of the imperialistic history of Germany, and the harm it caused during its colonization efforts in Africa. For a country so plagued by its disturbing recent history, it is surprising that the choice was made to rebuild a symbol of its colonial might. However, when analysing the ideology that built the Palace of the Republic, it starts to become a bit clearer as to why the decision was made to cloak the Humboldt Forum in an aristocratic style. To show that Germany and Berlin were moving beyond its troubled socialist past, a purely ideological decision was made to restore the face old order, yet not being able to fully purge East Berlin out of its history, the elements of a place for the people was kept from the Palace of the Republic. While on the heels of a disturbing rise in a new wave of nationalism and imperialism. While memorials can be sites of beauty and tell deep and profound messages or stories, they can also be the inspiration to more nationalistic elements of a culture. In the Soviet War Memorial for example, there is a mural depicting Stalin calling the peoples of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, etc. to unite and fight against the Nazi oppressors. Many of these minority groups under the thumb of Soviet Statehood suffered under the Russian majority in Moscow during the Soviet Union, and to this day Russia uses its former imperialistic ties to these lands to attempt to justify their war in Ukraine and interference in Georgian elections.

Due to the problematic nature of messaging and history of these sites, in recent years many relics from the Eastern Bloc and communist rule are being torn down in the name of moving forward and spreading democratic values. Despite the problematic messaging from a site like The Soviet War Memorial, I do not feel that tearing down and building over this past, like with the Humboldt Forum, is the right path. To me, tearing down the Soviet War Memorial would be just as terrible as tearing down the Palace of Versailles. While not a site as grand as Versailles, the Soviet War Memorial can tell us as much about Stalin’s dangerous ideology and how the Soviets viewed themselves as much as the Hall of Mirrors and gold chandeliers do about Louis XIV and monarchist France. Unlike Versailles however, the monuments of the 20^th Century are still being used by governments today. We cannot just allow these spaces to become centres of ideology; we need to understand who built them and look at them critically.  If we can learn about these monuments from our parents and grandparents who used them before us, we understand better how to use them for the sake of the next generation. These spaces may be monuments to “dead empires”, but the people who used these spaces are still alive. As somebody who studies Russia, understanding the Soviet period of their history is one of the most crucial matters in the world now. By erasing this difficult past, my generation that did not grow up under the thumb of a socialist regime, or the threat of nuclear annihilation, will not know the struggles of our parents, and proceed to make the same mistakes, and let our kids suffer the same consequences. We cannot bulldoze all the memorials to dead empires and build new ones to ourselves.

References

1. Hohensee, Naraelle, “Negotiating the past in Berlin: the Palast der Republik,” Smarthistory, October 21, 2018 https://smarthistory.org/palast-der republik/

2. Fienberg, Melissa, “Communism in Eastern Europe”, Routledge,