Statues of Robert E. Lee should be what Dachau is today: A reminder.
STATUES OF LEE SHOULD BE WHAT DACHAU IS TODAY: A REMINDER
The former concentration camp at Dachau is located in a pleasant suburb just outside Munich. You can get there easily by public transit — the S2 train from Munich’s Hauptbahnhof followed by the 726 bus — but there’s also vehicle parking at reasonable rates. Guided tours offer glimpses of the gas chamber (which guides say wasn’t used) and the ovens (which were used extensively).
After Dachau it’s only about 90 minutes to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountaintop lair in the Obersalzberg. The Nazi dictator didn’t spend a lot of time in the grandiose retreat on a peak overlooking Berchtesgaden, preferring his chalet farther down the slope, where he could harangue bored underlings with endless, repetitive monologues. Nonetheless, it’s a steady tourist draw, reached via a polished brass elevator that rises through sheer rock.
In the days since the tragedy at Charlottesville and the debate over statues to Civil War- era generals and Confederate statesmen, it has been argued that other countries don’t honour their worst political or military figures, so the U. S. shouldn’t either. Monuments to Lenin and Stalin were pulled down across the former Soviet Union; one of the enduring memories of the Iraq war is the trashing of statues of Saddam Hussein. And Germany, it was noted, doesn’t erect memorials honouring the Nazis.
That’s true enough, though the statues that once did exist were likely as not erected by the Nazis themselves, who were skilled at nothing if not self- glorification. But it’s also misleading to end the argument there. Germany has plenty of other leftover Nazi appurtenances, which act as a major draw for the important tourism industry. Underground tours of wartime bunkers are popular; visits can be booked of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin where 105,000 Jews perished; and there’s always the grounds at Nuremberg where Hitler held massive annual party rallies.
What’s important is that Germany doesn’t offer up the sites as shrines. In the aftermath of the war — two wars, really, including the First World War — German leaders grasped the first rule of learning from history: that it happened, and hiding from it does nothing. The Nazi era was real. Hitler and his monsters existed, and thrived on overwhelming public support for their crimes. The point of maintaining Dachau and the other sites is to acknowledge the past and accept responsibility for it, and to provide a lesson, and overwhelming refutation, to those who might wish to pretend it never happened.
The thing with history is that it doesn’t go away. The more you store it away in backrooms and memory holes, however, the easier it is to ignore. You could spark a good argument over which was a greater sin against humanity, the organized institution of slavery or the Nazis’ determined pursuit of genocide. Hitler’s heyday may have been shorter, but the butchery was far more concentrated. Slavery, on the other hand, was considered entirely acceptable by much of the “civilized” world for centuries.
If Nazi bunkers, museums and death camps act as a reminder of how dark the human soul can be, memorials to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the savage raider Nathan Bedford Forrest can serve the same purpose, a counterpoint to ongoing impulses to sanitize and reconfigure the realities of the war into a sort of Disneyfied southern struggle, in which honourable southern gentlemen sought only to protect the right of their home states to set their own standards and pursue their own policies in defiance of an intrusive and overbearing government in Washington. That view of the Confederacy is hooey: the “rights” the South so treasured were those that allowed it to treat other human beings as property they could buy and sell or abuse at will.
It’s a bit curious that the remaining statues would become such a belated focus of interest. The eastern U. S. is littered with other reminders of the conflict. Battle grounds at Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, Bull Run, Fredericksburg and the mother of them all, at Gettysburg, where Lee came the closest to a victory that could have altered the course of the otherwise hopeless crusade. There’s Jefferson Davis’ White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, the remnants of Fort Sumter in North Carolina, or the obscure courthouse at Appomattox, where Lee, in his finest regalia, surrendered to U. S. Grant in his field uniform and muddy boots. Why all the attention to a few bearded figures spotted with bird droppings? In a country where a sizable proportion of the population couldn’t name the vice- president, is there really a threat that more than a tiny percentage could identify the subjects of statues erected as much as a century ago?
Not likely. The statues serve only as the easiest target for activists and extremists bent on refighting long- ago wars. Sculpted images of Lee and the others could be for black Americans what the continued existence of Dachau is to Jews: a reminder of the horrors they were subjected to, the struggle they’ve waged to get to where they are today, and inspiration to continue the pursuit of justice against the sort of ragged remnants of hatred that turned up at Charlottesville.
It’s perfectly understandable that people despise the cause championed by the subjects of the statues and feel a thrill from seeing them smashed. But it serves no purpose other than to increase the likelihood that people will forget what happened in the past, and make the mistake of repeating it.