With Monuments, Does Language Matter? The Case of Germany

Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute for the first event in its Monument series.

This event is free and open to the public; a light lunch will be served at 11:30am. Please be so kind as to RSVP for our catering numbers through the FHI Facebook page (www.facebook.com/events/342451599571925/) or languageofmonuments.eventbrite.com.

What is at stake in conversations about monuments and monumentality? History and memory, space and place, inclusion and exclusion, destruction and recoding are among the usual suspects. Language, however, mostly goes unmentioned-the inescapable medium of those conversations though it remains. Language matters, we hear time and again, but does it matter where commemoration and oblivion are concerned? How and why? And what can a more prominent presence of language as a viable category add to the debate on what is monumental today? The German case, remarkable not only for the multiple layers of difficult heritage and the protracted bouts of "monument mania" (Andreas Huyssen) but also for the intricate and oft-negotiated taxonomy of commemoration, can be instructive for America.

[Event image is of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany. Its official title is "Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas," or "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe."]