Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

monument, its location and particularly against the artist. Alfred
Hrdlicka was and is an acknowledged sculptor but has always described
himself as a Communist. This did not make matters easy
and a few of the monument’s original supporters bailed out in the
intensity of the media campaign. I, however, supported the City’s
decisions and we were finally able to go ahead with the memorial.
There was many a dispute afterwards however – not least from representatives
of Vienna’s Jewish population. The ‘pavement-scrubbing
Jew’ sculpture, an integral part of the memorial, was
considered by some at the time to be degrading although today
there is no fuss about this at all. Criticism from the Jewish community
ultimately led to the erection of a specific memorial to commemorate
the Holocaust. I was given the task of finding an
appropriate site and sat on the panel that selected the artistic design
and supervised its subsequent construction. A location was
chosen right in the heart of the city, on the Judenplatz, and the panel
selected a design by the British artist Rachel Whiteread. Once
again there was intense public debate and once again we stuck by
our decision. I truly believe the memorial to be a success and, in
artistic terms, nothing short of a companion piece to Alfred
Hrdlicka’s memorial. Both, however, have their political and artistic
legitimacy.
This combination of town-planning and political/historical issues
and the structural residue of Communism confronted me once more
when, at the invitation of the German Federal Government and the
Berlin Senate, I became chairman (at that time I was already an
MEP) of a committee on the renewal of the historic centre of Berlin.
In practical terms the question at hand was whether the Palace of
the Republic, home to the parliament of the GDR, should be demolished
in order to rebuild the castle that had once stood on the
site and had been destroyed by the Walter Ulbricht. There were intense
discussions throughout Germany, especially in Berlin. After
intensive and painstaking deliberations and hearings lasting over a
year, our committee recommended the partial reconstruction of the
castle and the demolition of the Palace of the Republic. I voted for
this recommendation. There were no compelling reasons for preserving
the Palace as a reminder of the GDR, but there were some
very good planning reasons against it. Conversely, Berlin’s Castle
was not associated with the darkest chapter in German history and
233 Hannes Swoboda