Exiling Karl Marx from Karl Marx Square: The Political Lives of a Leipzig Monument before and after 1989

Abstract

Across the world, the ‘difficult heritage’ of discredited monuments has prompted pitched disputation. This article explores the fraught origins and fate of Leipzig's Karl Marx monument. From its unveiling in 1974, it was one of the East Bloc's most controversial landmarks, as it stood on the site of an intact Gothic church dynamited in May 1968 in the face of East Germany's largest mass protest between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution. Enthroned on Leipzig's central Karl Marx Square as an ideological triumph, the post-communist expulsion of Marx to a remote courtyard evolved out of a selective, contingent process, wherein asymmetrical power relations culminated in ‘events’ when the monument acquired an ideological charge. From a myriad of potential destinies, the decision to exile (rather than retain or destroy) Marx's effigy can only be deciphered by unpacking the layered symbolic messages players ascribed to the evolving aesthetics at its initial location before and after 1989. Informing disputes about landmarks from Ukraine to the American South, the rise and fall of Leipzig's Marx monument exemplifies how and why a metal object can become a lightning rod for controversy, as well as how its re-exhibition can facilitate discussions about trauma, guilt, and redemption.