The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

than destroy it. In the ensuing “public relations fiasco”, the concrete core of the
monument proved almost impossible to dislodge, and two demolition contractors, six
hundred thousand marks and three months later, Lenin’s pieces were laid to rest in a
gravel pit. In contrast, the Thälman monument survived after those who had lost the
battle over Lenin regrouped. In any event, its size made it almost impossible and too
expensive to destroy. Instead it became a site for popular graffiti through which
members of the public intervened in debates on old memorials. Likewise, the bronze
figures of Marx and Engels, which formed the centrepiece of the Marx‐Engels‐Forum,
and which were probably spared by their “lack of heroic monumentality” were
reinterpreted in the public imagination through the irreverent and unofficial nickname
“the Pensioners”. As a memorial in retirement, this site also became a site for graffiti
artists to intervene in the contests of meaning over biographic memorials. 90
As Lenin’s “heroic mythology” was dispelled in the 1990s, the reverence with which
its “holiest relic”, the Lenin mausoleum, had been treated began to wane. As the lines
of visitors started to disappear and demands for its closure mounted, the mausoleum’s
hours of operation were reduced and in October 1993, the vigil maintained by the 24‐
hour honour guard was abolished. Fearing an imminent presidential decree in favour
of burial, the outraged remaining members of Russia’s communist political structures
held a 24‐hour vigil for several weeks. In 1997, a referendum was proposed by Boris
Yeltsin in order to determine the future of the mausoleum, and a view began to be
expressed inside and outside the Russian Orthodox Church that Lenin’s body should
be properly buried. Since the late 1990s, any plans to remove Leninʹs body seemed to
have lost their impetus, and the mausoleum, instead, began to convey a rather bizarre
sense of being a place that had been forgotten by time. The debate over Lenin’s body
had become a symbol of Russia’s crisis of identity and the public’s ambivalent feelings
90 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, pp 196‐205; other biographic objects of socialist memorialism
such as figurines, sculptures, statuettes, engravings and conversation pieces which had formed the
basis of Stalinist exhibitions celebrating socialist achievement in the Museum of German History
in East Germany, were passed over to the German History Museum after unification, where they
were consigned to a “Special Inventory” of “a curious collection of surviving relics” of a “defunct
state”. Many of these souvenirs celebrated the memory of socialist leaders; see Andreas Michaelis,
DDR/GDR/RDA Souvenirs (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1994).
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