Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead"

Robert Lowell wrote these lines about the monument located at the northeast corner of the Boston Common directly across the street from the Massachusetts State House. It memorializes the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, the first black regiment organized in a free state. It is usually called the "Shaw monument," after its central figure, Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the regiment, who was killed along with many of his comrades in the assault they led against Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863. (Their story was the basis of the movie Glory.) Anyone familiar with the tangled history of race relations in Boston can well appreciate the power of Lowell's simile.

Lowell could, however, just as easily be writing about many monuments in many cities and countries. Indeed, I will discuss public monuments in locales ranging from Moscow to Managua, Albania to Zimbabwe, not to mention a variety of American locales. In all of these places, one finds polities roiled in controversies attached to deciding who within a particular society should be counted as a hero worth honoring with the erection of a monument or the naming of a public space. Although as an American I am most interested in, and most of the pages below are devoted to, examples from the United States, I begin in Budapest, Hungary, with the fascinating tale of the Millennium Monument found there. Its vicissitudes wonderfully illustrate the central themes of this book; beginning in Budapest also underscores the ubiquity of the issues considered in this book.

The 1881 proposal of the monument, ostensibly to celebrate the millennium of Hungary's founding, was rooted, as is almost always the case with such campaigns by self-conscious politicians, in the political exigencies of the moment. As Hungarian historian András Gero aptly notes, it was also to function as a step in "an unprecedented drive towards modernization and the development of national consciousness, the main objectives of Budapest in its golden age." To be sure, the monument that was actually erected in the first decade of the twentieth century included statues of Hungarian national heroes going back to the conquest that established Hungary and the reign of Christianity-establishing King Stephen, who in 1001 accepted his crown from the Pope. Moreover, the archangel Gabriel had his own freestanding statue in the middle of the monument (and rising high above the other two sections) to signify the importance of Christianity to Hungarian national identity. Yet, if Hungarian identity was depicted as beginning in the mists of the millennial past, it also was inscribed in a specific narrative with what its sponsors no doubt deemed a wonderfully happy ending: Hungarian membership in the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the rule of the distinctly non-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. Had Bill Clinton been a nineteenth-century denizen of Budapest, one easily imagines him supporting the monument as a "bridge to the twentieth century" symbolizing the marvelous promise of ever greater imperial accomplishments. Thus Budapest citizens could observe statues of various Habsburgs, including Franz Joseph himself, sharing space with angels and other national heroes all incorporated into a satisfying story of national identity and historical progress.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire (and Franz Joseph) did not, of course, survive World War I. Indeed, when reading of the ambitious plans for the Millennium Monument, it is difficult to avoid thinking of Robert Musil's merciless satire of 1913 Vienna, A Man Without Qualities, in which hapless characters devote themselves to planning a great celebration of Franz Joseph's extended reign. (His reign had begun in 1848, the year of crushed rebellions and other hopes for transformative change, which perhaps reinforced the illusion that the tides of history could in fact be controlled.) The power of Musil's great postwar novel in part derives from the reader's knowledge of how the story will actually turn out, a knowledge denied the happily complacent haute bourgeoisie and governmental officials who inhabit the book. Apropos the specific theme of monuments, one might well note Musil's own mordant observation that "the most important [quality of monuments] is somewhat contradictory: what strikes one most about monuments is that one doesn't notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments." Musil well captures the combination of hubris and pathos in the attempt by the monumentalizing generation to speak to and, ultimately, control the consciousness of their successors. All monuments are efforts, in their own way, to stop time. As Nietzsche put it, in his observations "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life," a "monumental" view of the past, a particular kind of consciousness instantiated in the physical stone of monuments, represents "a belief in the coherence and continuity of what is great in all ages, it is a protest against the change of generations and against transitoriness." History, of course, moves relentlessly to mock any such beliefs.

The humiliating defeat of Franz Joseph's Dual Monarchy generated the emergence of an independent (albeit territorially reduced) Hungary. Nothing would ever be the same, including the Millennium Monument. In 1919 events took what Gero describes as "a radical turn ... as the proletarian assumed power." Among other things, this led to a revisioning of the Habsburgs, who "were now presented as agents of feudal-capitalist oppression." Far from the statues becoming, as Musil suggests, "invisible," they were all too apparent, generating the same discomfort as a "fishbone in the throat." Of course, the thing to do when so afflicted is to remove the offender. The monument was thus stripped of its statues of members of the Habsburg dynasty, and the particular "statue of Franz Joseph directly associated with the regime that had lost the war was smashed to pieces." For better or worse, the radicals were rather quickly replaced by counterrevolutionaries who installed a monarchy whose legitimacy was based on the Dual Monarchy. Not surprisingly, "the Habsburgs resumed their place of honour" on the monument. Moreover, the site of the Millennium Monument also was designated as the proper place to put up a "heroes memorial." The specific heroes who were being commemorated were those thousands of Hungarians who had lost their lives fighting in World War I, altogether unsuccessfully, to "maintain the borders which had been in existence for 1,000 years. ... Ironically, the memorial was thus dedicated to the soldiers of a war in which they had lost everything they had been fighting for." Like many other societies, the Hungarians proved themselves thoroughly capable of organizing their public psyche around a "lost cause." The site of the monument and memorial became "an inseparable part of the capital and a national landmark," renamed Heroes Square in 1932.

Once more fate intervened in Hungary's destiny, as Hungary made yet another disastrously wrong choice in political and military allies. The aftermath of World War II swept away the conservative regime that had cast its lot with Nazi Germany;...