A Hero's Many Faces: Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments (The Holocaust and Its Contexts)

A Hero’s Many Faces The Holocaust and its Contexts Series Editors: Olaf Jensen, University of Leicester, UK and Claus...

Author: Tanja Schult

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A Hero’s Many Faces

The Holocaust and its Contexts Series Editors: Olaf Jensen, University of Leicester, UK and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, Loughborough University, UK. Series Editorial Board: Wolfgang Benz, Robert G. Moeller and Mirjam Wenzel More than sixty years on, the Holocaust remains a subject of intense debate with ever-widening ramifications. This series aims to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Holocaust and related issues in contemporary society, politics and culture; studying the Holocaust and its history broadens our understanding not only of the events themselves but also of their present-day significance. The series acknowledges and responds to the continuing gaps in our knowledge about the events that constituted the Holocaust, the various forms in which the Holocaust has been remembered, interpreted and discussed, and the increasing importance of the Holocaust today to many individuals and communities. Titles include: Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (editors) ORDINARY PEOPLE AS MASS MURDERERS Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives Tanja Schult A HERO’S MANY FACES Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments Forthcoming titles: Olaf Jensen (editor) HISTORY AND MEMORY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST IN GERMANY, POLAND, RUSSIA AND BRITAIN

The Holocaust and Its Contexts Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-230-22386-8 Hardback 978-0-230-22387-5 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

A Hero’s Many Faces Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments Tanja Schult Researcher at Stockholm University

© Tanja Schult 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-22238-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-22238-2

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral thesis which I defended at the Department for Northern European Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, in October 2007. The thesis was financed by the European Union–project BaltSeaNet and supported by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Södertörn University College contributed generously to the printing costs and a contribution by the Department for Northern European Studies, Humboldt University, made it possible to engage Frances Boylston of Montreal, Canada, to upgrade and standardize the English.

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He tore open the wrappings to find a small, exquisite statue, a Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom. He gasped . . . turned the statue around, admiring its delicacy and grace from every angle. It was the one miracle that could suddenly wash away his fatigue and the unceasing images of brutality and suffering that had been with him for the past months. Athena—beauty and wisdom. These qualities still existed. He passed his hands over the figure wonderingly, caressing it. He was lost in reverie; Mrs. Kasser, glowing with the success of her gift, turned to go. He looked up. “Thank you, I’ve missed art,” he said. Raoul Wallenberg upon receiving a Christmas present from a colleague in 1944, as retold by Elenore Lester in Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 119.


Contents List of Plates

xiv

List of Figures

xv

Preface

xvii

Introduction

1

The Raoul Wallenberg monuments

1

State of research and scope of the object of research

4

The personal monument genre

7

Theoretical and methodical approaches

18

The use of the terms monument and portrait

23

Syntax of the study

26

PART I Raoul Wallenberg 1

29

The Monuments’ Protagonist

31

2 Raoul Wallenberg’s Life, Mission, and Fate

34

3 Raoul Wallenberg in Historiography and Popular Imagination

41

4

The stuff heroes are made of

43

Hero skepticism and the survival of a questioned concept

48

Raoul Wallenberg—A Hero’s Tale

51

The hero’s origin

52

The call to adventure

54

The challenge that makes the hero

56

Tragic fate—eternal life

58

The individual against the cruel regime

59

Legend by number

60

The civil hero

63

The universal hero

65

Wallenberg as the world’s conscience

68

xi

xii

5

Contents

The Monuments as Part of the Wallenberg Commemoration The Holocaust hero in the age of globalization

73

Concluding remarks

76

PART II The Raoul Wallenberg Monuments 6

Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed

8

9

79 81

The hero as man-of-action

81

The fighter

81

The helper

99

The diplomat 7

69

114

Raoul Wallenberg’s Fate

133

The hero as victim

133

The prisoner

134

The lost son

149

The hero without a grave

154

The martyr

157

Raoul Wallenberg’s Legacy

169

The hero as ideal and obligation

169

The outstanding deed

170

Thank you

189

Courage and compassion

196

Freedom

201

Hope

203

Pienza

219

In memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s deed

226

Raoul Wallenberg’s Insubordination

233

The hero as trouble maker

233

The unconventional hero

234

PART III Raoul Wallenberg as Monument and Hero

257

10

259

Challenges, Comparisons, and Conclusions Specific genre preconditions

259

The challenge of finding a consistent motif

265

Contents

xiii

The problem of readability in the monument genre

273

Expectations on the monument genre

284

A question of concept: Unambiguousness versus openness

289

Wallenberg monuments as contemporary representatives of the genre

292

The monuments’ protagonist: The universal hero Raoul Wallenberg

296

Catalog

303

Overview of all Raoul Wallenberg monuments (in chronological order)

304

Catalog entries of every monument (containing basic facts)

306

Notes

364

Bibliography

400

Photograph Credits

417

my heroes

418

Index

419

Plates 1

Pál Pátzay, Snake Killer, 1949/1999, Budapest, Hungary.

2

Philip Jackson, The Wallenberg Monument, 1997, London, England.

3

Franco Assetto, Angel of Rescue, 1988, Los Angeles, USA.

4

Uga Drava, Pietà, 1987, Nepean (Ottawa), Canada.

5

Imre Varga, The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1987, Budapest, Hungary.

6

Jon Rush, Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg (Thank You Raoul Wallenberg), 1995, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

7

Gustav and Ulla Kraitz, Hope, 1998, New York, USA.

8

Staffan Nihlén, Pienza, 1993, Malmö, Sweden.

xiv

Figures 6.1–6.2 6.3–6.4 6.5

6.6

6.7–6.10


83–84

Paul Lancz, Raoul Wallenberg Bust, 1996, Montreal, Canada.

94–95

B. Horn, R. Wallenberg, 1986, Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study- and Memorial Center in Eilat, Israel.

97

Lotte Stavisky, Raoul Wallenberg Bust, 1983, New York Public Library, Manhattan, New York, USA.

98

Willy Gordon, The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg, 1999, Lidingö, Sweden.

6.11–6.16 Philip Jackson, The Wallenberg Monument, 1997, London, England.

100–105 115–123

6.17 Adam Chyrek, Raoul Wallenberg, 1992, Sydney Jewish Museum, Sydney, Australia.

126

6.18 Miri Margolin, Raoul Wallenberg Bust, 1995, US Capitol in Washington DC, USA.

127

6.19 László Csíky, Raoul Wallenberg Sculpture, 1996, Jewish Museum, Budapest, Hungary.

128

6.20 Franco Assetto, Angel of Rescue, 1988, Los Angeles, USA.

130

6.21 Ulla and Gustav Kraitz, Attaché case, 2002, Skärsätra, Lidingö, Sweden.

132

7.1–7.4

Anna Cohn, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, Sydney, Australia.

135–138

7.5–7.7

Ernest Raab, The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1996, Toronto, Canada.

139–141

7.8

Gianpietro Cudin, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg, 2001, Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow, Russia.

xv

142

xvi

Figures

7.9–7.10

Ernst Neizvestny, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 2002, Gallery Astley, Västmanland, Sweden.

143–144

7.11–7.13 Uga Drava, Pietà, 1987, Nepean (Ottawa), Canada.

150–152

7.14 James Stoval, Raoul! Where are you?, 1983, Menlo Park, California, USA.

155

7.15–7.19 Imre Varga, The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1987, Budapest, Hungary.

159–163

7.20–7.21 Mark Salman, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg, 1991, Yad Vashem – The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel.

166–167

8.1–8.3 Lenke Rothman, To Remember – The Outstanding Deed, 1997, Swedish Riksdag (Parliament), Stockholm, Sweden.

174–182

8.4–8.6 Jon Rush, Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg, 1995, Ann Arbor University, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

191–193

8.7–8.10 E. M. Adams, Courage and Compassion, 1998, Parsippany, New Jersey, USA.

197–200

8.11 Károly Veress, Freedom, 2000, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA.

202

8.12–8.17 Gustav and Ulla Kraitz, Hope, 1998, Manhattan, New York, USA.

204–218

8.18–8.21 Staffan Nihlén, Pienza, 1993, Malmö, Sweden.

220–222

8.22–8.23 Charlotte Gyllenhammar, In Memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s Deeds, 2007, Gothenburg, Sweden.

227–229

9.1–9.7 Kirsten Ortwed, Hommage á Raoul Wallenberg, 2001, Stockholm, Sweden.

236–247

10.1 Joseph Wachtel, Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg, 2000, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA.

266

10.2–10.3 Klement and Marek Trizuljak, Raoul Wallenberg Monument, Bratislava, Slovakia.

267–268

10.4–10.5 Cecilia Campos, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Sculpture, 1999, Vitacura, Santiago de Chile, Chile.

269–270

10.6–10.7 Karl Duldig, Monument to Raoul Wallenberg, 1985, Melbourne, Australia.

271–272

10.8 Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1985, Cardiff, Wales.

298

Preface The Series ‘The Holocaust and its Contexts’ aims to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Holocaust and issues related to it in contemporary society; it acknowledges and responds to the continuing gaps in our knowledge about the events that constituted the Holocaust, the various forms in which the Holocaust has been remembered, interpreted and discussed, and the increasing importance of the Holocaust today to many individuals and communities. The series is distinctive in its reference to actuality and in its interdisciplinary openness to contributions from a variety of fields, including history, sociology, psychology, memory, the theory of culture, European-Jewish philosophy, and gender. It provides a forum for original, leading-edge scholarship, offering established scholars a place for reflecting on their work and enabling younger authors to publicize their original research. The series is particularly keen to promote the work of international Holocaust researchers who may write traditionally not in English with a view to promoting this to English-speaking audiences. In this way, it aims to accelerate and expand the dissemination of innovative Holocaust research in the Anglophone world. Tanja Schult’s monograph A Hero’s Many Faces: Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments combines an analysis of the activities of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, one of the most important and well-known Righteous Gentiles who rescued a large number of Jews in Budapest in 1944, with the postwar acts and politics regarding his remembrance and memorialization in many parts of the world. It sheds light on the artistic concepts, collective memories and ‘master narratives’ behind the individuals and groups who were setting up the monuments to commemorate and honor Wallenberg in the different countries and how the memory of Wallenberg is used and incorporated into those pieces of art. A Hero’s Many Faces presents a unique and thorough analysis of almost all monuments erected to commemorate Raoul Wallenberg around the world. The author traces how these monuments came about and analyzes the ensuing political, social, artistic, and historical debates surrounding them. The research is based on first-hand visits and xvii

xviii

Preface

documentation of the monuments, and interviews with many artists and those involved in setting up the monuments. The book provides invaluable material for the analysis of public and private, official and unofficial reactions to these monuments, their influence on public and private discourses and social memory. Olaf Jensen & Chris Szejnmann, January 2009

Introduction

The Raoul Wallenberg monuments Since the 1980s there has been broad public acknowledgement of Raoul Wallenberg’s humanitarian activity on behalf of the Hungarian Jews during World War II. This is manifested by the existence of monuments erected in his honor. By 2008, 31 Wallenberg monuments had been erected in 12 countries on five continents: from Hungary to Sweden, from Canada to Chile, from Australia to Russia. And at the time of writing these lines another monument is waiting for its realization in Germany.1 For Professor Frank Vajda, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who credits his survival to the actions of Wallenberg, the question of comparative artistic merit is simply not relevant to a discussion of monuments erected to honor his rescuer. Speaking some 55 years after surviving the Holocaust, Vajda expressed his views thus: I don’t think it is a matter for comparison. We have to accept that they [the monuments] express an idea of human recognition of greatness, and they pay tribute to a man who is above tributes. He is international, he himself is symbolic now and we must remember he was a human being and for that reason I prefer something tangible that reminds me of a human being, a strong, powerful, intelligent, brave human being. But if you just draw a diplomatic bag or a Schutzpass or a big S and that represents Raoul Wallenberg or just a name, a big W, that already indicates Wallenberg, I am very happy with that and I don’t criticize any work of art in relation to Raoul Wallenberg. I think it is all wonderful.2

1

2


Vajda’s statement foreshadows many topics relevant for the present study. It makes clear that the Wallenberg monuments are intended to honor the historic person. By referring to the variety of formal expressions of the Wallenberg monuments, Vajda takes up the problem of what constitutes a worthy tribute to a man whom many consider to be “above tribute”—in other words, a hero. This is essentially a question of how the artists choose to deal with the historic figure and the myth that surrounds him. Furthermore, Vajda’s statement expresses an attitude often found within Holocaust survivors and others active in keeping the Wallenberg memory alive: thankful that Wallenberg is commemorated at all, the question of how particular commemorations look is not of primary interest. The aim of this study, however, conducted from the viewpoint of art history, is to investigate the various understandings of Wallenberg as expressed by artists in their particular monuments. Consequently, for this study the question of how the Raoul Wallenberg is represented is crucial. The purpose of the study is not to judge between “high” or “low” art, but rather to investigate which strategies or concepts the artists used to present their ideas of Wallenberg. How does posterity commemorate a man who in popular literature is often called the “greatest hero of all times”? Which places do we dedicate to his memory? Which artists are chosen to create these signs of remembrance? How are we affected by these monuments once completed? What societal impacts do they have? With the exception of the very first monument (erected in 1949 but demolished even before its official inauguration), all the Wallenberg monuments have been created and erected essentially during the last two decades, starting seriously in the mid-1980s.3 The rich diversity of these monuments invites dialog about the different understandings of Wallenberg as expressed in the artistic solutions. The question how the artists choose to represent Wallenberg’s deeds, fate or legacy, and which aspects of the Wallenberg narrative the artists regard worth telling, is the center of attention in this study. As will be explained in Part I, the Raoul Wallenberg story incorporates many aspects of a classical hero narrative and can be read as a hero story that has survived the “un-heroic” twentieth century. Wallenberg has become a hero of World War II, and his example is used today to communicate humanitarian values and human rights in many democratic societies. After both the monument genre as well as the hero concept fell into disrepute in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, especially in the latter, many regard it as a particularly difficult task to

Introduction

3

create a public monument for a purported hero. By their shapes and settings, the Wallenberg monuments shed light on how contemporary artists tackle this challenge and how they deal with the genre and the hero theme. Of foremost importance to investigating the Wallenberg monuments adequately is the realization that they belong iconographically to the well-established genre of personal monuments. The personal monument genre traditionally implies remembering and honoring a person who is regarded as outstanding. The Wallenberg monuments pay tribute to Wallenberg’s humanitarian actions on behalf of the Hungarian Jews in 1944/5. Unfortunately, the Wallenberg monuments are often mistakenly defined as Holocaust Art and then criticized in terms of this false perception. Historian Tim Cole (Bristol, England) criticizes the Budapest monuments dedicated to Wallenberg because in his eyes they seem to neglect the Jewish victims.4 Historian Paul A. Levine (Uppsala, Sweden) erroneously defines Kirsten Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument in Stockholm as “Holocaust art” and even states that her work “is Sweden’s primary public memorial to the genocide of European Jewry.”5 Of course, it was never Ortwed’s intention to create a memorial to the genocide but rather specifically to Raoul Wallenberg. And indeed, there are several monuments in Sweden commemorating the destruction of European Jewry, one in fact close to Ortwed’s work: the Holocaust Monument erected in 1998, situated behind the Great Synagogue. A clear distinction between “Art of the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Art” is complicated; the lines are fluid. In this study, “Art of the Holocaust” is used to describe the art produced in camps and ghettos and artworks created by survivors,6 whereas “Holocaust Art” describes works that are responding to the Holocaust, including artworks by the second and third generation, which challenge the forms of representation as well as critically reflect on the Holocaust remembrance.7 What unifies all these artworks is the subject that defines the term: the overriding theme is the destruction of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis.8 Though dealing with the same period, the Wallenberg monuments are not Holocaust monuments. They are erected to honor Wallenberg, not to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, even some of the artists who have created a Wallenberg monument felt the need to point out that this distinction exists. For example, Jon Rush, creator of the Ann Arbor monument, made this clear: “I wanted this to be a memorial to Wallenberg, not to the Holocaust.”9 However, there can be no doubt that the Wallenberg issue is related to the Holocaust. It was in the context of the Holocaust that Wallenberg’s

4


mission took place, on behalf of Europe’s last large Jewish community, and it is owing to the attention paid and the recognition given to the Holocaust over recent decades that the Wallenberg story gained the significance it has today in many Western societies. But in contrast to monuments erected on the actual sites of the crimes and dedicated to Jews murdered in these places, or any other artwork dealing with the destruction of European Jewry, the Wallenberg narrative gives voice to hope, shelter, and rescue. At the same time, this story is intrinsically tied to the Holocaust. Some artists may perceive it a dilemma that the Wallenberg narrative is both a Holocaust-related subject and a subject conveying hope and positivity. How do you honor a man, who was rather an exception in an age of war and destruction, against a backdrop of millions of Jewish victims whom no one ever tried to save? How do you create a personal monument long after the genre itself seems to have lost its relevance and the hero concept has fallen into disfavor, especially given the genre’s misuse by Nazism and Stalinism? When creating their Wallenberg monuments, the artists had to deal with these dilemmas and had to take a position toward the monument’s topic as well as toward the genre itself.

State of research and scope of the object of research The Raoul Wallenberg monuments were the topic of the documentary Raoul och de 30 monumenten (30 Monuments to Raoul Wallenberg), directed by Swedish filmmaker Peter R. Meyer in 2001. For his film, Meyer was awarded the “Guldbagge,” the highest Swedish film award, for best documentary film. The documentary offers a valuable overview of the subject, mainly concentrating on the question why it took such a long time to erect a Raoul Wallenberg monument in Stockholm. The only academic study on the subject to my knowledge was written by Yann Ollivier, then a student at the Faculty of History. His unpublished master’s thesis is divided into two parts: the first, called La Mémoire de Raoul Wallenberg (2001), deals with the commemoration of Wallenberg in general while the second part, Les Monuments dédiés à Raoul Wallenberg (2002), investigates the monuments more specifically and from a socio-historic point of view. With the exceptions of the small brochure that accompanied Lenke Rothman’s work in the Swedish Parliament (1998), the booklet on Gustav Kraitz’s Wallenberg monument in New York (1999) and the book by photographer David Finn, also on Kraitz’s Hope (2000), no

Introduction

5

single publication is dedicated exclusively to a Wallenberg monument. Of importance are the two exhibitions organized by the Skissernas Museum (Museum of Sketches for Decorative Art) in Lund, Sweden, which resulted in two booklets, the one already mentioned about Kraitz’s monument, and another on the competition for the Wallenberg monument in Stockholm. These exhibitions evoked much media response, especially in the regional newspapers of southern Sweden. All in all, the Wallenberg monuments in Sweden, and even some abroad, such as the one in New York created by Swedish artist Gustav Kraitz, were subject of widespread Swedish media interest. The articles on these works were easy accessible in the comprehensive databases of Mediearkivet, Artikelsök, and Presstext. Furthermore, the Wallenberg monuments of more prominent artists, such as Imre Varga, Kirsten Ortwed and also Staffan Nihlén, were discussed in catalog texts or other publications.10 However, even if there was a considerable material available in databases such as those mentioned above, much research was required to discover the monuments’ existence and to contact their creators. The homepages of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF) and The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of Sweden were useful, though some contained notable mistakes, for example, listing wrong dates or settings.11 Initial research thus revealed that even though there was a fair amount of information about Wallenberg monuments, there remained a general lack of adequate classification of these monuments. Few of the monuments have been described, analyzed, and discussed from the point of view of art history. Clearly there was a need for further investigation and research into the process by which these monuments came into existence (which would include determining who was instrumental in creating the monument, including organizations responsible for the commission, art dealers, politicians, and especially the artists), as well as an analysis of the final outcome. Prior to this study no academic scholar had investigated from the perspective of art history all the existing Wallenberg monuments in a comparative cultural study, starting with the question of how the monument artists expressed their understanding of the hero Wallenberg. It was this task that I set for myself by conducting an interdisciplinary study designed to contribute to the socio-historical research on the commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg. Thereby, this study uses the hero concept to investigate how artists understand Wallenberg and express this through their monuments. Furthermore, the study contributes to the discussion of the personal monument genre.

6


In conducting the study I investigated 31 Wallenberg monuments. My criterion for selection was that these works can be found in public places or are permanently installed in museums or libraries, thereby accessible to the public, or are at least occasionally on display as part of other cultural activities. Reliefs placed on some houses in Budapest are for the most part not included in the study and only one memorial stone is included as representative for that type of monument. Other known works were not examined because they were not found within a public installation;12 some works are referred to only within the references, are mentioned for the sake of completeness and to facilitate further research. Furthermore, neither medals nor smaller sculptures that are used as awards are considered.13 In a few exceptional cases unrealized projects or competition drafts are briefly mentioned, largely in cases where they indicate that the Wallenberg story had attracted the interest of particular individuals long before the political will was established to raise a Wallenberg monument. As a three-dimensional art form, the Wallenberg monuments depend on the environment and their placement within it. The setting, as we will see, can be decisive for the interpretation of the work: the setting can contribute to enriching the monument’s meaning or, on the other hand, it can be a clear disadvantage that undermines the work’s expression. The nature of the genre makes it necessary to view the monuments “on the spot.” It is very difficult to give a reliable description without seeing the work in its surroundings, noting how light changes the surfaces and thus the whole expression, and appreciating how it interacts with its surroundings. In fact, the specificity of the medium makes it desirable for it to be experienced tactilely whenever possible to achieve a better comprehension of the work.14 Photographs can serve as supporting tools but cannot really replace the actual visit to the site. Unfortunately, owing to the widespread distribution of the Wallenberg monuments it was not possible for me to visit all of them. With limitation of resources and time, I decided that it would be essential to visit Wallenberg monuments in Sweden, which was Wallenberg’s home country, in Budapest, where he performed his deeds, and in the country that had the biggest influence on bringing his memory to international attention, the USA.15 Fortunately, I had the opportunity to see some monuments in England, Wales, and Canada, but other monuments had to be described from photographs. Although not entirely satisfying, this imposed choice is not without justification. First, busts like the ones in Jerusalem or Moscow can be better described from photographs than larger and more ground-covering works, whose

Introduction

7

expression changes when we walk around them. Second, the unvisited monuments do not contribute thematically or artistically anything new to the subject; the exception is the one in Santiago de Chile, and it has a very flat character that allows it to be accessible through the means of photographs only. Most of my field-study trips took place in 2003, and in the main I will refer to the monuments’ conditions at that time. In the course of writing this study, changes were made that affected some Swedish monuments. While I was able to deal with the changes made in the Stockholm area and in Malmö, I was, for obvious reasons, not able to do the same with the other existing monuments.

The personal monument genre Because the Raoul Wallenberg monuments belong to the personal monument genre with its long tradition in art history, I will give a brief review of the development of the genre and draw attention to some genre-specific aspects. This overview is meant to facilitate the understanding of the monuments’ analyses that follow in the present study. The focus of the overview lies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because developments then still influence our understanding of the personal monument genre today. Both the Greeks and the Romans erected monuments to individuals, including rulers as well as philosophers and poets.16 Christianity did not serve as a suitable ideology for developing the genre because of its refusal to honor individual deeds: it was God only who was to be honored. As a result, personal monuments were hardly ever seen during the Middle Ages; seldom did they appear, for example, as monastery figures. It was only during the Italian Renaissance, against the background of the intellectual movement known as Humanism, that the personal monument genre once more had the chance of a real breakthrough. Renaissance artists created personal monuments that emulated the monuments of antiquity. The first freestanding monuments with the character of a memorial were dedicated to popes and sovereigns.17 Soon afterwards other outstanding personalities were considered memorial-worthy. However, most projects dedicated to geniuses were not undertaken in practice; an exception was the monument to Erasmus in Rotterdam dated 1622. During the Baroque period, it was primarily monarchs or other royal rulers who received monuments; only in exceptional cases were there clerical rulers, as in Rome, who were the subject of monuments, thus authenticating the idea of absolutism.

8


The friendship monuments and memorial stones dedicated to men of politics, science, and philosophy, which had already become common in English landscape gardens in the first half of the eighteenth century, can be seen as early forerunners of personal monuments as we understand them today. By the end of the eighteenth century, the first bourgeois monuments had been erected in public places. For instance, the enlightened government of the absolute monarch Frederick the Great of Prussia tolerated the erection of such monuments. They were indeed a sign of the ongoing emancipation of the bourgeoisie.18 The Age of Enlightenment provided the theoretical framework for and ushered in a proliferation of personal monuments. It extended the range of persons who through their intellectual and individual achievements were found worthy of a monument. Now dynastic monuments, dedicated to those who received honor by birth, found competition. The French Revolution led to an iconoclasm of unknown dimensions. Monuments were overthrown because of their massive dimensions and because they supported the belief in a world order under an absolute monarch. In other words, these monuments symbolized a political system that was no longer valid. However, the Restoration in France soon halted this direction in the development of the genre. When the bourgeoisie gained more and more financial and political power, they were able to commission monuments themselves, without any form of monarchic paternalism. During the nineteenth century, when the liberal bourgeoisie began to take over the role of the purchaser, which previously had been the exclusive role of monarchs, the aristocracy, and the church, the personal monument could flourish. Now monuments were even initiated by artists or intellectuals. During this time the role of the artist changed, and so did the role of the bourgeoisie. While previous monuments were primarily dedicated to monarchs and generals, personal monuments were henceforth dedicated to outstanding individuals from, for example, the fields of art, science, and business, and were even installed in public places.19 This development made visible the claims of the bourgeoisie for a more prominent place in society. It also is testament to their financial capacity to erect such works because the choice of material (preferably bronze or marble) and its treatment, were expensive, even though industrialization made them less exclusive undertakings than they had been in earlier centuries. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, personal monuments depicted people selected from all walks of life on the basis of their accomplishments.

Introduction

9

The chosen individuals, for the great majority men only, were often represented in a standing pose. From its inception this monument type was not employed to designate a certain class, unlike the monuments that were in the genre of the equestrian and seated monument,20 although it began by being reserved for historical characters like monarchs, statesmen, heroes, popular speakers, and reformers. During the late nineteenth century the genre of statues of great men was so popular that critics soon spoke of a pestilence of monuments.21 During the 1860s, innumerable monuments were erected to scholars, artists, physicians, inventors, and entrepreneurs. This flood of all types of monuments was an attempt to establish testimonies of duration in a rapidly changing world.22 The abundance of monuments questioned, however, the genre’s exclusivity and contributed to its devaluation. From being considered as one of the most distinctive tasks of artistic creation, even as the highest ranking in the hierarchy of the monument genre,23 the genre became increasingly obsolete largely as a result of the general inflation of personal monuments from 1860 onwards. By then nearly anybody could be commemorated with a monument. Even though monuments, even before the age of enlightenment but especially during the nineteenth century, always had didactic or educational purposes,24 there was a risk that monuments might become no more than decorative elements in public places. Nevertheless, we are reminded that the purpose of the genre, however, was (and is) to encourage one to “think.” This becomes particularly clear when examining the German term “Denkmal,” which conveys the sense that the genre is characterized as functioning as a symbol of ideals and moral orientation.25 This characteristic was often criticized and regarded as a hindrance in the genre’s artistic development. However, even today most memorial makers are convinced that monuments should convey some (uplifting) message or have some useful, enlightening function. The genre has always been accompanied by discussions of who deserved to be commemorated by a monument and, if judged worthy, how the person could be commemorated in a worthy way. Did the honored deserve the pose of a standing figure or would the portrait bust be enough? After a while, such categories became less strict but then there remained the question of the style of clothing used in the monument. If the represented is to act as an ideal owing to his achievements (and most that were represented were, indeed, men), would it be better to clothe him in an antique robe representing timelessness, as common during Early Classicism and Classicism, or would it be better to bestow upon him a time-specific costume to give an idea of the time and place

10 A Hero’s Many Faces

when he had lived, as became common during the nineteenth century? Would the antique robe heighten the idealized and in this way contribute to the beholder emulating the individual? Would the time-specific costume mean a degradation of the represented or contribute to a better identification? While there was continuous debate over the formal strategies through the centuries (the question of the clothing came to be replaced by the question whether figurative or abstract solutions were more adequate), the core problem remained. How can the person adjudged worthy be represented adequately and in a way that is understood by many people over a long period of time? This is a problem that the Wallenberg monuments artists had to face. To simplify matters, one may state that in general the personal monument genre underwent formal changes that implied the radiation from complex formal solutions to reduction and abstraction. Figurative solutions fell into disfavor especially as a result of their misuse by totalitarian regimes during the twentieth century. However, even in earlier times not everybody was convinced that the (nude) human body was suitable for expressing ideals. Even today, both figurative and non-objective monuments exist, but so does the controversy about which of the two formal strategies is better able to create a public (personal) monument. Non-objective monuments are often accused of being unable to mediate message and thereby considered inadequate to fulfill the monument’s function, namely, to remember and to honor. However, it is worth mentioning that not only contemporary artists who create non-objective monuments, but even artists during Classicism, especially at the beginning of the nineteenth century, believed the non-objective strategy to be superior to figurative solutions. In fact, doubts about the legitimacy of figurative representation were a precondition for the emergence of non-figurative monuments. It was believed that non-objective monuments were better suited to offering timeless solutions.26 The emergence of non-representational or non-objective personal monuments is tied to the history of Modernism and the breakthrough of abstractionism.27 Since the Renaissance, art has continually developed toward an autonomous field of experience. As a result, artworks were primary judged by their aesthetic quality. The breakthrough of abstract Modernism can be seen as the peak of this development with great consequences for the monument genre. “At the beginning of the twentieth century stands the discovery that it is form that is constitutive for an artwork.”28 Abstract elements had, however, always been a part of the arts. Indeed, abstract monuments of the twentieth century had their forerunners in art history. We only have to think of the obelisk of

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11

ancient Egypt or the memorial cult during the Enlightenment with its restriction on pure stereometrical primal forms. New [in the twentieth century] in the area of monuments is not abstraction as such, but the expansion of its claims to the whole: even to the position of the most prominent, which so far had been occupied by the figurative monument. The concept that the avantgarde of classic Modernism had of abstraction implies its universal responsibility.29 Precursors of the development of abstract elements in monumental art can be found in the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century when it was believed that monuments could do without figurative or portraitive elements because the honored was paid homage as the “incarnation of an all-embracing spirit of the world.”30 During the eighteenth century, monuments lost their iconographic obligations. The significance of pure forms became more important. Especially in architectonic monuments, geometric forms were increasingly dominant after the abandonment of figurative representation. At the beginning, iconographic references were still noticeable, but they were already charged in a subjective way. Gradually the new quality of abstraction emerged. Monuments underwent a change marked by a tendency to architectonization, which finally led to the principal renewal of the genre.31 Abstractionism acquired a new status during the twentieth century. In the beginning of this development, only a few artists tried to achieve an interpretation “of things and of the human spirit” (Obrist)32 through a language of non-representational forms. Most monument artists still made use of the human figure, even if they supplemented it with allegories or attributes. Those who renewed the genre radically were the Soviet constructionists, especially Vladimir Tatlin. He is credited with taking “the radical step from representational to non-representational sculpture”33 with his model for The Monument of the Third International (1919/20). All symbolic representations were omitted in this building in favor of entirely abstract structures. Even though Tatlin’s building was never realized, it became a starting point for innumerable abstract monuments. Italian futurists, Soviet constructivists, and German expressionists developed a radical abstract language of forms in the years prior to and especially after World War I. The then-current political movements, with their renunciation of the individual and their unbroken belief in progress,


contributed to artistic developments that entailed a departure from figurative toward abstract representation. Non-representational monuments appeared usually in periods of radical socio-political changes that seemed to favor their existence, such as the French Revolution, and can even be regarded as the reason for their breakthrough, as was seen during the Russian Revolution.34 Non-representational monuments fell into obscurity after a short flowering during the 1920s. In the Soviet Union, Socialist Realism became dominant. All over Europe, plastic art was marked by a return to Classicism. The takeover by the Nazis in 1933 and World War II suspended the development of this style. However, Soviet constructivists had made major developments in the monument medium as, for example, the idea behind the structural integration of the base with the ambition of sculpture’s total liberation from the base;35 such attempts were later taken up and developed further. Despite the short blossoming of abstractionism, monumental forms that had been developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were for a long time still typologically assumed with only gradual or no changes. Artists who favored official monumental art continued to adhere to traditional representations of the human figure until World War I.36 As commonly known, World War I had a strong impact on Western societies and the arts. After 1918, the cult of the dead soldier generated more and more non-objective solutions. The aftermath left by the dictatorships of the twentieth century, as well as the development of art after the breakthrough of Modernism, had a lasting impact on the medium. World War II and the Holocaust were definitely benchmarks in history, and this fundamental rupture in civilization affected especially the monument genre. After half a century of severe ideological misuse, dictatorships, world wars and in the backdrop of the Holocaust, many artists refused to hold on to traditional hero representation in the personal monument genre. To those, non-objective monuments expressed a mistrust of the preeminent importance of individuals in contrast to the figurative monuments of the nineteenth century.37 While Modernism questioned the justification of further monuments, Auschwitz seemed to make it impossible to create them. The barbarism of the Nazi crimes led to a fundamental rupture that affected the arts enormously, at least on an intellectual level. For many artists the atrocities of the crimes demanded a rethinking of the role of the artist as well as how artworks look. This attitude is still strong among many contemporary artists, particularly in the field of monuments.38 At the same time, there was a strong need to remember the victims of

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13

Nazi persecution. For many, memorial places as well as monuments were judged the appropriate way to satisfy this need. The artists faced a dilemma: while many regarded the “Final Solution” as too dreadful to be represented at all, the need to mourn had to be satisfied somehow. Many artists resolved this issue by choosing abstractionism as best able to handle the problem that figurative representation, they felt, was unable to cope with: to express what was regarded as inexpressible. For those who favored the genre, the abstract language of non-representational monuments was the answer. Abstract art seemed to exclude any kind of use or, even worse, misuse.39 Furthermore, abstractionism was viewed as being able to unify the many different nationalities of the victims of ethnic persecution during World War II. Contributions to that an artwork, it was argued, could be understood independently of the viewer’s ethnic background.40 Hence, abstract forms were perceived as a suitable world language. Furthermore, many avant-garde artists of the past and present were convinced that abstraction was simply superior to figurative representation.41 Non-objectivity seemed also to respect the traditional tendencies in Jewish culture toward abstractionism, which in regard to Holocaust memorials was considered an advantage. Against the background of the atrocities of World War II, abstraction within the non-representational monument lost its meaning as a metaphor for the belief in progress, as Tatlin expressed in his visionary Monument to the Third International. Instead, abstraction became an expression of mourning, lamentation and even speechlessness, and a means of self-questioning. However, there were also critical voices raised against the use of abstractionism, especially from the survivors. Many demanded figurative solutions because the suffering had indeed been physical and not abstract. According to these critics, the human body had to be part of the representation if one did not want to diminish the victims’ suffering. Similar arguments for and against non-representational art and figurative representation are employed by monument producers and critics today even for works that do not necessarily deal with the Holocaust. Although major artistic developments were undertaken before World War II, the artistic achievements of modern art really expanded after 1945. Postwar abstract art was generally perceived as representative of modern Western industrial and democratic nations. Although it was the Ukrainian Tatlin who created the first non-representational structure, it was the arts and architecture of Western societies that in the course of the Cold War turned away from figurative representation owing to its misuse in the Nazi era and under Soviet communism. Abstract solutions


were now favored in Western democracies. They had even “assumed the role of an ideological antidote to Soviet and East European figuration.”42 Abstract art was regarded as predestined to represent the ethos of the West. In the postwar period the turn toward abstractionism in Western democracies clearly focused on the individual. This focus stood in contrast to the attitude that once led to the breakthrough of nonrepresentational monuments in the 1920s. Previously, it was socialist artists, or at least artists who stood in opposition to the art of the bourgeoisie, who created such monuments. After the experiences of art’s misuse during the reign of various dictatorships, there was a general skepticism toward any ideological use of art in the West. Individual freedom was now regarded as most worthy of protection. Non-objectivity seemed the most appropriate way to express individual freedom, and abstractionism became an absolute synonym for it.43 The second blossoming of non-representational monuments was at first limited to the years after 1945. One of the many pathfinders for the development of the monument genre in the 1980s was the general growing interest in public art during the 1950s. In the 1960s, the monument medium was, however, generally still a mistrusted art form. For many, the genre appeared to give only limited, one-sided images of history and was in Western societies often regarded as useless.44 During the 1960s, the alleged noble pretensions and representative necessities with which monuments commonly seemed aligned were left to the whim of artists who turned the genre upside down.45 One artist, Claes Oldenburg, carried this tendency to the extreme. Oldenburg utilized and enlarged everyday objects, icons of America’s mass culture like hamburgers and lipsticks, to gigantic sizes and placed them in public places. With his large-scale projects, Oldenburg satirizes the monument’s noble claims to symbolize timeless virtues. His strategy implied a return toward representation. The arts of the 1960s were marked by innovation and experimentation. Many artistic styles such as Action Art, Pop Art, Neo-realism, Happening or Fluxus, to name only a few, breathed new life into traditional art forms.46 While the 1960s had no direct influence on the development of the personal monument genre, these years of experimentation and of challenging norms were nevertheless important and in the long run also influential for sculpture and the monument genre. While some artists had experienced World War II and the Holocaust as a fundamental rupture that made it impossible for them to continue in their former style, other artists continued to look at nineteenth

Introduction

15

century’s monuments for inspiration, if even certain elements, such as the base, were subject to change. In contrast to sculpture, which underwent much bigger changes and which in turn also affected the monument genre, the creation of new forms in the field of the monument genre was rare. Here the conservative trend persisted in contrast to radical developments in modern sculpture of the twentieth century, at least until the 1960s. For almost two decades many continued to perceive the monument genre as anachronistic, an impossible artistic task. Many understood the genre’s origin as undemocratic, as a demonstration of the powerful,47 or simply as old-fashioned. The general criticism against monuments was whether or not the genre had anything to contribute to the ongoing discussions in democratic societies.48 Hence, it could be said that the monument genre underwent revitalization in a democratic sense. In the 1980s, the genre was revived and renewed on the basis of the previous artistic achievements and socio-political developments. Since the 1980s, there has been a renewed interest in and a renewal of the genre via a strong interest in history, especially World War II history. Broadly understood, the knowledge of history became the responsibility of every politically mature citizen.49 This development is traceable to demographic changes in society. The generation who committed the crimes during World War II was crowded out by the succeeding generation, which feels the responsibility of investigating the crimes committed by their parents and has a mission to keep the memory of the victims alive. Notwithstanding this development, neo-fascist movements are simultaneously succeeding in attracting some adherents again, and not only in Germany. While the primary function of nineteenth-century monuments was to influence broad masses of people,50 the twentieth century had developed much more influential ways to influence people or to provide knowledge such as through mass media and the internet. Monuments of the nineteenth century had to use a recognizable and conventional language of forms, which was easily understood by the mass of people, to fulfill the genre’s function. Since the 1960s and especially since the 1980s, monument makers do not necessarily consider it to be the monument’s task to spread information about a certain event or person and to offer a recognizable language of forms for this aim. Now monument artists see their foremost task to be to raise questions and invite discussions about history. From the 1980s onwards, the monument genre was understood “as a generator of impulses for critical reflection, a source of friction for public debate.”51 Monuments created during that time often rejected simple statements or authoritative manifestations and forced


spectators to chart their own mental paths. While the traditional monument was meant to find a binding image of history, the monuments created since the 1980s were much more multifaceted. They intended to evoke reflection, document historical events, encourage people to communicate with each other, actively change the urban space, provoke and shock—there is only one thing they do not want: to reduce history to one generally-valid formula.52 To achieve this goal, artists made use of general developments in the field of art. From the 1960s many attempts were made to integrate art into daily life. In fact, this was a common characteristic of many styles that flourished, such as Fluxus, Minimal Art, or Arte Povera. The common goal was to encourage the passive art-consumer to take on a more active role in the perception of artworks. It was hoped that this integration would lead to a further democratization of art (and society). However, the renewal of the monument genre, especially since the 1980s, went along with a radical questioning of the genre. Some artists created monuments that turned toward invisibility. These works caused intense discussions about the genre’s function, use, and possible appearance and contributed to rethinking the genre. For example, in 1990, the German artist Jochen Gerz secretly removed cobblestones during the night from the square in front of the castle of Saarbrücken. On the bottom side of the stones, Gerz engraved the names of Jewish cemeteries where Jews were buried until the Nazis came to power. Then he replaced the stones. Later on, when the project was officially approved, more and more names of Jewish cemeteries were added. By 1992, 2146 stones had received inscriptions. The number of stones gave the monument its title: 2146 Steine—Mahnmal gegen Rassismus Saarbrücken (2146 Stones—Memorial Against Racism Saarbrücken). The action left no visible traces but caused an intense public debate. The process of engraving names on the bottom side of the stones and replacing the stones in exactly the same order brings to mind the acts of concealment of the Nazi crimes during and after the war. It visualized the all too-common pattern of brushing Nazi crimes under the carpet and pretending that nothing had happened. In this way, the work challenged the genre’s involvement with the powers during the dictatorships and demanded a discussion of the genre’s current possibilities. Even today there is still a vivid mistrust toward the monument genre, which has been reflected in many projects. Many artists took up the problem of “monumentality” including the Swedish artist Alejandra

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Lundén with her installation För tro—en installation med 843 byggklossar (For Belief—An Installation With 843 Building Bricks, 2006–). The names and life data of children who died in the Israeli-Palestine conflict are engraved onto building bricks. While children play innocently with these colorful bricks during the exhibition, their parents are overwhelmed by discomfort because they realize the context to which the bricks refer. Even while these children from a society at peace play, Lundén’s bricks function as a reminder of the innocent children who died during the conflict. In a global media age, we live our lives knowing about conflicts far away. By letting the children build high towers that sooner or later will crash, Lundén reflects on dreams we have built in our lives, some of which crash not because of mechanical problems but because of the decisions other people take. Furthermore, the installation brings to mind associations with the thousands of monuments that were erected to dictators in Eastern Europe but torn down after 1989, reminding us of the genre’s ideological misuse during the centuries. I met with a similar mistrust toward the monument genre when using the term “monument” to classify the works dedicated to Wallenberg. Many artists reacted harshly against using the term monument to describe their own work. They insisted that their particular work was not a monument but a memorial. These artists apparently felt a strong need to differentiate their works from the monuments of former decades, which were stigmatized by political misuse. Such reflections and developments, as only suggested here, of course had a strong influence on the monument genre. This will be further discussed when we investigate the Raoul Wallenberg monuments. Here we conclude by stating that since the late nineteenth century the end of the monument genre has repeatedly been announced but has never became reality. The personal monument genre persevered and continues to exist today. Although monuments were detrimentally affected by misuse during Nazism and Stalinism, and although monuments have been a highly questioned art form ever since, they never entirely ceased to be a legitimate working field for artists. After being the subject of considerable controversy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the renewed interest and further development of the genre contributed to its enjoying a renaissance, particularly since the 1980s. In terms of Holocaust-related subjects, the monument discourse has changed over the years. The question was no longer if the past should be remembered but rather how it could be remembered and represented.53 At the same time, the human figure became “monument worthy” again, both to honor the deeds of an individual as well as to


commemorate the suffering of victim groups. Despite all reservations toward the genre, monuments, both non-objective as well as figurative, still proceed to public installation. The existence and variety of the Wallenberg monuments indicate that the genre is still wanted and indeed very much alive.

Theoretical and methodical approaches Monuments have always depended for their existence, as well as their appearance and the choice of setting, on a number of time-specific socio-political, socio-economic, and aesthetic factors. Hence, they can be investigated from many different angles. Who or what is judged worthy to be depicted? How did the idea of a monument emerge? Who took the decision and how was it implemented? To what extent did costs affect the choices? Were the funds public or private, and were they from subscriptions or taxes? Was the artist commissioned directly or through competition? What degree of freedom was the artist given? All the above issues influence the monument’s appearance, and all these aspects together document the cultural attitudes of a certain historical period toward a certain person or event as well as the genre or art in general. It is the complexity of the genre’s condition that invites us to discuss monuments as art as well as signs of visible political statements of public memory, that is, as visible results of a specific socio-political situation. All in all, many dimensions are at play in public monuments that allow us to draw wider conclusions about how relevant a certain subject was, or is, in society. It is the artistic, socio-historical, and political complexity that makes the Wallenberg monuments such an interesting topic of investigation. During the last two decades, the area of cultural memory has become very popular in the field of cultural studies and humanities. As a consequence, many books on art dedicated to the Holocaust and related subjects are often written, despite the theme, not by art historians but by historians and literary historians. In those books, the main interest is not the works themselves as products of art. Instead, these are treated as artistic artifacts that serve as examples to illustrate such aspects as the attitude of a nation toward the Holocaust and its dealing with this particular memory. As a typical example I refer to James E. Young, a professor in English and Judaic Studies, who has written several important books on Holocaust memory, and in particular memorials, in which he explores both the idea of a memorial and its role in public memory.54 For this purpose, Young uses monuments, museums, and memorial

Introduction

19

days to illustrate how the respective nation remembers the Holocaust according to its own traditions, ideals, and experiences, and how these memorials reflect the evolved meanings of the Holocaust in Europe, Israel, and the US. To investigate the Wallenberg monuments as representatives of cultural memory would mean considering only the countries where several Wallenberg monuments exist. No single monument, if not national (and few of the Wallenberg monuments could be classified as such), is qualified to give more than an affirmation of a stereotype, or mark an aberration, of what is generally understood as the nation’s attitude toward Wallenberg, the hero concept, or more generally the Holocaust. Such a study, primarily interested in finding examples that confirm the higher-ranking problem, tends easily to go beyond the expanses of an open-minded analysis of the single work, thereby risking drawing overhasty conclusions and missing the meaning of the monument. Furthermore, such an approach stands in contrast to the existence of the more than 30 Wallenberg monuments situated on five continents. This phenomenon points to the universal character of the Wallenberg narrative. An investigation of all Wallenberg monuments in these countries from the angle of national memory would, however, be met with a number of serious problems; the necessary language skills would be the least of these. The documentary evidence about the monuments’ brief histories varies enormously in the various cases and is often difficult to collect at all. In many cases, it is a real challenge to identify the key persons responsible for a monument’s coming to existence and establish the true motives for the person’s engagement. Much further research would be necessary to draw wider conclusions about such socio-political aspects and set the monuments in a broader context. So although the field of cultural memory leads to interesting outcomes, and though my study benefited from the theoretical and empirical undertakings in this field, it is not the primary aim of this interdisciplinary cultural study with its focus on art-historical aspects to contribute to the field of cultural memory. Nevertheless, I regard my study, both from the standpoint of the comprehensive analyses and the collected data presented in the catalog, as an offer to other scholars to investigate the Wallenberg monuments from that angle. However, as an art historian, I will investigate the Raoul Wallenberg monuments first of all as products of art. Despite its intended use and its function, a work belonging to the personal monument genre also makes claims to being an artwork and is defined by its artistic qualities.55 Despite the fact that monuments


depend on socio-political factors, they can be comprehensible even if not all these connections are known. In fact, all dimensions of the work’s historical origin and its wider context when erected can never be traced back in the work itself. More important is whether the monument, as an artwork placed in a public place, communicates itself. To succeed with that, the work has to carry its meaning within its forms.56 Indeed, monuments are of concern to many people even before their inauguration, particularly when they have entered the public sphere. In fact, monuments are erected in public places precisely because they are supposed to find and affect an audience. This condition challenges the genre in many ways as it grants it the possibility of influencing society. However, this condition is also the reason why the genre was a suitable tool for political propaganda. The genre’s reputation suffered from its misuse especially during the twentieth century. Independent from any moral implications, the fact that monuments are public can lead, in contrast to a planned visit at a museum, to surprising encounters with sustainable effects on the life of some individuals. Without wanting to exaggerate the political or moral relevance of monuments and despite the genre’s widely postulated invisibility,57 monuments can influence at least particular individuals. In contemporary democratic societies, monuments are meant to provoke remembrance and discussion.58 They exist in public places that belong to all and everyone. In this way, the medium can indeed be a very democratic genre. People may only bump into these works accidentally but, given their positioning in public places, the monuments can find an audience with individuals coming from all ranges of society, thereby attracting attention to a particular subject. The monument is a lasting result of a prior process, but it has to speak for itself. It is not the artwork’s intention to act as a historical document, “the meaning it acquires [lies] in the work of art” itself.59 Consequently, I disagree with James E. Young when he states that “the aim of memorials is not to call attention to their own presence so much as to past events because they are no longer present.”60 That may be the case for a national memorial that is kept alive by annual commemorative ceremonies. But how shall other monuments succeed in attracting interest in a historical event or person if not by their own presence? This will happen only if their design succeeds in attracting attention, thus having the power to spread knowledge about the subject to whom they are dedicated, to keep memory alive, and to shape future remembrance. It is my aim to comprehend “the truth” of each monument.61 The work invites us to stay, while its existence refers to many other things.62

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21

The reconstruction of the brief history or the historical context can, of course, help avoid misinterpretation or help one to come to a deeper reading of a monument. However, it is the forms that will be encountered by future visitors, most of them unfamiliar with the history of the way the monument came into existence. Therefore, the focus of this study lies on the works themselves. The outer appearance of the realized works is meant to reveal the socio-historic, political, or cultural context. The physical appearance of the Wallenberg monuments and their setting testify not only that Wallenberg was commemorated from the 1980s onwards, but their design reveals the attitude of their makers toward Wallenberg and how the memorial makers wished Wallenberg to be commemorated by future generations. Monuments reflect the history of their making and represent the artists’ interpretation of the subject and his or her attitude toward the genre. The forms have to bear meaning, have to mediate the subject matter the artist had in mind. Hence, the artists of public monuments mediate their ideas by the language of forms. The means of fine arts are their arguments.63 It is the formal quality of the work that can secure its perpetuation even if the formerly praiseworthy person has been forgotten or if posterity regards the represented no longer of particular importance. However, artistic quality is, of course, no protection against the monument’s overthrow if the content becomes the subject of extreme, even violent, disdain. To be able to give consideration to the Wallenberg monuments as products of art, I regard the tried-and-tested method of art historical hermeneutics as an appropriate approach for investigating the works because its starting point is every single work. Furthermore, for that reason it does not leave out the socio-political or socio-historical context of how the monuments came into existence. The single analysis makes use of classical art historical methods of interpretation and is written under consideration of all accessible literature and other material available on the works.64 The semantic description refers to all relevant factors, but the starting and focal point for every analysis is the artwork in its given surrounding. It is important to show how a monument appears and why it looks the way it does. Hermeneutics describes the process of understanding and accurate interpretation. Its concern is “to seek the experience of truth that transcends the domain of scientific method wherever that experience is to be found, and to inquire into its legitimacy.”65 Hermeneutics is the art of communicating what is originally expressed in another medium (or language). This presupposes that the interpreter


first had to understand what was communicated in the other medium. Not without reason is hermeneutics named after “Hermes, the interpreter of the divine message to mankind.”66 The art historian begins the process of interpretation by starting a dialog with the artwork, translating the meaning of the work into language, trying to make it accessible by making it “speak.” The interpreter’s basic attitude is to be open to what the artwork wants to tell. That implies, as a start, that the interpreter even has to be willing to strengthen the artwork’s arguments, that is, to explain it from its own terms, its own conditions.67 In trying to understand the Wallenberg monuments in their given contexts, it is necessary to realize and explain the intellectual links expressed in the works. These coherences are not immediately comprehensible when looked at superficially; comprehensive descriptions and analyses are important. By providing help to truly see the work,68 art historians clarify and mediate through their own interpretations of what is said by someone else in the medium of art.69 The analyses of the individual monuments follow the hermeneutic circle that determines the process of interpretation: the whole must be understood from the individual and the individual from the whole. Hence, “the movement of understanding always runs from whole to part and back to whole.”70 The meaning of a work shows itself first in all its parts that again are determined by the whole. Thus every interpretation is “guided by an expectation of meaning arising from the preceding context.”71 While the process of gradual understanding is decisive for the final outcome of the analysis, the reader will not be troubled by all the individual steps taken. It is necessary only that the argumentation be clear, traceable, and verifiable.72 For those who have not had the chance to see the monuments themselves, the art historian, who was at the site, tries to replicate the visit to the site, aiming to grasp the first effect the work produces as well as giving an extensive analysis of the work’s meaning. The hermeneutic approach intends to open up the work’s “hidden” secret and beauty. The aim of the description is not to destroy the work’s aura. The comprehensive analyses attempt to provide insight into the works and the subject, and thus increase the delight of each work’s magnitude.73 However, the gap between the work and its written interpretation remains a general problem. Every investigation of art can only be an attempt to find the right words. These are the words that embrace the meaning and reach an audience—but can never substitute for the experience the artwork itself offers.74

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However, by unfolding the layers of meaning the artwork provides, by describing them, and investigating the formal strategies and signs used, the art historian strives to make a better understanding of the work possible. A felicitous interpretation renders accurately the main meaning of the work; it does not put in something that is not there.75 All parts of the interpretation have to be coherent and evident; it is this kind of evidence upon which the truth of hermeneutical science is based.76

The use of the terms monument and portrait Having used the term “monument” within the title and using the term “portrait” frequently within this study, I better explain briefly how I understand these terms. Looking at various reference books, it becomes obvious that the term “monument” has a quite specific function: a monument is supposed to remember a person, historical event, or an idea, and it is meant to last.77 A monument is meant to last because it not only honors, as in our case, the person judged worthy, but that this chosen person is regarded as worthy to be remembered even by future generations. It is believed that he or she has the capacity and the significance to inspire present and future society.78 All works dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg fulfill the genre’s function to remember and offer the possibility to inspire others. Therefore, and for the sake of simplicity, all plastic art dealing with Wallenberg will in this study be summarized under the term “monument.” While there is a broad consensus in Western societies concerning the monument’s function, the term is relatively vague regarding the monument’s physical appearance, its presence. Monuments should be concrete visible reminders, but in fact their design can range from a simple stone setting to monumental architecture and can be described in various terms, such as statues, buildings, or other tangible structures. The key point is that the monument is something that exists as a testimonial to a notable person or event and that it has commemorative and celebrative power. In terms of the outer appearance of public monuments, the only explicit distinguishing characteristics are that they be made of materials, such as stone or metal, that would infer the intended lasting character of the genre, and that an inscription or a notice nearby is usually added to elucidate the work’s purpose and function. In contrast to monuments, busts are defined much more specifically in their outer appearance: the bust is a reduction of the human body to the head and a chosen cut-out of the upper part of the body, whereby


parts of the neck, the shoulders, the breast and even the arms can be visible. In general, busts are placed on a column or a console. Notably, even busts are intended to commemorate a certain person found worthy for future emulation. Consequently, I consider busts as also belonging to the personal monument genre. While the short definition of the bust genre focuses on the display format, portraits are simply identified by the display object.79 A bust is always a portrait but a portrait can be more than a bust. As with the genre monument the definition of a portrait is rather vague. To simplify matters, we can start by distinguishing between two criteria that define a portrait. First of all, there is the intention of the artist that it be dedicated to a certain person, meaning simply that a certain person is intended and this is so indicated, for example, by the title, the inscription or the added portrait relief.80 These tools function as indicators of an intention and act as a means for identification.81 Second, there is a “physical resemblance” to the historical person. A physical likeness, or at least some characteristic features, is commonly accepted as the basic condition for a portrait. If the dominant expression of a person is captured, we are able to recognize him or her. Nevertheless, resemblance is obviously a vague criterion since, with the exception to some degree for the (death) mask, an authentic objective record of a subject’s appearance is basically non-existent. After the invention of photography and again after 1945, the sculptural effigy lost more and more of its veracity, and became more obsolete and problematic.82 Even if resemblance is no longer the most relevant criterion for portrait busts in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, the postulated resemblance continues to make the bust genre a particular difficult one.83 Even if physical likeness is a widely accepted criterion for portraits, few of those who chose to represent Wallenberg by a figurative solution or a bust seemed at all interested in achieving physical likeness (or succeeded in so doing). In fact, only Mark Salman and Lotte Stavisky created busts that resemble Wallenberg as he is known from published photographs, and a hint of likeness can be found in the monuments by Franco Assetto and Anna Cohn. Indeed, it takes more than physical resemblance to make the viewer accept a portrait as an effigy of, in our case, Wallenberg, as being apt or felicitous.84 Success depends not only on the degree of resemblance; specific outer characteristics are most often not enough to mark the depicted. Most important and most difficult to achieve is an interpretation with which the beholders can agree, or which they at least can accept. This will only happen if the beholder regards the artist’s solution

Introduction

25

as successfully capturing the person’s individuality. As Imre Varga, creator of one of the Wallenberg monuments, expressed it: A portrait does not necessarily have to be like a copy of a face or match the original like a photograph. You should only show as much of a person in a portrait as you believe is characteristic for him or her.85 The artistic interpretation in the portrait is, of course, based on the artist’s subjectivity. While one may make use of physical resemblance and create an effigy, this is not the only possible outcome. In the first place, all artists aim to capture what they regard as the essence of a person’s character, that is, the individuality. The portrait they create can result in an effigy or in a whole figure, or even in a non-figurative solution. The result depends on the choices artists make and what they regard as best suitable to visualize and honor the judged-worthy person. Unquestionably, all Wallenberg monuments give a portrait of the honored. The question remains of how the artists try to show the person’s individuality, his foremost characteristics, which make up his charisma or aura.86 Only if the beholders share the offered interpretation, or find the artistic solution at least stringent and comprehensible, do they experience the work as a convincing portrait of Raoul Wallenberg, his work, fate, or legacy. The variety of formal solutions to the challenge of creating the Wallenberg monuments gives an idea of the many faces of Wallenberg, the many facets the Wallenberg narrative incorporates. In the monuments, we are confronted with what the artists found essential in the Wallenberg narrative. By creating their portraits of Wallenberg, these artists created at the same time also something new,87 and contributed in their own ways to the Wallenberg commemoration as a whole and eventually even to the field of the monument genre. As I see it, the openness of the term “monument” allows it to summarize all the following works dedicated to Wallenberg. By doing so, however, I depart from the traditional view, one that still finds a broad consensus concerning what is meant by the term monument. In the comparative discussion of Chapter 10, we will therefore take up the question concerning which of the chosen formal strategies are most convincing to the public and art critics as representative of the monument genre as well as portraits of Raoul Wallenberg. As we will see, the public’s and art critics’ expectations for the personal monument genre happen to stand in contrast to my rather simplified use. The different expectations determine the use of the term and explain why some


people refuse to call some of the presented solutions “monuments.” However, it seems that only by taking a broad view of the term and the genre is it possible to have an open-minded approach toward the works dedicated to Wallenberg, works that in their outer appearance do indeed differ much from each other.

Syntax of the study The first of the hermeneutical conditions is to understand the subject matter.88 The understanding of the Wallenberg monuments demands recognizing the subject matter we are dealing with and comprehending the higher-ranking question. Consequently, the reader will become acquainted with the monument’s protagonist, Raoul Wallenberg, and be introduced to the higher-ranking problem of the hero concept. After telling the Wallenberg story by commonly agreed facts, I will briefly elaborate on everyone who so far has written about Wallenberg being captured by his being a real-life hero. This leads to recounting the Wallenberg story along established hero patterns. After that, the Wallenberg monuments will be embedded in the larger context of the Wallenberg commemoration as such and of the Holocaust remembrance in particular. This part familiarizes the reader with the historical personage of Wallenberg and the many dimensions of his popular narrative. Those who are essentially interested in Raoul Wallenberg or the hero concept are invited to focus on this part of the study. Against the background of Part I, the analyses of the Raoul Wallenberg monuments will take place. Part II is divided into four chapters, which are organized according to categories that refer to the artists’ Wallenberg understandings as expressed within their works: Wallenberg is depicted as man of action, as victim, as representative of higher-ranking ideas, and as unconventional hero. None of the publicly accessible Wallenberg monuments will be excluded, but not all will be discussed to the same extent. Extensive case studies of typical representatives for a certain Raoul Wallenberg understanding will be described and analyzed in detail while other monuments will be treated briefly if they do not contribute anything new to the topic. The subsequent comparative discussion concentrates on genrespecific aspects and the expectations placed upon the genre. Thereby, the analyses of the Wallenberg monuments will be deepened and embedded in the broader context of the personal monument genre. This part will conclude by returning to the monuments’ protagonist,

Introduction

27

who in contemporary pluralistic societies acts as representative for universal values and human rights politics. Because the focus of this study lies on the formal aspects, other factors such as the brief history, the artists’ biographies or their artistic characteristics will only be taken into account when necessary to explain the artwork’s appearance, its setting or when the biography contributes to deepen the work’s interpretation. If these aspects were not decisive for the analyses but nevertheless interesting in our context, such as an artist’s background, or were important for further research on this field, they are included in the catalog that appears at the end of the study.


PART I Raoul Wallenberg


1 The Monuments’ Protagonist

I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is.1 Perhaps one day only legends will tell [Wallenberg’s] story, of which the coming generation will not know how much is the truth, how much is certain.2 A personal monument is a monument to a real person. To meaningfully analyze that monument, the critic must know that person’s history. But a monument is not a work of history. Personal monuments do not aim to function as documents about historical persons. Though a monument originates from a historical figure, it is not meant to cover all aspects of the person. Instead, it aims to communicate messages and feelings about an individual known and idealized by posterity for a certain deed. Though it may not convey any new information about the historical person, a monument does reveal how the person was perceived at the time the monument was created. Consequently, the knowledge of historical facts about the historical person is not enough by itself to interpret a personal monument. As important as the knowledge of art history is, knowledge of the myth as established over the years is necessary to truly comprehend the artworks. All Wallenberg monument artists reacted to Wallenberg’s story as popularly known, and created their works against that background. Thus, as I conducted my study, it was not only necessary to familiarize myself with the historic person but also with the popular images of the Wallenberg narrative in order to be able to investigate which aspects of the historical person or the myths that surround Wallenberg the artists 31


relate to through their art works: I had to be able to distinguish between facts and myth. Monuments respond to the existing narrative that surrounds a historical figure, but at the same time their creators relate the historical figure’s narrative from a subjective viewpoint. Hence, they can support the existing story or contribute to the existing myth with a new facet. Surprisingly, considering Wallenberg’s popularity and the many books published about him, there does not exist an adequate academic study about this historical figure. Nor does there exist an academic study that addresses the popular images of Wallenberg literature and other forms of commemoration established over the last 25 years. Currently, historian Ulf Zander is working on the popular images of Wallenberg and his symbolic status (inter alia in films), but his book will only be published in 2010/11. Historian Paul A. Levine is also working on a book on Raoul Wallenberg under the preliminary title Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. Myth, History & Holocaust; the book is scheduled to be published in 2009. The most recent dissertation on Wallenberg dates from 2004, Hjälten och Offren: Raoul Wallenberg och judarna i Budapest (“The Hero and the victims: Raoul Wallenberg and the Jews in Budapest”) by historian Attila Lajos. Lajos places Wallenberg’s rescue mission in a wider historical context. The merit of Lajos’s thesis is that he located relevant files in Hungarian archives, thereby making these sources accessible for further research. However, for various reasons, Lajos’s thesis is not a convincing study on the subject.3 He does not satisfactorily expound on the problem of the hero-term he uses in his dissertation and seems to be unaware that his own perception of Wallenberg is based on a Christian martyr-hero image. Lajos’s anger about mistakes in popular scientific literature leads to a rather hastily and unfair devaluation of Wallenberg’s mission, which stands in contrast to the facts he himself presents. These facts, found between the lines or in the references, give a much more beneficial narrative than the continuous text. Clearly, the lack of academic texts about Wallenberg necessitated a closer investigation. As I am an art historian, not an historian, it was not my aim, nor does it lie within my capacity, to research new facts or to rewrite the Wallenberg story. However, given the lack of an academic study on the field and in order to approach the monuments adequately, I brought together what today can be considered as widely accepted historical facts about Wallenberg. I discovered that the consensus in terms of Raoul Wallenberg led more or less, directly or indirectly, back to Raoul Wallenberg: His Remarkable Life, Heroic Battles and the Secret of his Mysterious Disappearance, written by Hungarian journalist and

The Monuments’ Protagonist 33

Holocaust scholar Jenö Lévai,4 a Holocaust survivor himself. His book on Wallenberg, first published in 1948 in Hungarian, was translated that same year into a slightly shorter Swedish version. The first English edition followed in 1989.5 Lévai’s book was one of the earliest publications on the subject, based on a series of original German, Hungarian, and Swedish official and private documents as well as on testimonies, and included material from the Swedish Foreign Office and apparently also material that had survived in Budapest and which documented the Swedish humanitarian helping action. Lévai also visited Stockholm to conduct further research.6 According to Wallenberg’s close aide and friend, Per Anger, Secretary of the Swedish Legation in Budapest during World War II, Lévai’s book is “the most authentic and well documented description of Wallenberg’s work.”7 Every historian who has researched Wallenberg, from Randolph L. Braham, commonly regarded as the leading expert on the Hungarian Holocaust, to Attila Lajos in his dissertation in 2004, refer to the work of Jenö Lévai—and so will I. This part familiarizes the reader with the historical person Raoul Wallenberg, considers the appropriateness of his myth to be told as a hero’s tale and offers an idea of the broader context in which the monuments were erected. Together these different aspects constitute the foundation on which the reading of the Wallenberg monuments will take place.

2 Raoul Wallenberg’s Life, Mission, and Fate

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was born in Stockholm on August 4, 1912. He was a member of a prominent Swedish family, the Wallenbergs, who for generations had played an important role in the country’s economic, political, and social life. His father, Raoul Oscar (1888–1912), was a naval officer, who died from cancer three months before his son was born, leaving the son to be raised by his widowed mother, Maj Wising Wallenberg (1891–1979). In 1918, his mother married Fredrik von Dardel (1885–1979), and from this marriage, two children were born, Guy in 1919 and Nina in 1921. Raoul’s paternal grandfather was Gustaf Wallenberg (1863–1937). He was a career diplomat, who served as the Swedish Minister to Japan, China, and Turkey. After his retirement he remained in Istanbul. Despite the distance, Gustaf played an important role in his grandson’s life, acting rather like a surrogate father to Raoul. Under the patronage of his grandfather and the tutelage of his mother, Raoul Wallenberg developed, from an early age, a cosmopolitan view of the world affairs. This view was reinforced by his extensive travels and enhanced by his talent for languages. As a schoolchild, Raoul was sent abroad to learn French, German, and English. He also learned Russian in school, and started to study Spanish while living in the US. Raoul Wallenberg moved to the US during the middle of the Great Depression at the request of his grandfather, who felt it was important that his grandson experience the American culture and way of life. He studied architecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 1931 to 1935, graduating at the top of his class, with honors, and received the American Institute of Architects’ Silver Medal. Among his classmates were Gerald Ford, who later became the 38th President of 34

Raoul Wallenberg’s Life, Mission, and Fate 35

the USA (1974–7) and Sol King, the President of Albert Kahn Associates, Inc. (1958–75). Albeit Wallenberg was allowed to make his own choice of academic study, it was apparent that his grandfather intended that he pursue a career in banking. His grandfather wanted him to get some work experience after graduation and arranged for Raoul to work in South Africa, where he was apprenticed at a Swedish construction company, and then in Palestine, where he was apprenticed at a Dutch bank in Haifa. In 1936, while working in Haifa, Wallenberg came into contact with immigrants from Germany who told about the Nazis atrocities against the European Jews. Despite Raoul Wallenberg’s privileged background, he was not guaranteed a career in the family business. His grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, had left the family empire to his brothers, after a disagreement, and became a diplomat. His grandfather died in 1937, before the international bank he had planned for his grandson had been established. Wallenberg’s American degree in architecture was not valid in Sweden, and he did not wish to go back to university. A position in one of the Wallenberg companies or Stockholm’s Enskilda Banken was not in the picture, even if some help and assistance from the Wallenberg family might be hoped for. In fact, it was via his uncle and godfather, Jacob Wallenberg, that Raoul Wallenberg acquired a position at the foodtrading enterprise MEROPA. The company was run by the Hungarian Jew Kálmán Lauer, who had immigrated to Sweden before World War II broke out. Wallenberg became his employee and later his partner. During the war, Wallenberg traveled to Germany and Hungary, among other places, on business trips for the company. For Lauer, being a Jew, such traveling might have proved a death sentence. It was while working at MEROPA that Wallenberg was chosen for the mission for which posterity remembers him. In June 1944, the Rabbi of Stockholm’s Great Synagogue, Marcus Ehrenpreis, asked Wallenberg’s boss if he knew anyone who would be willing to travel to Hungary to investigate the condition of the Jews in Budapest. Lauer recommended his employee, Raoul Wallenberg.1 Members of Lauer’s own family were in Budapest, and earlier Wallenberg had attempted to procure a visa for himself to go to Hungary to try to help the Lauer family, but his visa request had been denied.2 Later, after his arrival in Budapest, Wallenberg learned that Lauer’s relatives had already been deported. At about the time of Ehrenpreis’s request and Lauer’s recommendation of Wallenberg, American plans developed to send a Swede to Hungary on behalf of the remaining Jews there. One department of


the office of the American Legation was situated in the same building that housed Wallenberg and Lauer’s office. Consequently, it was easy for Lauer to meet with Herschel V. Johnson, the Minister at the American Legation in Stockholm, and Iver C. Olsen, Special Representative of the American War Refugee Board at the same legation. At the time, it was not commonly known that Olsen was working simultaneously at the US Treasury Department and the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. During World War II, Stockholm was a center for the exchange of information between diplomats as well as spies. Johnson and Olsen assured themselves of Wallenberg’s suitability, and then gained the approval of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs for Wallenberg’s departure to Budapest. Wallenberg was selected and his mission supported by the American War Refugee Board (WRB) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC). The WJC was founded in 1936 with the aim of protecting Jews from Nazism and the WRB followed on January 22, 1944 as an initiative by the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wallenberg was given the rank of Secretary, enjoyed diplomatic immunity, and was granted extraordinary freedom of action.3 The WRB and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT) provided Wallenberg with financial resources. Developments in Hungary and the general course of the war, together with the growing knowledge of the genocide of European Jewry, lay behind the planning of Wallenberg’s mission. On March 19, 1944 the Germans occupied Hungary. The Third Reich feared that its former ally would attempt to secure a separate peace with the Allies. The success of the Allies in the West and the advance of Soviet troops in the East meant that the Germans would soon be cut off from their major source of energy, namely the oil fields of Romania. This strategic imperative, together with the Nazi will to annihilate the Hungarian Jews—by then the only large Jewish community in Europe the Nazis had not yet destroyed—was the rationale for the German occupation of Hungary.4 Although Hungary was the first country to introduce anti-Semitic legislation with its “Numerus Clauses law,” a law that prevented Jews from entering universities and high schools, no further anti-Semitic laws were passed until 1938. In fact, during the government of Miklós Kállay (March 9, 1942 to March 19, 1944), Jews enjoyed a high degree of protection. Kállay was steadfast in his opposition to German demands. Most of the Hungarian Jews lived in relative safety, and Jewish refugees from Europe enjoyed extended asylum rights. But with the German occupation, a new government came into power, and policies against


the Jews were established within just a few weeks. Mass deportation began on May 15, 1944. By that time, the Allies were aware of the extermination of the European Jews in the gas-chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. News of the atrocities faced by the Hungarian Jews was leaked to the press, and a flurry of articles was published, chiefly in Swiss newspapers. The reaction to the murder of the Hungarian Jews stirred the Western world, and the fate of the remaining Jews finally became of eminent interest to the Western Allies, the Vatican, the neutral states, and the International Red Cross. This change of attitude is reflected in the posting of Raoul Wallenberg as an envoy, sent out by the Swedish Foreign Ministry, to help the overworked personnel of the legation, but with a special mission: to save as many Jews as possible. At the time the Red Army was advancing from the East and the Western Allies had succeeded in Normandy. Given the state of war and the tremendous international repercussions of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, Regent Miklós Horthy (Regent of Hungary from 1920 to October 1944) gave the order to halt the deportation on July 7, 1944. For the majority of the Hungarian Jews, however, his order came too late. By that time, the Germans had deported the vast majority of Hungary’s Jewish rural population, primarily to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The deportations were mainly carried out by the Hungarian military police on German orders. Only Jews in labor service companies and in the capital remained alive. Horthy’s order meant that the planned deportation of the Budapest Jews, scheduled to begin only a few days after his order came, was prevented. Following Horthy’s order, the mass deportations of the Jews had ceased almost completely just before Wallenberg’s arrival in Budapest on July 9, 1944. However, single trains continued to leave Budapest, and the threat of further deportations was still taken seriously.5 Even before Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, the Royal Swedish Legation had attempted to help Jews,6 but it was not until after June 30 that the legation “became more deeply involved in aid and rescue work,” and the “humanitarian activities of Sweden were greatly enhanced after [Wallenberg’s] arrival in Budapest.”7 By the end of August, the status of the Budapest Jews had improved considerably, because the Hungarian government now accepted attempts by neutral consulates, as well as the Red Cross, to protect the Jews. Horthy had appointed a new government and replaced Döme Sztójay (who in March 1944, after the German occupation, had been set up as a puppet prime minister) with General Géza Lakatos. As a result


of this positive development, Wallenberg planned to return home. In fact, from the beginning it was understood that Wallenberg would return to Sweden in September 1944.8 His mission seemed to be complete. However, on October 15 the Arrow Cross coup (Arrow Cross or Nyilas Party, the Hungarian Nazis) changed the situation completely. After Horthy had announced a preliminary armistice on the radio, as an attempt to extricate Hungary from the war, the Germans forced him to recant and abdicate. The Germans then installed a quisling government headed by Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the right-wing extremist Arrow Cross movement. Consequently, Wallenberg decided to remain in Hungary to help the persecuted. The Jews of Budapest faced their most dangerous time. Initially, the Arrow Cross seemed to tolerate the activities of the neutral powers because they hoped for diplomatic recognition. However, Sweden did not recognize the new government. The Arrow Cross’s cruelty toward the Jews grew, particularly as Soviet troops approached closer to the capital. Although Sweden was not the only country that refused to recognize the new government, the members of the Swedish legation suffered from worse treatment than other legations because the deputy head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, László Vöczköndy, had personal reasons to take revenge on members of the Swedish Legation. Vöczköndy had been an assistant military attaché at the Hungarian Legation in Stockholm, but had declared himself “Hungarian Chargé d’Affaires” in Sweden after Szálasi seized power. As a result, he was ordered out of the country by the Swedish Foreign Ministry. In his new position in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, he could avenge himself by trying to make the Swedish rescue mission as difficult as possible.9 The situation in Budapest became increasingly anarchic as the Red Army came closer. In order to assist the Jews more effectively, Wallenberg moved his office from Buda, where most of the foreign legations, including the Swedish Legation, were situated, to the Pestside. Here, on the Pest-side, were most of Wallenberg’s protégés, the international as well as the large ghetto. The Arrow Cross cracked down on the rescue attempts, and began attacking the safe houses and even the Swedish Legation in December 1944. Under Wallenberg’s guidance, Swedish aides attempted, with the help of protective passports, to rescue Jews who were being sent on death-marches to Hegyeshálom, near the Austrian border. If rescue was not possible, the helpers tried to ease the Jews’ situation by distributing food and medicine. The political upheaval during this period, especially after the Arrow Cross coup, presented the Swedish Legation’s personnel with extreme


challenges.10 Members of the Swedish Legation, with Wallenberg as Head of the Humanitarian Department, in close contact with other neutral legations, organizations such as the Red Cross as well as Jewish resistance groups, tried to help the Jews by negotiating with the political persons in charge, distributing official protective papers, establishing safe houses, and distributing food and medicine, among other things. The so-called liberation of Budapest clearly ended the power struggle between the Germans, the Arrow Cross, and the Soviets, but the aftermath, namely mass rapes, plundering, destruction, hunger, and the recruitment of forced labor, continued to add to the misery of Hungarian civilians, including the Jews. During this time, on the very day of the liberation of the Pest-side, January 17, 1945, Wallenberg left for Debrecen to meet with Soviet military officials such as Marshal Malinovsky. Debrecen, then the third largest city in the northeastern part of the country, was the seat of the newly established pro-Allied provisional government and temporary National Assembly of Hungary. Wallenberg had hoped to establish contacts in order to help the Jews of Budapest even after the end of the war. However, Wallenberg never arrived in Debrecen. Instead, he was transported to Moscow, and transferred to Lubianka Prison in the beginning of February 1945. The first official Soviet statement, made in August 1946, said that Wallenberg was unknown in the USSR, and that he probably had died in Budapest. This account was not altered until 1957. In the meantime, former German prisoners returned from the USSR, and testified that Wallenberg had been alive, at least until 1947. The Gromyko Memorandum of 1957, written a short time after the Hungarian uprising ended, stated that Wallenberg had died in Lubianka Prison in Moscow in July 1947, as a result of a myocardial infarction. This statement remained the official Soviet version of events for decades to come. In 1991, a Swedish–Russian Working Group was established to investigate Wallenberg’s fate. The results of the investigation were published after nine years of intense research. However, the reasons for Wallenberg’s arrest and imprisonment, as well as his whereabouts, could not be determined with any certainty.11 Apparently, Wallenberg was suspected of espionage on behalf of Germany and/or the US. It became also obvious that there had been Soviet interest in exchanging Wallenberg for Soviet citizens captured in Sweden. The Soviet plans failed because of Swedish ignorance and reluctance. No doubt there were shortcomings in the official Swedish response to Wallenberg’s imprisonment, especially between 1945 and 1947, but later as well, that


may have contributed to Wallenberg’s continued imprisonment and ultimate fate. Unquestionably, the biggest responsibility for Wallenberg lies with the Soviets, but some representatives of the Swedish Foreign Ministry and officials in the Swedish government acted all too passively and seemed unwilling to push for his release.12 No legal document has ever been found that proves, with any certainty, the reasons for Wallenberg’s imprisonment, his further whereabouts or death. Today, the official Russian position is that Wallenberg died in July 1947, but the Russians no longer insist that the reason for Wallenberg’s death was a heart attack. The official Swedish attitude toward Wallenberg changed substantially only in the late 1990s, largely a result of the efforts of Prime Minister Göran Persson (1996–2006). As in many parts of the Western world, the Holocaust had become a topic of enormous political relevance in Sweden. Persson’s engagement led, among other things, to the conference The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (2000) on education, remembrance and research, and the Forum för levande historia (The Living History Forum), founded in 1997 but established as a government organization in 2003. In 2001, Persson admitted the earlier Swedish shortcomings and apologized for them to the Wallenberg family. Such actions ensured that Wallenberg would receive official honor in Sweden.

3 Raoul Wallenberg in Historiography and Popular Imagination

The majority of books on Wallenberg have not been written by historians, but by journalists such as Rudolph Philipp, who wrote directly after the war, John Bierman, Harvey Rosenfeld, and Elenore Lester, who all published in the beginning of the 1980s when Wallenberg became known outside Sweden and Hungary.1 The books by Bierman, Rosenfeld and Lester were written in English and are among the best-known studies on Wallenberg, being referred to by many of the Wallenberg monument artists. In evaluating these books, as well as those written by Wallenberg’s colleagues, including Per Anger and Lars Berg,2 which will be summarized as popular accounts in the following discussion, one must keep in mind that these authors, as I see it, did not intend to create a myth around Wallenberg. Rather, they presented the facts to which they had access at the time. Nonetheless, they took advantage of telling Wallenberg’s story in the style of a mythological narrative, including exaggerations and hearsay comments, without always having historical evidence in form of documents. Their behavior could be attributed to the fact that they were not academic scholars and that, a point I believe is even more important, they remained hopeful that Wallenberg had survived. Encouraged by new witness reports in the late 1970s that Wallenberg was still alive, these authors regarded their publications about Wallenberg as instruments to raise public awareness of his fate. By doing so, they hoped to contribute to Wallenberg being released. Exaggerations or oversimplifications have been a part of many books on Wallenberg, and sometimes Wallenberg’s true motives were also questioned; it was speculated that he had been a spy.3 The exaggerations or oversimplifications found in some of the popular literature on Wallenberg seem to be the reason why, in recent years, some historians have expressed their disapproval of this kind of literature as 41


contributing to a simplified and idealized image of Wallenberg. The critics stress the importance of reviewing Wallenberg’s actions in the context of the possibilities offered by the Swedish Foreign Ministry. Furthermore, they think it is important to consider Wallenberg’s many associates as well as the particular situation in Budapest in 1944/5 that together made the rescue mission at all possible. This was something Wallenberg himself was aware of, writing to his mother in August 1944: “It is obviously extremely uncertain whether it will be possible to achieve a positive outcome, given that everything ultimately depends on the general situation.”4 Historians such as William D. Rubinstein and Paul A. Levine, for example, regard the popular belief that Wallenberg alone rescued 100,000 Jews— in terms of his actual role—as highly exaggerated and as having contributed to a somewhat disproportionate general image of Wallenberg.5 The reservations expressed by these historians are comprehensible if we consider the image of Wallenberg as depicted in the popular and nonscholarly imagination. This idealized portrait of Wallenberg includes the false assumptions that Wallenberg, on his own initiative, using only the power of his personality and with his own private money, personally overwhelmed the Nazis as well as the Arrow Cross, and by doing so was able to save at least 100,000 human beings. Such exaggerations are unacceptable to historians, as “contemporary historians believe it is their duty to distinguish legend from fact.”6 In general, many historians are not receptive to the formation of a myth around a historical figure such as Wallenberg, and nor are they interested in understanding its sociological value. “Historians have traditionally tried to explain what ‘actually happened’ in the past. Doing so, they have drawn a clear line between themselves and their objects of study and between fact and fiction in order to crush well-established myths.”7 Levine and Rubinstein have no intention of minimizing Wallenberg’s heroism. They are interested in revising the popular image of Wallenberg because they believe that the importance of his actions can only be understood against the background of the historical situation. Therefore, they voice their doubts and reservations about the hero concept. To many historians, heroes seem simply to “belong to a credulous prescientific age.”8 It is no wonder, then, that some historians are careful to include the word “almost” when describing the “hero’s” extraordinary behavior or fate: “The loss of that brave individual,” Levine writes, “remains a human tragedy of almost classical proportions”9 (my emphasis). In contrast, many artists have readily swept these reservations aside, embracing Wallenberg’s life as the narrative of a classical tragic hero. Many historians tend to

Wallenberg in Historiography and Imagination 43

deny the existence of heroism, but when writing about Wallenberg they seemingly cannot avoid describing him as a hero. When it comes to their description of Wallenberg, contemporary historians, like those who wrote earlier on the subject, from Lévai to Lajos, also do not entirely avoid the popular vocabulary used to describe this rescuer. Everyone who has recounted Raoul Wallenberg’s story is somehow captured by the fact that he was a “real life hero.”10 The use of the term hero is not limited to popular literature on Wallenberg (for instance, as indicated by book titles like Missing Hero, Lost Hero, Hero of Our Time, and so on). Historians likewise make use of the term in their book titles, as in Lévai’s Remarkable Life, Heroic Battles, or Lajos’s The Hero and the Victims. In the end, several historians make similar statements about Wallenberg to those of the authors of popular literature. For example, Paul A. Levine calls Wallenberg a “real life hero” and classifies his deeds as “heroic efforts.”11 He goes on to state that Wallenberg did what “was humanly possible to do,” and sometimes “did even more.” Like Rubinstein, who writes that “Wallenberg acted with super-human dedication,”12 Levine states that Wallenberg displayed “an almost superhuman stamina and energy”13 and acknowledges “his prominent place in the pantheon . . . of heroes of the Holocaust.”14 The historians’ reservations lead to contradictory statements. On the one hand, Levine writes that Wallenberg “was perfectly trained to accomplish the task that history gave him” but on the other he states: “What really explains the dramatic transformation of this man from an average businessman into a heroic diplomat remains unknown.”15 Levine’s statement is surprising because the Wallenberg exhibition, for which the texts were written and for which Levine was a member of the exhibition team, clearly aimed to provide an answer to that very question. In my opinion, it was precisely the merit of this exhibition at the Stockholm Jewish Museum that it succeeded in explaining this “transformation” of Wallenberg, by referring to his upbringing and education as well as explaining the circumstances of his mission in the historical context of 1944/5.16 Apparently, contemporary historians, like everybody else, are captivated by the myth of Wallenberg’s hero narrative.

The stuff heroes are made of An essential part of each hero story is its mythical aura in contrast to its historiography. “Heroes are . . . in direct conflict with history as science. Heroes have to die so that the science of history can live. . . . The hero is, quite simply, not compatible with modern ideals of science


and methodology.”17 Consequently, the autonomy of mythical hero stories from academic historical accounts is often regarded as disturbing. Of course, historians are justified when explaining the actions of exceptional individuals such as Wallenberg within a historical context because only then they can act as realistic models for emulation. However, in the collective imagination the hero must, at least to some extent, remain inexplicable. This is part of the hero’s appeal. A hero is meant to be emulated. Explaining every single circumstance of the historical situation and examining the hero’s motives in detail would mean depriving the hero of his or her aura. In common understanding, a hero displays capabilities beyond those of the average human being. Otherwise the hero’s story would not be told and retold. Heroes “are the products of their time, their insight, and the work of their devotees, who create a mythical image and a second life for them. The key to the hero’s existence is function; his province is both history and folklore.”18 The word “hero” has many meanings, and its concept has changed and keeps on changing according to the moral or ethical values that constitute the society that creates such heroes. Nowadays, when the term is used in an inflated manner to indicate anyone we consider to be outstanding, it has lost much of its power. Especially in the academic world the hero is—if not a suspicious subject—something to smile at. The quoted words by Levine or Rubinstein refer to the difficulty many academics, especially historians, have with the hero theme, and likewise many of the Wallenberg monument artists have a similar conflict. As the hero concept will be used in this academic study to investigate the artists’ “hero understanding” as expressed in their Wallenberg monuments, it seems necessary to define briefly the sense in which the term “hero” will be presented here. There is insufficient space to elaborate on the term’s changing meaning in an intense exegesis or to go into the various concepts of hero theories.19 In the context of Raoul Wallenberg, the original sense of the term “hero” as it is understood in IndoEuropean languages, as “protector” or “helper,” seems appropriate.20 The understanding of the hero as a morally worthy man, worthy both of admiration and of emulation, was passed down from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the age of Enlightenment. Needless to say, the hero concept inspired not only altruistic deeds throughout the centuries, but also the terrorist suicide bombers to which our own age testifies. Nevertheless, as a hero Wallenberg is strongly connected to the classical tradition of worthy individuals who distinguish themselves from others by their extraordinary deeds, as will be elaborated in more detail later in this chapter. Seen in the light of today’s questionable


“heroes,” as known from comics or movies, who have lost their faith in history, long-term solutions and moral principles,21 Wallenberg appears as a relict of former times. He incorporates the tradition of a classical hero: a true fighter of good against evil, rooted in the principle that moral values should be constitutive for society and who committed himself for the sake of the community. Accordingly, it cannot be said that a “fighter of good against evil” is always “altruistic, or honest;” he is “not good necessarily, but great.”22 The heroes are themselves anomalies: to protect the moral they embody, heroes are often forced to break with the rules of the society that they want to repair or preserve. The hero has to break moral values, even use evil to achieve good. Similarly Wallenberg sometimes had to make decisions that were not altruistic. The historic situation of Budapest in 1944, and especially the time after the Arrow Cross coup on October 15, forced Wallenberg to take fast and resolute decisions if he wanted to save people. As György Konrad formulates it: “Wallenberg was forced into nonstop decision making, and the decisions were not always philanthropic; some were also merciless. To save A implied that he had to refrain from saving B. And if he should accidentally manage to set B free too, the rest of the letters would fall by the wayside.”23 However, against the background of the historic circumstances of World War II, Wallenberg can indeed be seen as the embodiment of positive virtues, as described by Thomas Carlyle in his famous 1841 book On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History: gifted in mind and in character, and if not a creator of history at least a historic figure who had some impact on history. Much more critical concerning the hero concept—not surprisingly after its misuse during two world wars—is the American philosopher Sidney Hook. However, even Hook conceded in 1945 that, “at least some individuals, at some critical moments, play a decisive role in redirecting the historical wave.”24 Hook’s concept of the hero as an individual of historical action, as an event-making person whose individual actions had a decisive importance on the course of history “that would have been profound different if he had not acted as he did”25 is applied also to describe Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was certainly not an epochmaking man; however, his actions in Budapest had a profound impact on this specific historical situation and arguably would not necessarily be the same if another man had been sent there instead. In accordance with the present use of the term “hero,” I define the term “myth” (as well as legend) as a symbolic narrative of a person who is considered extraordinary. Such a person’s narrative is meant to give


answers to timeless questions relevant to every human life.26 Myths claim to reveal universal truths, even if they are not rationally provable. The “hero” of such narratives, as a matter of course, is idealized. Despite the historians’ criticism regarding popular literature about Wallenberg, it is actually the image related by popular literature and film that is best able to establish myth. It is this kind of storytelling that transforms a historical person into a hero figure of mythical qualities.27 Myths are meant to be simple. Raoul Wallenberg’s story is often summarized as “One Man Can Make a Difference.” This phrase illustrates how a complex historical figure is simplified and amplified: what “resonates is not the life lived, but the life as made sense of, the life imaginatively reconstructed and rendered significant.”28 The heroes that are created by myth-making are meant to be remembered, and to shape identity. This cannot be effectively achieved by the more complicated, but less dramatic narratives of historiography, however valuable they are and however indispensable to my own research.29 As Eva-Carin Gerö expressed it: “For the one who seeks to express timeless truths, which correspond more to emotions and intuition rather than to logic and conceptual clarity, the myth is a welcome alternative.”30 Hero stories are meant to fulfill a function within their communities. They serve as models for the creation of a new order or to preserve the given system.31 The mythical hero and the historical figure “exist side by side, like two distinct realities that are almost foreign to each other. They never destroy, exclude or impinge upon another, for they belong to two different universes, those of art and history.”32 As Jan de Vries so accurately described it: “One might call it a mutation when one considers the transition of an historical person into a hero. He is placed in an entirely different sphere—a sphere much higher and more important than that of the world from which he has emerged.”33 Hero stories express “what can be known but not told.” In this way, “mythology is the penultimate truth . . . because the ultimate truth cannot be put into words.”34 Marcus Ehrenpreis, Rabbi at the Great Synagogue in Stockholm when Wallenberg was chosen for his mission, described Wallenberg’s story as a “true tale” (“sannsagan”).35 It is this kind of penultimate truth that for many provides purpose in life or acts as inspiration, rather than historical facts. The popular historical literature offers hero stories with which to identify. The hero we choose depends on the values and the ideologies of our age.36 The hero encourages us to believe in our own hopes and dreams for a better world. There is a similarity between popular historical literature about Wallenberg and the early storytelling literature of the Middle Ages.


Such stories were meant to celebrate outstanding people so that the community “could participate in their magic.” These storytellers (not unlike the early Wallenberg biographers, such as Philipp or Lévai, or later works by his former colleagues and journalists such as Berg, Anger, Lester, or Bierman) attempted to “give an authentic account of the story (at least as it was assumed to be)” while ensuring “that none of the power of the hero would be lost.”37 Their accounts could, at times, even be critical or reveal the protagonist’s negative sides or failures, which only made their stories more credible. In their accounts, Lévai, Anger, and Berg, like the medieval storytellers, displayed both “a remarkable honesty and a slightly ambiguous attitude toward the hero,”38 which made their stories seem all the more authentic. However, what was most important for these storytellers was to relate the magic of heroes, just because they had lived. It was central to the authors of these stories that the power of the hero was maintained, and that the audience was inspired by the hero’s example. In contrast to the heroes of mythology, Wallenberg was a historic figure, who turned out to be a real-life hero. Imagination may have enlarged the historical account but, nevertheless, his story is based not on fiction but on the life of an historical person. He was not a saint of a legend from a fabulous time long ago, but he lived and acted in a time that still affects our own. Raoul Wallenberg was real. This is an essential aspect of this hero story. Historians may not know exactly how many people Wallenberg saved in Hungary, and may question on factual grounds his being credited with the rescue of 100,000 Jews in Budapest, but there is no doubt that Wallenberg took the decision to leave his secure homeland, went to Budapest during World War II, where he contributed to saving lives, that he was captured by the Soviets and that his fate has not been entirely clarified. In the shape of Wallenberg’s story, the classical hero concept becomes valid again because this man really existed. Today, Wallenberg serves as example for moral guidance for contemporary pluralistic societies in several ways and acts as a tool to establish social responsibility and good leadership. Wallenberg’s example is used today to inspire to noble and generous action. Just to give three examples: in 1992, the Swedish Institute arranged a symposium about human rights on the occasion of a huge exhibition on Wallenberg in Budapest, commemorating his 80th anniversary; The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the US created the curriculum “A Study of Heroes” for elementary and middle schools; and the Swedish project the “Raoul Wallenberg Academy for Young Leaders” was established to inspire high school students to learn more about good leadership.39


When investigating the Wallenberg monuments, our first concern is not whether the artists have related the historical facts correctly. We are primarily interested in whether they succeeded, in the sense of the popular literature on Wallenberg, in bestowing upon their protagonist some kind of magic aura that attracts the viewers, lets them pause and reflect upon this hero’s narrative and perhaps become inspired by his example.

Hero skepticism and the survival of a questioned concept The skeptical attitude toward heroes is related to the political developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even if the hero concept was also periodically viewed with skepticism in other centuries, the misuse of the concept during the nineteenth century’s nationalism, and especially during the totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Stalinism in the twentieth century, made it a highly controversial topic after World War II. This was true not only in West Germany but generally in the Western world. The developments of the German Empire since 1871 offered evidence why the hero concept was and is still often met with suspicion. From the rule of Wilhelm II until the end of the National Socialists’ regime, the hero was commonly defined as the war-hero, who was more than willing to die for his nation.40 The crimes against humanity committed during the two world wars, which arose in a sense from such a heroic ideal, are well known and remain the subject of public debate. It was, in fact, Nazi ideology itself that contributed to the devaluation of the hero and the hero’s elitist aura, as a result of the fascists’ egalitarian use of the hero concept: all dead soldiers were honored as heroes, and the soldiers who remained were destined to die a heroic death on the battlefield. As historian Ute Frevert points out, it was in this way that the hero became an inflated and trivialized mass phenomenon.41 Likewise, the idea of the working hero of socialist societies failed. The award of the title of “working hero” was nothing more than a “stimulus for production” and an “individualized bonus system.”42 By the second half of the twentieth century the hero had became a banal echo of its once powerful meaning, and not, as some assume, a consequence of the media age, when “hero” was often synonymous with terms such as star or idol, meaning both the firefighter who risks his life for someone else on a daily basis as part of the profession and a famous rock singer or successful athlete. The media age is indeed hostile to heroes, as shown by Epstein and Edelstein. If the status of the hero is to be retained, it is better that


“we do not know too much about him.”43 Peter H. Gibbon is convinced that our time is characterized by the common notion that nothing is perfect, and even the hero must be inherently flawed.44 The public may be curious about the dark sides of famous people, and the media is eager to serve the public’s curiosity. However, when heroes turn out to have failed or have some less favorable characteristics, their reputations are easily damaged.45 In our age, skepticism regarding the hero concept as well as sensation-mongering dominates. For example, several biographies about outstanding politicians of the twentieth century highlight their personal weaknesses instead of their achievements, as Gibbon has demonstrated: many people remember John F. Kennedy for his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, or Martin Luther King for betraying his wife, rather than for their commitment to American society. In contrast, Wallenberg’s position seems secure, precisely because we do not know too much about him. We certainly do not know of any major mistake or human weakness. As it seems, this hero will not betray us. That is why Wallenberg could maintain the aura of anonymity and mystery necessary for hero status. While the differences concerning how the hero is perceived in the 12 countries where public Wallenberg monuments are erected will not be the topic of this investigation, it seems, however, right to state that in an age of emancipation and feminism, the concept of the male hero is questioned in most postmodern societies, and, as a consequence, has lost its evident importance in Western democracies.46 To many, the hero concept appears as “a gendered and ‘raced’ concept”47 and therefore outdated. Furthermore, the hero may appear an anachronism in democratic societies, an outdated idea that subverts the notion that all human beings are equal. Democracies are meant to make the hero, at least the hero of history, the hero of determinative historical action, dispensable. As Bertolt Brecht reminds us in his Galileo Galilei, “unhappy the land that needs heroes.” In fact, as Hook argues, the hero could even be a threat to democracies, because he is able to change the course of history and consequently can endanger the given democratic system.48 Despite the skeptical attitude in many postmodern societies toward the hero concept, people do still long for hero figures. Daniel Boorstin points out that each “successive age has believed that heroes—great men—dwelt mostly before its own time.”49 He goes on to explain that the “traditional belief in the decline of greatness has been equated with fame, and fame could not be made overnight.” Furthermore, Boorstin states that men “of the last century were more heroic than those of today; men of antiquity


were still more heroic; and those of pre-history became demi-gods. The hero was always somehow ranked among the ancients.” Despite all skepticism, many still feel a need for heroes even in democratic societies, such as the USA or Canada.50 The US is illustrative of the increasing popularity of hero figures such as Wallenberg, where nearly every federal state has its own Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Day marked on the calendar. Even in today’s pluralistic societies, which as often stated a lack a cultural or moral consensus, the Wallenberg story satisfies the general human need to be reminded that, as Gibbon demonstrated, idealism and selflessness still exist. Following Hook, in democratic communities the hero should perhaps rather appear as a great figure “in the Pantheon of thought,” a person of ideas or social vision rather than as an event-making individual of history.51 Nevertheless, even then the hero maintains a necessary function of the one who imparts “vision, method, and knowledge.” In the twenty-first century, the war hero hopefully does not once again become the idol of the majority of people. However, the human longing for stories, myths, and heroes, or, if one prefers the “less grandiose, more human” term “role model,”52 has not decreased. “Even in our twentieth-century age of doubt, when morality itself has been in ill repute, we have desperately held on to our belief in human greatness. For human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.”53 Personal monuments are raised in this spirit. They reflect the values the memorial makers have agreed upon when choosing their hero. By erecting a personal monument to a person considered to be outstanding the memorial makers make these values visible and tangible to others, so that the viewers, in turn, can emulate these values in their own lives. The mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote: “wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, it is killed.”54 In the present analysis of the Wallenberg monuments, I will do my best not to “kill” the myth, and similarly when relating Wallenberg’s story as a hero’s tale. Historical facts alone are not enough to capture the many dimensions of the Wallenberg story or the many layers of meaning of the Wallenberg monuments. I aspire to vividly describe the monuments and the myth to which they are dedicated, while simultaneously subjecting my writing to academic scrutiny. This is a challenging task: while the art of praising is typical for mythical narratives, academic writing is characterized by alleged objectivity, a critical attitude and focus on facts, including the shortcomings of the historical person.55

4 Raoul Wallenberg—A Hero’s Tale

By working out what makes the Wallenberg narrative so suitable to be told as a hero’s tale, I simultaneously outline the story’s many dimensions, providing the general background for an understanding of the Wallenberg monuments. By doing so, the potential of Wallenberg’s story will become clear and explain why his narrative was and continues to be told and retold with variations, depending on which aspects of the hero story is relevant to the storyteller’s audience. In the process, I refer to scholars from various disciplines such as mythology, history, psychoanalysis, literature, social theory, and philosophy. Many scholars, including Joseph Campbell in his influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949), have shown that heroic myths may vary enormously in detail, but their basic narrative structure remains remarkably similar, irrespective of the cultural background. From early centuries through to today, generic hero patterns recur in heroic narratives, in both high literature and popular fiction, with, naturally enough, adaptations to time and place. Among the recurring patterns are the hero’s origin, the challenge for adventure, and the hero’s tragic fate, to name just a few. Seldom does one find all patterns displayed in one story. Such worked-out hero patterns serve in the following as a guideline. The classical hero patterns are extended by finding suitable terms that both fit the Wallenberg narrative as well as our contemporary understanding of the hero concept.1 I will, furthermore, refer to biographical facts, testimonies by family members and contemporary witnesses in addition to various literary sources. Taken together, all these sources give an idea of the appropriateness of Wallenberg’s narrative for being told as a hero tale. The facts and fiction of the Wallenberg story are interwoven. This combination seems appropriate because Wallenberg was a real-life hero who is 51


surrounded by a myth and because monuments refer as much to facts as they do to imagination, being themselves artistic creations based on imagination. Even though I will give a fairly comprehensive account of suitable patterns that describe the Wallenberg narrative, this is not intended to be an all-encompassing picture. I leave out aspects that lack any historical basis as, for example, the alleged liaison of Wallenberg with the wife of Hungary’s foreign minister, Gabor Kemény. Baroness Elisabeth Kemény indeed helped Wallenberg with his rescue mission, but the rumor that the Baroness and Wallenberg were a “heroic couple” has no historical proof, a fact that did not deter CBS Paramount Network Television from including a romance between the two, for dramaturgical motives, in the mini-series Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story, with Richard Chamberlain as the leading character. The series (which was written by Gerald Green, who was also the author of the famous Holocaust series) was broadcast in 1985 in the US and then in many countries worldwide. Additionally, other hero patterns such as the hero’s betrayal or the hero’s companion will be omitted here because the monuments solely deal with Wallenberg. These aspects, which would include further personalities, are therefore irrelevant within this study. Furthermore, it is worthwhile mentioning that additional information about Wallenberg will be given in Part II when relevant to the context of the analysis of a monument.

The hero’s origin Of utmost importance to many hero stories is the moment of birth or even the moment of conception, which act as a precondition that endows the hero with extraordinary powers.2 Stories about the hero’s childhood are meant to emphasize that what the hero later became was foreshadowed earlier. Wallenberg, at a young age, already appeared to have characteristics different from his peers: he was said to be stronger, smarter, and wiser.3 According to myth, heroes are descended from a connection between a god and a human as indicated in the word “hero,” derived from the Greek, in which it means “demi-god.”4 Thereby, the hero inherits, so to speak, a divine aspect, becomes a somewhat god-like, albeit mortal, hero who owing to this origin can achieve incredible deeds. “This accords with the view that hero hood is predestined, rather than simply achieved.”5 The importance of the hero’s origin, the hero’s divine or extraordinary aspect, continues to be characteristic of the common understanding of


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a hero, regardless of all changes of perception in the hero concept since antiquity. In fact, the “majority of heroes throughout history have been, or pretended to be, or aspired to become, aristocrats,”6—a secularized but still outstanding version of the divine. Of course, we all know that Wallenberg was a common mortal, but his origin coincides with many aspects that are suitable to tell a hero’s tale. He was not only born on a Sunday but with a caul about his head, which, according to popular belief, is considered a sign of luck, an omen that the child is distinguished by greatness of mind and even equipped with supernatural powers.7 Furthermore, Wallenberg was a descendant of one of Sweden’s most distinguished, affluent, and socially prominent families, which for generations, up to the present, has played a significant role in Swedish society. Members of the Wallenberg family have been bankers, diplomats, and bishops. In fact, Wallenberg was proud of his ancestry, and considered it to be both an advantage and an obligation. In response to the human need for the hero’s origins to be extraordinary, if not divine, the Wallenbergs are often considered aristocrats in popular imagination.8 Many also assume that the name Wallenberg suggests that the family is Jewish. The family is neither aristocratic nor Jewish, but there are people who have difficulty believing that Wallenberg, a Lutheran Protestant, helped the Jews for purely humanitarian reasons. These people may dig into history and may feel affirmed when they learn that Wallenberg’s grandmother’s grandfather was Michael Benedicks (1768–1845), an immigrant Jew from Germany, whose children were later baptized.9 Although less often used as the family background but, indeed, even more suitable for telling the Wallenberg story as a classical hero’s tale is the fact that Wallenberg’s father, Raoul Oscar, a naval officer, died from cancer at the age of 23, three months before his son was born. Raoul’s mother, only 20 when she married, had not even reached 21 at the time she was widowed. Naturally, she was full of grief over her loss. As her letters to her deceased husband’s parents indicate, her boy became the joy of her life. Heroes have been the subject of modern psychology since the field began.10 Of course, Wallenberg’s origin and family history lend themselves to psychological analysis.11 Even without intending to provide a psychological profile, it seems apparent that the early loss of his father, and his upbringing by his widowed mother and grandmother (even she became a widow only three months after his birth), had a strong impact on Raoul. In response, the boy became a comforter to both of them, displaying empathy and responsibility. The father’s


death, and his wish that his son would become a “kind and good” person, became a commitment for the boy.12 The expectations the grandfather, Gustaf Wallenberg, had for his son were passed on to his grandson, who did everything in his power to meet his grandfather’s and his mother’s hopes.13 In a letter to his grandfather in July 1936, Raoul wrote that he always felt inferior to his father, describing himself as an unworthy substitute for the honest and self-sacrificing man he knew only from photographs.14 Later, Raoul might have felt quite frustrated after his grandfather’s death in March 1937, realizing that his excellent American diploma was not accepted in Sweden. Without the support of his grandfather or a valid diploma it was difficult to find a decent working position in Stockholm. Against this background, we may regard his willingness to go to Budapest as the ultimate chance to prove that he could fulfill his family’s demands as well as his own. As previously stated, for Wallenberg a career in the Wallenberg empire was not a possibility. Despite that, his story can still function as a hero story, not as a self-evident success story, but the other way round: told as a life at the periphery. In the shadow of the successful uncles and cousins, the neglected outsider, despite all odds, struggles his way through. In the end, it was Raoul who turned out to be the best that the Wallenberg family was ever able to achieve with its name, while other members of the family were to some extent discredited because they profited from the war by doing business with both Nazi Germany and the Allies.15

The call to adventure In retrospect, it is easy to regard Wallenberg’s origin and family background as preconditions for his later mission. Even if we consider Wallenberg’s upbringing, especially when we read the correspondence between Raoul and his grandfather, we find several indicators that seem to prove that his hero-hood was predestined, and that Wallenberg was, as Lenke Rothman, the creator of the Wallenberg memorial in the Swedish parliament, expressed it, always searching for a meaningful mission for his life.16 According to his sister, Nina Lagergren, Raoul had personal role models since his early youth, which seem to confirm this assumption: these were Elsa Brändström and Fridtjof Nansen, whose relief-work during and after, respectively, World War I had a strong impact on Raoul.17 He knew their stories by heart. The Swede Elsa Brändström (1888–1948),


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in fact a distant relative by marriage to Raoul, was a delegate to the Red Cross between 1914 and 1920. She educated herself as a nurse and traveled voluntarily to Siberia in 1915 where she contributed to the efforts that saved the lives of thousands of prisoners of war. Her whole life was directed toward helping people in need, after World War I first in Germany and later in the US where she and her husband, an opponent of the Nazis, had moved to avoid persecution. The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) is commonly known as an explorer of the North Pole, but is also widely remembered for his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations. In the aftermath of World War I, Nansen contributed to efforts to return nearly half a million German and Austrian–Hungarian refugees of war to their homelands. In addition, Nansen helped Russian and Armenian refugees, for example, by creating the so-called Nansen-pass. Nansen received the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work in 1922. Later on, Brändström’s and Nansen’s farsighted and comprehensive rescue operations would serve Wallenberg as a concrete guideline for his own mission; and Wallenberg called his post-war reconstruction plans for Budapest the “Nansen-plan.” When Raoul and Nina saw the movie Pimpernel Smith at a private screening at the British Embassy in 1942, Raoul told his sister that that was something he would like to do, as she recalled later. The film’s main character is Professor Horatio Smith, a seemingly absentminded academic, who in his outer appearance is an unlikely hero as Raoul himself. Horatio Smith rescues persecuted from the Nazis, as Wallenberg indeed did two years later. In retrospect, it is interesting to note that Wallenberg, following the description of his colleague Per Anger, shared many of Professor Smith’s characteristics. Like Horatio Smith, Raoul finds it “rather hard to stand by” and watch people destroyed; like Professor Smith, Raoul apparently considered himself “not a spectacular person.” Nonetheless, both Smith and Wallenberg had the ability to blend into any new environment and mysteriously appear when their help was needed, bluffing and outwitting highranking Nazis.18 In fact, Raoul often had his doubts about his planned bank career. He wanted to work for something positive rather than “saying no to people.”19 However, it is worthwhile remembering that Wallenberg’s role models did not suffer a tragic end: they did come back from their missions and returned to a private life. They gained the appreciation many classical heroes enjoyed. Wallenberg, who apparently felt a strong call for adventure, also planned to return from his mission.20


The challenge that makes the hero One essential element in the hero’s journey is that it is marked by perils. The hero always encounters struggles and is meant to face pain and even death without fear. Without a challenge, without peril, there is no hero. The classical hero ventures out into a world full of danger, leaving the safety of the home. This hero is not bound by close family relations, has no spouse or children yet. Raoul Wallenberg was 31 years old and unmarried when he left his secure homeland. He had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf twice in about 1936/721 and had been both in Germany and Hungary, among other places, on business trips during the war. He had read about and to some degree even witnessed the consequences of the Nazi reign on these occasions. Therefore, he had an idea of what was going on in Europe, even if he could hardly imagine the physical and emotional stresses and strains that the mission would involve. The pillar that supports Miri Margolin’s Wallenberg bust in the Capitol in Washington DC has a plaque that states: “Raoul Wallenberg’s mission . . . during World War II was unprecedented in the history of mankind.” This simplification of his mission might lead to the assumption that Wallenberg was exceptional when it was actually the historical circumstances that were unprecedented, and demanded unprecedented action. Without the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust, no such rescue mission would have been necessary and no hero of Wallenberg’s dimensions could have been created. It is in times of urgent crisis that the great, or unprecedented, hero is born.22 As Hook summarizes it: “For on the whole, heroes in history have carved out their paths of greatness by wars, conquests, revolutions, and holy crusades.”23 The potential hero always depends on a substantially changing historical context.24 In addition, the hero needs an enemy, an antagonist that he can conquer. Wallenberg found his in Budapest in Adolf Eichmann or, if not in Eichmann himself, in the SS Colonel Kurt Becher and the Hungarian fascist leaders. According to Wallenberg’s colleague Lars Berg, Wallenberg met with Eichmann and had dinner with him, but no other proof survives that this really was the case.25 Historians doubt that this dinner ever took place. However, apparently posterity had a strong need to believe that Wallenberg, the hero, and Eichmann, the demon, had directly met and negotiated with each other; it is a motif frequently used, as in the TV film Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story (1985), in the symphony Portrait of Raoul Wallenberg by Ulf Björlin and Herb Schapiro (1990) and in the opera Wallenberg by Erkki-Sven Tüür and Lutz Hübner (2001).26


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Wallenberg did not resist the call of history. Besides the acceptance of the first challenge, namely to go to Hungary and help the persecuted Jews, Wallenberg met the real challenge in October 1944, after the Arrow Cross coup. Although he originally planned to return home by the end of September 1944, he remained in Budapest when the political situation became worse. In fact, the following months after the coup turned out to be the most difficult for the persecuted and the helpers. As Lévai described it, Wallenberg mastered the challenge: It was then that Raoul Wallenberg in reality became head of all the rescue attempts. From this moment his entire independence and self-reliance became crystal clear. He took over the central direction of the rescue attempts from the control of the Swedish Embassy from Gyopár-utca. [“Utca” is Hungarian and means “street.”] He established himself on the broadest possible base, independently of the Legation. Ambassador Danielsson . . . left him the whole field and during the remaining terrible months of the rescue mission, Wallenberg made all decisions in a plenipotentiary capacity, in all matters relating to protection, and used to the full, the whole prestige of the Swedish State. Although Danielsson stayed at his post in Buda, Wallenberg exercised control over such an incredibly extensive scale of activities as though he were not just a modest Secretary to the Embassy but rather the Chargé d’Affaires of the Swedish Embassy, in the absence of the Ambassador.27 It was during these weeks in October, when the situation for the Jews worsened, that Raoul Wallenberg became “the Wallenberg of survivor’s memories.”28 The survivors were indeed well aware of this fact, as they expressed it as early as June 26, 1946 in the prologue to the gala concert in memory for Raoul Wallenberg’s work, written by Paul Forgács, the son of one of Wallenberg’s closest members of staff: “And later, when developments forced him . . . suddenly Wallenberg the hero stood there and nobody was surprised.”29 These weeks after the coup became the “Heroic Period,” which turned Wallenberg into “a legendary figure.”30 Retrospectively, it seems easy to say that: “If there ever was a right man, in the right place, at the right time, it was Wallenberg.”31 His background, education, and personal characteristics seemed to make Wallenberg the right man for the mission.


Tragic fate—eternal life We often hear about Raoul Wallenberg, a hero and a saint. . . . To a brother he’s not a hero or a saint. He had done something heroic. But we don’t want him to be a real hero. A real hero dies on a battlefield in shining armor. A saint can hardly be a saint without dying as a martyr. That is not what we want. We want Raoul to be alive. We would like him to come back to ordinary life.32 It might seem cynical to Wallenberg’s family, and to those people who fought for decades for Wallenberg’s release, but the fact that Wallenberg never returned, and the fact that his fate was never entirely settled, contributed to his story being kept alive—more so than if his death had been confirmed in 1947, or if he, like other diplomats, had returned home in 1945 and lived a long and comfortable life. “A hero dies young: that is his tragedy . . . his fate will be fulfilled inexorably. That is perhaps what is most moving about the image of the hero: his fragility in spite of his (humanly speaking) unassailable strength.”33 To many, the hero’s death is decisive, acts as a precondition for “hero hood.”34 To others, the hero’s death might not be absolutely necessary, hence the hero’s fate is essential for the way the hero is commemorated by posterity. In order to be widely admired, something about the hero’s narrative needs to be imperfect: the hero, who after a successful mission lives a long and happy life, could easily be forgotten or meet only with envy.35 Suffering, an undeserved fate or an early death may be the stimulus to evoke sympathy for the hero. Imperfection or tragedy, but not hidden traits, create the possibility to identify or feel pity for the, in other regards, exceptional person. Like most of the classical heroes, Wallenberg—despite his seeming indomitableness—was vulnerable in the end. After successfully saving many lives, he was imprisoned, and unable to save himself. Although Wallenberg’s story had already started during his days in Budapest to develop into a myth,36 it is of course his unsolved fate (and how it was handled) that contributed to the mythic dimensions of the Wallenberg story. In fact, the majority of books about him focus not on his deeds, but on his fate. Wallenberg’s unsolved fate contributed to the development of his myth and led to speculation about his whereabouts, a topic that could be kept on the political agenda for more than 60 years. Recent leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, have still been confronted with appeals to finally reveal the truth about Wallenberg’s fate.37


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Testimonies by former Gulag prisoners, some as late as 1992, which alleged that Wallenberg was alive after 1947, have contributed to the continued interest in the Wallenberg case. Of course, by the late 1970s, when American interest brought Wallenberg on to the international agenda, his case was extremely suitable to be used politically: the imprisonment of Wallenberg provided exemplary proof of the cruel Soviet regime. Testimonies by prisoners who returned from the Soviet Gulag nourished the hope that Wallenberg would return home. Considering Wallenberg’s advanced age, such hopes seemed remarkable. They, however, demonstrate the hero status bestowed upon Wallenberg over the decades: Wallenberg, like Odysseus or Aeneas who returned from places no ordinary mortal ever left, is imagined as re-emerging “into the land of living.”38 Given his disappearance, Wallenberg is preserved as a young hero. The last known photograph of Wallenberg depicts him at the age of 32. In popular imagination, Wallenberg will, therefore, continue to remain eternally young. An obscure origin corresponds to a tragic early death. Together, they assure the symbolic survival of the hero.39 The young and triumphant hero is gone, leaving humanity with an unfathomable loss, but his deeds and sacrifice bind us to his legacy.

The individual against the cruel regime Western societies are experiencing the age of the individual. While many people today feel impotent against state power, and lost owing to globalization, the action of single individuals reaffirms the belief that one person’s actions still matter and can be influential. We long for an individual who is able to fight and succeed against state-power. “It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.”40 A statement on Paul Lancz’s homepage, the creator of the Wallenberg bust in Montreal, is symptomatic of this attitude: “[Wallenberg] is the quintessential contemporary ‘David’ [sic] he confronted the Nazi juggernaut single-handedly and by dint of the sheer force of his humanitarian convictions prevailed VICTORIUS [sic].”41 Such a statement is, of course, based on incorrect historical assumptions. The belief that an individual can rescue tens of thousands of lives as a result of his character alone is indeed highly problematic. It leads to a false understanding of the real Wallenberg. Anyone who regards Wallenberg as an example does better by considering the historical context of his actions. However, in contrast to celebrities, who are made-up and made famous, heroes are indeed self-made.42 They become famous because of the deed


they committed or because they stand fast by their ethics or religious beliefs. Wallenberg was not a career diplomat who was obligated to accept the mission to Hungary. He was a young architect and businessman, who, as a private citizen, accepted the responsibility he was requested to undertake. Wallenberg accepted a perilous mission that took him far away from his homeland. The fact that Wallenberg, as an individual, made a voluntary decision that put his life in danger, makes him a much more selfless hero than others mentioned in the same breath like, for example, Oskar Schindler, who was already part of the political events when he acted, whereas Wallenberg volunteered himself for a dangerous mission far from home. However, in view of Western societies’ need for a strong individual, capable of acting against cruel state regimes, Wallenberg’s individual decision to take part in a larger rescue mission with various governments and institutions involved is often forgotten. Instead, as Lancz’s quotation indicates, Wallenberg is viewed as an individual, the diplomat or businessman, who succeeded in saving 100,000 persons, entirely on his own—something no single nation or even the combined efforts of the Allied governments achieved, as often stated.43 In this context, it is again necessary to remember that Wallenberg’s hero tale functions because it is simplified and dramatic. Wallenberg became a symbol of the individual’s fight against cruel state regimes. However, Wallenberg did not really act in Budapest solely as an individual. As demonstrated, his diplomatic appointment as well as his actions depended on a certain historical situation with various institutions and other helpers involved. Wallenberg came to represent the heroic individual because there is a human need to view him that way. However historically inaccurate this view is, Wallenberg’s individual choice is the crux of his view, even if strongly modified.

Legend by number Legends are based on simplification as well as on magnification. Generally speaking, a hero must achieve something extraordinary to be revered and memorialized. It is commonly believed that Wallenberg was responsible for saving at least 100,000 lives. Together with the protective passports, which have become a symbol for Wallenberg’s rescue mission (other documents and means of assistance have remained unnoticed),44 the number 100,000 represents in popular imagination the success of Wallenberg’s rescue mission. In recent years, attempts have been made to honor other World War II rescuers, and as a consequence, several individuals who were active


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in Budapest, such as Nuncio Angelo Roncalli, Spanish Attaché Giorgio Perlasca,45 and Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, were accredited with saving “tens of thousands” of people. We do not know, and will probably never know, which of these rescuers saved how many individuals. What we do know is that about 120,000 Jews survived in Budapest, whereby about 20,000 Jews survived in the underground. Historians assume that the Swedish Legation, in cooperation with other neutral states and organizations, such as the Red Cross and the Jewish Council, saved up to 30,000 lives.46 Still controversial is the question of who was responsible for saving the approximately 70,000 dwellers in the so-called “large” or “sealed” ghetto. Some stress the reputation of Wallenberg’s name, which may have contributed to saving a possible forthcoming destruction of the ghetto,47 while others do not think that there is adequate evidence to support this theory. Only one monument refers to the saving of the ghetto, namely, Franco Assetto’s monument in Los Angeles, California. The inscription says: “In the final hours of the siege of the city, he prevented the Nazis from blowing up the ghetto where 70,000 Jews still lived.” It is, however, not clarified if or to what extent Wallenberg contributed to this large ghetto being spared. For the success of Wallenberg’s hero narrative however, this makes no difference: A hero’s appearance is sometimes all that is required of him. . . . Indeed it isn’t necessary that he be actually present: it is enough that he should be so apparently. . . . A hero, once his fame reaches a certain pitch, becomes a totem, an object of magical potency that need take no action in order to achieve results.48 Independent of whether there is any documentary evidence, many credit Wallenberg for the rescue of the ghetto and, therefore, for saving 100,000 lives. Historians, too, such as Levine, can understand that the hero’s reputation is more important than the exact number of lives the historical figure has saved. He states: The exact number is, in fact, quite unimportant. We remember Wallenberg today, and celebrate his courage and commitment to life not because he saved a specific number of Jews, but because he chose to help during a time when so many others turned away.49 Still, it seems that the number 100,000 does play a significant part in this hero narrative. Such a large number corresponds, of course, to the


greatness of this hero, who individually, and on his own initiative, saved innumerable lives. This only a hero could achieve. However simplified this image is, it fulfills the demand required of a hero’s tale. Without question, this number confirms the view that Wallenberg is a legend, and a “legend is someone . . . who has become larger than life, someone around whom an aura of mystery has gathered.”50 That Wallenberg alone could rescue the incredible number of 100,000 people would support a belief that he was equipped with some superhuman power. It seems also that the number 100,000 became of utmost importance when Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife tried to make Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the US in 1981. The large number of lives that Wallenberg allegedly saved was a way for Lantos to raise awareness about the case, so that, as a consequence, people would become engaged and, thus, the chances to save Wallenberg would increase. Furthermore, the precise number of “100,000” has a symbolic value of its own, especially in contrast to the number of “six million” Jews who were killed during the Holocaust: if one person was able to save 100,000, it would have taken only 60 individuals like Wallenberg to rescue all of the murdered Jews. This comparison seems to highlight how indifferent the world was to the fate of European Jewry. If we consider the inscriptions on the monuments, we realize that the number of lives saved by Wallenberg mattered to the memorial makers. Many also cited the number of 100,000 when seeking financial support for their monuments. From talking with the artists, however, I learned that few of them thought that the actual number of saved lives did matter. As they told me, most would have created their Wallenberg monuments in precisely the same way, even if the number had been smaller. For most, Wallenberg’s decision to help the Jews was the most important aspect of his story. Many artists felt that Wallenberg’s name symbolized the combined rescue mission that took place in Budapest. Even those who insisted on the number of 100,000 still considered Wallenberg’s decision to rescue Jews to be the most important factor. Among the Wallenberg artists who found the number 100,000 to be exaggerated, many felt, nevertheless, that the number had to be high, even when they left the number unspecified, as expressed in the monuments’ inscriptions: “countless,” “innumerable,” or “thousands.” The openness of these words allows a certain amount of speculation regarding the actual number and in this way might even encourage myth-making. Those who believed that Wallenberg might have saved about 20,000 Jews, interpreted the number 100,000 to include the offspring of those who could have been born to parents rescued by Wallenberg. The idea


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of symbolically representing the offspring, based on the number of 100,000, was in fact the subject of an unrealized proposal entitled The Raoul Wallenberg Project, by Ronald Jones and Laurie Haycock Makela for the Wallenberg monument contest in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2005. The proposal included a clock of survivors. This clock reflected data researched by an employee of Sweden’s Statistiska Centralbyrån (Statistics Sweden), a mathematical model for predicting generational growth based on what is known of the survivors. One may imagine that one day the number of the descendants would be higher than the number of people who died in the Holocaust. There is a risk that the loss of those who were murdered and never had descendants might be completely ignored. However, in the latter attitudes and approaches, the hero acts as redeemer. The sacrifice the hero made led not to his own resurrection, but instead paved the way for new life. A comment made by artist Charlotte Gyllenhammar, creator of the Wallenberg monument in Gothenburg, Sweden, contrasts with historians’ skepticism and the need to find documentary evidence. When asked if the number of Jews that Wallenberg supposedly rescued had any influence on how she created her Wallenberg monument, Gyllenhammar answered that the number mattered certainly for those who had been saved by Wallenberg and those who had the chance to be born because their parents were saved. One may reason that while we are unable to prove that Wallenberg actually saved 100,000 lives, we cannot disprove it either. So why not maintain that number, and the power of myth? Would it harm or inspire us? It is remarkable that Wallenberg emanated such an aura of trust that this is accepted even by someone like Joseph Wachtel, another creator of a bronze dedicated to Wallenberg, whose own mother-in-law, despite possessing a Swedish Schutzpass, was deported to Auschwitz and killed. Nevertheless, Wachtel believes that Wallenberg rescued 100,000 Jews. To many people, the number 100,000 seems important in considering Wallenberg as a hero.

The civil hero Raoul Wallenberg, who stands for resistance against injustice, represents the civil hero, a hero type that is relatively new in history. This type is exemplified by figures like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela: Like the classical heroes they risk their own lives, but not for the sake of the logic of battle. . . . They themselves do not want to fight in the


classical sense, that is, to kill or die. They are civil heroes who fight for a community in which heroes no longer have to or shall exist, at most citizens of a high moral, intellectual and cultural level.51 The term civil hero may find acceptance also among those who are critical toward the hero concept after its misuse in the twentieth century. “But those who resist . . . are not in power—those who follow their conscience, their moral impulses, against the demanded, tyrannically imposed . . . who would rather die than submit to unjustness—for them one may abandon the term hero, but not its sense.”52 The term civil hero seems most suitable when describing a twentiethcentury hero like Wallenberg within the context of today’s secularized hero concept. However, other terms such as secular saint, philanthropist, or Righteous Gentile (used to describe non-Jews who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust) may be equivalent in this context. Wallenberg’s actions can be described as philanthropic because it was not his own people that he fought for and because he went beyond his duties as a career diplomat. The search for a suitable term to describe Wallenberg occupied the thoughts of Hungarian survivors as early as 1946. They sensed that Wallenberg differed from traditional heroes but, for the lack of a better term, they assigned Wallenberg to a more familiar hero type, which we may call “the religious hero.” He was a wandering knight, pure and unafraid, a reincarnation of the dragon-killer of old who unhesitatingly went to battle for superhuman ideals, the true, irreproachable idealist. . . . He was a crusade but of a new kind, for he loved everyone. He feared danger but despised it and overcame his fear because he wanted to defeat danger. He was more of a hero than the heroes of old, more like a worthy successor to the apostles. He did good for the sake of good . . . because he considered it his duty to fight for someone else’s cause, fight for an idea, which he possibly wasn’t aware of but only felt in his heart. An idea which perhaps was embodied in only one person in the whole city, Raoul Wallenberg.53 Over half a century later, the historian Rubinstein refers to this “religious hero type.” Rubinstein called Wallenberg “an authentic—and very typical—secular saint of the twentieth century.”54 Civil hero, Righteous Gentile, or secular saint—whatever we call him, Wallenberg can be used to visualize, through every detail and act of


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his secular life, the universal good, and acts as a proof that such can be immanent in all of us.55 Wallenberg . . . disappeared before the eyes he had saved, just as a hero of legends. He did what he had to do, saved thousands of people and vanished after he had completed his mission. And still more. He brought back the belief that there has existed and will exist people who selflessly cast themselves in the way of the powers of evil to protect the unprotected. There will always be heroes and knights to come, battle and disappear, pure and uncompromising. That was the lesson Raoul Wallenberg gave us.56

The universal hero The heroes of the twentieth century were often national heroes. National heroes are characterized by their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their nation, such as the countless soldiers who died while serving their country, or for people’s achievements in science, sports or culture. This accounts for the hero status accorded to people such as Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut of the USSR, as well as today’s athletes, who win medals for their nations, and as well as civil heroes like Gandhi or Mandela. Wallenberg-as-hero is in contrast to them and all hero figures put on a pedestal during the nineteenth century, to celebrate the great citizens of the nation and by doing so, strengthen the nation-building process, or the bourgeois example of the great son of the city whose example was meant to manifest the power of that class. Wallenberg represents a different hero type: the non-patriotic or universal hero. Actually, it is this categorization that makes Wallenberg such an appropriate hero figure for so many societies in the Western world. In retrospect, Wallenberg’s upbringing appears as the optimal precondition for becoming a universal hero. He lived what we would call today a cosmopolitan life. His grandfather carefully prepared his grandson to become a citizen of the world. His studies in the US were meant to lead to a deeper understanding of human nature, and they taught Raoul how to make useful contacts with people from all walks of life and culture, and prepare him for a leading position in later business life.57 After his studies, Raoul worked in South Africa and Palestine. Among the factors that contributed to Wallenberg being easily received as a “national” hero in many countries, without actually being a citizen of these nations, was the cosmopolitan life he lived. In fact, he lived, worked or traveled on four continents, indeed in several of the countries where monuments


later were erected in his honor. His cosmopolitan lifestyle was already obvious to his protégés in Budapest. “That attitude showed traces of his having been in America and Africa, without his mentioning it.” He was a man who “had been all around the world.”58 The fact that Wallenberg is not a national hero is of utmost importance. While other heroes were “always articulated through the ideological frameworks of gender, imperialism, and national identity,”59 Wallenberg represents something different. He is a hero who via his upbringing and education, and by the circumstances of his mission in Budapest, crosses national borders, and is celebrated by nations to which he never belonged. Wallenberg is accepted by several nations and might for that reason be located at the top of the hierarchy of heroes.60 One reason that Wallenberg could easily be assimilated into other nations’ self-images was perhaps his own nation’s neglect during the early years after the war. Sweden was late in honoring its forgotten son. Wallenberg monuments were erected in Sweden years after such monuments were established in Australia and the US. For example, a national collection or monopolization had not yet taken place, and this left the opportunity for other countries to celebrate him. The fact that Wallenberg had lived in Palestine certainly contributed to Israel’s celebration of this Righteous Gentile’s deeds via the erection of a copy of Imre Varga’s Budapest monument in Tel Aviv in 2002, celebrated as his “homecoming,” to quote the headlines of local newspapers. The fact that Wallenberg’s mission was initiated, specified, and financed by the American War Refugee Board, which also chose him for this mission, made it easy for Wallenberg to be used to celebrate America’s participation in the rescue operation. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat but with an American assignment. Congressman Tom Lantos called him a “Swedish–American hero.” Wallenberg had studied and traveled in the US, and the time he had spent there was influential to his personal development. After his story became widely known in the US in the 1980s, many Americans felt a moral responsibility toward him. Against this, it is no wonder that the inscription on James Stoval’s monument in California does not even mention that Wallenberg was a Swede. The viewer of Stoval’s monument could easily mistake Wallenberg for an American. This interpretation is strengthened when we consider the wider context of the National Mall in Washington, DC: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is situated at Raoul Wallenberg Place at one end


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of the mall. The bust of Wallenberg is placed in the Capitol, located at the other end of the mall. As Walter Reich, representing the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, mentioned in his speech at the unveiling of Margolin’s bust in the Capitol: “There are now two memorials to that great human being, between which so many of the symbols of American history, decency, and democracy stand arrayed.”61 This remark was followed by a canticle on the US as land of the free and concluded: “For democracy is the political system, pioneered and developed in this country more robustly than anywhere else, that frees us to be most fully, and most decently, human.” The same tendencies are present when we take a look at Tom Lantos’s speech on March 26, 1981, regarding the introduction of the bill proclaiming Wallenberg to be an honorary citizen of the US: [I]n taking Raoul Wallenberg to our Nation’s breast, we bring even more honor to ourselves than to him. We recognize our responsibility to him by commemoration the great achievements in his life. His contribution to answering the call of the American conscience of that time, and our involvement in his fate. . . . In honoring Raoul Wallenberg we are honoring ourselves as a Congress and as a nation, recognizing that beyond the problems of the day . . . there are issues that unite us far more serious that our divisive partisan battles, and those issues are our common concerns for the very principles upon which this very great republic was established.62 It is not surprising that Wallenberg’s narrative of the successful individual was especially useful in the US, the land of individualism par excellence. Wallenberg, who outwitted the Nazi regime, was captured by the Soviets. This fact was, of course, quite valuable during the 1980s when his fate became popularly known in the US. It was useful to argue, as Reich and Lantos did, that not even such an outstanding individual as Wallenberg could avoid undergoing an undeserved fate in a cruel state-regime such as the USSR in contrast to the “land of democracy par excellence,” as many Americans like to view their country. Another important reason for Wallenberg’s widespread acceptance surely lies in the fact that “[t]here are still people [Wallenberg] saved scattered all over the globe.”63 The survivors, many of them who fled after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 to various parts of the world, kept the memory of this universal hero alive in the nations where they established their new homes.


Wallenberg as the world’s conscience By the time Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, German intentions to exterminate the European Jews were known to world leaders. News of the atrocities committed against the Hungarian Jews had finally reached the West, which had previously been indifferent to the fate of European Jewry. While it is hard for posterity to judge how aware the people or the leaders really were of the ongoing genocide of the Jews,64 in retrospect it appears, however, that the change in attitude toward the ongoing genocide seemed expressly reflected by the posting of Wallenberg as an envoy, a humanitarian attaché. When Wallenberg decided to undertake the mission, he knew, at least to some extent, of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, and it seemed that Wallenberg wanted to prevent the ongoing genocide in its totality. Wallenberg became the world’s observing eye (Jenö Lévai) in Budapest, and the world’s conscience—most importantly, he acted on that behalf. This is also expressed in some of the Wallenberg monuments’ inscriptions, as two examples from California demonstrate: Wallenberg “saved our faith in humanity” in Los Angeles by Assetto and “redeemed the reputation of humanity” in Menlo Park by Stoval. However late this rescue mission came for the last large Jewish community, it nevertheless contributed to the rescue of at least parts of it. The survivors of Budapest were in fact the biggest Jewish community that survived within one country on the European continent. This posterity remembers. Retrospectively, it seems as if the world’s attitude toward genocide, national sovereignty, and passive bystander mentality changed during the period when Wallenberg was sent to Budapest. The reasons why Wallenberg was an appropriate universal hero are obvious: he questioned bystander mentality and acted instead. Even if it took decades before a new policy on genocide could be implemented (as in Kosovo, and this policy is by no means functioning well, as the case of, for example, Rwanda has proved), the basis for a new policy was established during Wallenberg’s Budapest period, and was later expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (see Chapter 8, the section on the Gustav Kraitz monument). The posting of Wallenberg and the manner in which he handled the mission had indeed set moral standards that later, when the Holocaust was widely remembered, became an obligation for the world.

5 The Monuments as Part of the Wallenberg Commemoration

Today, Raoul Wallenberg is decorated with honorary citizenships, commemorated by innumerable newspaper articles and books, documentary as well as feature films, theater plays, symphonies, and musicals. Stamps of several nations have published his portrait. Streets, public buildings, and institutions in many countries bear his name. Monuments are just one part of the huge Wallenberg commemoration. The first Wallenberg memorial that was meant to last came in a simple shape: a memorial tree was planted for Raoul Wallenberg, Righteous Among the Nations, in Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority), Jerusalem, in November 1979.1 Indeed, the year 1979 marks the time that the Wallenberg commemoration really got off the ground. Attempts to raise international interest had been made even earlier as articles or notes in journals and newspapers, and even books had been previously published on the subject. However, it was only in the 1980s, after the death in 1979 of Wallenberg’s mother and stepfather, and when Wallenberg’s brother and sister became involved, that the Wallenberg case became internationally known, primarily through the engagement of English-writing journalists and American politicians. Tree plantings and stone settings, without a particular artistic adaptation, are effectively neutral manifestations of the will of memorial makers to keep Wallenberg’s memory alive, without revealing their understandings of Wallenberg.2 Sometimes a tree planting was combined with a stone setting, as in the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1985) in Cardiff, Wales3 (see Figure 10.8). The tree plantings follow the same intention: they function as living tributes to Wallenberg’s memory. Stone settings refer to the general wish to establish a lasting sign of 69


memory and thus a durable material was chosen; this principle is already known from gravestones. For the Wallenberg Memorial in Cardiff the combination of a tree, a stone, and a plaque was a providential choice as the committee in charge of the monument had desired a lasting memorial. While the first tree had to be replaced because of sickliness and the plaque was vandalized once and had to be cleaned, a stone monument is heavy and is less easily carried away or destroyed. In this sense, the stone is not only the holder of a plaque but demands permanence, duration. The tree as a living, growing material symbolizes the committee’s hope both that Wallenberg personally was still alive and that his legacy could be kept alive. As the chairman of the committee expressed it, the memorial could be understood as a parable: if Wallenberg would ever be released, he might come to Cardiff and stand under the tree realizing that he has not been forgotten for all these years. A special tree was chosen, called the Tree of Heaven, both for its name and its beauty, which seemed to be apt for the person it should symbolize: What better and more fitting symbol to his selflessness and his humanity than this tree which has its roots firmly planted in the earth and whose branches stretch up to the skies. It stands head and shoulders above ordinary humans and so does Raoul Wallenberg. The leaves will turn in the season to a brilliant flame colour and people will pass and see and marvel at its beauty and so, we hope, will ponder and read the plate attached to the stone.4 Wallenberg had no relationship with Cardiff and its small Jewish community. Nevertheless, the committee, an interfaith organization, regarded it as important to praise his deeds and mark the fortieth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance, at the same time as the end of World War II. For some Wallenberg committee members, the aim was to work for Wallenberg’s release by raising public awareness as most committee members believed that Wallenberg was still alive somewhere in the Soviet Gulag. A public memorial in a central place in the city was regarded as one appropriate way to achieve this goal. The setting of the Wallenberg Memorial in the very center of Cardiff satisfied the intention to raise awareness. The existence of a Wallenberg monument in Wales testifies to the relevance the subject had for many people throughout the Western world during the 1980s. The Raoul Wallenberg case has received more and more attention since 1979, first in the US and then also internationally. Although the

The Monuments as Part of the Wallenberg Commemoration 71

Wallenberg commemoration, his memory, and memorial makers can only be touched upon in this study, the example of US Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife Annette, both Holocaust survivors and involved in the erection of some of the US Wallenberg monuments, gives an idea of the general outlines of the developing commemorative process. Their example shows many parallels to other Holocaust survivors who were engaged in the erection of Wallenberg monuments, even if the Lantos were active on a higher political and consequently more influential level. Both Tom and Annette Lantos grew up in Budapest.5 Shortly after the German invasion of Hungary, Tom was sent to a forced labor battalion north of Budapest. He managed to escape and returned to the capital. Together with his aunt he found refuge in one of the Swedish safe houses, in fact at Szent István Park 25, just opposite the site where the first Wallenberg monument was to be erected a few years later. Tom joined the Hungarian resistance. Annette survived through the help of the Portuguese Embassy, and, as she is convinced, also through negotiations Wallenberg conducted with German or Arrow Cross authorities that enabled her and her mother to leave Hungary. Whether it really was through Wallenberg’s efforts that Annette survived in France and Switzerland is impossible to tell. The various articles draw somewhat different pictures of the rescue. Nevertheless, the Lantos, as many other Jewish survivors from Budapest, are convinced that Wallenberg contributed in one way or another to their rescue. The Lantos were able to reunite after the war in Budapest while the majority of their family members were killed. In 1947, Tom Lantos (1928–2008) received a scholarship and moved to the US where he studied economics. Tom and Annette were married in 1950 and lived in California ever since. For three decades (1950–80) Tom Lantos was a professor of economics before he became involved in politics in the 1980s. Like most other Holocaust survivors, they first established a new life, very often far from their homelands, and moved on from the experiences of World War II. The memory of Wallenberg only became a topic of the Lantos’s personal agenda when their two daughters started asking about the Holocaust in the early 1970s. Confronted by their daughters’ questions, they felt it would be wrong to talk only about horrors. They regarded Wallenberg’s deeds as much more beneficial for their children. Then Annette was asked by one of her daughter’s teachers to talk about the Holocaust in class. That was the starting point for many more talks in high schools in the area.


Until the middle of the 1970s, the Wallenberg case was only occasionally an issue outside Sweden. Around 1977 Annette learned that there was a chance that Wallenberg was still alive in the Soviet Gulag, and it became her goal to set Wallenberg free.6 In 1978, Annette launched the first Free Wallenberg Committee. In the beginning, public interest was low. The first breakthrough came in 1979, when the American Jewish Committee organized a press conference for her and Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg’s sister. The conference resulted in an article in the New York Times. Then, in October the same year, Annette had the opportunity to ask President Jimmy Carter a question on national radio about Wallenberg. Carter showed himself to be quite well informed about the subject. Taking a cue from the president’s knowledge and interest, the public media suddenly became highly engaged in Raoul Wallenberg. In the years following, the subject received fervent attention. After Elenore Lester’s and Frederick Werbell’s article on Wallenberg appeared in the New York Times on March 30, 1980, as a cover story of the paper’s Sunday magazine, many more Wallenberg committees within and outside the US were established, and innumerable articles and books in English and other languages published. Since then the Wallenberg case has received unbroken international public interest. After Tom Lantos entered politics and became a member of Congress in 1980, one of his first legislative actions was a bill conferring honorary US citizenship on Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was only the second individual, after Sir Winston Churchill (awarded in 1963), to receive this honor.7 The bill was signed by President Ronald Reagan in March 1981 in the White House Rose Garden. It made Wallenberg’s welfare of official concern for the US government. Now the US had a reason to press Soviet leaders for his release. The citizenship legislation called for periodic congressional hearings to examine new information about Wallenberg and to renew the efforts of the US and other governments to claim Wallenberg’s release. The honorary citizenship was the reason why his case has been raised on many occasions with the Soviet government by high-level American officials and by state representatives of other Western governments. Once Wallenberg had become an honorary citizen of the US his popularity in the country grew rapidly. The Lantoses contributed to Wallenberg being honored and memorialized in many different ways over the years. They wrote, for example, the text for James Stoval’s sculpture in California in 1983 and inaugurated it. They were instrumental in renaming a section of 15th Street SW, the area in front of the then-uncompleted US Holocaust Memorial Museum, as “Raoul Wallenberg Place” in 1986, and a brass plaque was


installed in the sidewalk. In 1987, the couple initiated the writing of a letter to Michael Gorbachev urging the release of Wallenberg, signed by 113 Congressmen. Especially in the following years when the politics of glasnost promised a new openness in the case, they continued to urge the subject with high-ranking Russian politicians. In 1995, Miri Margolin’s Wallenberg bust found a permanent placement in the Small House Rotunda owing to the efforts of Annette and Tom Lantos. They were furthermore instrumental in the issuing of an American stamp with Wallenberg’s portrait by the US Postal Service in 1997. Tom and Annette Lantos raised public awareness on the subject, brought it to a high political level, lobbied for Wallenberg’s release, pressed US government officials to raise his case with Soviet and after 1991 Russian leaders, made sure that he was remembered and honored, and kept on demanding the clarification of his fate. However, it was, of course, not only through the engagement of Tom and Annette Lantos that Wallenberg was remembered throughout the Western world. That Wallenberg’s story was able to receive so much attention since 1979 was owing to a combination of several factors. Among them, the fact that a heightened focus was laid on human rights in American foreign politics, especially after Jimmy Carter became president (1977–81). Furthermore, Wallenberg’s story was a means to depict the USSR as being a state without justice during the Reagan era (1981–9). Most importantly, however, there seemed to have been a generally growing awareness of the Holocaust from the 1980s onwards.8 As a consequence, more and more people became engaged in the Wallenberg case after 1979, both in the US and elsewhere.9

The Holocaust hero in the age of globalization The Wallenberg monuments are embedded in a larger context, here referred to as “Holocaust remembrance.”10 In the Western world, the Holocaust is today widely considered as the “civilizational break” (Dan Diner) of the twentieth century.11 Since the end of World War II there have been many tendencies to internationalize the meaning of the Holocaust or to remember the atrocities as the negative example of modernity, but only from the late 1990s can one speak of a globalization or, maybe better, an internationalization of Holocaust remembrance.12 In an age of globalization, nation states lose their absolute formative meaning and their preferential interpretation of how the Holocaust should be remembered within their national borders. Over the years, especially during the 1990s after the end of the Cold War and against


the background of the Balkan crisis, the awareness of the Holocaust generated discussions of its origin to point out state-organized crimes and to make sure that genocide was regarded as war against humanity and a threat to all societies. The Holocaust is considered as a memory-emblem of the twentieth century, which has evolved into a moral benchmark for good and evil. In an age of ideological uncertainty, after nearly a century of world wars and genocides, the memory of the Holocaust serves as a guideline for the establishment of a global politics of human rights.13 In this way, the Holocaust becomes the key for a new, forwardlooking humanitarian memory, which has the potential of a universal identification. Through a collective commemoration of the European catastrophe the hope is that new forms of solidarity can develop across national borders.14 An example of this is that during the Kosovo war even the pacifistic Green Party voted for German military participation; the argument of “Never Again” (which originated after World War I) no longer meant “Never Again War” but “Never Again Auschwitz.” The bond of the Holocaust consequently has to be the prevention of genocide.15 We will come back to this topic in Chapter 8, in the section on Gustav Kraitz’s Wallenberg monument. In the 1990s the focus moved toward the question of joint responsibility or joint guilt that borne by other nations for the fate of the European Jews. The focus was no longer only on the perpetrators or the victims but also on the bystanders. This development was accompanied by an interest in the long-neglected “Heroes of the Holocaust,” those who actively fought against the Nazi crimes. While the historic catastrophe of the Holocaust calls out for more universal teachings to draw from this event, in the 1990s numerous attempts were made in many countries to concentrate on positive identification figures, the “Holocaust Heroes” or Righteous Gentiles, who had helped persecuted Jews. The appearance of the over 30 Wallenberg monuments in 12 countries confirms the establishment of such an “internationalization” of the Holocaust memory and embodies the suitability of Wallenberg as an ideal and symbol in a global world. In the last 15 or more years there has been an interest in individual rescue attempts, seeing them as positive examples, which can serve as an inspiration even today.16 Not only does the growing number of publications on this subject reflect that development but so do other forms of commemoration such as films, for instance, Schindler’s List (1993) by Steven Spielberg. It is obvious that the new century has begun with the remembrance of the Righteous of the last century. In 2003, the International Institute of the Righteous opened as part of the enlarged


Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan (formerly in West Bloomfield)17 and in Buenos Aires a Monument for the Righteous Gentiles is planned.18 In this context I wish to stress the importance of positive identification figures. While the sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (in their book Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust, 2001) concentrate on the Jewish victims as identification figures for a moral globalization based on the Holocaust remembrance, I choose to enlarge their concept. In my opinion, the “heroes” of the Holocaust are much more appropriate as identification figures than the victims. Victims do evoke pity and sympathy, but actors illustrate that a given situation can be changed. In this way, Raoul Wallenberg could become a far more suitable symbol of a universal memory than Anne Frank, the example that Levy and Sznaider focus on.19 Examples like Wallenberg can inspire political action that then establishes a global ethos based on the Holocaust remembrance. Such examples offer, as the actors of other benchmarks in history do, the adoption of positive values for future action. Wallenberg offers one of the rare chances where, out of the negative memory-emblem of the Holocaust, positive identification is possible to inspire action. When the Holocaust became generally understood as a benchmark in history, a widespread need for moral guidance called upon the heroes of the Holocaust. Wallenberg was considered to be an example for moral guidance and human rights politics. The monuments erected in his honor show us that the historical figure Wallenberg has been used as a symbol across national borders to bear witness to the value of civil courage and the necessity to intervene when genocides occur. The cover of the 2002 brochure of Michigan’s Holocaust Memorial Center shows Adolf Hitler as the “epitome of evil and destruction” and Raoul Wallenberg as “role model of altruism and compassion.” This example clearly demonstrates the status Wallenberg had received in the popular imagination during the last six decades: his example serves today as a chosen antagonist of evil itself. Of course, Wallenberg’s role, as the representative of good, is based on the perception that the Holocaust was a benchmark in history. In most Western societies in the 1990s the Holocaust had come to be considered the ultimate crime committed by human beings against other individuals. So far, the Holocaust remembrance as a moral obligation within education is found within Western democracies. However, there are examples that indicate that the teaching about the Holocaust also reaches other parts of the world: Holocaust Museums or educational Holocaust


centers were established, for example, in South Africa, Japan, and Russia. The first Arab Institute for the Holocaust Research and Education, directed toward an Arab audience, opened by an Israeli Arab, was inaugurated in May 2005 in Nazareth. It can be seen as an attempt to spread the knowledge about the Holocaust with the objective of contributing to a better understanding of Israeli politics.20 Despite these initiatives, the Holocaust remembrance and the Wallenberg narrative is thus far still primarily a topic of the (white) Western world. Nevertheless, Wallenberg’s “hero-hood” has universal qualities that can be—and are—used to establish an international Holocaust remembrance.

Concluding remarks And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; . . . How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it.21 Hero stories can expand over the years, when the kernel of an historical event becomes much clearer, when doubts about the protagonist’s motives are overcome, and details become secondary—until only the core of the successful hero narrative remains. Today, Wallenberg has become symbolic, in the way that Frank Vajda highlighted in the Introduction. Determining how much Wallenberg, the historical figure, actually achieved, and the specific number of lives he saved, seems no longer of major interest. The fact that most Wallenberg monuments do not need a physical likeness in a portrait of Wallenberg may be regarded as a confirmation of Vajda’s statement. As it seems, over the years, the criterion of physical likeness becomes as unimportant to the monument artists as the details of Wallenberg’s historical narrative. It is the quintessence of Wallenberg’s narrative and the universal quality of his myth that maintain the fascination. Despite the lack of a serious academic study, it is unlikely that, in the future, the Wallenberg narrative will be told in an entirely different way,22 or that his popularity will cease to grow, or his memory be forgotten. An increasing interest in World War II and the Holocaust continue to keep Wallenberg’s memory alive. His story is an important narrative of the twentieth century; it represents the atrocities of the two totalitarian regimes that dominated twentieth-century history, Nazism and Stalinism. Wallenberg became a fighter against the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic policies by actively saving the lives of persecuted Jews in Budapest, but himself became a victim


of Soviet Stalinism. These elements constitute the core of the Wallenberg narrative and secure Wallenberg’s place in popular imagination in many parts of the Western world. After familiarizing ourselves with Wallenberg, his life, mission, and fate, the appropriateness of his narrative to serve as a hero story of various dimensions across national borders and the wider context in which these works are embedded, we can now turn our attention to the monuments erected in his honor. We will investigate which aspects of Wallenberg’s narrative the artists believed had the power to be retold in monumental art and learn about the portrait of Wallenberg they created within their monuments.


PART II The Raoul Wallenberg Monuments


6 Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed

The hero as man-of-action One of the prerequisites for being accorded hero status is engagement in an “epic fight against perils.” It is in the process of confronting perils that the hero demonstrates the heroic qualities of vitality, power and defiance of death. As evidenced in Greek mythology, the refusal to turn away from extreme difficulties sets heroes apart from ordinary human beings and imbues them with the quality of “an indefeasible superiority in strength and valour” and the “ability courageously to confront the perpetual possibility of violent death.”1 In the following section, we will be introduced to monuments that focus on this aspect of classical hero status—the man-of-action persona that is ready to intervene and rescue the vulnerable by physical or intellectual force.

The fighter It is not surprising that the very first Wallenberg monument, created directly after the war, represents Wallenberg as a man-of-action. In his Snake Killer, completed in 1949, the sculptor Pál Pátzay concentrates on the hero’s fight against evil, here represented by a serpent. Pátzay’s sculpture group was raised in the XIII District of Budapest, in Szent István Park, just opposite the island of Margaret. This area is of historic relevance because it is in the north of Pest, where the international ghetto was situated along with the protective houses of neutral legations. The park also served as the assembly point for deportees after the Arrow Cross coup, and nearby, on the banks of the River Danube, Jews were thrown into the water and shot. The bigger ghetto was in the eastern part of Budapest, in the VII District of inner Pest, and the Swedish Legation was 81


on the Buda-side of the town. Pátzáy’s Snake Killer was dismantled the night before its planned inauguration. It took 50 years before a copy of the work was inaugurated in its original setting. The following description relates to the copy of the monument installed in 1999. The work is composed of a light shell limestone pedestal of about 3 m in height that broadens at the top to accommodate a dark bronze sculpture of about 2.6 m in height (Plate 1).2 The bronze depicts a mature, male nude for whom the model was probably between the ages of 30 and 40. The man battles with a serpent. His strong left hand grasps the serpent beneath its throat so that it can still hold its head up facing the man. However, the serpent struggles in vain; it is immobilized under the man’s foot. In his right hand the man holds a club high in the air, ready to inflict the final strike on the coiled snake at his feet. In reality, of course, it is unlikely that a snake could be killed in this way. Nevertheless, snake slayers have been depicted in similar compositions throughout the centuries, as for example Hercule combattant Achéloüs transformé en serpent (1822) by Frànçois-Joseph Baron Bosio exhibited in the Louvre; in terms of composition, Bosio’s work shows strong similarities to Pátzay’s monument. Although the muscles of the man’s body are clearly articulated, the action we are confronted with is not that of a physical hero. The monument obviously depicts a fight, but the well-balanced proportions and clear composition express harmony. Even the facial expression articulates a calm, even determined actor (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). All in all, the man’s expression and posture are harmonious, and he appears almost emphatic, although he is determined to kill the snake. He fights with a calm strength; his gesture is marked by certainty rather than unrestrained physical force. This man, looking directly into the eyes of the snake as it flicks its tongue, knows what he is doing. The scene shows the last moment of their fight. Pátzay had spent two years (1928–30) in Italy, where his artistic style came under the influence of the so-called “School of Rome.”3 He was a classically trained artist who favored Neo-Classicism and kept returning in his art to Classicism as is obvious in his Wallenberg monument. His Snake Killer is strongly reminiscent of the style used in French and Italian Neo-Classicism. If we think of an early work by Jacques-Louis David, the Oath of the Horatii, painted in Rome in 1784, we recognize that Pátzay’s sculpture shares David’s calculation, the same clear order of composition and the stage-like character of the pose of the lunge. In The Snake Killer, Pátzay selected a monument style that had become popular toward the end of the nineteenth century and remained common at the time Pátzay created his Wallenberg monument. Instead of a true

Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed 83

Figure 6.1 The night before its scheduled inauguration, Pál Pátzay’s Snake Killer was torn down by security forces in 1949. It took 50 years until a copy of the statue could be inaugurated in the same place in Budapest, Hungary.

representation of the person honored, an allegory sits on top of the pedestal. At the end of the nineteenth century, the allegorical monument type, which has the allegory on top and the portrait-relief on a side of the pedestal, was regarded as a departure from the traditional personal monument, which placed the honored person on the pedestal. The allegorical monument established a new hierarchy that demanded a new form of perception from the viewer. In fact, the invention of this monument type contributed much to the later repression of figurative personal monuments in favor of purely architectonic forms. This was demonstrated by Storm-Rusche who refers to an early example of this monument style that has indeed many compositional similarities with Pátzay’s Snake


Figure 6.2

In Pátzay’s Snake Killer we encounter a determined hero in action.

Killer, namely, the monument to Rudolf Virchow by Fritz Klimsch in Berlin (1906–10).4 Here, the fighter’s body is much more muscular, and consequently the struggle between the Titan and the sphinx, symbolizing man’s fight against diseases, has a much more physical dimension than in Pátzay’s work. A characteristic of this allegorical monument concept is that the effigy of the honored is reduced to a portrait-relief. Pátzay also included Wallenberg’s profile, turned to the left, on the lower front of the pedestal. While the original relief was created by Pátzay, the duplicate of the monument in 1999 was made by István Marosits, a former pupil of Pátzay. Marosits reconstructed the relief by working on the basis of the photographs of Wallenberg that Pátzay had previously used, and in his master’s style. While this consequent inversion of the traditional monument order was once trend-setting, it had already become outdated, though still common, by the time Pátzay designed his Wallenberg monument in 1949. As an artist deeply rooted in the classical spirit of an Aristide Maillol, Pátzay imitated the softness of Maillol’s female sculptures and never sought to create a realistic effigy of Wallenberg. Instead, his aim was to depict the ideal that Wallenberg represented to him. The human figure in the Snake Killer functions as an embodiment of an idea.5 The topoi


of the (nude) human figure has always been one of the most important themes of artistic creation, which continued to be the case even after 1945 and the establishment of non-objective sculpture. By the figure being nude, it is intended that the viewer associate it less with a specific person than with a representation of a universal idea. Pátzay’s aim was to create a timeless parabolic presentation. Following Sellier’s tableau of the Hero’s solar nature, Pátzay’s hero is the epitome of the solar hero, as his handsome appearance indicates— his full hair, the facial beauty, and virile physique—while the snake is the bestiary from the shadow world.6 In visualizing his conceptualization of Wallenberg, Pátzay depicts a male figure that embodies the classical ideal of beauty; his face and hair emulate ancient sculpture. We can see in the sculpture the ancient Greek belief that the body and facial features express the inner state of mind and a person’s character. The figure’s intellectual and spiritual potential are transformed into his physical features, in the idealized proportions of the limbs, and in his clearly articulated posture. The universal theme expressed by Pátzay’s sculpture, which even today remains easily comprehensible for a wide range of people, is the fight of good against evil. The composition clearly indicates the man’s superiority over the snake at his feet and that good will prevail over evil. The snake motif has been a common theme since ancient times and throughout art history. Although the symbolism surrounding the snake is extremely rich and complicated, the snake is traditionally understood as the archetype of all evil. This reading of the motif is well known, stemming from the biblical story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. It has been repeatedly claimed that a swastika was etched on the snake’s head in order to highlight Wallenberg’s fight against Nazism.7 However, this was never the case. Despite the rumors there is no evidence: neither do Pátzay’s preparatory models contain a swastika nor do any photographs of it show a swastika. Furthermore, both the artist’s widow, Hertha Pátzay, and Pátzay scholar Imre Varga confirmed to me that there was never a swastika in the first version of the monument. It seems that these rumors result from a general longing for the evil to be defined more precisely, in other words, that a reference to the actual historic time be made. The inclusion of a swastika would, however, be inconsistent with the monument’s universal and timeless concept. Pátzay’s Snake Killer is often called “St George Fighting the Dragon” (or serpent).8 Indeed, in mythology both snakes and dragons represent evil. Because snakes hatch from eggs as birds do, it is no wonder that


the snake motif was often modified and evil appeared in the form of mythological creatures or turned into dragons. However, the narrative of St George is insufficient to adequately describe Pátzay’s monument; the male figure has no component of martyrdom and the evil appears clearly in the form of a snake. If one wants to relate to a saint a better reference would be to Archangel Michael who fought Satan in the shape of a dragon to rescue the faithful from the power of the enemy at a time of urgent crisis. In art history, he is usually depicted as warrior. St George was an early Christian martyr who during the Middle Ages became the ideal of martial valor and selflessness for his supposed slaying of the dragon. The “St George and the dragon” motif can be considered a Christian version of the Perseus myth, while the motif Pátzay is actually referring to is that of Hercules. In 1949, Pátzay could still assume that the educated classes possessed the necessary knowledge to understand the general meaning of the allegory and thus apprehend the imagery of the man fighting a snake as a reference to the most famous and celebrated hero of ancient classical mythology, Hercules, who represents the laborious fight and victory of good against evil. Hercules fought snakes while in his cradle and then again when he had to complete the 12 great tasks known as the Labors of Hercules. In his battles with the lion, the hydra, and the two-headed dog. Hercules’ heroic strength inspired many works of art, including the well-known Farnese Hercules.9 The attribute in his hand, the club, as well as the snake, identify Pátzay’s figure as a variation of this classical hero. Hercules was the perfect embodiment of the Greek concept of “pathos,” which is the virtuous struggle and suffering that eventually leads to fame and, in the case of Hercules, to immortality. However, despite the figure’s athletic body, Pátzay seemed to have been more interested in presenting a spiritual hero. The nude and well-articulated body represents an idealized, strong-minded hero. In his monument, Pátzay tried to come closer to the characteristics that distinguished Wallenberg, who prevailed by his character rather than by physical strength. But even here, the Hercules metaphor is highly relevant: Hercules’ whole life was one of non-stop action. Both Wallenberg, as he is remembered in the popular imagination, and Hercules were determined, courageous, and clever; both had a strong will to perform any task to set things right. Already as a young man, Hercules had made a decision that was decisive for the rest of his life. Instead of enjoying pleasure and riches, he chose to be guided by the maiden Arete, who offered him glory as a reward for his lifelong struggle against evil.


An ancient myth serves as a parable to relate Wallenberg’s story. Like Hercules, Wallenberg was a young man when he accepted the challenge fate had lain upon him; like the classical hero he faced countless foes and difficult situations. But, in contrast to Hercules, who slew his own children, Wallenberg never engaged in misconduct before he undertook his extraordinary deeds. Wallenberg managed to perform seemingly impossible tasks with what many consider superhuman power. And like Hercules, Wallenberg’s tireless efforts gained him glory and immortality. However, even those who subscribe to the popular description of Pátzay’s work as “St George Fighting the Dragon,” make an insightful point: The cultural achievement of heroes lies in the overcoming of the fear of a relapse into archaic social conditions. The hero calls off one’s primal ghosts and monsters of phantasy by disenchanting them. They turn out to be vincible by human hand. A hero is someone who looks fearlessly into the eye of the dragon.10 If evil is represented in the form of a snake, or the apparently even more scary dragon, the expressed emotion is essentially the same: it stands for the human fear of evil associated with an archaic prehistoric past bereft of law and order and full of inscrutable, horrible creatures that only a hero could defeat. In his Snake Killer, Pátzay makes use of this comprehensible allegory. In the fight with the snake the artist succeeds in illustrating Wallenberg’s fight against Nazism. The handsome hero struggles against barbarism, a reference to the described human primal fear. Thereby, the battle against Nazism is generalized as the fight against an uncivilized system of which the representatives are creatures that provoke horror because their acts no longer appear human, but rather seem to stem from another world. Only an extraordinary human being could look such a creature straight in the eye and conquer it. The dramatic story of Pátzay’s Snake Killer deserves to be retold at length.11 The idea for the very first Wallenberg monument appeared as early as 1945. Jewish survivors wanted to celebrate and commemorate the man who had acted selflessly on their behalf. They formulated three goals: the naming of a street in Budapest after Wallenberg, the erection of a monument, and the publishing of a book about their rescuer. The first goal was already achieved in the same year, 1945: the former Phönix utca (street) close by was renamed Wallenberg utca (and in 1946 Raoul Wallenberg utca). The third goal was attained in 1948 with the publication of the previously mentioned book about Wallenberg by Jenö Lévai.


In accordance with the second goal, namely, the erection of a monument, the Wallenberg Committee accepted a model by Pál Pátzay, a well-known sculptor and art professor, who himself had given shelter to persecuted Jews during the war at his atelier in the X District of Budapest. Pátzay also remarried his Jewish ex-wife in order to protect her from persecution, thereby delaying the marriage to his second wife, Hertha. In recognition of his actions, Yad Vashem recognized Pátzay as a “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1998. Pátzay had also met with Wallenberg, who had rescued one of his friends from a deportation train.12 In 1949, Pátzay’s sculpture group was installed in the XIII District of Budapest, in Szent István Park. The style of the monument, even at the time of its creation, was already outdated from an artistic point of view, with its high pedestal making claims both of duration and adoration. Pátzay was even accused of plagiarism, and some regarded the monument as of mediocre quality, boring or too simple.13 However, even though Pátzay had chosen a timeless motif in a classical style, his monument fell victim to changes of political power. In 1949, the political struggle was decided in favor of the Hungarian Communists, who after 1947 were regarded as being loyal to the Soviet Union. While the nearby Wallenberg utca was allowed to keep its name, the monument disappeared on the day of its planned inauguration. Its story and fate are recorded on the back of the pedestal of the sculpture’s duplicate, which was installed in 1999. The ill-fated Pátzay monument was erected in April 1949. Very early on the morning of the monument’s planned inauguration, on April 11, unknown persons tore it down. Lajos Hatvany, a well-known Jewish patron who lived at Szent István Park, was awakened by the noise. He called Pátzay, who took a taxi but arrived too late.14 One of the observers of the aftermath of this destructive act was Frank Vajda, later chairman of the Free Wallenberg Australian Committee and translator of Lévai’s book. At the time Vajda was eleven years old and had survived the war in Budapest. He recalls the fear among the many people gathered to see the monument unveiled only to discover it had been dismantled.15 Hundreds of people were left wondering what had happened to the monument.16 Even today, there are no definitive answers as to who was responsible for the removal of the monument. In the mid-1980s, the historian János Pótó made a pioneering effort to find out more about the monument’s mysterious disappearance.17 Following Pótó’s efforts and archival studies, we now know more of the details, even though some aspects remain to be clarified. The question of precisely who was responsible


remains a mystery, for example, though the finger probably points at the Hungarian Secret Service who gave the order to dismantle the monument to avoid any trouble with the Soviets. The story of its disappearance and further whereabouts has taken on mythic qualities of its own. It appears that, at the time, the whole affair was also an enigma to the Wallenberg Committee who advertised shortly after the event that the inauguration could not take place because of technical reasons, even though clearly this was not the case. It seems that the committee still had hope that the monument might be installed at some later time. The removal of the statue must be seen in the context of the changing political climate in Hungary. The immediate post-war years were characterized by relative political pluralism until 1948. During these years, the neo-classical sculptor Pátzay was able to play a key role in the art world of Budapest. In his efforts to defend Hungarian art “against political interference from the government,” the “liberal-minded” Pátzay, “politically aligned with the social democrats,”18 came repeatedly in conflict with the increasingly influential communists who transformed Hungarian cultural institutions following the Soviet model. As Reuben Rowkes demonstrates in his 2002 dissertation “Monumental Sculpture in Post-War Eastern Europe, 1945–1960,” the year 1949 was decisive for Hungarian politics. As was the case for all satellite states, Hungary had to adopt the Soviet model. Hungary was in fact watched very carefully by the Soviets after it was judged to be too friendly with apostate Yugoslavia. Hence, Hungarian communists needed to demonstrate their loyalty.19 After 1948 all fields of culture were organized on the Soviet model; artistic uniformity under the banner of socialist realism remained the model until Stalin’s death in 1953. The election that took place on May 1, 1949, just two weeks after the removal of Pátzay’s monument, was followed by what can be seen as the “culmination of the political transformation” in “the subsequent adoption of a Soviet-style constitution establishing, on August 20, 1949, the People’s Republic of Hungary.”20 Even in the years before the election, the communists were engaged in an aggressive power struggle, especially in 1948 when direct responses to Soviet criticism affected policy to art.21 Against this background, it can be safely assumed that the monument fell victim to overeager and Moscow-faithful politicians. The events surrounding Pátzay’s Wallenberg monument may have contributed to his being forced to make compromises with the regime in order to be able to function as an artist. In the very same year, 1949, Pátzay’s Stalin bust was chosen to mark the Soviet leader’s 70th birthday. The Stalin cult was at its height during these years: 200 plaster


and ten bronze copies of Pátzay’s Stalin bust were made and erected all over Hungary.22 However, in the main, Pátzay seems to have succeeded in keeping away from highly political commissions.23 In the following year, Pátzay exhibited smaller copies of his Wallenberg monument as Snake Killer or Fight against Fascism but, given the political climate, without any reference to Wallenberg. Notably, and again the political milieu explains this, there are no images of Pátzay’s monument in Lévai’s original Wallenberg book published in Hungarian in 1948, but the Swedish edition did contain a picture of the model. Whether Pátzay’s monument disappeared owing to direct Soviet interference or merely through precautions taken by Hungarian communists is impossible to say. The monument disappeared and remained lost. In this context, it is worthwhile remembering that Holocaust monuments erected after 1945 also met with strong resistance from the communist regimes in the countries where they were erected. Here, one only has to think of Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument, unveiled a year earlier, on 19 April 1948. However, even though many obstacles had to be overcome, Rapoport’s monument was realized.24 Still one wonders at the incongruity of the street named for Wallenberg having retained his name, while the Wallenberg monument disappeared. The question arises: If the memory of Wallenberg had to be erased, why were not all traces eliminated? The text on a bronze plaque, installed shortly after the war, at the corner of Wallenberg and Pozsonyi utca, hints at the answer: “With his courageous acts and enthusiastic devotion he saved the life of tens of thousands during the Nyilas rule. He disappeared during the siege of Pest.” This simple sheet metal board was later replaced by a bronze relief by means of a private initiative. It was created by Gerö Bottos and inaugurated on Wallenberg’s 77th birthday, August 4, 1989. The relief shows Wallenberg with a Schutzpass in one hand and his other hand raised in an arresting gesture. The text on the relief was the subject of many discussions and the given date of Wallenberg’s year of death, thus with a question mark, was later on covered up after a protest by Per Anger.25 As Henry Kamm points out, the inscription credits Wallenberg only with saving many people “without specifying that his efforts were directed at saving Jews” and, in accordance with the Soviet line concerning Wallenberg’s whereabouts, the inscription merely states that Wallenberg disappeared during the siege of Pest, “suggesting that he perished in the heat of a battle. In fact, Pest was firmly in Soviet hands at the time of his disappearance.”26 Not to mention that the victims were Jews was common practice within the Soviet Union, as it was elsewhere. The reasons vary a


great deal in the different countries. However, as the inscriptions of the Wallenberg monuments prove, even after the Holocaust was commonly accepted as a benchmark in history, the victims’ origins were often left unmentioned. We will revisit this issue in Chapter 10. This text was thus deemed non-offensive by the authorities, but we can assume that the monument was deemed to be more threatening and thus removed from sight. There was a risk that the universal fight of good against evil depicted in Pátzay’s monument could easily turn from the representation of Wallenberg’s fight against Nazism to the unwanted awareness of his struggle as a prisoner of Soviet communism. Ironically, the sculpture of the Snake Killer, turned down in 1949, found a home in Debrecen in 1953. This was the city Wallenberg intended to go to in 1945 in the interest of establishing relations with the temporary national Hungarian Government. Wallenberg never arrived there—but the sculpture honoring his deeds undertaken in Budapest did. According to an email dated February 5, 2007 sent to me by Lajos Hegedu˝s, current managing director of TEVA (today owner of the factory), in front of which the statue was installed, the Minister of Health presented the sculpture on the day of the inauguration ceremony of the factory, August 20, 1952, but the sculpture was not in place before spring 1953. The sculpture was installed at the entrance of the Biogal pharmaceutical factory, but without the original pedestal, the relief, and the explanatory text. The original pedestal was never found again. In the context of the new location, the sculpture lost any connotation to Wallenberg and his fight against Nazism. However, it is said that many inhabitants knew the original meaning of the monument. This was confirmed by Kristian Gerner, Professor of History at Lund University, in an email to me dated January 17, 2007. In 1977, Gerner met with a person in Debrecen who had referred to Pátzay’s work in a way that made clear that it was commonly known to whom the monument was dedicated. In 1984, about the same time that Imre Varga created his Wallenberg monument for Budapest, there was a movement to return the sculpture and mount it in its original settings in time for the 40th anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance. On the wall of the former Swedish Legation, now a residential house, in the XI District of Budapest on Minerva, formerly Gyopár utca, a stone plate showing the bronze portraits of Danielsson, Wallenberg, and Anger in relief and a text in Swedish and Hungarian, memorializes the Swedish mercy mission. It was created by Antal Czinder in 1994 on the initiative of the people who tried to bring back Pátzay’s Snake Killer from Debrecen to Budapest.27 Even though the


monument project was repeatedly an item on the political agenda, Pátzay’s Snake Killer was “returned” to its original settings only in 1999, but then only as a copy. When asked by the Raoul Wallenberg Association in 1989 to return the sculpture to Budapest, Ribor Keri, then the general-director of Biogal, refused to do so.28 Biogal insisted on keeping the original sculpture at its entrance in Debrecen, arguing that the motif of the Snake Killer was part of the company’s corporate identity. The company director maintained that the location of the Pátzay sculpture in front of the company served as an allegory of the fight against deathly diseases. Furthermore, he stated that the original idea of the Wallenberg monument, the fight against Nazism, and, according to the director, the contemporary conception, the fight against illness, could exist in parallel with each other. Keri even opined that the sculpture in Debrecen could also be perceived as a commemoration of Wallenberg, given that in 1945 Wallenberg was on his way to Debrecen. His final argument for keeping the sculpture was that there already was a Wallenberg monument in Budapest, namely, the 1987 installed work by Imre Varga, which we will discuss in the next chapter. It is not only the Biogal company that claimed Pátzay’s sculpture symbolizes “mankind’s fight against diseases, as the man fighting with the snake is the old symbol of medical science.”29 This interpretation is also attached to the 1974 smaller copy that stands in front of the Radiological Clinic in Budapest. These recurrent false readings result from a misinterpretation of the snake motif. When associated with medicine the snake has a positive meaning. One has only to think of the well-known motif of the serpent coiled around the staff of Asclepios, the Greco-Roman god of medicine. Ironically, in the settings in front of these health institutes, Pátzay’s sculpture is bereft of any kind of meaning since within a medical context the snake does not symbolize evil. Essentially, the arguments of Biogal are anachronistic and indicate that those making them are unaware of the symbolic role the snake motif plays in medicine. However, the director of Biogal promised that the company would make sure that the work’s original intent would be clarified by an explanatory sign. In the meantime, Biogal was privatized and since 1995 has been owned by the Israeli company TEVA Pharma. According to the company’s manager, Lajos Hegedu˝s, in 1992 an inscription was added at the pedestal by the former director of Biogal, which states in Hungarian that Pátzay’s work is a “symbol of mankind’s victory against evil. In memoriam Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish Diplomat, who saved thousands of lives chased by Nazi murderers.”30 Other informants say that the stone plate giving information about the monument’s origin


had been installed in 1990 and on behalf of the Jewish organizations of Debrecen, not by the company. 31 In July 1998, the Wallenberg Statue Committee was formed under the patronage of Gábor Demszky, mayor of Budapest since 1990. The goal was to pursue the reinstallation of Pátzay’s sculpture. Mátyás Vince and Gábor Deák, who initiated the project, were assigned to realize it. After long negotiations with the Debrecen municipality and Biogal, the decision was taken to make a copy of the sculpture. In the end, the Debrecen municipality and Biogal contributed financially to the duplicate statue. Further donations came from the city of Budapest, the local government of the XIII District, Hungarian and Swedish companies and private people. Following the recommendations of Attila Zsigmond, who served as general-director of the Budapest Galéria for more than 28 years, the monument was recreated as an identical copy of the 1949 destroyed monument. Only additional inscriptions on the back of the monument and on new stones behind the monument were added, giving details about Wallenberg, the monument’s history and the names of the major sponsors. The inauguration took place in April 1999, 50 years after the original monument should have been inaugurated. The unity of the committee superseded political affiliations, with the exception of the far right, and this indicates that the recreation of the monument indeed shows a commitment to Wallenberg. According to György Krausz, a member of the committee, whom I met in Oslo in March 2005, the initiative is also evidence of Hungary’s regained political freedom and political independence. Krausz expressed the view that the will to erect a visible sign was important since anti-Semitism was surfacing in the 1990s in Hungary. We should remember that the original monument was commissioned in the immediate post-war years, the short period when Hungary was independent. It appears that the 1990 committee wanted to take up to the spirit of that time and was committed to mounting the statue, and if not the original, at least a copy. Another version of a fighter, created by Paul Lancz in 1995, can be found in the courtyard behind the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada (Figure 6.3).32 Lancz’s massive bust of Wallenberg hints at a nude classic hero. The strong larynx and the pronounced bones of the upper body suggest a physically strong man. The slightly receding hairline is accentuated by a dramatic forelock. The frowning expression is marked by strong, over-articulated eyebrows and the powerful lines of the face are carried though his jaws and chin. The face is dominated by an expression of determination, dauntlessness, and purposefulness.


Figure 6.3 Since 1996 Paul Lancz’s Raoul Wallenberg Bust has found a home in the courtyard of the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Montreal, Canada.

As shown, Pátzay uses the nude figure in his allegory to represent the timeless theme of the fight of good against evil, stylistically referring to Neo-Classicism and Greek Antiquity. Likewise, Lancz uses nudeness, but in so doing his rendition does not necessarily transcend timelessness. In my opinion it is difficult to accept the predetermined feeling of awe when looking up to the bust, which is about four times life-sized on its high column (Figure 6.4). However, this feeling of resistance to paying homage to the depicted does not result from the elevation per se but rather from the style used. Lancz’s bust strongly reminds the viewer of the official optimistic and dynamic socialist (pseudo)realism of the mid-1930s, for example, as typified by Vera Mukhina’s well-known Worker and Collective Farm Girl. Probably the best-known symbol of the Soviet Union, this sculpture group crowned the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937. The style fell into discredit after being misused during Stalin’s terror regime (compare Chapter 7, the section on Ernst Neizvestny’s monument). The similarity of style between Lancz’s bust and socialist realist art is striking. Given the Wallenberg context, it appears inappropriate. The stylistic patterns are too clearly identified with an ideology and a


Figure 6.4 Lancz’s Wallenberg bust is reminiscent of the official socialist realism style that prevailed in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

propaganda emanating from an outdated and failed political system. Indeed, there is much irony in the paradox that arises from Lancz’s work: an artist represents Wallenberg in the style used by the totalitarian regime that was responsible for his fate. Pál Pátzay generally resisted the temptation to adopt socialist realism, and therefore did not become a celebrated state artist in the years after 1948 when the communist regime took over in Hungary. In contrast to that, 46 years after Pátzay created his Wallenberg monument, another native Hungarian, Paul Lancz, takes on that socialist realism style in Canada without any political coercion to do so and uses it in his version of Wallenberg as a fighter.


Lancz held on to a style identified with Soviet propaganda, years after the style had been given up even in the Soviet Union. From the mid1980s, socialist realism was no longer in vogue, neither in the Soviet Union nor in the eastern satellite states. As Fowkes argues, by 1958 the decline of socialist realism had reached a point of no return; monuments created by such artists as Lancz’s teacher Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl and Sándor Mikus, who were “leading figures of the Stalinist era scene” in Hungary,33 had been abandoned. “The re-imposition of socialist realism was no longer possible because by that stage it no longer had any credibility as a creative practice; it had been thoroughly exposed.”34 Statues then became “symbols of the hated Stalinist order and targets for popular wrath in the wave of iconoclasm that swept Hungary in October 1956.”35 The use of the obtrusive-realistic style in Lancz’s bust breathes the heroicpathetic spirit of the official socialist state sculpture of the 1930s. The heightening and “idealization” of the “hero against all odds” evokes reluctance rather than admiration. It is hard to understand why Lancz, a native Hungarian Jew who had immigrated in 1957, still referred to this discredited style as late as 1995 given the subject of Raoul Wallenberg. As discussed in Part I, the concept of heroes has been misused or misapplied throughout the course of history. And the Wallenberg narrative is not immune to misuse, as the following episode illustrates. In February 2000, Paul Lancz met with Jörg Haider, the then leader of the extreme right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, in front of the Wallenberg bust. Haider used this opportunity for a photo shoot. Understandably this provoked consternation within the Jewish community of Montreal, which had generally refused to meet Haider. In an interview in spring 2003 with Paul Lancz and his son, I was told that the reason they had agreed to the meeting was that they hoped to make contact via Haider with people in Vienna in order to erect a copy of the Wallenberg bust there. They had also hoped that the public meeting would bring greater public awareness of Paul Lancz’s art.36 The fears and protests of the Jewish community that Haider would take advantage of a meeting with well-known Montreal Jews were borne out. Haider faded from the scene and did not contact the artist again. Haider died in a car crash in 2008. That Haider, of all politicians, would engage himself in the erection of a copy of a bust dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg seems highly problematic and the incident casts a shadow on Lancz’s work. The next two busts, by Horn and Stavisky, can be subsumed under the tag man-of-action, although they hardly depict men in action. Characteristic of both busts is a determined expression that leads the viewer to intuit that these men are indeed able to take direct action,


Figure 6.5 B. Horn, R. Wallenberg, 1986, Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study and Memorial Center in Eilat, Israel © Jacques Pri-Gal, Eilat, Israel.

that they are ready to fight for their convictions. The bust by Horn (the artist’s first name is unknown) is in the library of the Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study and Memorial Center in Eilat, Israel (Figure 6.5). The bust is easy to accept as an idealized version of the young, determined Wallenberg, despite the oddity that the man does not wear any shirt under the heavy collar. The head is slightly bent forward and is inclined to the left, giving him an insightful and sympathetic expression.37 A similar impression is conveyed in Lotte Stavisky’s bust, on display in the New York Public Library in Manhattan since 1987. Stavisky envisions Wallenberg as a young handsome hero, who is also characterized by melancholia (Figure 6.6).38 Wallenberg is depicted in his 20s when he still had full hair. Although clearly aiming for an idealization, Stavisky still achieves quite a high degree of resemblance. She expresses the melancholic but determined character of Wallenberg in the reserved raised eyebrows, the sadness of the gaze and in the closed mouth, with the full lower lip over a strong jaw. Stavisky’s Wallenberg has “eyes which seemed sadly fixed on something in distance.”39 But despite all the sadness emanating from the bust, Stavisky is still able to express Wallenberg’s emotional fortitude and personal strength. Her Wallenberg interpretation, despite the light gleam of silver, is reminiscent of


Figure 6.6 Lotte Stavisky, Raoul Wallenberg Bust, 1983, on permanent display at the Edna Barnes Salomon Gallery, in the New York Public Library, Manhattan, New York, USA. Photographer unknown. Compliments of Joel C. Feffer, New York, USA.

Classical Antiquity and Neo-Classical representations of the handsome young hero. Like Pátzay’s, Stavisky’s Wallenberg represents a hero in the classical sense of ideal beauty and a man-of-action. In viewing Stavisky’s bust, we may recall Elenore Lester’s description of Wallenberg: He had the poise and polish of a worldly Swedish aristocrat, but the intensity of his eyes and the sensitive modeling of his mouth suggested a character that did not fit into social molds. He looked at once vulnerable and highly controlled. Inside him was a demon of still-unleashed creative energies. Neither he nor anyone else knew his full capabilities at that time. There was still a boyish diffidence about him.40


The helper A different interpretation of the “man-in-action” topos can be encountered in Willy Gordon’s The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg, inaugurated in 1999. It focuses on a situation where help is needed as well as being given. The work is set upon a hill in a green space across from the commercial center of Lidingö, an island just outside the city limits of Stockholm.41 The monument lies near to the Lidingö town hall, between the pedestrian area, the library, and a large parking place. It is situated in a small park that is easily accessible and frequented. Initially, both the artist and the private committee formed to bring about the monument’s realization, had planned for the monument by Gordon to be installed in a central part of Stockholm. The goal was to have it finished and displayed in 1998, the year when Stockholm was Europe’s Cultural Capital. Although the initial reaction of local politicians was quite positive and the Stockholm City Planning Committee was even looking for a proper square, ultimately no agreement was reached. The attempt to donate the sculpture to the city of Stockholm failed. The city instead announced its own Wallenberg monument competition. The positive effect of the local power struggle can be seen in the fact that politicians were sensitized to the need for a memorial and thus the political process was accelerated. The Nybroplan in the center of Stockholm had been renamed Raoul Wallenbergs torg (square) as early as 1987, but no monument had been erected in his honor. Spurred on by the private initiative the process got off the ground and an internationally announced contest with invited artists took place. This competition finally resulted in Kirsten Ortwed’s Hommage à Raoul Wallenberg, installed in 2001. As a result of the announced competition for Stockholm, the private committee asked the City of Lidingö if it would accept the donation of Gordon’s monument, which it gladly did. On the way up to the little hill in the center of Lidingö there is a notice board, installed by the city, which introduces the viewers to the monument and to the deeds and fate of Wallenberg, as well as to his ties to Lidingö. Wallenberg was born in the family’s summerhouse Kappsta in Skärsätra, a few kilometers south from Lidingö center, where he also spent the summer months until 1928. Additionally, the notice board bears a photo showing Wallenberg at a train station in Budapest and an image of a Swedish Schutzpass (protective pass), one aspect of Wallenberg’s rescue mission. Approaching the sculpture from a distance, all the viewer sees is a huge abstract figure of about 2.4 meters in height. Made of bronze, the


Figure 6.7

Willy Gordon, The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg, 1999, Lidingö, Sweden.

sculptured figure, with clasped hands, extends its long arms down to four outsized hands that are thrust up to grasp the figure’s proffered hands (Figure 6.7). Looking up the hill, the viewer sees the monument surrounded by tall pines on the left side and humble bushes to the right. This placement gives the monument a kind of frame or stage-like exposition. Halfway up the path leading to the monument are three rectangular, upright granite stones. These stones were created by Gordon’s wife Mona. They complete the monument by providing basic information. The slight inclination of the stones backwards helps to convey the impression of fingers. Thus, the entry-stones’ reference to the shape of hands, which is used as the main motif of Gordon’s monument, signals the extent to which the whole arrangement of the monument and its


setting have been thought out. In fact, the whole area was rearranged when the monument was set up, in cooperation with Lidingö’s city planning architect. The stone in the middle of the three entry-stones is covered with a bronze plate containing the following inscription, which translated from the Swedish reads: Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters] saved innumerable Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust at the end of World War II. In remembrance of his deed—and in tribute to other individuals who showed moral courage during this difficult period—this monument was erected in 1999 at Wallenberg’s birthplace. The initiative was undertaken by individuals and the monument was financed by many persons, organizations, and companies in Sweden. With this knowledge in mind, one approaches the monument. The figure is placed on a bronze plinth, which in its turn is based on a block made of concrete. Together the plinth and base are about one meter high. Depending on the observer’s point of view, the figure is either holding his arms abutted sideways or is placing them on his back. Wrapped in some kind of coat that is hanging to the side, it seems as if the wind, or perhaps the movement of the figure itself, is lifting the cloth to the left side (Figure 6.8). This latter assumption is encouraged by the implied shape of a leg under the coat, a leg in motion, striving forward. The whole figure is permeated from head to toe with a determined, energetic line, giving the whole figure an impression of resoluteness. The head is held up high, the back straight, the figure ready to go. This is a dynamic expression of a determined person in action. The shape of the coat, accentuated by the edges of the bronze coat and blown to the left side, directs us to the action behind the “back” of the statue. From this point of view, the viewer senses something, but is not certain what. The observer becomes curious: What is going on behind the figure? Turning to the “rear” part of the monument, four hands thrust out of a shorter bronze block, situated on a concrete base. The bronze blocks are surrounded by three plain steps made of granite stones, which serve as a link between the two parts of the monument. Unlike its companion piece, the bronze figure, the lower bronze block is not rectangular. From its textured surface the huge hands, the largest of the four hands being about 40 cm in diameter, reach up to the figure’s somewhat smaller and less articulated hands. In the outstretched hands of the figure is a bundle of papers (Figure 6.9). The top paper reveals the


Figure 6.8 Gordon’s Wallenberg monument is situated on the island of Lidingö where Raoul Wallenberg was born in 1912.

Swedish triple crowns emblem, three crowns arranged in an inverted triangle (two above one), which is intended to represent the Schutzpässe, the protective passes distributed by the Swedish Legation as a means of helping the persecuted Jews of Budapest. We will come back to the wider meaning of the symbol of the three crowns and the importance of the protective passes. The highest of the hands holds one of these papers, depicted simply as a sheet without the symbol of the crowns. The coat waved to the side functions as an enclosure, a suggested protective curtain for the scene of the hands in front. Obviously, the four hands represent people begging for help, reaching out of the ground as if their owners are hidden underground.


Figure 6.9 Gordon’s monument focuses on a situation where help is needed and given.

Gordon uses the gesture of the hands, with the fingers widely outstretched toward the figure, to reveal the desperation of those seeking help. Looking from the other side, the hands appear as burning flames swept toward the figure by a stormy wind. The textured bronze base stands for the insecure position of those seeking help, while the rectangular bronze plinth with the figure above appears to be more stable, possibly representing the sidewalk. Because the figure is heightened from ground level, the viewer’s gaze is directed upwards. In this way, the artist was using a technique found in many nineteenth-century monuments that were raised on plinths. This technique of elevating the subject carries with it a form of idealization, a kind of visible honoring.42


However, here the figure does not seem overwhelmingly to dominate because the hands, which thrust up in supplication, are much larger and more articulated than the figure’s. Hence, they gain great significance. It is no wonder that the motif of the hand is of importance to several of the Wallenberg monuments. In the history of art as well as in cultural history, the hand is a recurring motif, as the main tool and outstanding characteristic of mankind. The Hebrew word “jad” means both “hand” and “power,” indicating that the hand has always symbolized activity, power, and authority, and it was seen as a divine or royal symbol.43 Of course, the hand can even function as pars pro toto. This idea was taken up by Maria Miesenberger in her entry for the Wallenberg monument contest in Gothenburg. Her proposal, which was not selected, was even entitled The Hand. It focuses exclusively on this one motif to visualize in a depersonalized way the help given by Wallenberg. The most fascinating observation when approaching the monument as described above is the feeling that Gordon offers a play in two acts or better two scenes of one play—in non-chronological order: At first, one sees the resolute “on-the-move man,” maybe rushing away to another place where his help is needed. Then one discovers the preceding action, the deed that has taken place. The observer becomes engaged, realizing that something has just happened—an action that apparently demanded not only the capacity to act quickly and resolutely but that also demanded secrecy. The viewer has discovered a covert action. With the information already obtained from the bronze plate on the entry-stones, the realization comes: this action was undertaken to save lives. The Swedish inscription on the block of the larger plinth, the side which, according to the description above, one encounters first, anticipates the story we discover in the monument’s title: Raoul Wallenbergs gärning—The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg. The composition underlines the message that the action of providing help is of utmost importance; everything is focused on the action that takes place between the pleading and the giving hands. In the group of hands, the center of reference is the hand holding the triple crown paper, polished by the touch of visitors and lit by the sun (Figure 6.10). This effect is not just a result of the composition lines but also because the crowns are indeed articulated and easily readable signs. As such they are the monument’s most compelling aspect. That this side should indeed be understood as the main front of the sculpture is accentuated by the fact that a bench is positioned a few meters away. Viewers can sit there in contemplation and meditation. They are free to enter the monument, putting themselves in the position of the petitioner, looking up, seeing the bundle of passes provided.


Figure 6.10 The main motifs in Gordon’s work are the hands and the triple crowns symbolizing the Swedish protective papers Wallenberg distributed to help the Jews of Budapest.

Or the viewer may lean against the bronze coat of the figure, observing the thrusting hands. That Gordon searches for a depersonalized conception of the hero becomes especially obvious in examining the main motif, namely, the hands. No sign of individualism appears in the hands, neither of the helper nor the help-seekers. Obviously, it is the helping act itself that Gordon found most remarkable. Gordon wished to de-individualize the effect and thus made the head of the figure hollow. This hollow head has caused much irritation and criticism. On the positive side, the hollowness can convey anonymity to the rescue operation, thereby not venerating one single man but all,


even the unknown men and women, who acted as rescuers at that time. The deed, generalized as an act of humanity, is honored. And in fact, as stated in the entry-stone’s interpretation quoted above, the monument is dedicated to Wallenberg’s deed but also pays “tribute to other individuals who showed moral courage during this difficult period.” In this way, the monument applies to the symbolic function of the name, where “Raoul Wallenberg” stands also for other individuals who proffered aid, less well-known and even unknown people. This interpretation is further supported by the introductory text, which appears at the foot of the hill, stating that any person can make a difference and that many Jews saved by Wallenberg and his colleagues never had the chance to know who exactly was responsible for their rescue. The text also specifically elucidates the monument’s treatment by stating that its anonymous character epitomizes this aspect of the rescue efforts. Giving additional support for this interpretation, the text refers to Wallenberg’s statement to the effect that his mission, under the circumstances, was to save as many as possible rather than addressing the needs of particular individuals. However, it should be noted that there are other, less favorable readings of Gordon’s monument. The hollow head with the dark shadow inside can be seen to cast an ominous mood. In fact, some observers find the hollow head unworthy of Wallenberg’s legacy because he did not acted anonymously but in a way that identified him by name. Furthermore, the gesture in combination with the hollow head and the backward-leaning posture can easily be misinterpreted as arrogant, especially because the group of hands and the figure are on different ground levels. While the feeling of uneasiness evoked by the different ground levels seems to be intended by the artist to illustrate the insecure situation of those persecuted in Budapest in 1944/5, the problem remains that uneasiness emanates from the figure itself. While the man without a face is meant to represent the humanitarian rescuer, its hollow head gives it a sinister aspect. Though Gordon lifted up the figure from the ground to signify honor and respect for the man, the missing face has caused some people to be highly critical of the monument. An element that for a long time contributed to misunderstandings of Gordon’s monument was the text on the first introductory information board erected by the City of Lidingö. It was replaced in August 2003. The initial text was in part identical with the press release issued at the time of the inauguration and on the leaflet about the monument provided by the city and revised in 2008. The initial text had some historic inconsistencies and focused on the Wallenberg family home


in Kappsta. But in the context of the monument per se, the most relevant and disturbing aspect was that this text influenced the viewer’s perception of the monument, and told the visitor how to read it. For example, one line read (my translation): “Raoul Wallenberg stands with his back to the camera, the hands behind his back, negotiating with the Nazis for the release of the Jews who hold protective passes.” Furthermore, we are told that Gordon used as a starting point the wellknown photograph taken by Wallenberg photographer Tom Veres, and widely published in the Wallenberg literature, which shows Wallenberg at a train station somewhere in Budapest. The photograph captures Wallenberg with his hands folded behind his back, wearing a hat and a broad, heavy overcoat. It appears in the 1982 Wallenberg book by the American journalist Elenore Lester whom Gordon knew personally. He was her host when she did research for her book in Stockholm and later he visited her in New York. It is true that the photograph and book inspired Gordon to create the model of the Wallenberg monument, and in that sense can be seen as a starting point that led, as demonstrated, to a very free artistic interpretation. However, largely because of this text, a number of newspaper articles written after the monument was installed described the Gordon sculpture as showing Wallenberg passing out Schutzpässe behind his back. As a result, misinterpretations about the monument arose, even provoking anger as some critics even went as far as assuming that it depicted Wallenberg as a refugee profiteer, doing something illegal behind his back.44 Such an impression emerges from the text rather than from the sculpture. Neither viewed from a distance nor up close does the figure hold its arms behind its back as Wallenberg does in the photograph. Instead, what is conveyed is the action of pleading for and receiving urgent help, conducted under hurried and desperate circumstances. The initial notice board at the monument’s site was replaced in summer 2003. Although still showing the photograph, the new one is much more favorable. It omits any misleading instructions for viewing and provides much useful, complementary information that contributes to a better understanding of the monument. The new text also contains a reference to the monument by Ulla and Gustav Kraitz erected at Wallenberg’s birthplace on the island in 2002, as well as mentioning the Raoul Wallenberg Room in Lidingö’s town hall. In the Raoul Wallenberg Room, where marriage ceremonies take place, there is material on the monument’s history and information about Raoul Wallenberg himself. In 2002, the City of Lidingö declared the January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, which is commemorated in many countries,


as Raoul Wallenberg Day. On this day, an annual torch parade to the monument is held, followed by the announcement of the winners of the “Raoul Wallenberg’s Spirit-Award” contest, conducted by the city among local school children. These officially organized events as well as the new information text indicate that the City of Lidingö respects and appreciates the Wallenberg monument and endeavors to make it an integral part of the ongoing commemoration of its prominent son. Flowers at the monument, laid by private persons on Wallenberg’s birthday, testify that the work is appreciated by its citizens. One of Wallenberg’s central tools for his rescue mission was the provision of protective passes, entitled Schutzpässe. These documents play an important role not only in Gordon’s monument but also in other Wallenberg monuments, sometimes visualized directly in the monument and in some cases mentioned in the inscriptions. At this point we will briefly appraise the passes themselves to better understand their place in the Wallenberg monuments, and to inform understanding of the historical situation in which Wallenberg’s mission took place. During World War II, protective documents in various forms served to secure escapes.45 Even before Wallenberg’s arrival, provisional passports had become one of the aid measures used by the Swedish Legation in Budapest.46 The delegate of the Swedish Red Cross, Valdemar Langlet, had issued letters of protection to help the Jews. According to Per Anger, it was Wallenberg who changed the design of the protective papers shortly after his arrival in Budapest. From then on they were called Schutzpässe. Wallenberg gave them a more official and important look, including a serial number and the Swedish colors. In addition, he placed the triple crowns of the Swedish emblem in the very center of each document. Furthermore, the Schutzpässe showed a photo of the owner, a stamp, and the signature of the ambassador. According to Lévai, Ambassador Danielsson personally signed all passes, something no other ambassador did. In this way, the Swedish passes were unique.47 However, on other occasions, Lévai mentions that Wallenberg was the one who signed the passes.48 It seems that the ambassador signed them in most cases, but that occasionally Wallenberg also signed or countersigned a pass, as well as other documents.49 The introductory notice to Gordon’s monument shows a Schutzpass signed by Danielsson that, as explained in the text and visible on the copy, was countersigned by Wallenberg with his initials. The text on each Schutzpass declared that the holder and his dwelling were under the protection of the Royal Swedish Legation until the time of their departure to Sweden. However, it was known that all


travel routes to Sweden were closed. But given that travel to Sweden was neither possible nor intended, these passes were not meant for an individual’s entry into Sweden, but really meant to grant Hungarian Jews some form of protection or relief until the end of the war. For example, Schutzpass-possessors were exempted from wearing a yellow star. In this way, they had a greater freedom of movement and were able to help themselves and their families. The Swedish Legation was officially limited to issuing a certain number of passes; at first the number was fixed at some 700 and later on was increased to some 4500–5000. The hidden inflation of illegal copies, estimated at over 8000 documents, endangered the value of the protective passes, but seemed, nevertheless, necessary if one wanted to help the Jews.50 The final number of passes distributed will probably never be known. The value of the various kinds of documents issued by the Swedish Legation varied throughout these war years. There were no guarantees that they would provide protection, and even those Jews who had protective documents risked being humiliated, beaten, killed or transported to Auschwitz.51 Nevertheless, there are many examples of the passes saving the life of the owner by preventing their deportation or execution. Thus, even though the passes were in themselves of relative value, the assumed ownership of a document could function as the only convincing argument to prevent deportations. Documents did not exist in every situation. However, their alleged existence acted as a pretext to intervene.52 Wallenberg himself is said to have personally removed from trains, and brought back from death-marches, people who possessed or claimed to possess these Swedish passes. The success of the passes depended on a variety of factors. Sweden represented Germany as well as Hungary in belligerent countries; this fact could always be used as an important argument in negotiations. Sweden was still an important trade partner for Germany. Furthermore, the possible exchange for Germans living outside German-controlled territory must have been of an even more convincing argument at the end of the war.53 The issuing of these Swedish passes occurred at the same time as another set of favorable factors for the Jewish community. These included a higher degree of cooperation with other neutral legations and help organizations; the engagement of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in January 1944 established the War Refugee Board; the role of the international Jewish organizations and the resistance activities of local Zionist groups; and last but not least the weak military position of Germany. In addition, humanitarian services by Sweden


for Hungarians during World War I may have had some influence on Hungarian ministries as well. Clearly, these types of documents were vital tools as objects of negotiation and instruments to win time, but clearly too every new situation called for new solutions. Long-term established rules or guarantees did not exist. The constant danger faced by people, even those holding a Schutzpass, especially after the Arrow Cross coup in October, made it necessary for the power behind the documents to insist and fight for their official acceptance. And that is what Wallenberg and his team did. For instance, after the Arrow Cross coup Wallenberg negotiated for the passes’ legitimacy. On October 29, 1944, the protective passes were given renewed recognition, at least officially.54 Wallenberg skillfully engaged the cooperation of reputable persons working at the various Hungarian administration departments. Without their cooperation the various documents, issued in accordance to the everyday political changes, would not have been accepted and thus would have had no impact. Additionally, the general political developments naturally had a strong impact on the acceptance of the Schutzpässe and on the viability of Wallenberg’s actions. These developments included such factors as Germany’s growing dependence on good relations with Sweden and maneuvers by Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg to use the remaining Jews as negotiating tools with the Western Allies. How many lives the Schutzpässe actually saved will probably never be known, but it is clear that they did contribute to saving lives. Importantly, also, they gave the endangered hope and moral support to carry on. In popular memory, the Schutzpässe are as closely connected to Raoul Wallenberg, known as the inventor of its design, as the White Busses are to Count Folke Bernadotte. Over the years, these tangible, lasting objects became one of the most popular symbols for Wallenberg’s rescue mission. In nearly every exhibition touching on Wallenberg and the Swedish rescue operation in Budapest in 1944/5, a Schutzpass (or a copy) is exhibited, acting as a symbol of Wallenberg’s action. Even early on in the mission, the symbolic power of the protective passes was well understood by Wallenberg’s colleagues and associates. For instance, as a Christmas present, Wallenberg’s staff (predominantly Jews whom he had employed to save them and who in their turn contributed to the rescue operation) presented him with a portfolio showing the form of the Schutzpass through the centuries. This treasure has survived the war. Wallenberg’s colleague Lars Berg found the gift, along with other things, in a bank, otherwise plundered by the Red Army, where Wallenberg had deposited private belongings and money.


Berg took the find with him and later gave it to Wallenberg’s mother, Maj von Dardel.55 Its small paintings, drawings, and stitches in the style of different periods, showing well-known topics or even afterimages from art history, presented with allusions to the “history of the Schutzpass.” Full of spirit, irony, and knowledge, the text and images prove that the people around Wallenberg understood the (symbolic) significance of the Schutzpässe. It is highly remarkable that this gift came into existence in the days between the Arrow Cross coup and the Soviet capture. Despite the circumstances of war, Wallenberg’s overworked colleagues found the time and energy to create such a gift. Its text and images give an idea of their spirit, the words were written in the language they all spoke, namely, German. The calendar was published in 2004 under the title Christmas of Raoul Wallenberg Budapest 1944. In regard to the design of the Schutzpass, historian Attila Lajos has made an interesting observation. He notes that the three crowns on the Schutzpass background layout were arranged in inverse order, one crown above two instead of the other way round. As far as I know, Lajos was the first to comment on this, but his conclusion seems over-hasty. Because of this feature, Lajos assumes that the Schutzpässe were not designed by Wallenberg, an architect and skillful draftsman, or that the wrong design came by even on purpose to consciously prevent the passholders from entering Sweden. Here Lajos forgets to mention another, even more important, detail of the passes that seems to disprove his analysis: the official Swedish seal that shows the three crowns in the correct order. The seal is, of course, of much higher value than the background layout, and as Lajos mentioned himself, the wrong arrangement of the crowns in the background may even have been a mistake from the very beginning, unmentioned or uncorrectable because the passes had already been printed.56 His observation is interesting not only in the context of Gordon’s sculpture, but also for other monuments, in particular Adam Chyrek’s sculpture in the Sydney Jewish Museum (which will be presented at the end of this chapter). Gordon’s sculpture not only incorporates the symbol of the three crowns (in correct order in contrast to Chyrek) into the monument, but the text of the entry notice, which also shows an image of the Schutzpass, mentions that the triple crowns were placed in incorrect order on the background layout of the original Schutzpässe. According to the text of the notice, this happened “by accident” because the documents were created under enormous time pressure. For the visitor who discovers the difference between the arrangement of the three crowns on the document and on the sculpture, the text provides


an explanation. Both the information as well as the image of the Schutzpass are useful in decoding the main motif of the triple crowns used in the monument. By providing a copy of the historic document and the descriptive text information, the connection between the triple crowns symbolizing the Schutzpass and Wallenberg is made clear even to future generations, who may not be aware of the link between the triple crowns symbolizing the Schutzpass and Wallenberg’s action. We will now turn to the main motif of Gordon’s monument, the symbol of the triple crowns, a heraldic symbol with deep mystic meaning. Sweden has two coats of arms, the lesser and the greater (Lilla/Stora Riksvapen). The lesser coat of arms is blue with three crowns of gold, two over one. This three-crown emblem is frequently used and a widely known and popular symbol of the Swedish nation. Today, there is a popular Swedish ice-hockey team named Tre Kronor, and the emblem frequently appears not only on hockey shirts but on various products and Swedish souvenirs. It has been a symbol of the country since the reign of King Albert of Mecklenburg who ruled Sweden between 1363 and 1389.57 However, the triple-crown symbol has another meaning. It is not only used to represent Sweden, but traditionally in Christian art the three crowns symbolize the Magi, the three men in search of the Christ child. Today in many countries, the Magi are best known by the representation of the three wise men, Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior, and for the largely Catholic feast day in January, Epiphany, that is dedicated to them. From the early days of Christian belief, the Adoration of the Magi has been a popular topic in Christian art. Often the Magi were symbolized by three iconic crowns. This iconic device has continued in the history of art but has also been associated in other contexts, including as a symbol of the Swedish nation.58 Even though the devotion to the Magi was especially popular and fervent in the Middle Ages in Central and Northern Europe, it has always remained a theme of Christian art. First and foremost, the three crowns of the Schutzpass symbolize the bureaucratic rescue mission of a neutral nation, but given its historic and religious significance the three-crown icon has the potential of imbuing the monument with an additional meaning. It should, however, be noted that the Jewish artist Willy Gordon hardly intended to include “Christian” symbolism. Moreover, I am not arguing that Gordon intended this religious iconic meaning. In fact, the three crowns were not part of the initial model (nor was the head hollow). However, adopting a hermeneutic approach, meaning emerges from interpretation. When we once have learned about the motif we cannot


ignore its meaning. Christian and heraldic symbols are an important part of the European cultural heritage, even though their meaning is no longer as familiar to us as they would have been earlier. After being confronted with their meaning, however, we cannot ignore their influence on the work’s interpretation.59 Against this background, let us expand the reading of the triple crowns as a mystic symbol. In Gordon’s monument Wallenberg, the educated, language-talented and widely traveled young man with an exceptional upbringing and family background, reminds us of the positions the Magi held. Like them, he comes from faraway, bringing light, explicit hope, as well as practical goods, money, food, and medicine, to the Jews of Budapest. His arrival may, in analogy to the arrival of the Magi, be seen as a manifestation of redemption, or at least as hope for salvation. Biblically, the symbol of the crown refers to the “Crown of Life” (James 1:12, Revelations 2:10) and the “Crown of Justice” (2 Timothy 4:8), which can be interpreted as the promise of eternal life. This is specifically evocative of the role that Wallenberg’s Schutzpässe played in giving their holders a chance for life in a specific historical situation. In our context, it is of special interest to note that, from the fifth until the nineteenth century, a small Magi-amulet worn by travelers on the body was regarded as a talisman. That custom existed among Christian believers, even though it was not very common.60 More common and still practiced today was the practice of inscribing the initials of the Magi on walls of houses for protection. We see this “magic of letters,” the power of the written word, continuing from the Middle Ages into modern times, and this association is most striking as we reflect on the power of official papers that were posted by the Swedish Legation on the walls of the safe houses in Budapest. On June 21, 1945, the Budapest Jewish Community arranged a ceremonial in tribute to Raoul Wallenberg. As in the legend of the Magi, the shining star appears in the speech by Domonkos: Who was Raoul Wallenberg? Son of the noble Swedish nation, a hero of modern legends, he was sent by the Lord. . . . There are legends about this young man. . . . He did not ask who they [the unfortunate] were or whether they were meek or powerful, rich or poor. He cared only about one thing: that they were defenseless . . . He went to them and saved them. As a hero of legends, Raoul Wallenberg appeared as a shining star in the dreadful darkness. He was a ray of hope and he fell like a shooting star at the edge of the horizon.61


In ancient times as well as in early Christian legends, the star was seen as the sign that announced the birth (or death) of an outstanding (human) being.62 In fact, for many survivors Wallenberg was regarded as having obtained the rank of the “Angel of Budapest,” which became a common term to characterize him. In this context it is worth mentioning that this appellation seems to be traceable to Wallenberg’s early biographer, Jenö Lévai, who in 1935 had written a book about Elsa Brändström, called Siberia’s Angel. This Swedish heroine acted for the Red Cross in Russia during World War I and, as explained in Part I, was one of Wallenberg’s personal models and inspirations. The frequent use of the nomenclature “Angel of Budapest” to signify Wallenberg might be a result of the name given to Elsa Brändström. In both cases, Lévai seems to have established a name that has been repeated ever since. Wallenberg was the one with “superhuman” power who acted as the “Light in the Darkness.”63 Consequently, the prosaic interpretation of the bureaucratic or heraldic sign of the triple crowns gives the monument a deeper, mystic meaning. In Gordon’s monument, it is Wallenberg’s humanitarian action, not the man himself, who is represented by an abstract figure with a hollow head, and that action and what the man represents are further symbolized by the triple crowns, charged with their own religious meaning. It is worthwhile remembering that the Magi were regarded as holy or equal with saints, although they were in fact never canonized.64 In Gordon’s monument, Wallenberg is not only understood as a secular rescuer but as a savior of sacred dimensions. The chosen symbol of the triple crowns in Gordon’s monument represents the bureaucratic apparatus, showing in this way that the rescue operations were under the protection of the neutral sovereign nation of Sweden. Furthermore, the symbol of the triple crowns with its wide range of associations provides the monument with a layer of religious or mystic meaning. By choosing this symbol, Gordon succeeds in doing justice to the historic facts as known to us today as well as to the Wallenberg myth. He satisfies the desire of ordinary people to identify and recognize their hero by providing a symbol that is easy to identify; this can be one reason for the wide acceptance of the artwork.

The diplomat Although Raoul Wallenberg was originally not a career diplomat and often did not follow diplomatic protocol, posterity remembers him above all as the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews during


World War II and then disappeared into the Soviet Gulag. As we will see, six of the 31 Wallenberg monuments refer to Wallenberg as a Swedish envoy. And in fact, without diplomatic status, his mission would not have been possible. In this context, it is worthwhile recalling that modern diplomacy has its roots in antique mythology. Ancient gods and heroes served for centuries as examples for actors in the international arena.65 In this sense, “the diplomat” belongs to the classical hero type, but his action depends largely on skill in negotiation. The prime Wallenberg example of the diplomat motif is Philip Jackson’s Wallenberg Monument, installed in 1997 in London (Figure 6.11). It is situated in the crescent of Great Cumberland Place, just a couple of minutes north of Oxford Street and Marble Arch. In contrast to the

Figure 6.11



shopping streets nearby, Great Cumberland Place, with its trees and benches, offers visitors some respite from busy city life. Although the setting is indeed fortuitous (it was one of the few places still available for the installation of a monument in central London), it seems tailor-made for Jackson’s Wallenberg Monument. It is located opposite the Western Marble Arch Synagogue, close to the West London Synagogue and the Swedish Embassy, right in the heart of London’s West End, the City of Westminster. Clearly, the site was renovated in preparation for the monument, which in terms of scale harmonizes with the architectural setting. The monument is well integrated into its surroundings; the pavement is imbedded in the semicircular area and the monument’s axis is at a 45° angle in relation to the main road. Although the monument rests only on a low plinth, this slight inclination allows the work to be easily visible from the main street that divides the area into two halves. In Jackson’s monument we encounter a male figure, slightly largerthan-life, standing in front of an upright rectangular bronze wall, about 4 m in height. The man is placed on the right side of this wall. In accordance with the “law of the golden section,” approximately two-thirds of the surface of the rectangular background is roughly structured as if it were an impasto painting. As the eye moves upwards along the background, the rough surface of the upper part is less pronounced. On the left side of the upper section, the name “Wallenberg” appears in capital letters, thus identifying the bronze figure. The whole composition rests on a little elevated square base of York stone, a material used in many London monuments. The bottom base, designed as if it were pavement, is largely covered by moss. As a result, the green–blue bronze is integrated, in terms of color, with the moss-covered base. Standing in front of the monument, the viewer sees a man dressed in suit, shirt, and tie. Over his shoulders hangs a heavy overcoat, with empty hanging sleeves that frame the figure and give the impression of weight, dignity, and determination. The suit does not indicate a particular time period other than the twentieth century, though viewers may be reminded of the 1930s and 1940s when it was in vogue to hang one’s coat over the shoulders.66 Jackson has composed the figure standing in contraposto, with his left leg straight and his right slightly bent, the right foot turned toward the right. His left arm crosses his chest as the hand tightly grasps the heavy collar of his overcoat, while the right hand is visible under the coat, clutching a bundle of papers (Figure 6.12). His head tilts toward the left, and gazes into the distance. The eyes, with their clearly articulated and slightly curved brows, knitted together into a frown, appear somewhat


Figure 6.12 Wallenberg holding a bundle of papers. Detail of Jackson’s Wallenberg monument in London.

tense; the mouth is closed, the chin defined (Figure 6.13). The figure has a composed but determined look, the upwards gaze suggesting creativity.67 The thin hair of the head gives the face an expression of openness and accessibility. The previously described variation in the background’s textural surface leads the viewer’s eye through the various parts of the monument’s composition. The contrast of the soft, delicately modeled surfaces of the face and hands against the rough background texture capture the viewer’s attention. The figure’s posture is inviting in character. Although the figure is in relief against the background, the bronze figure and the wall make up an integrated entity by the treatment of the surface as well as the fact that the bronze background joins the figure sideways.


Figure 6.13

Jackson depicts Wallenberg as a man of vision ready to intervene.

The direction of the head and the figure’s posture lead the onlooker toward the left. Moving clockwise around the monument, the viewer encounters three additional sides, all equally important in understanding the monument. The experience of the monument can be divided into four acts, as in a theater play. In the “first act,” we encountered a man holding a bundle of papers. As we move to the second side (the edge) of the block, we find the following text: In 1944, armed only with determination and courage, Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest as a member of the neutral Swedish Legation and set about rescuing the 230,000 Jews who remained. Snatching many from Nazi and Hungarian death squads, he demanded the removal


of others from trains departing to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He placed tens of thousands under the protection of the Swedish Crown by issuing them with false passports, “Schutzpasses,” sheltering them in safe houses from which he flew the Swedish flag. All texts on the monument were composed by John Bierman at the request of the artist. In 1981, Bierman had written Righteous Gentile, the popular factual biography of Wallenberg. After reading the text on the monument, we realize that this edge of the wall, with its uneven base, evolves bit by bit into piles of hundreds of painstakingly articulated papers (Plate 2). We turn around and discover that the back of the monument is composed as a wall of papers, stacked in unequally sized, slightly displaced bundles, each held together by one or two bronze ribbons (Figures 6.14 and 6.15). The lower piles protrude sideways and forwards from the rectangular wall. On the ground, three passes lie on top of each other. The top one is unmistakably identifiable as a Schutzpass of a mother and her two children as indicated by their “photographs” on the paper. The text is not entirely legible, but certain words can be deciphered such as Schutz-Pass and Schweden (as well as their equivalents in Hungarian), as well as the information that the woman had black hair and brown eyes. Less visible is Ambassador Danielsson’s signature. However, the monument unquestionably allows the viewer to identify the papers as official documents; this is clearly indicated by the design as a whole, which includes the Swedish emblem and seal. The words Schutz-Pass as well as the Swedish crown were mentioned in the text on the monument’s leftside edge. Now on the rear side, they are represented as visual signs. According to the artist, the protective passports appear about 30,000 times. Obviously he considered the passes to be the essential tool in Wallenberg’s rescue mission. We recall that Jackson placed on the front of the monument the figure of Wallenberg, holding papers in his hand—Schutzpässe. As the viewer circles the monument, reads the inscriptions and finds the images of thousands of passes, this viewer cannot help but realize the magnitude of Wallenberg’s accomplishment, in that Wallenberg did not issue merely a couple of documents but thousands, and thus helped not a few but many, many people. Looking at the back of the monument, our eyes are drawn from the protective passes on the ground up to the thousands of single papers. On the right-hand side, the passes are framed by a drapery that hangs down from the top, ending in a pile of documents. Looking closer, one discovers the cross on the drapery, and upon closer inspection we see that the drapery is actually a Swedish flag, a reminder of the safe


Figure 6.14 The back of Jackson’s monument is made up by thousands of protective papers. The Swedish flag frames the scenery.

houses that had been marked by a Swedish flag. This was another tool Wallenberg used in Budapest to protect the Jews, as the inscriptions on the edge of the monument had taught us. Proceeding left around the monument to its other narrow edge side, we find the following text: Wallenberg’s bravery helped save the lives of as many as 100,000 men, women and children destined for the death camps only because they were Jews. When, in January 1945, Budapest fell to the Soviet Army, Wallenberg was taken under guard to Moscow where he vanished into the Soviet prison system. The last resting place of this selfless hero is unknown.


Figure 6.15 Detail of the painstakingly articulated papers in Jackson’s monument.

The monument does not symbolically depict Wallenberg’s fate in any overt fashion. His fate is nonetheless captured in the color of the monument. Depending on the light, its color varies from green to blue to green–gray, giving the monument a melancholic character, hinting at Wallenberg’s fate. Returning to the front of the monument, we encounter the man once again. By circumventing the monument, we comprehend the enormity of Wallenberg’s achievement. We follow once more his pensive view directed into the distance. In Jackson’s conception, Wallenberg was an intellectual rather than a physical hero. The artist succeeds in presenting a man who had a vision and was determined to act upon that vision. Encountering Jackson’s Wallenberg, who is shown with such revealing candidness in


his face, we find it easy to accept that it was not the diplomatic suit alone that made Wallenberg successful in the particular historic situation, but rather the man’s character. In Part I we considered Wallenberg’s sophistication; here in Jackson’s interpretation this takes on the veneer of trustworthiness. Looking at his Wallenberg, one can see the justice in Lena Einhorn’s characterization of Wallenberg as a man who had the ability to “comprehend human psychology as quick as a flash and act according to that knowledge.”68 When we look upon Jackson’s Wallenberg, the following statement of Per Anger acquires much resonance: I was convinced that no one was better qualified for the assignment than Wallenberg. He was a clever negotiator and organizer, unconventional, extraordinarily inventive and cool-headed, and something of a go-getter. Besides this, he was very good at languages and well grounded in Hungarian affairs. At heart, he was a great idealist and a warm human being.69 Jackson regarded Wallenberg as a strong-minded man, and his Wallenberg radiates “self-trust,” the ability Ralph Waldo Emerson described in his 1841 essay on Heroism as the essence of heroism. This trait is underscored by an anecdote from Wallenberg’s life that is oft-repeated, according to Ricki Neuman because it is “the only opportunity for the reader to meet ‘a hero in the making.’”70 As the story goes, Wallenberg often hitch-hiked when he was a student in the US. On one occasion he was picked up by hoodlums. They robbed him by turning a gun on him. Fearless and unabashed, the young Wallenberg asked his robbers to give him a lift back to the main road because there it would be easier for him to hitch another ride. Astonishingly, the robbers agreed. After this event he wrote home that people have the tendency to exaggerate unknown dangers. He continued to hitch-hike, and through this and other experiences became aware of his talent as a convincing talker and indeed came to see these experiences as a form of diplomatic training.71 In Jackson’s monument circumambulation is an essential element. Using that tool, Jackson succeeds in telling a story in four acts. He intended that the viewer would move around the monument rather than stand devoutly in front of it. The element of circumambulation appears again, as a fifth act, summarizing the lesson that is supposed to be learned from this “play.” On a bronze strip around the outer edges of the low plinth, we find an additional inscription that states: The 20th century spawned two of history’s vilest tyrannies. Raoul Wallenberg outwitted the first but was swallowed up by the second.


His triumph over Nazi Genocide reminds us that the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruellest state machine. The fate of the six million Jews he was unable to rescue reminds us of the evil to which racist ideas can drive whole nations. Finally, his imprisonment reminds us not only of Soviet brutality but also of the ignorance and indifference which led the free world to abandon him. We must never forget his lesson. In order to read the inscription one must move around the monument once more, this time counter-clockwise. As we return to the main view, we look up at the figure again, up to the man to whom the monument pays tribute and whom we are clearly invited to regard as a hero. The last line echoes in our heads: “We must never forget his lesson.” The theatrical character of Jackson’s work contributes to securing visitors’ attention. Certain elements stress the stage-like character of the monument (Figure 6.16). The base functions as the stage, the draped curtain acts as an unveiling tool, as if the artist wanted to say: “Look, I have revealed the tools of Wallenberg’s rescue mission and placed them right in front of your eyes.” Even the lighting stresses the monument’s stage-like setting: on the back, lamps light up the

Figure 6.16 Jackson’s monument is characterized by theatrical elements and makes intense use of inscriptions.


monument from the ground. The different “acts of the play” can only be discovered by circumambulating the monument. For example, the drapery is not visible from the main view. The representational elements, such as the bundle of papers in the figure’s hand, acquire their meaning after we have viewed the “play” and discovered what it wants to teach us, through images as well as words. Obviously, Jackson’s Wallenberg monument is strongly rooted in the tradition of the personal monument genre as a standing figure that was regarded as the most exclusive form of the bourgeoisie monument in the nineteenth century. But before it was identified with the bourgeoisie this was the pose taken by monarchs, whenever an equestrian statue was not possible; military figures and statesmen were also generally represented in this standing pose.72 Thus, Jackson’s standing figure incorporates the well-known pose used for monarchs, generals, and statesmen, and the pose later identified as the most elegant depiction of the bourgeoisie. Jackson’s Wallenberg holds a document in his hand that identifies him as a man of peace. His figurative monument refers to the “art of the typical,” “the straight bearing of the independent human being, standing leg and free leg as an allegory of inner harmony, the upright-held head, gestures of the active vita or vita contemplative, foremost clarified by attributes.”73 With the coat, referring to the motif of the greatcoat that frequently was used in personal monuments during the nineteenth century, Jackson bestows his Wallenberg figure with dignity. In accordance with the genre’s tradition, Jackson indicates the monument’s subject by showing his name on the front; but Jackson does not inscribe it on a pedestal, rather on the wall. He replaces the traditionally used reliefs and allegory figures on the monument’s sides with the attributes of the flag and the Schutzpässe, and he integrates into the monument a long text explaining the virtues of the honored. In this work we find all the elements traditionally associated with the genre. However, Jackson alters this tradition in certain ways. His Wallenberg is not placed on a high pedestal as in many of the nineteenth-century monuments (or as in the case of Pátzay or Lancz), which are inaccessible to the visitor. The viewer is allowed to enter Wallenberg’s sphere and examine at close range the figure and the story the monument unveils. The slight elevation gives his figure an air of dignity and respect, and fulfills the popular desire to be able to look up to the hero, yet at the same time, the hero remains approachable. By such techniques the Wallenberg that Jackson presents is an extraordinary person, admirable but still no superhuman, an individual who is both exemplary and exceptional. As Geoffrey Cubitt described it: “Exemplarity involves a perception not just of excellence, but also of


relevance—and thus, in a sense, of similarity. Those whom we take as exemplars may be better than we are, but not than we might in principle become.”74 Jackson, who was originally asked for a head and shoulders, proposed a much larger and extensive project instead because he considered Wallenberg as one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century and wanted this to be reflected both by the design and size. Nevertheless, his London monument conveys not a superhuman but a mundane version of Wallenberg. Here, Wallenberg is presented as an ideal to serve as a model to encourage ordinary human to follow an ideal they “might in principle become.” Jackson succeeds both in portraying Wallenberg as a human being and, at the same time, a hero.75 In his monument Jackson seemed to have adopted the approach of Ralph Waldo Emerson who makes us feel that “we can appropriate the attributes of the great, make them our own, and become heroic in our own lives.”76 Another version of a diplomat, which is quite similar although artistically not as convincing or impressive, was created by Adam Chyrek in 1992, five years before Jackson’s monument was inaugurated.77 His sculpture, entitled Raoul Wallenberg, is found in the Sydney Jewish Museum, Australia (Figure 6.17). Chyrek’s version is almost life-size but somewhat smaller than Jackson’s Wallenberg figure. Like Jackson, he depicts Wallenberg as a relatively young, considerate diplomat, wearing a suit with an overcoat draped over his shoulders, who is distributing protective passes. With his left hand Chyrek’s Wallenberg protectively holds three passes against his body, enabling the word Schutz, in capital letters, meaning protection, to be easily readable on one of them. Wallenberg reaches out with his right hand, ready to hand over another pass. This pass shows the words, again written in capital letters, Schutzpass and Schweden, and depicts three crowns. Here the crowns are arranged as in the background layout of the original passes, with one above two, and not as in the Swedish emblem, two above one as used by Willy Gordon in his Wallenberg monument on the island of Lidingö. This observation is especially interesting when we consider that the object exhibited beside the statue does not show a Schutzpass but a Schutzbrief. The latter was a protective letter issued by the Swedish Red Cross and not by Wallenberg, as the text erroneously states. However, given that Chyrek depicts the crowns the way he does, he must have seen an original Schutzpass and taken that symbol from the background layout as a motif for his monument. It appears that Chyrek was unfamiliar with the original Swedish emblem and simply followed the “mistake” that occurred in the Schutzpass layout, as pointed out by Lajos.


Figure 6.17 Adam Chyrek, Raoul Wallenberg, 1992, Sydney Jewish Museum, Australia © Blake Hamilton, Sydney, Australia.

Chyrek’s Wallenberg statue at the Sydney Jewish Museum stands in front of the section entitled “Righteous Among the Nations,” one part of the museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibition, together with Chyrek’s sculpture of Janusz Korczak. The latter was a Polish physician and writer who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Korczak chose to accompany the Jewish children for whom he was responsible to Treblinka, and subsequently, along with the children, was killed. The pairing of Chyrek’s Korczak sculpture with his Wallenberg sculpture offers the viewer two different kinds of helpers: Korczak as the man who made a sacrifice and Wallenberg as the man who took action. As is expressed in Chyrek’s sculpture, the success of Wallenberg’s action was not a matter


of physical strength but rather reflected the way Wallenberg used his diplomatic status. This diplomatic status was also conveyed in busts by other artists who tried, through the adumbration of a suit and a tie, to give Wallenberg the appearance of a diplomat. Seldom are these attempts to grasp the essence of Wallenberg convincing, neither in terms of representing Wallenberg as a diplomat nor in securing a convincing portrait of the man. One such example is Miri Margolin’s Raoul Wallenberg Bust, situated in the US Capitol in Washington, DC. This shows a middle-aged man with fine strands of hair over a balding forehead (characteristic of the time when he was active in Budapest), amateurishly executed ears, and narrow eyes, nose, and mouth (Figure 6.18). The facial expression appears stiff and raw-boned.78

Figure 6.18 Since 1995 Miri Margolin’s Raoul Wallenberg Bust is located in the Small House Rotunda on the first floor of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA.


Margolin’s bust is of interest primarily because of its setting in a place of high political relevance. Since 1995 it has stood in the southeast niche of the Small House Rotunda on the first floor of the US Capitol in Washington, DC. The setting testifies to the importance the Wallenberg case had been accorded in the US during the 1980s and 1990s. The setting of the bust can be seen as a “confession that the consensus for contents is not based on the depiction but on the function.”79 Obviously, it was the will to raise the Wallenberg case to an issue of high political national importance that led to the erection of the bust in such a prominent place. Another artist who uses the diplomat theme is László Csíky. His Wallenberg bust of 1996 is located in the Jewish Museum in Budapest (Figure 6.19). Here, Wallenberg is depicted as a middle-aged man who

Figure 6.19 László Csíky’s Raoul Wallenberg Sculpture from 1996, can be found in the Holocaust Chamber of the Jewish Museum, part of the synagogue on Dohány utca, Budapest, Hungary.


somehow is a rather an odd figure with his heavy eyebrows, large clumpy nose and smiling lips. This portrait appears hardly suitable for either the historical context or the man the bust represents. Although if we consider that many relatives and biographers point out that Wallenberg was humorous, that his sense of humor was dry and sophisticated in the British style (as can be retraced when reading the letters to his aunt Amalia, for example),80 it seems that Csíky’s portrait is a poor fit for the dimensions of the man or his fate because it comes too close to caricature. Csíky’s bust appears somewhat inappropriate in its given context, namely, in a Jewish museum and in a section whose objective is to inform visitors about the persecution of the Jews in Budapest at the end of the war. In comparison to Csíky’s bust, Margolin’s Wallenberg at least gives an earnest rather than a comical portrait of the subject, and she bestows upon him a hint of the intellectual. Nevertheless, on the whole, Margolin’s Wallenberg remains weak and pale. If we compare her bust with Jackson’s work, her Wallenberg seems no more than a stiff bureaucrat, whereas Jackson succeeds in combining the image of a manof-action with that of a man of intellect whose humanistic mentality is expressed in the whole posture as well as the features of his face. Another artist who took up the “Wallenberg-as-diplomat” theme was Franco Assetto in his Angel of Rescue of 1988. Assetto’s Wallenberg sculpture is situated in Los Angeles, California, in a small plaza on the northeast corner of Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, in what is still a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Between World War II and the beginning of the 1980s, this area, at one end of the Fairfax Business District, had been the geographic center of the Jewish community of Los Angeles.81 The bronze silhouette of a man, almost life-size, appears between two plates of stainless steel, each about 2.7 m in height, which rest on a pedestal of about 90 cm in height. These two triangular-shaped plates with rounded corners frame a highly stylized bronze silhouette (Plate 3). Despite the silhouette’s irregularly shaped gaps, the man’s face has a discernible likeness to Wallenberg as known from photos of that time. For viewers who do not perceive the similarity, two bronze plaques on the concrete terrazzo base offer information on the monument’s subject. The man is stepping forward through the plates as though it were a passage, and he is stretching out his hand, as if to shake someone’s hand. His hand is, in fact, not perforated with cutouts; in this way, as well by the gesture as such, the action gains additional importance. In view of the monument’s setting in front of a bank branch82 and the golden shining man dressed in a suit reaching out his hand, some may mistake


the represented diplomat for a businessman offering his services, ready to make a good deal—instead of offering protection, a helping hand. Obviously, Assetto entitled his monument with thought. The title Angel of Rescue is inscribed on the plaque on the front. Its meaning is made explicit on the back of the sculpture: the outside structure of the plates is highly textured, flat-bar stocks are welded onto them and together they imitate the feathers of angel wings.83 The robes that dressed the angels of the Middle Ages are replaced by this feather-structure of steel, whose polished front reflects the golden silhouette of Wallenberg. By referring to the popular nomenclature of Wallenberg as “Angel of Rescue,” Assetto combines the diplomat motif with the biblical motif. His understanding of the term is very general: the angel, an agent from the celestial world, a messenger from God in the shape of a human being, comes to offer protection and aid for people in need. Wallenberg becomes the mediator, the messenger sent from above, as it is told in the Bible: “Behold I will send my angel, who shall go before thee, and keep thee in thy journey, and bring thee into the place that I have prepared” (Exodus 23:20). The hero in the shape of the angel becomes the knight in shining armor. In fact, Assetto’s rescuer seems, by the chosen materials, perfectly fitting in the glamorous and famous Beverly Hills (Figure 6.20). Both the polished bronze and the stainless steel reflect the area’s strong sunlight.

Figure 6.20 Diplomat or businessman? Franco Assetto, Angel of Rescue, 1988, Los Angeles, USA.


The contrast of the different metals, bronze and steel, reflecting California’s shining sun, gives the sculpture an enormous photogenic quality, both during the day in the bright sun as well as during the night with the right lighting. This makes it blend into the Hollywood surroundings with the film studios close by. The play of shadows is, in fact, the strongest part of the work, making Assetto’s sculpture vivid and suitable for an outdoor placement in Los Angeles, California’s celebrity-city. However, although there is a lot of foot traffic for the shops nearby and the bus-stop in front of a bank with a cash machine for which people queue, the sculpture seems somehow lost in this Fairfax site. In this car-dominated city few people take the opportunity to step outside the vehicle and see the silhouette reflecting on the polished steel, discover the angel wings or read the text on the plaque. Another reference to Wallenberg as diplomat can be found in Skärsätra, on the island of Lidingö, close to Stockholm. In 2002, Ulla and Gustav Kraitz, who created the New York Wallenberg memorial Hope in 1998 (see Chapter 8), selected one part of the work, the attaché case made of bronze created by Ulla Kraitz, and placed it on the grounds of Kappsta where Wallenberg was born. Only the foundation walls of the former summerhouse are left as the house was destroyed by an accidental fire caused by a short-circuit in August 1933 (Figure 6.21).84 Today, this area is a nature park, owned since 1986 by the City of Lidingö. A small path that bears Raoul Wallenberg’s name leads down to Lake Lilla Värtan, along the former foundation walls of the summerhouse. The realistically sized bronze briefcase is marked with the initials R.W. and is placed on cobblestones taken from the former ghetto in Budapest. It is situated near what was once the main entrance stairs to the summerhouse. In front of the foundation walls, there is a notice board with a longer text, which mainly gives information about Wallenberg’s relationship to his maternal family’s summer home where he was born and where he spent his childhood summers until 1928. The text recounts his mother’s fear for her unborn baby after her husband’s death and tells of Wallenberg’s admiration for the family home and its rural surrounding. Another bronze plaque, modestly placed on the foundation walls, installed about a year after the inauguration, contains the names of the artists and the donor as well as stating that the work “symbolizes the unique deed” Wallenberg achieved in Budapest. Given the personal connection to the place, it seems only logical that the text of the notice board should focus on Wallenberg as a private person. However, the text contains very little information about Wallenberg’s mission as official Swedish envoy, not even once referring to him as a diplomat.


Figure 6.21 The attaché case designed by Ulla Kraitz was installed in 2002 in Skärsätra, Lidingö, on the grounds of the family’s summerhouse Kappsta, where Wallenberg was born.

Additional information would help the viewer to identify the bronze case as that of a diplomatic attaché case. For viewers who are aware of Wallenberg’s accomplishments—and most Swedes still are—the briefcase functions well in this place of biographical importance. The attaché case can easily be understood as a symbol for Wallenberg’s diplomatic rescue mission. Its place on the grounds of his natal house connects Wallenberg’s childhood with the deeds for which this individual later became famous. The melancholic atmosphere that emanates from the foundation walls that remain after the destructive fire—ironically, the house was destroyed in the same year the Nazis came to power—is a somewhat fitting setting in which to reflect on Wallenberg’s fate. We are called to remember that his life had begun in this peaceful place with its lovely surroundings. While the crumbling foundation walls remind us of what once was and is now gone, the bronze case, securely anchored on the cobblestones, testifies to the enduring quality of Wallenberg’s successful mission, and is a lasting manifestation of Wallenberg’s achievements as a Swedish diplomat at the end of World War II.

7 Raoul Wallenberg’s Fate

The hero as victim We have now examined the work of artists who chose to depict Wallenberg as the man of action, ready by physical or intellectual force to intervene and rescue those in danger. At this point we will now encounter artists who depicted Wallenberg as hero-as-victim, a man who became a victim himself, a prisoner, a person whom we mourn. We should note that this conception of hero-as-victim does not necessarily connote passivity. Even though today the term “victim” carries the sense of the passive victim, for example, the victim of catastrophes or wars, the role of hero-as-victim can actually be a conscious choice, such as the “active victim” who makes a sacrifice.1 In English, the two terms “victim” and “sacrifice” make such a distinction clear. That is not the case in other languages, for example, in German where the term Opfer can mean both victim and sacrifice, depending on the context. Generally, and independent of one’s own religious background, being a hero implies making a sacrifice: [A hero] has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. . . . The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it.2 Raoul Wallenberg risked and, in the eyes of many, ended up sacrificing his life in order to help saving the remaining European Jews. He thus was a hero who made an ultimate sacrifice; hence, we can categorize him as hero-as-victim. 133


The prisoner As previously mentioned, the majority of books on Wallenberg focus on his fate, in part because for decades investigating Wallenberg’s actions in Budapest was quite difficult and complicated. The attention paid to his unexplained fate was not intended to overshadow his deeds. Rather, it was perceived as a tool to raise public awareness about Wallenberg and to mobilize public opinion to militate to secure his freedom or, at least, clarify his fate. To focus on Wallenberg’s fate instead of his deeds also goes along with general tendencies characteristic of the twentieth century: the hero, whether in real life or in fiction, almost disappears, and instead the victim or anti-hero becomes the main actor.3 We especially see this in twentieth-century prose, which is domineered by the antihero type, the loser, who is somehow lost in his life or his profession. When the local Wallenberg Committee erected Anna Cohn’s Raoul Wallenberg Memorial in 1985 in Sydney, Australia, they hoped that Wallenberg, as the text on one of the plaques on the front of the pedestal states, was “still behind bars in the USSR,” still alive (Figure 7.1). The committee desired to raise and mobilize, in various ways, public opinion to campaign for Wallenberg’s liberation. To further this goal the committee commissioned Cohn to create a public monument. The contract between the committee and the artist stated clearly that the aim of the monument’s design was to “commemorate a humanist hero of World War II by representing in a symbolic way the story of his achievement in helping many in quest for freedom, resulting in his own subsequent loss of liberty.” Furthermore, the committee requested “figurative work of a general appeal.”4 The artist had to face the difficulty of representing both deed and fate within one work. In accordance with the committee’s intentions to honor and to press for the eventual liberation of Wallenberg, Cohn depicts Wallenberg as an elderly, emaciated man, at the age of about 73, which he would have been if it were true that he were alive in 1985, the year the monument was completed. Wallenberg’s face appears on the upper sandstone, next to a section composed of uneven, uncut stone, which results in a rough texture. His left hand clutches prison bars, symbolizing his internment (Figure 7.2). His face is turned to the left, looking down to a crowd in movement. A low-relief shows people gathered behind a barbed wire, made up of bronze welded copper rods (Figure 7.3). The element of the barbed wire winds over toward the back where there is an even bigger crowd. The arrangement of the highly minimalist men, women, and children

Raoul Wallenberg’s Fate 135

Figure 7.1 Anna Cohn, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, Sydney, Australia © Stephanie Forsmann, Sydney, Australia.

on the front seems to describe a course of events: people are rounded up, holding their arms up in the air; then they are forced to march to a camp where they were kept behind barbed wire. Clearly, the people represent the persecuted Jews in danger. The use of barbed wire (as well as smoke-stacks) is among the most commonly found symbols in memorials erected in concentration camps. Its use clearly points to the fate the Jews of Budapest would have had to suffer had they not been saved by Wallenberg or others. In fact, many Budapest Jews were at least temporarily imprisoned in camps on their way to deportation or before going on death-marches. In this monument’s composition the viewer sees, above the crowd of people, a full life-sized bronze hand, mounted on the stone that is


Figure 7.2 Wallenberg’s hand clutches prison bars, symbolizing his internment. Detail of Cohn’s Wallenberg monument in Sydney © Christina AndorferBerggren and Uwe Andorfer, Malsch, Germany.

holding a dove (Figure 7.4). The hand is crafted in the same style as the hand clutching the prison bars, thus, signaling that both hands belong to one person, namely, Wallenberg. The composition is compelling: the bird on top is accentuated, the viewer’s gaze wanders from the hand behind bars over to Wallenberg’s face, from where we follow his view toward the assembled people, and then further up to the dove. The outstretched arms of the figures, both on the front and on the back, lead toward the bird. The dove on Wallenberg’s palm has lifted its head high up in the air and its wings are spread out ready to fly to the sky, to the freedom provided by Wallenberg. By combining easily readable figurative elements, Cohn’s design succeeds in representing both Wallenberg’s deed and his fate. This reading of the monument is a result of the information provided by two plaques on the front of the pedestal and by the viewer carefully


Figure 7.3 Wallenberg looks down to a crowd of people gathered behind a barbed wire. Detail of Cohn’s Wallenberg monument in Sydney © Christina Andorfer-Berggren and Uwe Andorfer, Malsch, Germany.

following the composition lines. Without the provided information and without careful consideration, the figurative elements might be more ambiguous. For example, an uninformed viewer might misinterpret the emotion expressed by the figure as Wallenberg looking back in regret over his actions that resulted in his imprisonment for the rest of his life. Another question that might arise is: Why are the people depicted as victims, imprisoned behind barbed wire, given that they were actually saved by Wallenberg? And why does Wallenberg at this stage have full hair while he had not when he committed his actions in Budapest? As a result of the committee’s directive that the monument should commemorate Wallenberg’s deed and also remind us of Wallenberg’s fate in the Soviet Gulag, Cohn’s monument had to tackle different aspects of


Figure 7.4 The dove as symbol of the freedom Wallenberg made possible © Christina Andorfer-Berggren and Uwe Andorfer, Malsch, Germany.

the Wallenberg narrative within one monument. As a consequence, to some the monument may appear somewhat ambivalent: Does it honor the rescuer Wallenberg, the prisoner, or does it commemorate the fate of the Hungarian Jews? It is primarily through the symbol of the dove as the bird of freedom that salvation is expressed here. When we discover that both the hand behind the prison bars and the hand holding the dove belong to the same man, we realize that it was Wallenberg who provided this freedom and then became a prisoner himself. Just as the Sydney Wallenberg Committee saw the creation of a monument as a tool to secure Wallenberg’s freedom by raising public consciousness about his deeds and fate, so did the Canadian Committee in Toronto when it commissioned Ernest Raab to create his The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1996), which is installed in Toronto.5 At the time the committee clung to the hope that Wallenberg was still alive, though he would have then been in his 80s. Consequently, like Cohn, Raab depicts Wallenberg’s fate as a prisoner. As the bars enclose the base only partially, Raab’s Wallenberg memorial provides a series of shifting images. Wallenberg can be viewed as prisoner, entirely or partially enclosed by bars, or by his silhouette appearing against the sky (Figures 7.5–7.7). While surrounding the memorial, these shifting images set off a series of different thoughts.


Figure 7.5 Ernest Raab, The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1996, Toronto, Canada. Raab’s monument provides a series of shifting images showing Wallenberg as prisoner, entirely or partially enclosed by bars, or by his silhouette appearing against the sky.

We encounter a middle-aged Wallenberg, dressed in suit and tie (a reference to his former status as a diplomat), sitting at his desk, considering how he can help the persecuted. But, we also meet the same man as a prisoner behind bars. This play of images sets off a range of questions: Is Wallenberg still imprisoned? Or do the shifting images refer to a higher-ranking narrative in which Wallenberg’s silhouette against the sky suggests that Wallenberg’s spirit is too big to be locked up behind bars and his legacy will live on, as it is said in the text on the side pillar: Wallenberg’s “courage knew no bounds?”


Figure 7.6


While the shifting images are the strongest part of the memorial, which is indeed highly photogenic, they also contribute to a certain overstatement. It is as if Raab wants too much at the same time. He does not trust the play of contrasting images—caged versus freed—but instead over-articulates. Raab’s Wallenberg is simultaneously a diplomat dressed in suit and tie and a prisoner behind bars. The two question marks (not just the one that appears in some other monument inscriptions) on the plaque indicate that Wallenberg’s date of death is unknown, while the heavy iron chain and handcuffs supercharge the work with too much symbolism. Another element of rather heavy-handed symbolism in the work is the snapped-off key in the keyhole, which hints at Wallenberg’s forlorn lot as a victim who has disappeared in the Soviet Gulag.


Figure 7.7


Another Wallenberg monument that takes up the theme of prisoner or victim is installed in the Patio of the Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow. There the Wallenberg bust created by Italian sculptor Gianpietro Cudin has been displayed since 2001. From the rather lonely and sad demeanor given the figure on the pillar, this work also recalls Wallenberg’s fate as a prisoner or victim (Figure 7.8). The highly stylized facial features sketch a portrait of a friendly, almost naïve man with symmetrically curved brows set over eyes that are pensively cast up to the sky. His hair is characterized by a noticeably receding hairline accentuated by the sides being visibly combed back. The cutout of the shoulder section shows him dressed in a suit and tie, the mark of a diplomat’s clothes. The monument’s chosen material, limestone, much more restrained in character than bronze,


Figure 7.8 Gianpietro Cudin, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg, 2001, in the Patio of the Margarita Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow, Russia © Maris Khalilov, Moscow, Russia.

fits the friendly appearance of the portrait. However, the particular type of limestone, namely, Vicenza stone, has a low proportion of clay, which results in the stone having a yellowish-straw tinge; this means that the bust feels rather weak and pale, and looks lost on its column. Cudin’s bust serves primarily as a reminder of what Wallenberg is remembered for in Russia: as a victim of the Soviet system. Cudin’s bust was the first—and so far the only—Wallenberg sculpture in Russia, and for that reason alone it is of particular interest. Its very existence testifies to the political changes since the late 1980s in the Soviet Union and Russia that made the inauguration of the bust in 2001 possible.6 By 1989, the advent of the “perestroika” and “glasnost” policies in the USSR resulted in greater transparency in the Russian mass media concerning the fate of Wallenberg. The bust bears witness to the will of those who dared to raise public consciousness about a still-delicate subject. At


the time of the monument’s inauguration the Russian media used this occasion as a springboard to comment on Wallenberg’s fate and the lingering questions around that fate rather than focusing on the bust itself. An entirely different version of a prisoner is presented in Ernst Neizvestny’s Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1985). So far, this exists only as a model of about 90 cm in height, but since 2002 the model has been on public display in the Galleri Astley in Uttersberg, Västmanland, Sweden (Figure 7.9). In this work we encounter a broad-shouldered, muscular man whose arms are entangled behind the figure’s back as if they are tied up by invisible ropes. The figure’s dynamic tension opposes the perceptible tension of the surrounding spiral form of the cage construction. His right leg is pushed frontwards, suggesting movement forward, while

Figure 7.9 Ernst Neizvestny’s Raoul Wallenberg Memorial is since 2002 situated in the Gallery Astley, Västmanland, Sweden © Galleri Astley—Museum Tree of Life by Ernst Neizvestny, Uttersberg, Sweden.


the enormous chest, slightly winded, exudes physical tension as if struggling against the physical oppression inflicted on his apparently bound arms and against the spiral-formed cage that encircles parts of his body. The head follows the line of the topmost spiral yet clearly resists it as well. It is held high, with pride, the chin thrust out, the facial muscles strained. The body’s huge proportions signify the man’s vigor and vitality. The muscular arms are so strong and powerful that they seem to be about to explode; the whole body expresses the power of physical resistance. While head and upper part of the body are clearly articulated, the rest of the body remains rather vague. On the statue’s front there is a layer of green patina that on the back covers nearly all parts of the body, except for the arms and the head (Figure 7.10). The same patina is seen on one little corner of the bars on the back.

Figure 7.10 Ernst Neizvestny, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 2002, Gallery Astley, Västmanland, Sweden © Galleri Astley—Museum Tree of Life by Ernst Neizvestny, Uttersberg, Sweden.


The style employed recalls deconstructivism and Italian cubofuturism; similarities to works by Umberto Boccioni, especially his Development of a Bottle in Space of 1912 or Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913, are evident. Nevertheless, it is hard to assign Neizvestny’s work to one particular artistic style. His very personal style confuses the beholder: Isn’t there a whiff here of the heroic hero images of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s? Indeed, a trace of socialist realism cannot be denied even if the face is highly stylized. However, and in contrast to Paul Lancz, as discussed in the previous chapter, Neizvestny does not simply take over a certain style but by contrast rather cleverly plays upon the significance of artistic styles, combining styles and forms to create distance from and criticism of the very regime for which these styles had been identified. The outcome is a monument that can be read as a representation of resistance against Soviet state oppression. To explain this properly, let us take a closer look at the spiral form of the cage-like composition, which is reminiscent of Vladimir Tatlin’s visionary model for his proposed, but unrealized building, known as the Monument to the Third International in Moscow (1919/20).7 Had it been constructed, the building would have been at the time the world’s tallest structure, at over 396 meters. Consisting of an iron framework in the form of a leaning spiral, it was envisioned as providing space for all the needs and activities of the international communist party. Tatlin’s monument was intended to express the socialist utopian idea of an international, classless society. Hence, the spiral form was imbued with special meaning. As Reuße describes it, the impression intended from the formal characteristics of such a continuously growing dynamic development was the embodiment of a revolutionary movement that followed a legal, quasi-evolutionary process.8 However, the revolutionary, visionary spirit of the Soviet avantgarde and its utopian ideas, based on their admiration for machines and their belief in technology, quickly faded when Stalin came to power. “Stalin’s imposition of Socialist Realism in 1934 as the official party line in culture sounded the death knell for the Russian Revolutionary Avant-Garde.”9 In the following years, these ideas were exploited and misused in the Soviet Union. As a consequence, the arts were controlled for seven decades until the Soviet empire collapsed in the 1990s. Though never realized as a building, Tatlin’s tower, nevertheless had enormous impact on the architecture and sculpture of the twentieth century and functioned as the ultimate symbol for the Russian avant-garde


and their utopian ideas and belief in progress. Models of Tatlin’s construction are on display in many museums, such as, for example, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In Neizvestny’s Wallenberg Memorial the spiral form functions as a metaphor for the failed utopia. In his work the spiral is much more moderate than in Tatlin’s tower, with some bars on the back already broken: the social utopia is lost; resistance and time will lead to its total collapse. As Torsten Ekbom states, if realized, Tatlin’s tower would today probably have appeared as: A rusted ghost from the revolution’s promising beginning, transformed into a threatening symbol for the omnipotence of the police state, a very clearly articulated image of a bureaucratic petrification, like a gigantic, weathered skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex.10 In fact, Neizvestny’s spiral, much smaller than Tatlin’s models, which measure about 4 meters, has a rusty and weathered appearance. The green patina that covers the prisoner’s back has already started to affect the bars of the cage construction. This patina can be read as a symbol of hope that the inhuman state apparatus of the Soviet Union will soon collapse. In the way the figure entwines itself in the cage construction, associations go easily to Michelangelo’s Awakening Slave (1519–36), which is on display in the Galleria dell’ Accademia, Florence, Italy. Just as Michelangelo’s figure struggles out of the marble and thus suggests resistance against slavery, Neizvestny’s muscular man represents the physical and spiritual struggle against Soviet state oppression, a state that was once born of a utopian vision. The broken bars clearly are a metaphor for the end of the regime. Neizvestny’s biographer, Albert Leong, described the political development in the following way: “[A]fter attempting to eradicate free will and human nature in the course of seventy years of totalitarian control, the Soviet state, paradoxically, has proven beyond a doubt that free will and human nature do exist.”11 This attitude finds voice in Neizvestny’s Wallenberg sculpture; the artist himself described it thus: “A strong yet partially broken structure of ‘Jail’—GULAG—is encompassing a figure of ‘Man—Hero’—Wallenberg. (. . .) The main theme of the Memorial is the spirit of a human being, Raoul Wallenberg that cannot be broken even by an iron hand of tyranny.”12 We see this impulse toward freedom clearly expressed in the figure’s bearing. Thus, we can read the memorial as a statement of Wallenberg’s resistance against the regime to which he fell victim.


While being considered as the most promising sculptor of the USSR, Neizvestny repeatedly clashed with the political regime. Although his professional situation improved following ten years of oppression in the 1960s, he immigrated to the West in 1976 to be able to develop as an artist. Neizvestny, a believing Russian Orthodox, was able to leave the USSR because he was classified as Jew. He always remained highly interested in what was going on in his native country.13 At the end of the 1960s or beginning of the 1970s, while still living in the USSR, Neizvestny had already heard about Wallenberg. Not surprisingly his Wallenberg memorial, inspired by his Swedish art dealer Astley Nyhlén, came into being during the early 1980s and, again not surprisingly, in the US, the land of individualism par excellence. Here the narrative of Wallenberg as the successful individual who prevailed against Nazism but fell victim to the Soviet regime became especially popular. Wallenberg’s narrative carried the message of how inhuman the communist state regime was—a system where every individual risked suffering such an undeserved tragic fate. During the years that he was working on his Wallenberg model, Neizvestny was living in the US and spent most summer months in Sweden where Nyhlén had built him a studio. Neizvestny may have sensed the forthcoming collapse of the USSR. It is easy to imagine that the artist identified with Wallenberg’s unjust fate. After his emigration, Neizvestny became at times a persona non grata in the USSR (incidentally, the surname Neizvestny means “the unknown”), and he was practically “erased from the pages of Soviet cultural history, treated as have never existed.”14 When the regime collapsed, Neizvestny’s art once more became highly popular both in Russia and states formerly associated with the USSR. Neizvestny’s own native country’s treatment echoes Wallenberg’s fate during his first years of imprisonment in the USSR, when the official version stated that such a person was not known within the Soviet Union. Against this background, it is easy to comprehend Neizvestny’s use of the cage construction and his placement of the figure inside the cage. His caged figure has much in common with the many proposals for the 1953 competition for The Monument of The Unknown Political Prisoner. For that competition many artists used a somewhat simplified human figure “enclosed or encircled by cages, grids, razor-sharp objects or other symbols of imprisonment and oppression.”15 At the time of the monument’s creation, Neizvestny, like many others during those years, was convinced that Wallenberg was still alive, imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag. Given Neizvestny’s personal


story, this is no wonder: during the war Neizvestny served as a soldier and was seriously wounded. He had been declared dead, and his family had even received two official notifications to that effect. But he miraculously surfaced, having recovered from severe wounds. From his own situation, Neizvestny was inclined to believe that even Wallenberg could still be alive. Why should he not be alive after having been declared dead if Neizvestny had been twice declared dead but had been alive? Furthermore, he could identify with Wallenberg and his actions because Neizvestny himself had helped Jewish families to immigrate to Israel before his own immigration in 1976.16 Jews were allowed to emigrate from the USSR if they paid a “payback sum” for the free education they received in the Soviet Union. However, that sum greatly exceeded the monthly income and few Jews were able to pay this sum without the help of others. Neizvestny, who owing to commissions, was financially well off during the time (about 1972–5), gave money to the Jewish community because he desired to help these people leave the country. While it is true that Wallenberg’s and Neizvestny’s stories show many similarities, it seems that Neizvestny’s Wallenberg Memorial is more of a self-portrait of Ernst Neizvestny and his role as nonconformist artist in the USSR than a portrait of Wallenberg. Neizvestny had experienced “physical and spiritual ‘resurrection,’ a pattern that would become a major leitmotif in his life and art.”17 Here, one only has to think of the graphic works and his monumental work entitled Tree of Life, which became his life work since he first dealt with the theme in 1964 (after having been inspired by a poem by Pushkin's The Prophet to create an image of a man whose heart is torn out and replaced by a burning coal), or his many variations of the crucifixion of Christ.18 Neizvestny overcame state suppression and, referring to a recurring motif in his work, which has indeed much likeness to his Wallenberg figure, prevailed as a “giant” against all odds. Leong regards Neizvestny “as a model of human resistance to the Marxist totalitarian state.”19 According to Leong, from early days Neizvestny chose the role of David against Goliath, the artist against the totalitarian Soviet regime.20 The muscleman in Neizvestny’s monument is a much better fit for the artist’s own physical appearance and emotional temper than Wallenberg’s lanky figure and modest character. Likewise, the memorial seems to reflect the artist’s own struggles within the USSR more than Wallenberg’s fate. Neizvestny was raised and educated during Stalin’s despotic reign of terror, debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 in the now famous Manezh exhibition, challenged the Soviet cultural establishment, and became an internal émigré before he finally de facto immigrated to the United States in 1976, after being no longer able


to tolerate the oppression of his artistic freedom.21 Given that the Stalinist regime disapproved of the Russian avant-garde and oppressed everything that did not follow the official line of socialist realism, it is easy to regard the Wallenberg Memorial as a self-representation of the artist. In the guise of the Wallenberg monument, Neizvestny’s “distinctive monumental style,” which in the West often aroused the accusation of being “dated” and “totalitarian,”22 seems somewhat discordant. Like many others, such as Leong mentions, I also tend to associate this kind of monumental art with German fascist or Soviet communist art, even though I am also open to Neizvestny’s sophisticated use of the styles and forms. However, to imagine Neizvestny’s sculpture, realized as a Wallenberg Memorial in its desired dimensions of about 5 m to 7 m, evokes some reluctance, largely on account of the monumental character that is inherent in Neizvestny’s work. To me, this monument, with its strong parallel to the artist’s own fate, better acts as an autobiographical reference than as a tribute to Raoul Wallenberg.

The lost son Another composition that clearly refers to the hero-as-victim topos is Uga Drava’s Pietà. Since 1987 the sculpture has been installed in Nepean (Ottawa), Canada. From a distance, especially when driving by, the first impression of Drava’s statue is one of harmony, balance, and beauty (Figure 7.11). The sculpture fulfills its original purpose “to attract the interest of pedestrian traffic approaching the park from three main perspectives” as well as “the interest of vehicular traffic moving past the entrance in two directions at 40–50 kilometres per hour.”23 However, if the viewer is merely driving by, the sculpture’s complex meaning cannot be understood. The huge light-granite stone sculpture, about 2 m in height, melts beautifully into its surroundings. The three birches in the foreground correspond to the light granite with its dark particles of ore, the pines on the side and the firs in the back serving as a picturesque frame to the scenery. This first impression disappears quickly when the composition of the two figures is revealed. In contrast to other Pietà artworks, which show the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ in her lap, Drava presents a solidly standing, compact female figure whose body is diagonally traversed by a male corpse. The woman is neither embracing the corpse nor does the male body lie on the ground at her feet—rather the woman’s body is crossed by the male figure diagonally (Figure 7.12). The corpse seems to be in danger of falling to the ground,


Figure 7.11


although both figures are hewn from the same stone block. As a result of the composition, the viewer senses an unstable abeyance that stands in contrast to the material, the compact, solid stone block. This impression of peculiar inconsistency appears consciously applied by the artist and characteristic for the whole sculpture group. The woman, standing stable and upright, comes across as stiff. The three vertical lines on her robe reinforce this impression. She bends her head toward the broken body of the corpse, its head is snapped off backwards, hanging lifeless between the shoulders. The sharp edges that mark the chin, shoulders, chest, knees, and legs shape an emaciated corpse. The surface of the sections of the man’s hair and “feet” is rough while the surface of the whole sculpture is otherwise smooth and gentle (Figure 7.13). These rough sections as well as the sharp edges of the male figure offer a corroding surface, a disturbing element in what in other respects is a balanced and harmonic sculpture. The corpse seems to be an alien element to the woman figure—despite the fact that they are hewn from the same stone. However, the use of one huge piece of granite block, as well as the composition with the male body penetrating, merging with the female figure, reinforces the impression that the fate of the two figures is undoubtedly interwoven with each other.


Figure 7.12 Drava presents a solidly standing, compact female figure whose body is diagonally transversed by a male corpse.

Despite her stiffness the woman appears not to be indifferent to the man’s fate (Plate 4). The soft rounding of her silhouette, the soft falling head of hair and especially the posture of her head toward the man’s face, give her the expression of being empathetic, caring, and tender. We follow her line of sight toward the corpse’s face. Her way of mourning may not be overtly emotional, but we are convinced that she bears a heavy burden. In the face of the emaciated corpse she seems not to know how to cope with the loss. The sculptor Uga Drava chose a timeless symbol to express mourning and sorrow. Even though the motif of the Pietà has been used since the Middle Ages in a Christian context, its subject appears nowhere in the Bible24 and lends itself to having a meaning independent of the religious


Figure 7.13 The surface of the sections of the man’s hair and “feet” is rough while the surface of Drava’s sculpture is otherwise smooth and gentle.

background, namely, that of a mother mourning her child. The motif offers “the opportunity for elemental forms of human experiences, experiences not bound to a given culture or specified by a specific historical period.”25 Wilhelm Pinder has expressed beautifully what the motif implies: The sculpted Pieta [sic] possesses, in its very nature, a poetic root. What it calls into reality is the tragic, self-deceiving wish of those left behind: to veil, through the last chance for an embrace, the impossibility of future embrace, to replace the real loss through the apparent possession, to replace one who is irrevocably lost through his transitory image.26


The quotation aptly describes the poetic and melancholic mood that emanates from Drava’s sculpture. In the widest sense of the topos, Drava’s Pietà can be interpreted as a secular version of the religious motif whereby Wallenberg serves as a secular saint who sacrificed his life for the sake of humanity. As the artist himself expressed it, the sculpture can be seen as a visualization of the “gratitude to those, like Wallenberg, who were willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of humanity.”27 This general reading of the sculpture is brought to light on the accompanying bronze plate, which was erected on a irregularly shaped block. It was placed (according to the wish of the artist, but without his participation) several meters away from the sculpture so as not to block its view. The text refers first to the Talmud, giving the well-known quotation: “He who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.” This Talmudic reference is the only hint that the persecuted were Jews. The text goes on: “Raoul Wallenberg saved more than 100,000 lives from extermination during World War II. This park and sculpture were commemorated by Nepean City Council for his humanitarian deeds.” But why is the woman not able to embrace the corpse, which is traversing her body? Why did the artist choose this unlikely composition, which emanates an atmosphere of instability and uncertainty? The answer seems to lie in the unresolved questions about Wallenberg’s fate. As long as there is no satisfactory resolution to what happened to Wallenberg in the Soviet Gulag, posterity, represented by the female figure, cannot finish the mourning process, embrace, and then bury its lost son. Traditionally, there is a recurring narrative inherent in most hero adventure tales that involves the “separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return.”28 The heroes of such myths achieve great historical triumphs that lead to the regeneration of society as a whole.29 Wallenberg’s actions and subsequent disappearance were from an early stage seen to be part of that hero mantle, as the following statement indicates: [Wallenberg] became the symbol of resistance to the Nazi reign of terror, the hero of a true legend. And as in some ancient myths, his disappearance seemed to belong to his heroic and miraculous epiphany in the eyes of many who expected him back in triumph with the entry of the Soviet Army.30 But, as we know, Wallenberg did not return. Unlike other conciliating heroes—the prime example here must be the Christian belief in the


resurrected Jesus Christ—the Wallenberg narrative provides no victory, either through his death or his return from the mission. If it is true, as Joseph Campbell states, that the hero’s “return and reintegration with society” is “indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world,”31 posterity is still waiting for reconciliation in the case of Wallenberg. Thus, an essential part of the hero’s journey (departure, fulfilment, return) is missing. Without the return or at least the clarification of Wallenberg’s final fate, this hero journey is incomplete: the mourning cannot begin and the sacrifice made cannot be honored by posterity. Drava’s Pietà captures this dilemma in the arrangement of the two figures with each other and the discordant bearing of the woman in a mourning, thus stiff pose. Reconciliation is not possible given Wallenberg’s uncertain fate, even though a great sacrifice has been made. This reading is in accordance with the artist’s intention as expressed in his proposal to the jury: “The way in which he [Wallenberg] is joined diagonally to the standing figure, suspend in neither a perfectly horizontal nor vertical position, is symbolic of the fact that Wallenberg himself is still somewhere suspended between life and death.” If we follow Campbell’s characterization that the hero’s fate epitomizes the whole sense of his life,32 one may read Drava’s monument as a parable of the failure of the Western world, as stated by Elenore Lester: “The moral and political implications of Wallenberg’s mission must be viewed as part of the totality of the Holocaust and of the general failure of the world to grasp the facts and respond appropriately to the Nazi program of genocide.”33 This interpretation says that the Western world’s actions on behalf of the Jews came too late, and that Wallenberg served as the world’s proxy to assuage its moral values, its collective conscience. But then the West did not react swiftly or strongly on Wallenberg’s behalf, and “abandoned him,” as it is stated on Jackson’s monument. As it is depicted in Uga Drava’s Pietà, Wallenberg became the lost son.

The hero without a grave Another sculpture that takes up the topic of mourning is James Stoval’s Raoul! Where are you? (1983), located in the civic center of Menlo Park, a city some 40 km south of San Francisco.34 In the park of the civic center, one finds a library and different public departments. The civic center is close to the local train station and just a few minutes away from the main streets.


Stoval’s Wallenberg sculpture, about 1.25 m in height, consists of a rough rectangular French limestone pillar mounted on a pyramidshaped base (Figure 7.14). Its basic form is reminiscent of ancient grave monuments such as the stela or the obelisk. Furthermore, the sculpture’s low base, with its flattened pyramid appearance, is also suggestive of grave monuments: pyramids in ancient Egypt were funerary edifices. Stoval’s sculpture, with the evenly parallel-carved grooves that dominate the whole surface of the structure, is reminiscent of the classical type of pillar-like grave-stela with carved sketches known in Greece from the seventh century BC. The proximity to the tradition of classical grave monuments is further strengthened by the fact that the ground

Figure 7.14 James Stoval, Raoul! Where are you?, 1983, Menlo Park, California, USA.


on which the limestone is placed is abundantly covered with vegetation, as is common for grave sites in many contemporary societies. The soft character of the limestone, exposed to the weather over the years, is today partly covered by a fine layer of moss. The stone changes its appearance according to the light; the coloring ranges from white and gray nuances to beige to chartreuse, all of which intensify the impression of a weathered gravestone. This reading of Stoval’s sculpture as a tomb or memorial stone corresponds to the artist’s own reflections. As he was in the process of creating the sculpture, Stoval says that he was thinking of the Jewish custom of putting a pebble on the grave of the deceased when visiting a cemetery. In a sense, each time a pebble is laid on the grave, a small, new monument is being erected. Indeed, the custom, of uncertain origin, may have evolved from an ancient method of marking graves. In Stoval’s sculpture, the rounded forms on Stoval’s stela grow out of an upright rectangular block, apparently with the intention of covering the entire surface, and thus symbolizing the many stones survivors or their relatives would have put on Raoul Wallenberg’s gravestone if his burial place were known. Heroes have always been commemorated by ritual acts. Often these took place at the site of the hero’s grave, not at the place where he actually committed his deeds.35 Given that Wallenberg lacks a grave, or a place known as such, Stoval’s memorial can serve as a substitute place for ritual acts of honoring as well as mourning. By illustrating the unperformed activity of laying a pebble at the grave site with his pictorial representation, Stoval gives expression to an activity that hitherto could only take place symbolically because of the uncertainty of Wallenberg’s fate and consequently the uncertainty of his grave site. In light of the tradition of classical grave monuments, in combination with the Jewish tradition of laying a pebble on a grave, one may at first experience the sculpture’s title Raoul! Where are you?, as stated on a plaque on the back, as contradicting the first line of the plaque on the sculpture’s front, Wallenberg lives! However, here we have to understand that traditional funeral architecture always implied a pursuit toward life, in a literal as well as figurative sense.36 A gravestone does not only mark the grave of a person, but in all major religions gravestones express the hope for a life after death and shows that the deceased or, as in Wallenberg’s case, missing person is not forgotten. The laying of a pebble, as visualized by Stoval, is a concrete manifestation of the remembrance of the man. Consequently, the two inscriptions do not contradict but rather complement each other. James Stoval depicts the first line on the plaque Wallenberg lives! in a figurative sense, illustrating


by not one but many “pebbles” that Wallenberg has not been forgotten over the years, that he is remembered by many, and that his spirit lives on. Stoval’s monument should not be considered an attempt to give the “hero without a grave”37 a substitute grave, but rather expressing the wish to acknowledge the continuing existence of the survivors’ sympathies and gratitude, and their longing to know Wallenberg’s final fate, hence the title Raoul! Where are you?

The martyr In the last example of this chapter we will meet with an entirely different version of the hero-as-victim, the martyr. The history of Imre Varga’s monument, since 1987 situated in Hungary’s capital, is an exciting story of political relevance, and its narrative intermeshes at points with the vanished Wallenberg monument created by Pál Pátzay, Varga’s teacher, in 1949. Varga’s The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial was realized during a time of promising political changes, when it seemed possible in Hungary, if still risky, to take up long-hushed-up or sensitive subjects like the Holocaust or Wallenberg. Today, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the integration of Eastern Europe into the European Union, the political tensions of the mid to late 1980s and their relevance for the installation of a monument may seem far away. But at the time they had a direct impact on where Varga’s monument was erected; it was decided to place the monument in a rather remote setting, in the II District, an affluent residential area on the Buda-side.38 In the following discussion I summarize the monument’s brief history along general lines to explain its setting and the decision to place it there. The initiative for the monument came from Nicholas M. Salgó, the American ambassador to Hungary from 1983 until 1986 and a collector of Hungarian art.39 Salgó, a native Hungarian-Jew who left Hungary in 1933 for Switzerland, had lived in Sweden for a while and was married to a Swede. Through these connections Salgó was aware of Wallenberg and his humanitarian actions, and wanted to memorialize him in the town where Wallenberg achieved his deeds. In 1985 the ambassador asked his friend, the sculptor Imre Varga, if he had the courage to make a monument honoring Wallenberg. Varga answered yes without hesitation; furthermore, he already had a design for such a monument that he had made on his own initiative. When Varga approached the local authorities for the permission to install his monument somewhere in Budapest, he encountered solid resistance. Later on, while on a journey with other artists in Moscow,


he enquired at President Michael Gorbachev’s office for permission to install a monument to Wallenberg in Budapest. The answer came quickly and was positive—but with one restriction: the monument had to be free of any allusion to Wallenberg’s fate. Despite the Hungarian politicians’ cautious reactions, preparations continued. Varga traveled to Sweden to choose the huge granite stone block. Both the expense of cutting the granite and the costly transportation of what was a huge block to Hungary were financed by Peter Wallenberg, a second cousin of Raoul Wallenberg. The granite was sent to the address of the American Embassy, mainly because the embassy would then be responsible for the import duty, and the work on the monument continued on the property of the Embassy. At one point both Varga and Salgó feared that the final monument would not find a public installation anywhere in Budapest and would have to be erected on American property, a location that, though not ideal, would at least be visible from outside the fence. In 1986, János Kádár, premier of Hungary in 1956–8 and 1961–5 and at that time still first secretary of Hungary’s Communist party (1956–88), planned an official visit to Sweden. The Swedish ambassador in Budapest, Ragnar Dromberg, took this opportunity to inform Kádár of Salgó’s offer to donate a Wallenberg monument to the people of Hungary. Salgó’s tenure would end in November 1986. According to Varga, Salgó was called back to the United States owing to his constant intervention into Hungarian politics. Nevertheless, Salgó returned regularly to Hungary and pushed the project further. Before the end of his tenure, Salgó visited Kádár to present his farewells and reinforced his offer of donating a Wallenberg monument. For Kádár, now an old and sick man, this offer came as a relief. Here was the proper answer he could give to any inconvenient questions concerning Wallenberg that might be asked by Swedish politicians or journalists. A week before Kádár left for Sweden, the monument was erected. The actual site can be understood as a compromise considering what was politically possible in Hungary during these years. “This statue sought to reverse the Soviet erasure of Wallenberg’s memory and pointed, in part, to the increased freedom being exercised by Hungarian government vis-à-vis Moscow.”40 However, the original idea to place the work in Szent István Park, where Pátzay’s monument was once erected in 1949, and no copy had yet been substituted, was unfeasible. Budapest’s local politicians were still uncertain which way Moscow would go, but with Kádár’s general agreement to the project they had to abide by his directives. Nevertheless, the local authorities tried to delay


the project and hoped that Varga would reject the proposed place far from the city center and that the project eventually would fade away. In order not to endanger the whole project, Varga took the opportunity given and agreed to the location since he knew that an installation in a more relevant place would have been an impossibility at that time. In light of the changing political climate in Moscow and through diplomacy the monument was at least able to find a public installation in Budapest, even if it was not on the Pest-side where Wallenberg was active, but in a more remote place in the II District. According to Attila Zsigmond, General Director of the Budapest Galéria, Varga only learned after the installation that the site of the monument was not far from the place where Wallenberg’s abandoned and devastated Studebaker car was discovered some three weeks after his disappearance.41 Whether true or not, Varga liked the thought of a possible connection with Wallenberg’s biography. In 2003, with the copy of Pátzay’s monument having been “returned” to its original site, Varga said that he was quite satisfied with the placement of his own Wallenberg monument and no longer wished to find another setting. The monument is indeed well integrated into its surroundings, well defined from the street by the green corridor, and succeeds in establishing an aura of its own (Figure 7.15). The separate granite block with

Figure 7.15 Imre Varga, The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1987, Budapest, Hungary.


Wallenberg’s name in huge letters is visible at quite a distance and, because of the magnitude of the work, it is discernible even when just driving by. While the brief history of Varga’s monument is interesting in its own right and while it does explain the setting, the most relevant factor is the monument itself—that is what succeeds in attracting an audience in its present surroundings. We meet Imre Varga’s The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial as we come to the II District on the tram, crossing the highly frequented Szilágyi Erzsébet fasor (avenue), and encounter a rather sophisticated version of Wallenberg as a prisoner. Approaching the monument from the side, two huge upright granite stone blocks hide the figure of an elderly man, slightly larger-than-life. Moving on, we come upon a larger granite stone, inscribed with the name of Raoul Wallenberg in gold-colored letters and with an accompanying shorter text in Hungarian (for the inscriptions, see the catalog entry). Coming closer, the old man’s face suddenly appears between the granite blocks (Figure 7.16). It is not the cold of the snowy winter day that makes the viewer shiver. It is the encounter with the expression of the man’s face: strained eyebrows above deep eye-sockets; his eyes are not visible because his gaze is turned down; his mouth is closed. The face communicates great sorrow that is borne with the head held high. It is as if the man is about to move, as if he is about to approach the viewer in the next second. The noise of the traffic is forgotten in this moment. The man is dressed in a large, simple coat with the collar turned up, simple trousers and boots. The clothes can be read as those of a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. Indeed, if one has visited the museum Terror Háza (House of Terror) in Budapest and has seen the exhibit of prisoners’ clothes and simple felt-shoes, this reading is self-evident. The many pebbles laid at the feet of the figure testify to the monument’s numerous Jewish visitors (Figure 7.17). While the man has his left hand in the pocket, the right bony and aged hand is stretched out in an adjuratory gesture (Figure 7.18). In fact, the hand is by composition accentuated, underscored by the gaze of the man that rests on the hand.42 However, the man is caught between the stone blocks. The slabs of huge granite stones were once one, as the divided image on the back indicates (Figure 7.19). Here Varga has taken up the motif of the Snake Killer used by his teacher and friend Pál Pátzay in 1949 for the very first Wallenberg monument, which we have already encountered. Varga carved the outlines of the motif into the stone, accentuated through the golden color. After having first encountered the aged Wallenberg, faced his fate as a prisoner in labor camps from which he


Figure 7.16 In Varga’s Wallenberg we meet with a man of dignity yet full of sorrow.

cannot rescue himself, the quotation of Pátzay’s motif functions as a reference to Wallenberg’s deed. In contrast to Pátzay, Varga defines the evil the man is fighting against more specifically by adding swastikas on the snake’s back (see the cover image). The main character’s alter ego, as a young man, fought Nazi terror. The definitive, authoritative gesture of his hand can be seen as a reference to the deed he undertook, and that power is sensed in the divided stone block. During the time the monument came into existence, the quotation of Pátzay’s Snake Killer was not only an explanatory image, but served as a reference to Pátzay’s vanished monument—as the monument’s title The NEW Raoul Wallenberg Memorial already indicates. Until the installation of a copy of the Snake Killer in 1999, this allusion had particular political relevance and, for those who knew of the fate of Pátzay’s work, this double entendre is transferable to Wallenberg’s fate: both monument


Figure 7.17 Visitors lay pebbles at the feet of the Wallenberg figure as a sign of recognition and respect. Detail of Varga’s Wallenberg monument in Budapest.

Figure 7.18 Wallenberg’s bony, aged hand is stretched out in an adjuratory gesture. Detail of Varga’s monument in Budapest.


Figure 7.19 On the back of his monument Varga has taken up the motif of the Snake Killer used by his teacher Pál Pátzay in 1949 for the very first Wallenberg monument.

and man disappeared to an uncertain and unknown fate. In this way, Varga created both a monument to a man as well as a monument to a monument, by which he paid tribute to the work of his teacher. For the one unfamiliar with this story, the image of the snake killer serves as a tool to refer to Wallenberg’s deed, while the figure of the old man refers to Wallenberg’s fate. Wallenberg’s fate is indeed the main topic of the monument, which is also particularly made clear by the Ovid quotation added on the back of the granite blocks, framing the snake killer motif, Donec Eris Felix Multos Numerabis Amicos / Tempora Si Fuerint Nubila Solus Eris


The translation from Latin is as follows: As long as you are fortunate, you will have many friends / But when the skies get cloudy, you will be left alone Wallenberg stands alone, with his back turned toward his historic deed. The once-powerful gesture, seen from this viewpoint, fades away in the now-sunken hand. Wallenberg cannot chart the way further for himself. He is unable to leave the granite blocks on the ground’s defined territory. The upper part of his body is leaning forward as if meeting with an abyss, but the figure is held back by the feet, which solidly stand on the ground. One hand in the pocket, the adjuratory gesture has weakened. Still, the man bears his destiny with dignity (Plate 5). In this context, a quotation from another of the Wallenberg artists, Lotte Stavisky, fittingly describes what Varga expressed in his monument: “suffering alone does not make you a hero. Its how you meet suffering that makes the difference.”43 Varga’s Wallenberg indeed meets his fate in a heroic way. We are confronted with a man of conviction—a martyr—who can be taken prisoner but not broken. Strength, as the ultimate quality of the fighter-hero, is also true for the hero-saint, the martyr, albeit in variation: Varga’s elderly, uncomplaining hero-saint shows his resistance clearly in his whole bearing, expresses resistance against his persecutors, but as a martyr he cannot save himself, only bear his destiny with strength. Most often, saints are depicted in a moment of passiveness “representing the saint’s ordeal as a martyr . . . [which] illustrates the Christian concept of heroism,” or the resigned acceptance of God’s will.44 Through the facial expression and the gesture of the hand, Varga succeeds in conveying the sublime aura of an elderly authority and lets the viewer pause in devotion. Varga had ignored Gorbachev’s restrictions: he held on to his original idea and created a timeless monument about Wallenberg’s fate. In so doing Varga combines Wallenberg’s feats with the reference to Pátzay’s Snake Killer, but nevertheless concentrates on what he regards as the most essential aspect of the Wallenberg narrative: Wallenberg’s resistance. Given the monument’s brief history, one may relate the depicted resistance to the political background of the time in which the monument came into existence. At the time Hungary was still subordinated as a satellite of the Warsaw Pact under Soviet dominance. Wallenberg was known in Hungary but widely assumed to have died in 1947, a prominent victim along with the millions of other victims of Soviet politics. It was an act of resistance by the artist himself to deal with this long-silenced subject.


The most important thing to Varga is Wallenberg’s resistance: both against Nazism as well as against his imprisonment by the Soviets. According to Varga, Wallenberg knew of the risks he took when he came to Hungary in 1944. He regards Wallenberg as a martyr who sacrificed himself. Varga, who personally was convinced that Wallenberg could not have survived long in the Soviet Gulag, as he told me when we met in February 2003, nevertheless chose to depict Wallenberg as an elderly man. By so doing his figure refers to Moses, the great mediator between God and his people. The gesture of the hand and the broken stone blocks remind us of Moses parting the Red Sea to help his people flee from Egypt.45 Moses helped his people from slavery, as Wallenberg helped, albeit not his own people, the Jews of Budapest to survive Nazi persecution. However, in the end Moses did not reach the Promised Land. Rather, as an old man of 120 years he only viewed it from Mount Nebo, dying on the threshold to Canaan, and with the location of his grave unknown (Exodus 16, Deuteronomy 34). By the simple but effective use of the hand’s gesture and the way the figure is arranged between the broken stones, Varga references the similarities of Moses’ and Wallenberg’s deed and fate. In fact, Wallenberg was frequently called Moses by various individuals such as Annette Lantos, the Congressman Tom Lantos’s wife, who referred to the Swede as the “Moses from the North.”46 The Moses-metaphor serves well to illustrate Wallenberg’s deed and fate and the acts of resistance demonstrated by this historic figure. As in Drava’s Pietà, Varga refers to an originally religious figure, which he secularizes. The added quotation in Latin contributes to this secularization, given that the quotation by the Roman poet Ovid can in itself be seen as a hint to the origins of a long humanistic tradition. The humanist Wallenberg is linked to this humanistic tradition, as he at the same time follows the Christian–Occidental tradition. In this context we should note that Christianity had a strong influence on broader conceptions of the heroic and also influenced Varga, raised as a Catholic, in his hero perception (although here he refers to a figure of the Old Testament). Jesus, who deliberately decided to carry men’s sins to save the world, has served over the last 2000 years as the prime example of sacrifice.47 He is the ultimate representative of the martyr—the one who would rather die than deny his religious belief. With the death on the cross, the classical hero of ancient telling was altered: announced as the victorious Messiah and king sent from God, Jesus Christ appears superficially as weak and submissive, but prevails through his submission. Thereby all expectations of the hero are reversed: the classical “loser” becomes the world redeemer who has been resurrected. This was a radical


departure from the classical hero concept. Christianity questioned both the hero and the illusion of triumph.48 The martyr hero became characteristic for many, and more sacred, hero applications in which the hero sacrifices himself for the sake of others or out of religious or moral principle. The martyr hero implies a synthesis of triumph and dead.49 It can be added that Varga’s monument can be comprehended independently of the visitor’s religious background. In Varga’s Wallenberg monument, the martyr is understood as a man of conviction who stands up for his beliefs no matter what, and bears his fate with dignity. A younger, and even much more secularized, version of Varga’s Wallenberg can be encountered in Mark Salman’s bust, situated since 1991 in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.50 Here the man, in his thirties or forties, is marked by a hint of disappointment but has, just as his older personification, learned to keep his dignity (Figure 7.20). Salman’s

Figure 7.20 Mark Salman, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg, 1991, Yad Vashem—The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel © Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.


Wallenberg has thin hair and even a pale forehead, coming close to resembling Wallenberg as we know him from photos of his time in Budapest. The degree of physical likeness is indeed insistent although the amorphous artistic style is far from being literal or naturalistic. The depiction of Wallenberg as a melancholic character as well as the somewhat unfinished expression of the work matches Wallenberg’s uncertain fate. The bust is placed on a little console on a puce-colored wall. On the lower end, in line with the portrait bust of Wallenberg there is a floral ornament, a stylized flower that rises from the ground above the suggested barbed wire toward the Righteous Gentile—cautiously symbolizing the hope that Wallenberg represented. Encountering Salman’s bust face to face, Wallenberg appears proud or even arrogant and superior (Figure 7.21). Nevertheless, there is

Figure 7.21 Mark Salman, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg, 1991, Yad Vashem—The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel © Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.


hardly any kind of idealization. In fact, any kind of heroic attitude is missing in this portrait. Instead, Salman strives basically after a psychological interpretation of the young man as sensitive and empathetic, but also as a strong-minded character. Salman gives a reflective interpretation of a hero, referring primarily to the type of the civil hero, the hero who fights for a society where heroes actually “no longer have or shall exist.”

8 Raoul Wallenberg’s Legacy

The hero as ideal and obligation In the following section of this study, we will investigate the monuments that refer to Wallenberg in a more general sense than did the previous examples, which focused on Wallenberg’s deed or fate. The monuments in this section aim at expressing what their creators regarded as the higher-ranking, universal essence of the Wallenberg story that made it worth telling to future generations. Frequently, these monuments are based on the understanding of Wallenberg as a representative of humanitarian ideals. One effort at memorializing Wallenberg’s humanitarian values was a proposal in 1989 by Henry J. Leyser, a Holocaust survivor, and Carl W. Eatough to the Foreign Ministry of Sweden that there be a World Peace and Freedom Monument in memory of Wallenberg. The two men, both living in California, wanted to acknowledge Sweden’s neutrality during World War II and regarded “Raoul Wallenberg, by the magnitude of his deeds and sacrifice” as standing out “among all other modern day humanitarians.”1 It was their aim to build a peace memorial, in contrast to the many existing war memorials, and to integrate into it a study center with a library and other facilities, to be named the “Raoul Wallenberg Center for Humanity.” Their intention was to situate this building-memorial, which was to be about 100 m in height, at Stockholm’s harbor entrance and for it to serve as an inspiration “to all people of noble principle.” The proposal was rejected, among other reasons, because of its size, which was considered not to fit into a marina environment. However, many other institutions now bear Wallenberg’s name as, for example, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, established in 1984 at the Faculty of Law, 169


Lund University, Sweden. Furthermore, Wallenberg was several times proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize and, though he never received it, he and his actions are still commonly used as a metaphor for the struggle for human rights.2 The structure of this chapter is marked by an increasing level of abstraction as indicated by the monuments’ titles that act as its subheadings. First, we will investigate the monuments that make reference to Wallenberg the historic figure. Then we will turn to those that use Wallenberg as an example to illustrate more general, higher-ranking ideas such as freedom or hope, or regard Wallenberg’s recognition as exemplary for a universal humanitarian worldview. We will conclude with the currently most recent version of a Wallenberg monument, which epitomizes these topics, but more than that, results in an explicit demand to regard Wallenberg’s deed as an obligation for action—and doing this not in an abstract but in quite a figurative manner.

The outstanding deed We begin with Lenke Rothman’s To Remember—The Outstanding Deed, which has been displayed in the Swedish Parliament since 1997. Its brief history begins in 1986. From that year until 1994 Member of Parliament Elisabeth Fleetwood (together with Sven Munke, both members of the center-right party Moderaterna) tabled numerous motions in the Riksdag (Swedish Parliament) to honor Wallenberg in some artistic way.3 Already in 1981/2 Fleetwood had made a motion that an international commission should investigate Wallenberg’s fate within the Soviet Union. However, until 1994 all her motions had been rejected, always with the same rationale: Sweden could not commemorate any person whose death was not proven. It was feared that any recognition of such a kind might be misunderstood—Sweden might be perceived as no longer being interested in finding out the truth about Wallenberg’s fate. Until 1987 the Swedish postal services similarly used the same argument for not printing a stamp with Wallenberg’s portrait, although living athletes such as Björn Borg had been portrayed.4 Fleetwood maintained that this argument was not very convincing and pointed out that both politicians and artists had been honored in such a way even before their death. Fleetwood’s motions were first accepted in 1994/5— coincidently, the year that Miri Margolin’s Wallenberg bust was placed in the Capitol in Washington—when she marked the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance to table another motion.

Raoul Wallenberg’s Legacy 171

Now her proposal found wide acceptance for the time was seemingly ripe; even official Sweden wanted to celebrate its native son who had found worldwide honor. About a year later the Riksdag Art Group was commissioned to look for a suitable artist for such an endeavor. The well-known Swedish artist Lenke Rothman was asked to submit a design. Her 1995 memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, entitled Track, had won wide attention and appreciation. Furthermore, another work by Rothman, an appliqué and embroidery entitled Border between Dark and Light, installed in 1986, was already displayed in the Parliament and, therefore, her art was known to the members of the Art Group. As Anselm Eggert, then interior decorator of the Swedish Parliament and member of the Art Group, underlined, Rothman was not chosen for being a Holocaust survivor but for her artistic work.5 The Riksdag Art Group selected Rothman because they believed that her way of working could lead to a promising solution for a Wallenberg memorial. Rothman was given plenty of room to maneuver, though certain guidelines were established. Though the Art Group had no specific recommendations about the final appearance of a Wallenberg memorial, as Eggert told me, the group members stressed that they did not expect a “traditional monument.” Note that the term “memorial” was used instead of “monument.” Furthermore, the group made clear that the official position of Sweden was that Wallenberg had not been proven to be dead. As additional instruction was that the work should not include a portrait-like representation of any individual, in line with existing policy that strictly restricted portraits inside the Parliament to those of past speakers of Parliament and prime ministers.6 Rothman felt immediately that she wanted to create something very concrete from something that sounded very abstract; she wanted to make Wallenberg’s deed tangible. Her first design was rejected, primarily because the Art Group considered that the design would demand too much space within a room that was not exclusively dedicated to Wallenberg. In this first design Rothman was inspired by descriptions of Wallenberg’s mother who considered her little boy to be extraordinarily sensitive. The artist’s first approach can be seen as an attempt to visualize the immanent divine principle, in the sense of the good becoming incarnate in the world through a child. As we will see, even the text of the leaflet that accompanies the realized work echoes the belief that the hero announces himself at an early age. However, after the Art Group had confirmed their general approval of her work, Rothman felt that she had to immerse herself even more


deeply in the subject, as she told me when we met in February 2005. Rothman had said from the very beginning that the task would make it necessary for her to travel to Budapest. After the rejection of her first idea, it was time to travel to the Hungarian capital and see the places where Wallenberg had been active. Her revised design was accepted by the Art Group as well as by the political steering committee, and was installed in December 1997. The setting of Rothman’s To Remember—The Outstanding Deed in the Swedish Parliament shows how the political decision-makers had become willing to commemorate Wallenberg officially in Sweden. The work’s coming into existence should be seen against the background of the political changes during the 1990s that brought the Holocaust on to the political agenda, the Wallenberg fact-finding commissions, the increasing interest in Wallenberg worldwide and the resulting interest in erecting Wallenberg monuments in many countries. The comingtogether of these factors contributed to the realization of Sweden’s first official Wallenberg memorial in this important site. In the context of our study, it is worthwhile underlining the growing importance the Holocaust had received in Sweden. This becomes especially obvious when we take a closer look at the commemorative ceremony that preceded the inauguration of Rothman’s work on January 27, 1998 in the Plenar Hall of the Parliament. The leaders of the different political parties had gathered to remember the liberation of Auschwitz 53 years before and to manifest their common cause against the growing ignorance of history.7 The speakers were Birgitta Dahl (Speaker of the Parliament between 1994 and 2002), Göran Persson (Social Democrat, Prime Minister 1996–2006), Carl Bildt (Leader of the center-right party Moderaterna and Prime Minister 1991–4) and Jerzy Einhorn (Holocaust survivor, professor of radiotherapy and member of the Christian Democrats). The topics repeatedly mentioned by the speakers were the importance of human rights, the duties incumbent in a democracy, and the fight against racism and xenophobia. The ceremony can be seen as one element in the Swedish Parliament’s information campaign about the Holocaust and its goal of spreading knowledge about the topic, especially among the youth. Consequently, pupils from all over Sweden were invited to the ceremony. The political relevance the Holocaust had gained in Sweden was further demonstrated by the fact that even the King and the Queen of Sweden attended the ceremony, seated in the gallery. Prior to the change of the constitution in 1974, the Swedish monarch was not permitted to participate in any parliamentary event


other than the yearly opening of the Riksdag, and even though this had now been allowed the monarch had never exercised that right until this inaugural day. During the ceremony Prime Minister Göran Person referred to his special project Forum för levande historia (The Living History Forum), which had found the support of all parties and announced that the book om detta må ni berätta (Tell your children), about the Holocaust, was ready for publication. The book, written by the historians Stéphane Bruchfeld and Paul A. Levine was distributed to all households in Sweden with children. In the meantime it became something like a bestseller, translated into many languages, and was available for no cost on the Internet. While Persson underlined Sweden’s roots in democracy, the Moderate leader Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and until 1997 High Representative for the Peace Negotiations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and then UN Special Envoy for the Balkans, not only reminded the audience of the cruelties that had taken place in Bosnia but also of Sweden’s moral burden both as a so-called neutral state during World War II as well as for having abandoned Wallenberg in the years after the war. Bildt emphasized that Raoul Wallenberg’s name cast great honor on his native country. Additionally, Bildt expressed personal satisfaction that Wallenberg was finally being honored by Rothman’s work (although he left unmentioned the fact that its existence derived from the ceaseless efforts of his party colleague Elisabeth Fleetwood). The commemorative ceremony was introduced by a new oratorio dedicated to Wallenberg, composed by Boris Borisov and Robert Neufeld. During the ceremony, the imminent inauguration of Rothman’s work was mentioned several times and an actor recited Wallenberg’s dispatch, which Rothman had found in an archive and used as part of her work. The approximately 800 guests each received a copy of the brochure To remember—the outstanding deed; English versions were also made available. The brochure contained a picture of the monument, texts by Birgitta Dahl and Lenke Rothman, the text of the complete dispatch and further photographs. As there was limited space in the southern passage room, where Rothman’s work is installed, the inauguration of her work took place to a smaller group of invited guests, including among others the King and Queen of Sweden and leaders of the different parties. The speakers were Birgitta Dahl and Lenke Rothman. Lenke Rothman’s tribute to Wallenberg is situated in what is called the southern passage room that links the two buildings of the Riksdag. Her work is placed in one corner of the room opposite Carl Fredrik Breda’s full-length portraits of the Speakers of the Four Estates in the


Riksdag in 1810 (painted in 1811–18). Although in terms of color Rothman’s work matches the room with its low-key coloring, the work immediately attracts attention because it stands out from the traditional paintings (Figure 8.1). It is not possible to assign Rothman’s work to one particular genre; it is probably best to apply the term used in her own subtitle: “gestaltning”— arrangement.8 A glass pane cuts off a corner of the room, creating a triangular space to showcase Rothman’s work. Inside this showcase on the rosewood base is an array of eight candlesticks. It is these candlesticks that first attract attention,9 with their material heaviness and darkness in an otherwise

Figure 8.1 Lenke Rothman’s To Remember—The Outstanding Deed from 1997 is situated in the southern passage that links the two buildings of the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament), Stockholm, Sweden.


light composition, their positioning on the bottom, lined up as tin soldiers in a row, or, as Gitta Magnell puts it, “as witnesses standing at strict attention.”10 The candlesticks seem to originate from the first half of the nineteenth century, and are apparently not of great material value. Two pairs are identical, while the others are all individual in shape and size, but all follow the same archetype. The candlesticks, clean but not polished, are left empty as if they are bereft of their function to hold candles. Behind them, on the right-hand side, lies a stamp. At about waist-level there is another glass plate, of about half the size of the ground space. On it we find an accumulation of the following different items: in the middle lies an auburn leather-bound almanac (Figure 8.2). Alongside the date, 1944, there is the inscription Skandinaviska Banken, in gold lettering. The hackneyed-looking almanac is embedded among smaller stones, gravel and cullet, an open seed, some broken-off mural pieces and a piece of red plastic that lies close to the almanac. Because this plastic piece is the only colored element in the whole composition it attracts attention and ensures that the visitor’s gaze returns to the almanac, at the center of the ensemble. The accumulation of brown–gray colored items, the fine layer of dust that covers them and their arrangement behind the protective glass pane, as if they

Figure 8.2 A copy of Wallenberg’s almanac of 1944 is the center of Rothman’s collage that is composed of smaller stones, gravel, and cullet, and is highlighted by the piece of red bakelite that lies close to the almanac.


are precious items in a museum, gives the whole work an archival or museum-like impression. The soft lighting from above makes the arranged stones cast shadows on the walls beneath. The shadows appear as raindrops on a window, as tears or human silhouettes. To quote Gitta Magnell again: “The shadow play under the altar of glass . . . forms a feather-light pattern reminiscent of specters.”11 It is this rain of shadows that turns the otherwise rigid accumulation of items into a vivid composition. The transcendent lighting with its play of shadows, gives that the work has a lyric character. In the middle of the upper part of the pane, a rectangle is sandblasted onto the glass, leaving the following word-fragments: en sistnämnda frivilligt åtföljd av kland, den förre Gmunden, de senare e och var och en av herrarna lära i et få begiva sig utomlands. Weiss-konce till ett till Gestapo överlämnat ungersk lad arrendesumma på RM 1.000.000 och a övergått till Gestapo-Waffen SS-grup Budapest den 18 juli 1944 This section is followed by Wallenberg’s signature. Lenke Rothman’s own signature and the year 1997 are sandblasted on the very bottom in the right corner of the glass pane. There is a direct connection between the line Skandinaviska Banken on the almanac and the signature on the glass pane. This recalls that Wallenberg was a descendant of the Wallenberg family who owned that bank, thus clarifying the signature to be Raoul’s and consequently associating the almanac with him. The fragments of words, as sand-blasted onto the glass, are apparently taken from a document Wallenberg composed and signed. As we will learn later from the leaflet, these word fragments actually derive from a dispatch Wallenberg had written nine days after his arrival in Budapest.12 As it is neither necessary, nor does it seem intended, to decipher a whole story out of the word-fragments I will not give an extract from the dispatch. As part of the arrangement with the compiled objects these words have to be seen as additional clues in the big puzzle Rothman has spread out before us. They are part of the artistic technique Rothman uses within her arrangement: the collection of items includes words and word-fragments, making up a three-dimensional collage. All these elements are meant to evoke associations. Hence, the


word-fragments do not tell a complete story but are sufficient to refer to a certain time and place, namely, Budapest in the summer of 1944. The words can indeed be seen as helpful tools to read the items and to charge the other objects with specific meaning. It is interesting to look at these word-fragments from the Swedish text quoted above and understand their connotations. The “last-named” (sistnämnda) in this text refers to Wallenberg; he was the one who left Sweden “voluntarily” (frivilligt). This is the time period when the Jews, suggested by the reference to the Manfred Weiss company (Weiss), were threatened by the Nazis (Gestapo/Waffen SS). It is a time of radical changes ( förr–senare sooner–later) when “every single person” (var och en) is advised “to go abroad” ( få begiva sig utomlands); we read “may find salvation” because we know that leaving Hungary was an impossibility at that time for most Hungarian Jews. The mention of money (1 Mil. RM) may be seen as a reference to one tool used to prevent the handing over of the persecuted. Alternatively, it may show the insanity of the historical situation in which wealthy Jews such as the Weiss family were forced to negotiate directly with Himmler’s SS to buy free passage out of Hungary for their family members while their company was taken over by the Nazis. Beside the word-fragments further references to the specific historical time are communicated by the other items in the arrangement. As Rothman recounted to me, when she was undertaking research in Budapest she looked for candlesticks that resembled those that were in use when Wallenberg was active there. The red plastic piece is made of bakelite. Invented in 1909, bakelite displaced celluloid for nearly all electrical applications early in the twentieth century and consequently was very common when Rothman grew up. Even the gravel and stones are special: Rothman collected them in front of houses that had served as Swedish safe houses and consciously chose them for their “age”— they are visibly different from modern-day concrete gravel. A folder providing leaflets in Swedish and English is situated on the other side of the corridor. Apparently this placement was chosen to ensure that the work’s aesthetic expression is not disturbed. However, the very presence of the leaflet indicates that the text can be seen as an additional component of the work. Here it is worthwhile mentioning that the text followed after Rothman had created her work and came about in response to a request from the Riksdag. Also in connection with the opening ceremony at the work’s inauguration the Riksdag requested that a subtitle be added. The purpose of the leaflet was that visitors and official guests could take the brochure with them to provide more information about Wallenberg and the memorial. Rothman


herself, as she told me, considered her work as entirely “readable” as it stood and envisioned only a small plaque bearing the work’s title. She stressed that the text was not the result of Wallenberg’s deed being too magnificent to be represented visually nor because her own work needed explanation. Rather, Rothman took the opportunity gladly, after been asked to write something about her work, perceiving it to be an opportunity to satisfy her own personal need to explain how she approached the subject. Rothman regards the written word as a tool that can clarify and even extend a work’s meaning. A text can carry additional information that cannot be mediated by aesthetics alone and can open a wider perspective. Given the text’s placement beside the work, Rothman accepts that the arrangement and the text are today regarded as a unity. Consequently, in the following analysis the text will be treated as a part of the artwork. First of all, the leaflet informs us about the title of the work, and mentions to whom it is dedicated: Att minnas—den goda gärningen Hågkomsten, hyllningen och respekten för Raoul Wallenbergs gärning i Budapest 194413 In English translation: To Remember—The Outstanding Deed Commemoration, Homage, and Respect for Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed in Budapest 1944 Only the Swedish version contains the subtitle that was included on the invitation cards for the inauguration. According to Rothman, the original title, which comprises only the first line that she chose from the very beginning for her work, is in her view sufficient. The title affirms our previous reading—“we did remember.” The chosen items and word-fragments summon our memory. The presentation of the different objects as well as their arrangement within this altar- or shrine-like showcase in a corner of the room, with its warm illumination from above, creates a devotional effect and invites us to contemplation. The title underscores that the act of remembrance and the act of paying tribute are of great importance as the numerous variations of the word clearly point out. The composition is a close match to its title. While the use of verticality, given the whole composition in the corner, evokes reverence, the viewer is forced to step close toward the glass


pane and look down toward the objects on the glass plate at waist-level. By coming close and by looking down instead of upwards, we make an intimate contact with the artwork. Moreover, by looking down we are invited to reflect on ourselves and to contemplate. It is the act of commemoration that demands empathy and time from the viewer who has to read the different objects and depict their meaning within the arrangement. Above all, the title makes sure that Wallenberg’s deed will be commemorated, as the repetition of the word “deed” strongly suggests. The leaflet contains some basic information about Wallenberg’s mission, upbringing, and fate. The text demonstrates Rothman’s serious engagement with the historical figure and reveals how Rothman approaches the subject artistically. On the basis of Rothman’s text, these aspects will be examined more closely. The leaflet reveals how well Rothman had informed herself about Wallenberg and how much research she had undertaken. Consequently, the basic facts given in her text are, as is known today, historically correct except for her statement that Wallenberg met with Hungary’s head of state, Miklós Horthy. While Rothman could not have known that Wallenberg’s entry of the name Horthy in his almanac could just as well refer to Horthy’s son, it is known today that such a meeting is not recorded in any document.14 Notwithstanding this, it is obvious that Rothman had researched the Wallenberg story carefully and had read letters from Wallenberg’s mother to her late husband’s parents and as well as Wallenberg’s correspondence with his paternal grandfather. Furthermore, Rothman studied various documents in the Wallenberg Archive in Uppsala. The leaflet informs us that the word-fragments that are sandblasted into the glass pane were taken from a section of a dispatch Wallenberg wrote on July 18, 1944. Rothman chose this report instead of others in the archive because she regards it as providing “explicit background to [Wallenberg’s] involvement and ceaseless activities.” All following quotations are from the leaflet, if no other reference is given. Beyond her research in Sweden, Rothman undertook a journey to Budapest in the spring of 1997. Here she found most of the material objects for her ensemble by trying to walk in Wallenberg’s footsteps, following his movements, trying to find traces of him or his actions. Rothman also talked to survivors and photographed doors of former safe houses. Some of these photographs can be seen on the back of the leaflet, and one centrally placed photograph shows Wallenberg at his desk in Budapest, with two candlesticks with half-burned candles visible.


As we have seen, the text of the leaflet is helpful in understanding Rothman’s way of working, a method that can be described by the expression Konzept der Spurensuche (the concept of searching for traces). The term Spurensicherung (securing of evidence), which has existed in a forensic context for some time, is dated from the exhibition with the same title in Hamburg in 1974. Since then the term Spurensuche (tracesearch) has become an integral part of the vocabulary of the art critic.15 Rothman herself uses the term “traces” in the leaflet as well as in other contexts, and the same term is frequently used by art critics to describe Rothman’s artwork.16 The aspect that is characteristic for artists described by the term is not that they necessarily have a single consistent formal style but that their intention is to arouse personal memory and provoke a thinking process by such means as collecting items, their documentation and reconstruction. The German term Spurensuche seems quite appropriate given that it is applied to artworks whose intention is to find what exists of a material or spiritual nature, order these “facts” and prevent them from falling into oblivion.17 As we have seen, this is exactly what Rothman did and this is what the work’s title implies. Furthermore, this description seems to match Rothman’s intention as she states in the leaflet that she had “to work authentically.” It is important to her to document traces that Wallenberg left and to collect items on the very spot where he once undertook his deeds. She wanted to find traces that gave an idea of what happened, calling upon associations from that historical time. As is true for many of the works of Spurensuche, Rothman’s work reflects, both in the arrangement as well as within the text, the complexity that preceded the working process.18 For the Spurensucher the findings become, starting points for a structural consideration, since it is precisely the randomness of the discovery that can statistically serve as the probability of a generalization. The “objet trouvé” is taken as a representative pars pro toto of a general socially existential orientation.19 Rothman’s choices, both in terms of the items collected and the written information, are entirely subjective, despite the documentary character of the assemblage. Some of the items are documented, while others are not mentioned at all. For example, we see this in the attention to the almanac, which together with the dispatch, provides the strongest reference to Wallenberg’s deed. As stated in the leaflet, Wallenberg “recorded


meetings, times, telephone numbers” in the almanac, but Rothman does not inform us that the almanac is a copy of Wallenberg’s original calendar but only that it was “among the few possessions left to his family.” Neither does she state that in October 1989 members of the Wallenberg family and the Swedish Wallenberg Committee were invited by the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the KGB to Moscow where they received several personal items belonging to Wallenberg, including the calendar. Obviously, this is not the story Rothman wants to tell because she focuses on other aspects within her work. It is of special importance for Rothman that the almanac appears as if it was the original so that it can be integrated with other objects that were actually collected in the places in which Wallenberg was active and which were chosen on the basis of their time-specificity. For her the chosen pars pro toto, even though a copy, meticulously resembles the authentic one and serves to tell of another higher-ranking narration: Wallenberg’s almanac “embodied in it all the tragedies, cruelties and cynicism of human existence which litter the pathway of humanity. It also embodies all the insulting denials of the appalling crimes of our age.” According to Rothman, Wallenberg’s action can only be seen against its historical background, and his action functions in an exemplary way so that we can act in the face of ongoing crimes today. As described in the text, the eight candlesticks are in this context designed to symbolize the number eight as the sign of eternity, as Rothman stated in her inauguration speech: she wants her “symbol of life” to be understood as a support for memory and an inspiration that leads to the “necessary good deed” in today’s world, “as the lying eight requests: the never-ending good deed. Because Raoul Wallenberg will always be there because of his incomparable good deed.” Among the items not mentioned in the text but worth close investigation is the open seed (Figure 8.3). In her inauguration speech Rothman explains that she found the seed in the garden behind the former Swedish Legation at Minérva utca in Budapest, now a residential building where Wallenberg and the Jews he had employed had been active. Even without this knowledge, it is easy to read the seed as an unobtrusive symbol of hope amidst this landscape of devastation. By turning to the words about creation, often quoted by Rothman, this item receives an even deeper meaning: “The inner core and many husks. Husk on top of husk was created, a husk that is the core for the next.” These words are taken from the fundamental work of Jewish mysticism, Zohar. Rothman understands these words as “an inner possibility/power/spirit that is part of all creation and of all events.”20


Figure 8.3 The seed as a symbol of hope in a landscape of devastation. Detail of Rothman’s arrangement in the Swedish parliament.

Another item not mentioned in the leaflet but worthy of note is the stamp behind the candlesticks that, in terms of the overall composition, primarily refers to the bureaucratic classification process used by the Nazis to persecute the Jews, as is suggested by the emptiness of the candlesticks, symbolizing eliminated people. Wallenberg’s humanitarian actions toward the end of the war do not make us forget that nearly six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust—it is they who are the silent witnesses, and the empty candlesticks testify to this loss. However, because of the repeated references to Wallenberg’s deed within the text, the stamp may also be read as a reference to the bureaucratic process used by the Swedish Legation to help the persecuted by issuing protective passes. Actually, what the Swedes and members of other legations did by distributing protective passes was a way to beat the Nazis by employing the very tools that the Nazis used, that is, to use a bureaucratic classification system—but, unlike the Nazis, not to exclude people but to include them. While this reading of the role of the stamp in the composition has some merit, in the context of the particular composition, with the stamp lying behind the empty candlesticks, I regard the first reading as the more plausible. As we have seen, the text serves on the whole as a useful complement to the arrangement while other elements could easily be understood without further explanation. In the case of the candlesticks, there is


a more relevant discrepancy between the item and the text as the following analysis will show. Rothman regards the candlesticks, which she bought in Budapest, as “a tribute to Raoul Wallenberg from those who were saved. And also as witnesses. And according to Jewish tradition, candlesticks have always been lit at ceremonies and thanksgivings for miracles that happened and the saving of life which miraculously occurred.” (my emphases). Following these words, we are inclined to identify the eight candlesticks as the eight-branched candelabra used for the Jewish Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, and in this way charge them with a positive meaning. Independent of the personal religious background, candlesticks serve in every religious context as bearers of light, which in its turn symbolizes clerical light, life, and salvation. Consequently, we may want to read the candlesticks as bearers of hope. But what we see here is no eight-branched candelabra, rather eight single candlesticks. Most significantly, there are no candles, in contrast to the photograph of the leaflet showing Wallenberg at his desk with half-burned candles inside. The candlesticks are empty and show no traces of candles. The reading of salvation seems to result from an inner need to see Wallenberg’s deed visualized, as announced in the title, The Outstanding Deed. Still the reading is largely a result from the passage quoted from the leaflet. As indicated above, and even more significantly as the text states, the empty candlesticks, lined up in a row, can be read as standing for the silent witnessing of the Jewish victims who did not survive but died in the Holocaust. This reading of the candlesticks results from the feeling of loss that emanates from them. However, an objection can be raised even against this reading given that there are eight candlesticks rather than six, which would more clearly symbolize the six million dead. In fact, there is a certain sense of ambiguity as the viewer may experience the candlesticks differently from the way the text suggests. As explained in the introduction, I prefer to avoid the artist’s background or artistic development in the analysis of the single work. Even if Rothman’s art production is full of personal symbolism,21 her Wallenberg work was, up to this point, comprehensible without knowing anything about her background. However, to resolve the contradiction between the leaflet and the work in regard to the candlesticks, we will turn to Rothman’s biography. In 1944, Lenke Rothman was deported from Hungary to AuschwitzBirkenau, together with her seven younger brothers and sisters and her mother. Only one brother, the nearest to her in age, and Lenke, the oldest one, survived and were reunified after the war. All other family


members were annihilated in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her father was to die three days after the end of the war from to the consequences of forced labor; he was buried by his brother-in-law close to a mass grave in a cemetery in Wels, Austria.22 In 1981 Rothman wrote in the book Quality of Life: “The figure eight is etched inside me like a symbol of pain and missing.”23 The feeling that results from the eight empty candlesticks mediates exactly the feeling Rothman described, that is, bereavement. The candlesticks all follow the same archetype, in this way representing family likeness. Despite the written words of the leaflet, it seems impossible to read the candlesticks as enunciators of miracles. None of Rothman’s family was saved by a Wallenberg. The candlesticks are empty. There is no candle to be lit to announce a miracle. Instead they remain silent witnesses, reminders of loss. Two things are important to note. First, the feeling that emanates from the candlesticks arises from the initial encounter with the work, but then the text Rothman provided somewhat questions that reading. In this regard the text is rather misleading. Secondly, the biography serves to reaffirm the very first feeling; the reading of the arrangement itself was coherent and reveals more specific information on why there are eight candlesticks rather than six for the six million murdered or seven representing a menorah, a traditional symbol in Judaism. Rothman’s experiences lead to an artistic language that is capable of conveying a message even without knowledge of her personal losses, as she has described it herself: “It is from what I personally endured that I derive the material that enables me to create what is, and should be, universal.”24 In this context, it is worthwhile remembering that the text and the subtitle were the result of a request of the Riksdag. The arrangement should not be overshadowed by the text. It is also worthy of note that, as Rothman told me, her original idea was to light candles, at least occasionally, for example on Wallenberg’s birthday. However, given the logistics of the work and the placement, this could not be realized and later the artist came not to regard this ritual usage as necessary. The background information explains the “discrepancy” between text and work in regard to the candlesticks. Otherwise, the text and the arrangement complement and enrich one another. This reading of the work was several times supported by information provided by Rothman in our interview. The inclusion of this information, as well as the explanation of Rothman’s personal symbolism, deepens the arrangement’s meaning. In this context it can be noted that Rothman told me that she found the stamp in her native city Kiskunfélegyháza, not in Budapest.


Furthermore, the color of the bakelite gains a deeper meaning beyond its function within the composition when we learn that red is a color frequently used in Rothman’s work, a color that for her has a positive connotation. In her childhood, her father took her and her brothers and sisters to a rabbi to bless red bands that the children wore, which were meant to protect the children from any evil.25 In Rothman’s arrangement the low-key coloring of the red bakelite does not signalize danger, but rather its warm red tone ensures that the almanac is the focus of attention. Another aspect of Rothman’s biography that leads to a deeper understanding of the work relates to the inclusion of the shadows cast on the walls, which we have read as rain or human silhouettes and which give the whole arrangement a somehow melancholic character. On the day on which Lenke Rothman was separated from her siblings and her mother it rained. Regn (Rain) is also the title of one of her books, first published in 1990: [R]aindrop by raindrop in Auschwitz. . . . Raindrop by raindrop into and along the chimneys—down on the smoke and the ashes. Raindrop by raindrop, running elusively along the panes—annihilated and dripping, leaking anew—annihilated, washed away—dripping anew. The constrained memory, the detached in the present, and the fear. . . . If only the rain could wash away what shall disappear!26 In Rothman’s arrangement the commemoration of Wallenberg, emerging from a genuine desire to pay tribute to the historic figure, reminds us at the same time of the millions murdered in the Holocaust. In Rothman’s case this connection is more than understandable given her personal losses. However, other artists also, as we will see in Chapter 9, feel the need to look at Wallenberg against the historic background of the Holocaust. Through both the text and the collected items of the arrangement found in the places in which Wallenberg was active, Rothman’s work claims authenticity. While the arrangement fulfills above all the task of seizing our attention, arousing our memory, and creating the contemplative atmosphere in which the study of the text takes place, the text of the leaflet embodies in written form Rothman’s respect for Wallenberg’s deed—a deed that she wants to be remembered as outstanding. The leaflet reveals an understanding of Wallenberg that is based on the concept of the tragic hero whose destiny is predetermined. This is retold through such aspects as Wallenberg’s poignant start in life,


with his father’s death before he was born, the child who “never did anything casually or superficially,” and the young man who “always sought a meaningful mission for his life.” Primarily, Wallenberg is seen as an extraordinary human being, a man who contributed to the rescue of “tens of thousands of lives”—and who then disappeared, left to a tragic and unknown fate. Although Rothman does not deny that there were many who aided him in the rescue, it is Wallenberg who should be remembered ahead of others for his tireless attempts to save lives. This legend’s deed is considered “unique,” a man “without precedent” and worthy “to become a collective memory in the healing of our lacerated planet.” The image evoked in the text cannot be paralleled precisely in the arrangement. Wallenberg’s almanac does indeed constitute the heart of the composition, lying on the small-scale expanse of ruins singled out by the red color of the bakelite. However, the whole arrangement with its mundane materials remains entirely unheroic, giving it a rather melancholic character. While I previously described Rothman’s work by using the Konzept der Spurensuche, it seems helpful in this context to refer to Torsten Ekbom’s book on Rothman’s art.27 Ekbom shows that Rothman’s art is strongly influenced by the tradition of Chassidism, describing this tradition as a kind of pantheism characterized by there being no difference between high and low, profane and sacred, secular and religious. In Ekbom’s eyes, Rothman incorporates “the basic attitude that there is no border between the profane and the sacred, that everything conceals a divine spark.”28 Indeed, Rothman collected everyday items, but by their arrangement in the shrine-like showcase she bestowed them with a sacred aura. While I regard it as necessary to investigate every item at close range in order to decipher the puzzle Rothman has laid out in front of us and to grasp every level of meaning this complex work provides, such a detailed and exact analysis may easily overlook the poetic aura that characterizes Rothman’s work. To grasp the atmosphere of the work, composed by the arrangement of the different subjects, Ekbom’s reference to Chassidism is insightful. As he explains: “humbleness, shipluth, is one of Chassidism’s virtues, the insight that the most insignificant can contain the most essential.” In Rothman’s work it is such a small and unobtrusive item as the seed that has enormous potential: it symbolizes hope—the hope Wallenberg gave the Jews of Budapest and the hope posterity can find in his legacy. The almanac, highlighted by the important symbol of the seed, serves as the focal point of the composition. It reminds us of an essential act of


traditional hero worship, namely, the repeated act of honoring the hero. This ritualistic marking of heroes and the deeds they performed remains an important part of every hero story and is the only way to secure the myth’s survival. In Rothman’s work it is not a certain ceremony or act that takes place each year and attracts viewers to stand in front of the work. Instead, her arrangement communicates through its composition a devotional character that can be experienced by anyone who stops to absorb it. Impressively, her work shows how characteristics of the Greek hero cult have survived to the present and how they continue to exist in contemporary hero monuments.29 The almanac has the same status in her work as a relic in Christian practice, that is to say, a relic does not have to be the body of a person; it can even be an item, such as the sword of a king. Furthermore, its authenticity need not be proven. This is the case with the almanac Rothman uses, a copy that looks exactly like the original one. The importance is the belief in authenticity more than the item’s actual authenticity, and in this case the almanac transmits factual authenticity, that is, the trust in and acceptance of the item as representative of a person. The almanac acts as pars pro toto for Wallenberg’s action, enthroned on the stones, gravel, and cullet, causing the visitor to pause in devotion. With her arrangement Rothman arouses memory by using the objects’ factual or apparent historicity to refer to a certain time and place when Raoul Wallenberg undertook his Outstanding Deed. We will conclude with some remarks on the work’s setting. In the beginning, Rothman disliked the thought of “banning” Wallenberg to a corner of a room that was dominated by four huge paintings and furthermore served as a passageway. The Riksdag Art Group, however, deliberately proposed this room for the setting because it is one of the most frequented rooms and it was their hope that as many people as possible would be able to see the work. In addition to the members of Parliament, about 300 school pupils and other visitors take daily guided tours through the Parliament with its huge art collection of about 3500 works. Many of these tours pause at the work. Even official guests are taken to it, as for example at the beginning of April 2005 when a Hungarian delegation met there with Nina Lagergren, Wallenberg’s sister. When presented with the setting, Rothman took on the challenge and created a showcase in the free corner. Today she is satisfied with the placement and now sees it as an advantage because the room is highly frequented. As she said in her inauguration speech she became more and more pleased about the room “for it is—in fact—a room which like


life itself is a passageway!” Rothman’s only reservation concerns the lighting, which she feels can be too strong during the summer months; she considers her work best during the dark months of the year when the subdued lighting gives the work a devotional character. While its placement in such a highly frequented passage room is advantageous in some aspects, I remain doubtful if the setting is really suited to providing the privacy I regard as necessary to experience and comprehend this complex artwork. Coming from the elevators, before entering the southern passage room, one encounters another work by Rothman, an appliqué and embroidery entitled Border Between Dark and Light, a gift from the Jewish Communities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö to the Swedish Riksdag. As stated on the label beside the work, it was given “in gratitude to the Swedish nation for the Bernadotte Action in April– May 1946.” The work is based on the 1965 collage by Lenke Rothman that illustrated a passage of the poem Ich kenne nicht den Raum in a Festschrift dedicated to Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs on her 75th birthday. Rothman met Nelly Sachs in 1951 in Stockholm and they became friends. In 1972 the Friends of Textile Art Association asked to be allowed to translate some of the drawings of the Festschrift into woven pictures.30 Although unintended, a link can be made between the four paintings of the Speakers of the Four Estates of the 1810 Riksdag, located in the southern passage room, and the two works by Rothman that are dedicated to the Swedish humanitarians Bernadotte and Wallenberg. Their interplay conveys the official Swedish self-identity as a nation deeply rooted in a democratic as well as a humanitarian tradition. To explain this properly, the importance of the Instrument of Government dated 1809 will be briefly summarized. This instrument prescribed the balance of power between the King and the Riksdag, which then still consisted of Four Estates. The principle of a separation of powers distinguished between legislative, judicial, and executive power. A new Riksdag Act was introduced in 1810. Despite numerous changes over the decades, many still regard the constitution of 1809 as the foundation of Sweden’s modern form of government; it remained in force until 1974. While it may seem far-fetched to consider the Riksdag of 1809 as the beginning of parliamentarism or democracy, nevertheless, some authors regard the events of 1809/10 as a “civic revolution,”31 and this perception is still part of the Swedish self-identity given that the 1809 constitution––with its parting from absolutism and the taking over of the separation of powers––resulted in it being the most progressive in Europe during that time.


On this basis, the two works by Rothman and the portraits of the Speakers of the Four Estates of the 1810 Riksdag may be seen as a reminder for the Members of Parliament, who pass by daily, to be aware of the shortcomings of democracy and the need for constant vigilance. The interplay of the presented artworks can be seen as a celebration of Sweden as a nation deeply rooted in democracy and humanity, an aspect on which Prime Minister Persson focused on in his speech during the commemorative ceremony that preceded the inauguration of Rothman’s The Outstanding Deed.

Thank you We will now turn to Jon Rush’s Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg (Hungarian for “Thank You”) (1995), situated in Ann Arbor where Wallenberg had studied architecture in the early 1930s. Rush became a teacher at Ann Arbor University, Michigan in 1962, where he soon learned about Wallenberg. In 1975, apparently inspired by the Raoul Wallenberg Lectures that were initiated by Wallenberg’s classmate Sol King in 1971, Rush wrote a letter to the dean of the Faculty of Architecture to the effect that, if ever there were any interest at the School of Architecture in commemorating Wallenberg with a monument, Rush would not only be happy to undertake the task but would indeed donate his services.32 In spite of this generous gesture, the letter went unanswered for 17 years. In the meantime, Ann Arbor University honored its celebrated alumnus in many other ways. Since 1988 an annual Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship has been awarded through a design competition for undergraduates in their final year of study at the University of Michigan Architecture Program. By 1984, The University of Michigan Raoul Wallenberg Endowment had been established, consisting of an annual lecture series and a medal presentation (incidentally created and donated by Jon Rush), honoring a humanitarian who exemplifies the courageous deeds of Wallenberg. It was awarded for the first time in 1990 to Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel.33 Furthermore, Wallenberg was honored with a bronze plaque with his profile portrait, which was placed in Lorch Hall, the building where the College of Architecture and Design was housed when Wallenberg was a student. Another small plaque was added at 308 E. Madison Street where Wallenberg lived in 1931–2. Additionally, Wallenberg was honored with a longer text on the plaque to Leonard Baskin’s Holocaust Memorial of 1994 in Ann Arbor. Here, Wallenberg is praised for his “heroic actions” that stood in “contrast to the collaboration and silence, which dominated Europe.”


In 1992, Richard Croake, the development officer for the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning, was cleaning out his desk as he had taken a job elsewhere. He then discovered Rush’s letter that had been sent 17 years before to the previous officer. On reading it, Croake concluded that here was “unfinished business,” contacted Rush and asked if he was still interested in creating a Wallenberg monument. Not surprisingly, Rush was indeed interested, as he told me when we met in Ann Arbor in April 2003. Ever since Sol King (president of Albert Kahn Associates from 1958 to 1975) had initiated the Wallenberg Lecture in 1971, the King family kept close connections to the university and supported the annual lecture even after King’s death in 1988. Upon hearing of the memorial project, the family quickly granted support for the establishing of a monument. After meeting with Sue Ryback, the late Sol King’s daughter, who saw an overview of Rush’s work, this foremost abstract sculptor was entrusted with the design and given a free hand. After a meeting with the new development officer, Mary Ann Drew, and members of the Sol King family the decision for the setting was made: the work would be placed close to the entrance of the School of Art and Architecture, built in 1971. The building and the sculpture were intended to strengthen one another and make up a harmonious entity. It took nearly three years for the monument to be completed in 1995. The sculpture was mainly financed by the Sol King family as a means of also honoring the late Sol King. True to his original offer 17 years previously, Jon Rush as the artist donated his services and the granite stones. The work Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg is situated in front of the west front entrance to the Art and Architecture Building with its dark glasswalled silhouette, on the Northern Campus of Ann Arbor’s University (Figure 8.4). It is highly visible from the street and from the student café in the building that is just across the road with its huge windows toward Bonisteel Street. A large equilateral triangle of about 8.8 m by 8.8 m by 12.6 m serves as the base or floor for the composition, a three-dimensional collage that consists of huge granite stones, the highest reaching about 2 m, and stained steel. The triangle, bordered by a concrete frame, is embedded in the ground surrounded by the grassy lawns. One side of the triangle runs parallel to the path leading to the entrance. This detail reveals how well integrated the triangle is in its surroundings. Starting at the apex of the triangle, we look down to the first plaque, which is integrated into the light-red paving stones on the ground. The text informs us, among other things, about the title of the work, Köszönöm


Figure 8.4 Jon Rush, Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg (Thank You Raoul Wallenberg), 1995, in front of the Art and Architecture Building on the Northern Campus of the university, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Raoul Wallenberg, followed by the English translation. We move along to the ensemble that lies closer to the entrance of the building, stopping in front of another plaque that tells us that this is a memorial dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg. An upright gray granite block stands in front of two rose blocks between which stanchions of stainless steel are buried. The granite is kept in its natural condition, with its raw surfaces and the traces of the quarry worker’s chisel still visible. As we turn around, we see the flat unpolished surface of the gray granite, arranged toward the building’s entrance, and are again confronted with the title, carved into the stone, this time in Hungarian only (Plate 6). Attracted by the shining reflections of the sun on the stainless steel, we move over to the remaining part of the monument. On the righthand side two more rose-granite stones, one lying on the floor in front of a rectangular upright stone, are framed by a construction of stainless steel, delineating in its turn, despite its openness, a triangular space. The framework of stainless steel conveys the impression of an architectonic structure, suggesting a fence or a barrier, functioning as a cage or a roof for the two rose granite stones underneath (Figure 8.5). Rush, like many artists during of the twentieth century, for example Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier, uses the arrangement of bars to suggest space.


Figure 8.5 The framework of stainless steel in Rush’s monument conveys the impression of an architectonic structure, suggesting a fence or a barrier, functioning as a cage or a roof for the two rose granite stones underneath.

On the flat side of the upright stone another inscription is engraved, One Man Can Make A Difference (Figure 8.6). This statement reveals a simple truth, even though in the Wallenberg context this often-repeated phrase sounds somewhat banal. However, Rush had inscribed the phrase as well on the medal he had created for the University’s Wallenberg Lectures Series, 11 years earlier, because he felt that this award was to be bestowed each year to a person who really had made a difference, just as Wallenberg himself had. Moreover, he did not want to use in this context the often cited-phrase from the Talmud “To save one life is as if you have saved the world,” because Rush, as a non-religious Jew whose relatives immigrated three generations earlier from Eastern Europe to the US, wanted to open up a more universally accepted context. Another plaque on the ground with a longer text tells about Wallenberg’s mission in Budapest during World War II and his fate. (For the texts on the plaques, see the catalog entry.) Before coming to an interpretation of Rush’s monument, it is well worth remembering that this work is situated on a university campus, specifically in front of the School of Architecture. University campuses are per se a special form of public places, designed to act as places of


Figure 8.6

Detail of Rush’s monument in Ann Arbor.

intellectual interaction. Students of this school are, or will be, trained to read non-objective sculpture. Rush’s monument demands close scrutiny from the viewer, who is supposed to move around in this triangular space so as to discover the inscriptions and texts on the plaques. Although the plaques are discretely placed in the ground, they do contain important information such as that Wallenberg was a classmate of Sol King and a graduate of Ann Arbor. If the students do not yet know who Wallenberg was, during their studies they will become acquainted with the architect Sol King and will be able to surmise that, given that Wallenberg and King were classmates, Wallenberg had studied architecture at Ann Arbor. This fact can also be seen as a reason why Wallenberg, the humanitarian, is honored in this place. The reading of the accumulation of stones and steel on the left-hand side is in accordance with the artist’s statement that this part represents the chaos of war: “My ideas for the memorial took form as I recalled the many film images of bombed cities of World War II I had seen—the fragments of buildings, concrete with twisted metal.”34 Rush told me that, on the day of the inauguration, a survivor had approached him and told him that the work took him back to Budapest during World War II, that it reminded him of how the city looked in those days. However, we should table some reservations against this reading. Rush’s monument is


a well-composed work where even the paving stones match in color the red-rose granite stones; the stained steel shines in the sunlight. Nothing here is accidental; the stones are carefully arranged. In that sense, nothing reminds one of the chaos caused by war. Only the accumulation of stone blocks on top of each other, burying the steel stanchions between them, and the traces of the quarry workers’ tools signal some kind of destruction. The stylistic element of fracture appears frequently in modern sculpture since the late 1960s, as known, for example, in Ulrich Rückriem’s stone sculptures, and also in other Wallenberg monuments such as in Varga’s Budapest monument. However, I visited the place on a sunny spring day. Light plays a preeminent role in bringing out the beauty of the steel and the granite with its black and silver minerals, the quartz elements reflecting the sunlight. Visiting the place on a dull day, when the light is less intense, or when rain makes the colors of the granites appear much darker and the steel does not reflect any sunlight but remains matt, the impression of destruction may be much stronger. I can imagine that the monument then gives an idea of the devastated city of Budapest—in the sense an old yellowed photograph would do, like a faded memory. If we accept this part as a metaphor for the destruction of wartime Budapest it is easy to read the whole composition. The upright gray granite with the line Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg can be seen as metaphor for Wallenberg, who acted “firm as a rock.” By its very choice of the material, the monument communicates and honors Wallenberg’s personality: the strong, energetic, forceful character he is accredited with being, one who stood steady like a solid rock amid the chaos of war. Previously I mentioned the steel framework being read as some kind of roof beneath which the rose granites are situated. The plaque in front of this section informs the viewer that Wallenberg provided “sanctuary in ‘safe houses,’ which provided Swedish diplomatic immunity” during his rescue mission in wartime Budapest. This important phrase serves as the key statement to decode the monument, even though the emphasis of the work does not lie within the text. It is obvious that what is of most significance are the forms themselves. The inscriptions on the stones are very discrete, not readable from a distance; one needs to come closer to discover the plaques on the ground and read them. However, after reading the text carefully, learning that Wallenberg had offered persecuted Jews shelter in protective houses, the framework construction serves as a metaphor of the sanctuary given by the Swede in Budapest.35 This information is indeed highly relevant for the interpretation of the work. It was in Ann Arbor that Wallenberg studied


architecture and received the education his grandfather had envisioned. Indeed, that education played a role in Wallenberg later being chosen and then being successful in his mission in Budapest. Consequently, it seems highly appropriate and fitting to honor Wallenberg, an Ann Arbor University graduate architect, by using an architectural framework that symbolizes the shelter given by the Swedish safe houses.36 Wallenberg, who had already as a child been fascinated by architecture and had visited construction sites in Stockholm,37 never had the chance to build anything architectural38—as it seems, to Wallenberg’s own disappointment. In a letter dated 25 November 1936 to his former professor, Emil Lorch, at the School of Architecture, Wallenberg expressed his longing for America and the wish to work as an architect in the USA. Nevertheless, Wallenberg lived up to the ideal architects should, according to Sol King, always have in mind. When the annual lecture series in honor to Wallenberg was initiated in 1971, Sol King as sponsor clearly stipulated that the lecture should focus on architecture as a humane and social art, comprehending the work of architects under a critical ethical dimension. The Raoul Wallenberg Lecture has been sponsored by the College since 1972; an endowment was established in 1976 to ensure an annual lecture. The first Wallenberg Lecture was given by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner. Among the distinguished individuals, both historians and architects, who followed were Spiro Kostof, James Ingo Freed, and Daniel Libeskind.39 Sol King explained why this lecture series was named after Wallenberg: Wallenberg was selected as one to be honored by the College of Architecture and Design, not merely because he was an architect who happened to be a great humanitarian. He was also selected because humanitarianism itself is being recognized by those within the profession to be a necessary and vital component of our discipline.40 However, it should not be forgotten that architects do not automatically stand in a humanistic tradition, as is demonstrated by the example of Albert Speer, for 12 years Hitler’s chief architect and from 1942 his minister of armaments and munitions. As stated earlier, it was this lecture series that once inspired Rush to write his letter to the dean and offer his services. Rush’s monument realizes King’s intentions: the artist expresses in sculpture what King had started with his lecture series. Thereby Rush’s monument is indissolubly connected with its setting in front of the School of Architecture,


honoring the thwarted architect whose safe houses, however, ultimately fulfilled the prime reason why any building is ever built: precisely, to give protection. As Rush told me, he chose the Hungarian wording Köszönöm on the upright gray granite because he felt like an agent, acting on behalf of the Hungarian Jews, who never had the chance to say “thank you” to Wallenberg for the protection he gave them in the form of safe houses. Rush’s monument strives to express the desire that Wallenberg’s example should serve as an inspiration to future generations, especially for the future architects who receive their education at this university. The aspiration is supported by the following quotation of Sol King inscribed on a plaque on the ground: Wallenberg clearly saw the need for one man to bring all his resources of knowledge, creativity, and talent, to bear on his efforts to ensure the survival of others. Let us hope his selfless and understanding example will serve as an inspiration as we face the challenges both of the present and of the future.

Courage and compassion From the visualization of Wallenberg’s deed and the gratitude expressed for such action, we will now encounter some of the characteristics regarded as necessary to accomplish such a mission, as presented in Courage and Compassion. This sculpture was created by Edward M. Adams in 1998. It stands in Smith Field Park in the city of Parsippany, New Jersey, about 55 kilometers west of New York City. About 4 meters high, the sculpture rests on a rectangular bronze plate (Figure 8.7). On the plate, we find a plaque with the sculpture’s title, the artist’s name as well as the additional information that the sculpture is meant to honor Wallenberg. On the right-hand side there are three more plaques affixed on granite stones giving information, among other things, about Wallenberg’s mission and displaying his portrait relief. Additionally, the stones contain the names of the persons instrumental in the project’s coming into existence and the names of major donors; the names of other donors are carved on the light bricks of the paving around the sculpture.41 The sculpture evolves from the plate into two curved, slightly winding, square-edged ribbons of dark matt bronze about 60 cm in width. They vault sideways and upwards. Before the ribbons evolve into a circle they converge at the height of about 4 m. Without touching


Figure 8.7 E. M. Adams, Courage and Compassion, 1998, Parsippany, New Jersey, USA.

each other, the two ribbons balance between them a sexangle, which seems to hover between them. Walking around the sculpture, the visitor is provided with many different views. Sometimes it looks as if the two ribbons are lifting up the sexangle; they resemble arms holding or embracing the smaller form between them, up in the air (Figure 8.8). Then again it appears that these stripes resemble abstract human figures, whereby the sexangle looks as if it were the head of one of the figures hiding or seeking shelter under the cover of the other, winding its head around (Figure 8.9). Many more views can be discovered while walking around this sculpture, which readily stimulates imaginative responses. Standing in front of the sculpture, the visitor is supposed to look upwards. To Adams, as he told me when we met in May 2003, scale is important. He believes that the work’s scale must respond to Wallenberg’s greatness. It must occupy the appropriate space for the great story that the beholder has to face. Adams’s monument can be seen as a contemporary non-objective version of the monument type Pátzay followed in his Snake Killer. In Adams’s work the plinth is scaled down into a simple bronze plate, but the paving area, with the different zones of bricks and river-rocks around the foot of the sculpture,


Figure 8.8 In Adams’s work the two bronze ribbons balance a sexangle that seems to hover between them.

lends the setting a feeling of respect. The allegory presented, Courage and Compassion, is non-objective, and on the stones on the side there are the portrait relief and an explanatory text, both similarly used by Pátzay. The portrait relief was installed at the request of the committee that commissioned Adams’s work. However, in contrast to Pátzay’s Snake Killer, raised as it is on a high pedestal, Adams’s monument remains accessible and tangible. In his sculpture, Adams tries to visualize the characteristics he found most essential to the success of Wallenberg’s mission. As the plaque on the side close to the sculpture states, the work is erected as a tribute to Wallenberg for “his extraordinary courage, relentless compassion,


Figure 8.9 In Adams’s work the two bronze ribbons balance a sexangle that seems to hover between them.

and personal integrity.” As Adams told me, he regards “courage and compassion” as the counterpart to “fear and destruction.” It appeared to him that courage and compassion were characteristics not only for Wallenberg but are also indispensable for humanity’s survival in the long run. Adams wanted to focus on the more general lesson Wallenberg’s example provides for future as well as present generations. For that reason, the artist consciously chose bronze because, as he stated on his homepage, the “memory of Wallenberg deserves long life” as represented by the durability of this material. For Adams, the beauty and elegance of bronze ensures respectfulness to Wallenberg. The two bronze ribbons, when seen from the front, are often interpreted as a heart (Figure 8.10). This shape occurs because the two ribbons are joined at the base in such a way that their ends create a triangle, surging upwards, veering sideways and then coming together again as they curve into the center, right above the triangle. Consequently, to some viewers, this non-object structure conveys a heart. Indeed, this reading is encouraged by the work’s title with its emphasis on the emotional. Although it was originally not intended by Adams that the sculpture should resemble a heart, a statement on his homepage, saying that the sculpture is a “symbol of the triumph of good over evil and love


Figure 8.10 The two bronze ribbons, when seen from the front, are often interpreted as a heart. Detail of Adams’s monument in Parsippany, New Jersey.

over hate” supports a reading of the sculpture as heart. So even if the artist originally had no intention to create a heart-shaped sculpture or anything figurative, Adams accepts this reading, which seems to stem from a general need to think in figurative terms.42 The sexangle between the ribbons can be read as a formalized Star of David or a stereometric circle. The latter could also be understood as a mythic symbol of the world, the universe. Adams prefers the reading of the sexangle as the universe because he thinks that it allows more general interpretations than the Star of David, and in this way follows his ambition to express a timeless message. Whether seen as a heart, a Star of David or a stereometric circle, it is obvious that the sculpture stands


in the tradition of artworks that make use of organic forms, as used by Hans Arp or Constantin Brancusi, that are meant to express timelessness and universal values. While the artists considered so far made strong references to the historic person Wallenberg, Adams takes up the historic person to illustrate human characteristics that he generally regards as essential both for the success of Wallenberg’s mission but, even more importantly, for humanity’s survival in the long run. The narrative of the historic person transforms into a narrative of the need for certain specific human virtues. Accordingly, the sexangle, whether representing the persecuted Jews or humanity as a whole, needs courageous and compassionate caring as expressed by the bronze vaults that rise up full of verve and appear at the same time harmonic and decisive, focused on not letting the sexangle fall on the ground.

Freedom The sculpture Freedom by Károly Veress also refers to the higher-ranking, universal message the Wallenberg narrative has to offer. His sculpture is placed on the lawns in front of the Denkmann Memorial Building on the campus of the Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA. When Veress was asked to design a sculpture for that particular place, he learned that the hall on the second floor of the building was dedicated to the Wallenberg family.43 Immediately, Veress, a native Hungarian, thought of Raoul Wallenberg and was inspired to use Wallenberg’s deed as the theme of his sculpture Freedom. Installed in 2000, the sculpture stands today as a tribute to the well-known Swede. Veress expresses freedom in an abstract version of a bird with outspread wings, about to fly (Figure 8.11). The dark, warm and shining bronze is grounded in a massive, strong center and takes the suggested shape of a bird’s head with two wing-like formations. The patina used by Veress allows the sculpture to occasionally reflect shades of gold, orange, and blue, lending it an extraordinary beauty. The viewer’s gaze radiates along the sculpture’s lines into the surrounding space, following the many directions described by the bronze formations and its straight edges. For an understanding of the sculpture both aspects—the sculpture’s forms as well as the invitation to follow its composition lines into the surrounding space—are equally important. The protective character of the outspread wings can be read as the protection given by Wallenberg at a time when freedom was suppressed. The diversity of


Figure 8.11 Károly Veress, Freedom, 2000, on the campus of the Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA © Károly Veress, Fonthill, Ontario, Canada.

the prompted directions into the surrounding space seems to capture the core principle of freedom with the individual’s right to think and act freely, as the artist expressed it himself in the brochure of the monument’s dedication program: These wings sometimes lift us up out of a monstrous historic context into a state where all that remains is just one commitment: to human values, to the dignity of all human beings. This is what I consider to be freedom, and this reminds me of a Raoul Wallenberg who occupied my thoughts during the design of the sculpture “Freedom”.


Hope While Wallenberg’s deed reminds us of the value of freedom, the next example expresses the hope that such an example inspires contemporary and future generations to make this world a better place. Gustav and Ulla Kraitz’s Hope can be found in downtown Manhattan, New York. Several groups had long lobbied in vain for a Wallenberg monument in that city but Hope was the first to secure all the necessary approvals. It was inaugurated in 1998. Above all, and most relevant for the reading of the monument, as we will see, is the monument’s setting close to the headquarters of the United Nations. Its location, which seems so self-evident given the analysis of the work, was only agreed after much discussion. For Dag Sebastian Ahlander, Consul General of Sweden in New York (1992–9), it was important to highlight Swedish interests and make Sweden visible in New York.44 After Ahlander attended an exhibition of Gustav and Ulla Kraitz’s work at the New York Botanical Garden in the winter of 1994/5, Gustav Kraitz approached the diplomat and asked if there were a chance to exhibit, at least temporarily, one of his blue globes in a public place in New York. This approach led to intense discussions between Ahlander, Kraitz, and Henry Stern, New York City Parks Commissioner. The outcome of such meetings and negotiations was the idea for a Raoul Wallenberg monument. With the erection of a monument, Swedish interests would be made visible by commemorating one of the nation’s most outstanding personalities. At the same time, a man could be celebrated who had become very popular in the US particularly after being granted American honorary citizenship in 1981. As Ahlander told me, the monument came about in a very unbureaucratic way. It was the engagement of Gustav Kraitz, Dag Sebastian Ahlander, and Henry Stern and their commitment to the realization of a Wallenberg monument that led to the finding of the site as well as the actual look of the monument. Ahlander made contact with officials at the Central Park Administrative Office who accepted the Kraitz proposal unanimously. Together with Henry Stern, the search for a suitable site began. Several alternatives were discussed until Stern proposed the triangular traffic island that divides the flow of the traffic on First Avenue at the corner of 47th Street, close to Le Corbusier’s architectonical masterpiece, the United Nations Building (Figure 8.12). The traffic island lies opposite the Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza and not far from the nearby section between 42nd and 47th Street that since 1985 has been named the


Figure 8.12 Gustav and Ulla Kraitz, Hope, 1998, close to the United Nations building, New York, USA.

Raoul Wallenberg Walk at the initiative of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States. In addition, in the same area one can find Arbit Blatas’s Holocaust Memorial (1982) as well as the Consulate General of Sweden at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. All in all, this placement seemed made for a Wallenberg monument. It took Ahlander much effort to obtain the permits necessary before he could present a Wallenberg monument as a gift to the City of New York. Because the city receives many offers, requirements are stringent and donors have to ascertain that the person to be honored is actually worthy of this kind of appreciation. Ahlander succeeded in convincing the Manhattan Community Board who voted in unanimously


for the proposal. Further support came from the New York City Art Commission, which sits in judgment on the artistic merit of such works, when the Commission supported the Kraitz design. Because of the renovation of the adjacent Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the UN, the endeavor to place a Wallenberg monument at that spot seemed temporarily threatened, and the prospect of changing a city bus route nearly spelled the end for the idea. Finally, through the tenacity of the Consul General, a compromise was reached. By limiting the expansion of the traffic island the bus could proceed on its accustomed route. Another challenge was that a fund had to be established that would secure the monument’s future maintenance so that this would not be a burden for the city. Gustav Kraitz persuaded Marcus Storch to finance the whole project, including the maintenance fund. With the engagement of the Marcus Storch family from Stockholm the concerns over financing the project, estimated at a cost of 5 million Swedish crowns, were resolved. Marcus Storch, former head of the AGA Company, was the son of Hilel Storch, a refugee to Sweden from Nazi persecution in Riga. After his escape from Latvia in 1940, Hilel Storch tried to spread information about the ongoing genocide and desperately attempted to save Jews still alive on the continent.45 In Stockholm, he acted as a representative for the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee. In the closing months of the Third Reich he played a role in getting Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler’s masseur, to influence this topranking Nazi to negotiate about the remaining Jews. Even after the war, Hilel Storch helped Jewish survivors to find other family members who had survived and to assist them in starting new families. Most important in our context is that under Hilel Storch’s leadership of the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress the idea was conceived to send a special envoy on a rescue mission to Budapest. The one chosen to be sent was Raoul Wallenberg. Here the circle seems to be closed: Marcus Storch, the son of one of the contributors to the rescue mission of Wallenberg, pays tribute to Wallenberg by financing a monument in his honor and by doing so he is also able indirectly to honor his father. Later on, Marcus Storch became engaged in the erection of further copies of the attaché case, as we have already seen, on the island of Lidingö, for example, and contributed financially to the realization of the monument Vägen (which we will discuss in Chapter 9). The location of the monument close to the United Nations Building affords many suitable associations for a Wallenberg monument. The site was, nevertheless, a challenge for the artist. He had to place his work


on a triangular traffic island, which divides the flow of the heavy traffic on First Avenue at the corner of 47th Street in Downtown Manhattan, where about 10,000 people pass by daily. Gustav Kraitz visited this site many times and took photos from many different angles to be able to arrange the monument carefully in accordance with the needs of the place.46 He integrates the monument into this spot and its environment and, although situated in among the busy traffic on First Avenue, Kraitz’s monument succeeds in establishing an aura of its own. On the triangular traffic island we find five square columns (Figure 8.13). The area, made up of cobblestones, serves as some kind of base for the monument. Each column consists of four or five blocks of black diabas. At the top, each column is slightly tapered but flat. The

Figure 8.13 New York.

The five pillars of black diabas. Detail of Kraitz’s monument in


columns vary only slightly in height; the tallest reaches about 6 m. The sides that are parallel to the traffic are roughly hewn; the other two sides are smooth and polished. Inscriptions can be found on each column, on the side facing the UN building. Short texts give information about Wallenberg, his mission and fate. Two further quotations are taken from different sources such as the Joint Resolution of Congress in 1981, when Wallenberg became an honorary citizen of the US, and from a statement with which Wallenberg is accredited, according to Per Anger. On the opposite side only two columns are marked with inscriptions. At eye-level on one column one will find the monument’s title Hope, the artist’s name, the year the work was erected, and the name of the donor; another column contains, just above ground level, the name of the contractor who delivered the diabas. (For the inscriptions, see the catalog entry.) Together the inscriptions depict the image of a courageous and selfless man who risked his own life for the sake of the persecuted Jews The texts were assembled by Dag Sebastian Ahlander and Kjersti Board. Board translated Wallenberg’s Letters and Dispatches into English in 1995, and worked at the Consulate General at the time the monument was erected. The visitor moves from one column to the next, starting at the “first” (toward the UN building) to read the inscriptions one after another. Thereby, the visitor’s action is a ceremony of its own. Given the height of the columns and the relatively small area of the traffic island, the action of perambulating from one column to the next does indeed have a devotional character. This is even more so because the visitor will sooner or later look upwards and discover the ceramic globe on top of the tallest column, seen against the arc of the sky. The ceramic globe that crowns the column close to the midpoint of the ground area has an intensive, bright blue glaze. By virtue of its placement the globe on top claims the most important significance. Its impact is intensified by the bottom view as well as the fact that it is the only element that contains color (Plate 7). Thus, the globe is effectively staged. Kraitz establishes a hierarchy by composition and color, but also by the way the materials are handled. For example, the lower parts have a rougher texture while the globe on top has a fine finish. In much the same way as Jack Burnham described Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space (1919), Kraitz confronts the observer with rough textures (at least on the sides of the columns that parallel the traffic) in the lower parts and gives “finished precision of the subject above.”47 Burnham reminds us that “these textures establish a psychical hierarchy” with “symbolic implications,” harking back to the hierarchy used in Renaissance palaces where the rusticated façades on the bottom floor


are the roughest, followed by the piano nobile, the principle and most elegant floor of the palace. After reading the title on one of the columns we look upwards toward the blue ceramic globe. Then we connect the title with the blue globe as a representative symbol of hope, as Kraitz and many others have commented upon in connection with the monument—albeit it is actually the color green, not blue, that in Western or Christian–occidental societies traditionally symbolizes hope. The symbolic form of the globe, compositionally the most important element, has been repeated throughout art history. Its connotations have remained basically the same: “A globe . . . acts . . . always as a symbol of wholeness, perfection, as a symbol of the absolute.”48 In combination with both the title and the intense bright blue glaze, traditionally known as the color of faithfulness, truth, longing and even peace, the globe functions as a well-articulated symbol, full of associations. It is plausible to regard the blue globe as the “blue planet,” thinking in more universal dimensions. Some might be reminded of photographs of Earth taken from space.49 The ceramic globe was fired in accordance with an ancient Chinese technique that uses a wood-fired kiln. Gustav and his wife Ulla, who ever since their marriage have worked closely together, started to work with this old, time-consuming, and difficult procedure in the 1960s.50 This method is not yet satisfactorily documented, making it difficult to repeat any achievements made earlier. The Kraitzes developed the method further by trial and error. Some 30 years after they first used the technique, the couple remain among the few artists who know how to handle it successfully They are able to obtain the effect that they wish in achieving the same glimmering effects as ancient Chinese ceramics, in their own, custom-made large flame-kiln.51 The blue globe on the mid-column of the monument testifies to the level of the skill the Kraitzes had attained over the years. Here, we meet more than skilled craftsmanship. As Gustav Kraitz expressed it himself: “Anybody can make a globe, but not all can turn it into art,”52 but they succeeded. The globe weighs about 120 kg, but it still seems to hover weightlessly on top of the column, reflecting the drifting clouds up in the sky. Despite the blue coloring the globe does not look cold but warm. This seems to result from its creation in the kiln that reached over 1300° Celsius. As James Yood expressed it: “This is a heat that never seems to get fully cooled; even in the midst of winter these sculptures have a bit of a glow about them, a warmth that their surfaces have not forgotten.”53 The warmth of the glaze supports the confident character that emanates from the globe, supporting the work’s title Hope.


On the right-hand side of the mid-column, toward the UN building, a light bronze briefcase is placed on the ground, bearing the initials R.W. over the buckle. This element was invented and created by Ulla Kraitz. (For an image of the suitcase, see Chapter 6, the section on Kraitz monument on Lidingö.) Depending on the light, the briefcase actually looks as if it were made of leather instead of bronze. It may be this resemblance that first attracts the attention of busy passers-by, functioning as an eye-catcher. Pedestrians perhaps wonder: Who left his briefcase here? The erect handle of the case invites passers-by to lift it. But in trying to do so, they would realize that the briefcase is heavy, securely anchored to the ground. Interest thus caught, the passer-by may want to learn more about the briefcase’s meaning. Consequently, he or she turns toward the columns and begins to read the inscriptions in search of an explanation. Learning that Wallenberg was a diplomat makes it easy to comprehend that the briefcase is an attaché case. Learning that Wallenberg’s fate remains unknown, the viewer understands that the man is missing but the remaining attaché case acts as a metaphor for his bureaucratic mission. As Jan Torsten Ahlstrand states, the briefcase “marks both a presence and an absence”54—the presence of the action undertaken, while the man who is responsible for it is missing. As Ahlstrand continues, the briefcase contains a higher level of informational value than a relief portrait would have had. In nearly all newspaper articles however, Gustav Kraitz’s statement is repeated that the briefcase acts as a symbol of an “unfinished” mission.55 This aspect of the interpretation is difficult to follow given that Wallenberg definitely succeeded in fulfilling his mission: to save as many Jews as possible from Nazi persecution. The end of the battle in Budapest suggested that his mission was in fact completed. It is not only the columns that provide information in the form of inscriptions. An observant viewer can find additional information engraved upon one longer, rectangular, gray stone among the paving stones on the ground. This informs the viewer that the columns are made of diabas from the Swedish bedrock and that “the paving stones were taken from the former Jewish Ghetto in Budapest” and were given as a gift by the Hungarian capital. Actually they were taken from Dohány utca, which is situated in the central part of the former ghetto, the general ghetto in central Pest where the majority of Budapest’s Jews were penned up, not the international one close to the Danube River where the Swedish safe houses were situated and Pátzay’s monument erected. Kraitz undertook enormous efforts to obtain the paving stones from Budapest. It was mainly through the engagement of Mayor Gábor


Demszky that Kraitz was able to receive the stones. Demszky has been mayor of the City of Budapest since 1990 and is an admirer of Raoul Wallenberg and one of his prominent promoters, and he has played a major role in the re-erection of Pátzay’s Wallenberg monument. Kraitz’s efforts testify to how important it was to him that the stones not only have the character of cobblestones, thereby reminding viewers of old European cities, but that the materials had value in themselves. The explanatory stone informs us that the columns were made from diabas that comes from the Swedish bedrock, Wallenberg’s native country. Like Imre Varga, who also wanted to have Swedish granite for his Wallenberg monument, Kraitz believes in the power of the materials, as he described it in his own words: “pieces of two countries in the heart of New York, uniting us in the deeds of a great man.”56 Following Kraitz, the materials represent a unification of Sweden and Hungary as a tribute to Wallenberg.57 Kraitz regards the transferring of the stones as a “skin transplantation”58: “The one who knows where these stones come from can even make them speak. For those who were there they have much to tell. They evoke strong memories.”59 To those who know or learn about the origin of the stones, they can provide “an especially poignant historical touch.”60 From my point of view, this layer of meaning seems in the first place a result of a cognitive understanding, from a learning process as it is intended in Kraitz’s didactic concept with its importance of the integrated inscriptions, rather than a result of the monument’s aesthetic appearance. The implied deeper meaning of the cobblestones opens up only to those who discover the stone containing the information or learn about it in some other way. In their aesthetic character the accurate arrangement of the clean basalt stones has nothing to do with the atmosphere of the former ghetto as it once looked or with Dohány utca as it still appears at the beginning of the twenty-first century: sad, melancholic, shabby. However, the origin of the cobblestones was in fact the clinching argument when Ahlander sought acceptance for the placement of the monument from the Manhattan Community Board and the New York City Art Commission. In a city with a huge Jewish population for whom the Holocaust is more than an historical event but very often a personal memory, the origin of the stones from the former ghetto of Budapest is of great importance. Without doubt, for this community these stones were a powerful argument, and they have indeed “much to tell” and “evoke strong memories.” In his search to articulate a general and lasting message, Kraitz refers to forms that have been iconographically relevant since ancient time––the


column or obelisk and the globe, architectonic and geometric forms respectively. Obelisks were primarily grave markers but also used for dedication, commemoration, and demarcation. They were erected in Egypt as early as the 4th dynasty (from c. 2613 BC onwards). Traditionally, columns or obelisks are used to represent dignity or victory. Thereby the use of verticality is designed to indicate that the monument is dedicated to a dignified person or occasion. Since this early use verticality, as the foremost characteristic of such monuments, became accepted as a basic characteristic of monuments to outstanding personalities. By using columns, crowned by a globe, Kraitz makes use of unconsciously trained behavior patterns: the larger-than-life columns force the viewer to lift his gaze upwards toward the globe, feeling somehow small in front of the overwhelming height (Figure 8.14). However, in this environment, with

Figure 8.14 Kraitz’s Hope, set amidst the skyscrapers.


the surrounding skyscrapers, whose silhouettes reflect on the polished sides of the columns, the monument does not possess a monumental character, even if its composition is rooted in verticality. The use of geometrical forms such as the column or globe shows that Kraitz’s monument is basically rooted in the tradition of architectural monuments. However, the artist does not entirely rely on architectural forms when creating his public monument. Kraitz added the inscriptions and the attaché case after discussions with those commissioning the project, who demanded that the monument bear clear reference to Wallenberg. The use of such a representational motif as the briefcase secures him readability. But above all, it is the inscriptions that serve as the ultimate means to guarantee the significance of the work. The inscriptions are integrated into the monument’s aesthetics, are part of the design: legible and incised in simple lettering (Figure 8.15). In fact, they dominate a great deal of the columns’ surface at eye-level on the side toward the UN building. Kraitz establishes a tight relationship between the forms and the text, and it is through his use of the inscriptions that the monument acquires an air of clearness and the character of finality. The message of the forms is once and for all confirmed by the inscriptions: The monument honors the courageous diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who undertook the rescue mission on behalf of “countless

Figure 8.15

Inscriptions are carefully integrated into Kraitz’s Hope.


Hungarian Jews” and whose fate “remains unknown.” Kraitz’s didactic concept accomplished by the knowing use of ancient symbols and techniques meets the viewer’s rational and cognitive manner of perception. The columns are often regarded as smokestacks from destroyed houses in Budapest or even from concentration camps. This goes along with Kraitz’s own thoughts during the making of the monument as he has confirmed in many interviews.61 As Kraitz has described it: “My thoughts soon settled on the scenario: Budapest in January, 1945. Black, burnt-out chimneys in a city devastated by bombs.”62 But just as I had reservations about associating Rush’s monument with war, I have difficulties with this interpretation too. In my opinion, only one view makes associations with chimneys comprehensible: coming down First Avenue from the north, heavily smoking chimneys appear behind the monument (Figure 8.16). Given this line of sight, the columns might be associated with chimneys. Perhaps also if one who looks up at a single column and sees its silhouette against the sunlight, with nothing but sky in the background, a slight similarity to chimneys may be suggested. However, looking closely at the monument’s aesthetical appearance, it is difficult to follow this often-repeated interpretation. The valuable

Figure 8.16 Coming down First Avenue from the North, heavily smoking chimneys appear behind Kraitz’s monument, suggesting a comparison of the diabas pillars with smokestacks from destroyed houses in Budapest or even from concentration camps.


materials and the elaborateness of the design stand in strong contrast to the repeated reading. To me, it seems that the comparison of the columns with chimneys hinders the discovery of the true qualities the monument has to offer. In Kraitz’s monument, the valuable materials are carefully chosen and express duration, not fragility. According to David Finn, diabas is the “hardest stone in the world next to diamond.”63 The careful paving of the cobblestones on the ground around the midpoint close to the mid-column corresponds to the beautiful ceramic globe on its top. Elaborateness and exactness emanate from every detail of the monument, from the polished sides of the valuable diabas columns with their accurate engraved texts, and even the raw sides of the columns show glittering effects. Moreover, the valuable bronze briefcase makes it difficult to be reminded of the devastated city of Budapest of 1945, in ruin amid chaos, dirt, and dust. Yood described Kraitz’s ceramic sculptures as “items that are somehow purified, as if they have passed some test of endurance that now accords to them the status and stature of art.”64 It is exactly this character that emanates not only from the ceramic globe, but dominates the monument’s whole expression. Visitors enter a sphere of pure art as soon as they step onto the triangular area, as soon as they realize that the apparent realness of the briefcase was a conscious act of deceit. The monument is carefully designed and establishes an atmosphere of dignity that rather stands in contrast to the effects of war. The Kraitz monument expresses a timeless tribute to an outstanding humanitarian, thereby expressing the hope that such a man’s deed may inspire posterity to make this world a better place. Consequently, I strongly disagree with the reading of the columns as chimneys. Hope emanates harmony and dignity. The obelisk-like verticality and the globe stand in the tradition of ancient and classical monuments. The reference to these architectonic forms and the use of inscriptions implies a reference to human achievements in general as expressed in such architectonic phenomena as the Black Obelisk or Cleopatra’s Needle and the notional efforts necessary for that such achievements can be undertaken. The use of inscriptions can be seen as a reference to scripture as an important part of our cultural heritage, already used as part of ancient obelisks with their hieroglyphs. By the use of the forms as well as by the use of inscriptions and the careful arrangement of the composition, Kraitz places Wallenberg’s deed in the tradition of what mankind is able to achieve during the centuries, if acting in a human, civilized, and cultured way. In Kraitz’s carefully arranged piece of art, beauty acts as a sign of civilization. In this way,


his monument can be seen as the opposite of war and stands in sharp contrast to the brutalization of men and women during World War II. The reading of the Gustav and Ulla Kraitz monument depends much on the context of the setting. The fact that it is situated close to the headquarters of the United Nations in what is known as the “capital of the world,” New York, supports the reading of Wallenberg as a universal hero. This is in accordance with the Kraitz’s ambition of expressing a general message with their Hope monument. The United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the wake of World War II, which was ratified in 1948. Kraitz’s monument was inaugurated on November 9, 1998, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), and in the same year as the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Against that background and against the circumstances of Wallenberg’s mission in 1944, it is easy to regard Wallenberg as a worthy representative of the United Nations even before the organization’s actual founding.65 In this regard, I follow Jiri Grusa, who comprehended heroes as in some manner forerunners of changes or transformation-processes.66 With the protective passes, the protective houses with their ex-territoriality, Wallenberg anticipated the concept of the United Nations and can be seen as a prototype of the UN representative before the organization was actually founded. Using his country’s neutrality, Wallenberg acted against national sovereignty and tried to establish a supranational system to provide aid. In addition, Wallenberg knew about the necessity of long-term solutions. He planned to establish a supranational Raoul Wallenberg’s Institute for Support and Reconstruction after the end of the war. This plan originated to some extent from the time before Wallenberg was sent out and was a policy pursued by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm. By November 1944, Wallenberg had already discussed the establishment of a network to help to rehabilitate Jews who survived the end of the war.67 Furthermore, Wallenberg engaged Tom Veres as the Legation’s photographer after the Arrow Cross coup, not only to protect him from persecution but also because he wanted him to take pictures of both the atrocities and the aid actions that took place so that they would be documented for posterity.68 Clearly, Wallenberg can indeed be regarded as a very worthy representative of universal human rights policies as well as a global memory. This is reinforced by the information that indicates that Wallenberg, in connection with the imminent destruction of the ghetto, threatened high-ranking Nazis and Arrow Cross people with punishment after the war. This action can be seen as a forerunner of what came to fruition in


the Nuremberg Trials (1945–9), and institutionalized in the International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 2002 as a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Against this background, it is no wonder that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Secretary-General between 1997 until 2006) became a prominent promoter of Wallenberg. The fact that he is married to Wallenberg’s niece (whose birth Wallenberg learned of in Budapest, although he never had the chance to meet her) may have accentuated the issue, but was certainly not the cause of his involvement. In contrast to former Secretary-Generals, including those with Scandinavian backgrounds such as Trygve Lie and Dag Hammerskjöld, who refused to raise the Wallenberg subject with Soviet officials,69 Annan went out of his way to highlight publicly Wallenberg and his deeds.70 Kofi Annan was among the speakers at the inaugurations of several Wallenberg monuments, visited many of them “privately” and referred to Wallenberg in several speeches. He attended the unveiling of Philip Jackson’s monument in London, where he also gave a short speech, and the inauguration of Kirsten Ortwed’s monument in Stockholm, here as a “private person” and member of the family. Annan visited the monuments in Budapest, Ann Arbor, New York, the tree and bust at Yad Vashem, the bust and monument in New York, saw the models of the monuments of Buenos Aires and Chile and wrote a foreword to Finn’s book on Kraitz’s Hope monument. He also sent a message on the opening of the UNESCO exhibition in memory of Wallenberg in Paris in May 1999, which then toured across Europe. Furthermore, Annan was in regular contact with the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. During recent decades the importance of remembering the Holocaust has grown and been acknowledged. Kofi Annan describes Wallenberg as a man who is “among the foremost human rights defenders the world has known” and maintained that he represents “the third party amidst conflict and suffering.”71 He compares Wallenberg’s attitude to the attitude of the United Nations: We are supposed to follow the cause to which Wallenberg devoted his life, “the cause of peace, tolerance and understanding. These are also the goals of the United Nations.” Annan mentions that the United Nations was “born out of the very lessons of the Holocaust that marked Europe’s darkest hour,” and “was born out of resistance to fascism and Nazism; out of the lesson that such evils can be combated only through united action by nations. . . . The United Nations Charter gave universal value to the concept of human rights for the first time.” All these statements summarize the meaning ascribed to Holocaust remembrance.


The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) mark the beginning of modern human rights policies as well as of cosmopolitan memory.72 While for various reasons such as the Cold War it took decades until a global human rights policy was able to develop and it is still by no means functioning well—for example, during the genocides in Rwanda or Chechnya no troops intervened in time to prevent or stop the killing, and unfortunately the same seems to be happening in Darfur—nevertheless, the establishment of the International Criminal Court proves that a fundamental change has taken place. As Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider state: Memories of the Holocaust helped shape the articulation of a new rights culture. . . . The Holocaust is now a concept that has been dislocated from space and time, resulting in its inscription into other acts of injustice and other traumatic national memories across the globe.73 They furthermore point out: Modern cosmopolitan politics begins with the principle that sovereignty is not the highest principle and is not sacrosanct. Rather the highest principle is human well-being, and the duty to prevent suffering wherever it occurs is to not stand by and allow innocent people to be slaughtered.74 Similarly, Annan argued in his description of Wallenberg as a role model in the fight against genocide: “His name should be significant for everyone . . . his example tells us . . . that humanity is more important than neutrality. . . . Each of us has the duty to intervene.” As it seems, Wallenberg was already aware of the duty to do so, when he stated in an appeal as part of his reconstruction plan for Budapest: “I am a Swede, son of a neutral nation. My country and I have never regarded neutrality as an easy, passive task.”75 In the year 2005, the UN General Assembly decided that, starting in 2006, the United Nations would designate January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as an annual International Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The resolution implied the rejection of any denial of the Holocaust as an historic event and urged all member states to develop educational programs informing future generations about the Holocaust. All 191 member states agreed in consensus to a resolution condemning all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief.


The marking of the January 27 and the resolution text confirm Levy’s and Sznaider’s theory: the Holocaust is taken as a unified historic warning that is remembered in order to remind us that all nations of the world have a responsibility to prevent future genocides.76 It is indeed the setting close to the United Nations building that has strong impact on the reading of the Kraitz monument. In this given context, it seems that the work expresses the Hope that the UN resolutions will not just give lip service, but contribute in a way that the world community will remember the Holocaust and in so doing assume a moral obligation for future political actions based on human rights. In the context of the setting, the example of Wallenberg shall inspire posterity to learn the lesson of World War II. The array of blue-shining windows from the UN close by corresponds to the globe as well as the sky. One is free to compare the mission of Wallenberg with the tasks the UN has to face today all over the globe, still being confronted with wars and genocides. While on the property of the UN the fight against evil is represented by a St George fighting the dragon, Kraitz’s monument in front of the UN building symbolizes the Hope that the fight against evil can be successful (Figure 8.17). Like the attaché case, the United Nations Building

Figure 8.17 While on the property of the UN the fight against evil is represented by a St George fighting the dragon, Kraitz’s monument in front of it symbolizes the Hope that the fight against evil can be successful.


becomes somehow part of the monument, acting as a reminder, in the artist’s own words, that peace is also bureaucracy.77

Pienza From New York and the hope for a better world we turn to the City of Malmö in the south of Sweden where we meet with a utopian vision inspired by Wallenberg’s deed. Malmö is known for its beautiful parks. In the late 1980s the city planned to renew the former Altona Park, which was then only a parking area. The intention was to establish a park once more between the Admiral- and Kanalgatan (gata street), a green city space between the canal and Gustav Adolfs torg that should, in contrast to the vividness of the latter square, present a calm atmosphere. A Catholic church once stood on this spot, and the idea was to create something new that would also have some kind of sacred aura with an important idealistic topic. It was proposed that this would be the right place to honor Raoul Wallenberg, and the proposal found unanimous positive feedback.78 Wallenberg could thus be honored in the very center of the city. At first the commemoration took the form of naming the park after Wallenberg in 1988, which actually was the first park in Sweden to be dedicated to him. Then the idea emerged to find a sculptural decoration that would be worthy of his memory. The City of Malmö did not want a “traditional monument.” Rather it was decided that there should be a new design for the entrance of the park, which together with a sculptural decoration should commemorate Wallenberg. To achieve this aim, the Commissioner of the Urban Environment, Gunnar Ericson, chose the well-known sculptor Staffan Nihlén. By choosing Nihlén, the commissioner and his colleagues knew that a traditional monument was not what they should expect. Nihlén has been described as a “classical sculptor without classicism.”79 He is known as a sculptural poet deeply rooted in the Mediterranean landscape as well as in Greek poetry.80 Nihlén’s reserved sculptured stones, often small, have a poetic aura, spreading moods and spurring on thoughts. Often it is the title of the works that refer to a higher-ranking idea and open up a wider range of connotations, underlining how deeply rooted Nihlén is in the European humanistic tradition. For the project in Malmö, Nihlén was given a free rein to do as he wished. Nihlén was commissioned not only for the sculptural decoration but also for the design of the park entry, which he had ready in spring 1989. Then he presented a little stone sculpture, called Pienza, which he had created in the beginning of the 1990s as a preliminary idea for the


sculptural decoration. Because the basic design seemed very suitable to express the ideal Wallenberg represented and also because it fitted perfectly into the planned park’s entry, it was agreed to develop the idea further, in larger scale and in the medium of light marble. The work on the sculpture and the renewal of the park had already begun in 1990. While the park and the entry design were inaugurated in the fall of 1991, the sculpture Pienza, also known as “The Raoul Wallenberg Monument,” was not unveiled until July 1993. Apparently, because of the title, and the fact that the park is named after Wallenberg and was inaugurated before the sculpture, as well as the entry of the park being finished before the sculpture was installed, Nihlén’s Pienza is often not perceived as Wallenberg monument per se. The marble sculpture Pienza composes the center of a design that is marked by contrast and balance (Figure 8.18). The lasting impression is an atmosphere of beauty, achieved both in the huge lines of the composition as well as in its details. In order to emphasize the focal point of the little square that makes up the park’s entry, three huge stones lead toward the marble sculpture (Figures 8.19–8.21). The stones are about 2 m in height and about 4.2 m in length and taper toward the center of the composition. The stone’s formation accentuates the arrangement toward the center.

Figure 8.18



Figures 8.19 and 8.20 To come to Nihlén’s monument the passengers have to pass by three huge entry stones, which are formed like crests of waves or peaks of a mountain chain.


Figure 8.21

Entry stones to Staffan Nihlén’s Pienza, Malmö, Sweden.

Nihlén’s huge dark-rose granite stone in the middle of the three stones is flanked by two matt diabas formations that are composed of several parts, although at first glance look as though they are one. These three stones make up a prelude, arranged toward the center of the square, whose design is semi-circularly bordered by a low granite wall, penetrated by footpaths. Passengers walk past the three introductory stones when they leave the lively city and enter the calm park. Here, they may simply pass by or rest on one of the benches, maybe in the shadow of the huge tree, called Malmö’s tallest tree, which frames the poetic scenery. The large marble sculpture of about 2 m in height rests on a shiny polished diabas structure formed of circular as well as angular formations.


The spaces between them are filled with water and plants during the summer months. The light marble with its gently rounded shape seems to float, in spite of its weight of 10 tons, lightly in the water-filled basin (Plate 8). The diabas functions as a repository for the water that allows the overflow to gently fall over its edges. As a result of the diabas, the water flows evenly within and from the basin. Step-like elevations around the base of the marble sculpture uplift and accentuate its verticality. The sculpture itself is made of rose Portuguese marble. According to Nihlén, the marble’s durability makes it an obvious choice for the Nordic climate. He explained that Portuguese marble is one of the most resistant marbles in existence owing to its high iron content; it must be handled by specialized craftsmen because it is so difficult to work with. Nihlén worked three years on Pienza. The first problem was to find the right piece of marble. Nihlén’s co-helpers had to pour water over the stone again and again to see if the marbling of the stone followed the structure Nihlén had in mind. The original stone weighed 20 tons; after working on it, the sculpture still weighs about 10 tons. Nihlén chose this kind of Portuguese marble both because of its durability and because of its fine, light color with its soft tones of rose and nuances that shift from apricot to white to gray. Its surface has been softly polished in order to emphasize the subtle nuances of the marble.81 With its vertical positioning, and its germ-like form and light coloring, the sculpture appears as if it were growing.82 The composition depends on contrasts such as dark and light, circular and angular. Even the marble stone itself is full of contrasts. One side appears entirely smooth and rounded, while the other side has a flat plane carved into the rounded surface. The scene exudes balance and beauty, and the contrasting and corresponding elements are well balanced. The huge marble sculpture gives the impression of lightness and dominates the area by spreading an atmosphere of calm, harmony, and beauty. The concept of contrast and balance is clearly demonstrated in the huge compositional lines as well as in the details. The dark-rose granite of the entry stone corresponds to the rose tones in the marble stone; the black diabas at the foot of the sculpture corresponds to the dark parts of the marbling in the otherwise light stone. The sculpture’s beauty is underlined by small details: both the granite and the diabas have glittering elements, as the granite contains shiny silver points and the diabas golden flecks that reflect beautifully in the sunlight. One can clearly see, by the attention to detail in the work, that the Gatukontoret


(The Streets and Park Department) adhered to Nihlén’s design. The cobblestones in rose and dark blue around the three entrance stones match the color of the granite and the diabas respectively. The cobblestones are well placed, following the lines of the stone’s shape traced in the ground. As a result, it appears as though the three stones are growing out of the ground. Perfection is achieved in even the smallest details. The monument created by Nihlén refers to the tradition of the fountain monument that became an established type of the personal monument genre during the nineteenth century. Then monuments became part of city beautification programs. The monument had a similar function to adornment fountains and these, originally separate, functions were gradually combined.83 Such a work was indicated as a monument for a specific person primarily by the inscriptions. In contrast to the monument concept used by Pátzay and Adams, in this monument style there was no portrait relief of the honored within the composition.84 Typical of these works was that they took a figure of mythology and not of recent history as Nihlén does.85 Also Nihlén was clearly invited to create a monument that acted as a beautification of the park’s entrance and at the same time honored Wallenberg. Furthermore, the project was realized with the participation of a local beautification association. In addition, Nihlén’s sculpture corresponds to that tradition through the chosen title. Nihlén bestows his work with the title Pienza, thereby not referencing mythology, but a utopian idea born in the Renaissance. The title of Nihlén’s sculpture is modestly installed on a plaque on the granite stone in front of the water basin. No further information about what the title refers to is given. In fact, it is named after the Italian city of Pienza from the time of the middle of the fifteenth century, when it was the first planned city in the Renaissance, transformed by Pope Pius II and his architect Bernardo Rosselino. Pienza became a true utopia of harmony and beauty, and developed into the model city so many had longed for during the Renaissance.86 Instead, the text on the plaque provides information about Wallenberg’s deeds in Budapest. Hence, the text serves as a link between the given title and the historic person to whom the whole composition is dedicated. Nihlén’s well-thought-out design exemplifies Edmund Burke’s aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful. As described, passengers, coming from the lively city life of Gustav Adolfs torg, will be caught in astonishment in the best sense of Burke’s understanding when they pass by the three huge entry stones and enter the place around the water basin with its marble sculpture. The high entry stones, formed like crests of waves or peaks of a mountain chain, may evoke a


shivering feeling. After realizing that no danger emanates from them,87 the beholder can relax and find comfort in the face of the beauty of the marble in reference to Wallenberg. Accordingly, at least some of Burke’s criteria for beauty can be found in Nihlén’s design: the smoothness and elegance of the marble with its low coloring, and the gradual variations, both in the design for the basin with its even flow of water and in the sculpture with its rounded and flattened surfaces.88 The design as well as the metaphor of Pienza transcend simultaneously a feeling of attainability and immeasurability: the striving after an utopia that is not entirely achievable in this world but nevertheless worthwhile imagining, experienced in a physical way by the beholder who wishes to touch the soft surfaces of the marble but is hindered by the water basin, acting as a barrier. Obviously, Nihlén was not seeking to create a “portrait” of Wallenberg but, as always in his art, is trying to capture a mood, an atmosphere that corresponds to the spirit Wallenberg represents to him. As Nihlén expressed it in his own words, in regard to his art in general: “If the viewer gets caught up in the same indescribable feeling that once touched me, the sculpture has filled its function.”89 Nihlén states that he is engaged in two dialogs, one with the stone and one with the viewer, “who alone has to fill in what has been left unsaid.”90 Nihlén’s concept remains entirely non-objective without any symbolic reference to Wallenberg. However, he codifies the denotation of his work by giving it a title full of ulterior meaning. Even though the title is modestly installed on a plaque on a stone on the ground (in order to avoid disturbing the design’s aesthetics), it nevertheless bears meaning. For someone who knows about the Italian city, the title contributes to the reading of the sculpture as a visualization of an ideal concept and supports Nihlén’s understanding of Wallenberg as a humanitarian deeply rooted in the tradition of humanism established in the Renaissance. The title Pienza, the model city, the utopia of harmony and beauty, functions well as a metaphor to express the concept of a humanistic world outlook, as still longed for today and, following the artist, represented also in Wallenberg’s behavior. In Nihlén’s understanding, Wallenberg had a concept of the world based on peaceful coexistence and was determined to realize this concept through his actions. As the text on the plaque states (written by Gunnar Ericson in accordance with the artist): “Throughout the world the name Raoul Wallenberg stands as a symbol of hope and light in the struggle against persecution and oppression.” Nihlén regards Wallenberg as a ray of hope in the middle of chaos and destruction, and he visualizes this perception in the


combination of his light shining marble sculpture and the dark entry stones, thereby matching a statement made by survivors after the war that “Every expression of rawness was foreign to [Wallenberg]. In him you found sympathy.”91 While Kraitz expresses the hope that Wallenberg’s legacy inspires humanity to create a better world, Nihlén’s Pienza presents a utopian vision of a world in which heroes or heroic action would become dispensable. It is a vision of an ideal conception of the world, inspired by humanitarians like Wallenberg, a vision that will arguably always remain utopian in this world but seems, nevertheless, worth striving for.

In memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s deed This chapter will be concluded with Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s In Memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed, which was inaugurated in May 2007 in Gothenburg, Sweden. In front of a young man’s portrait, approximately 2.5 m in height, we find a waxed bronze sculpture with a black patina depicting two very thin boys of about 8–10 years in age92 (Figure 8.22). The boys are held together by a coat or blanket, the somewhat older boy embracing the smaller, covering him with the blanket, although the younger boy’s emaciated legs stick out. The boys seem to sleep while lying directly on the floor. They lean against each other, somehow supporting each other, propping themselves up against the concrete wall, on which is the man’s face that in its turn supports the reclining position of the boys, protecting them from falling backwards. Their leaning pose against the portrait gives the feeling that the young man becomes somehow responsible for the children. The enlarged portrait sticks out of the ground as if it were a door without walls. With the immediate eye contact viewers have with the apparently kind-hearted man, people may feel drawn to take a closer look. By his friendly but determined look we assume that the man acts as the boys’ protector. We may recall, as explained in the Introduction, that the primary sense of the term hero, as it was understood in Indo-European languages, means “protector” or “helper.” Few may recognize immediately who is being represented. It seems as if Gyllenhammar consciously chose a less familiar photograph of Wallenberg for particular reasons. First of all, Wallenberg appears as a handsome young man, which correlates, as we will investigate further, with the artist’s perception of beauty and “hero-hood.” Furthermore, this less well-known photograph, taken in 1931 when Wallenberg was registered as a student in the US,93 offers a chance to rethink the


Figure 8.22 Charlotte Gyllenhammar, In Memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed, 2007, Gothenburg, Sweden.

well-established Wallenberg narrative. It was only during the 1980s when contacts with Wallenberg’s alma mater were established that his relatives received a copy of this photo. When observers realize that this image surprisingly represents Wallenberg, they might also realize that their own image of Wallenberg might be made up of the well-established, unquestioned stereotypes of his narrative. By being confronted with an image with which we are not familiar, we may be encouraged to rethink the established narrative of the diplomat lost in the Soviet Gulag. When confronted by Wallenberg as a young man, the observer realizes that Wallenberg was once youthful, an individual who had a private life full of possibilities ahead of him. He was not a predestined martyr, but took a personal decision to go to Budapest.


In the justification for her proposal, Gyllenhammar referred to the original Greek meaning of the word “martyr,” the witness, the one who sees. Gyllenhammar does not use the word martyr for the one who voluntarily suffers death rather than deny his religion, but for the one who represents the moral good and acts according to his or her conviction. It is in times of crisis that moral behavior appears no longer the norm, but the exception to the rule. The time of crisis tests whether individuals will be faithful to their own convictions. In contrast to her original idea, Gyllenhammar chose to work in graphic concrete instead of enamel photography. Graphic concrete is basically a graphic method by which a two-dimensional, black-andwhite picture is transferred to a concrete surface. The picture is defined by the contrast between uncovered grains of sand and unaffected cement surfaces, as has been described by Mikael Göransson. He was the first Swedish artist to use the technique and develop it further, and it was Göransson’s workshop that undertook the final castings of Gyllenhammar’s work.94 The graphic-concrete method was introduced to Sweden during the 1990s, and is predominantly used for façade decorations. Although it seems very suitable for public art it has, as far as I know, not been previously used for a personal monument. Gyllenhammar binds together two different spheres: the private and the public.95 She succeeds in doing this by choosing a photograph that once only showed a private individual. But because Wallenberg became a historic person the photograph now can be seen as a document itself. Furthermore, Gyllenhammar used a photograph taken by Joe J. Heydecker in 1941 in the Warsaw ghetto as a starting point for the creation of the sculptures of the two boys in front of the portrait.96 Here, a document becomes part of an artwork, altered in the artist’s hands. These different levels give a hint of a complex issue that is already indicated in the rather accidental way the boys happen to lean against the portrait. Just as the boys, representing people in need of help (the Jews in the historic context of the Wallenberg narrative), became randomly selected victims, so did Wallenberg also somehow became accidentally their protector. They were both exposed to historic developments, but while the Jews were persecuted, Wallenberg could make a decision, and decided to take responsibility. Apparently, Gyllenhammar chose children for her sculpture group, because children are per se innocent and in need of care. The boys represent the innocence and vulnerability of persecuted European Jews. While there was (as in Heydecker’s photograph) a beggar’s cap lying between the boys’ feet in her original proposal, during the construction process


Gyllenhammar gave up that idea because she found it too illustrative and regarded it as an over-articulation. The boys’ need for charity, food, and care becomes obvious by just looking at them. It seems natural to feel pity for the fragile and vulnerable children, with their bony legs and the faces marked by starvation, as they lay there directly on the ground. The boys evoke a feeling of tenderness, the wish to help, and encourage the viewer’s pity and desire to cover them with another blanket or bring them to another, safer (and, during winter, warmer) place. The concrete offers a scale of gray-nuances so that the adapted photograph has the illusion of an old-time photograph or the look of a picture in a newspaper, while the black–brown sculpture has a soft and warm surface. The patinated wax finishes give the sculpture a modest brightness. The restrained, warm scale of gray, brown, and black contributes to that portrait and sculpture to form a unity, amalgamating with each other. The tone scale creates a noble atmosphere that assures the honoring of Wallenberg as well as it supports the motif of the children, evoking the feeling of pity and the wish to care. The tone scale seems of special importance because the starving boys could easily call upon one to look away, given that their situation seems unbearable. But the softness and warmth of the bronze as well as the sweetness, which despite the suffering still dominates the children’s facial features, encourages one to feel like acting on their behalf rather than looking away (Figure 8.23).

Figure 8.23 Detail of the bronze sculpture showing the two starving boys in Gyllenhammar’s Wallenberg monument in Gothenburg.


As shown in Part I, the hero’s origin is important for the hero story. In classical hero narratives the hero is the offspring of a mortal and a god. This goes along with popular imagination that tends to see something extraordinary, something superhuman or even divine in the hero. For many it is hard to believe that the hero’s extraordinary characteristics should only be human. As Lenke Rothman expressed it some years before she was commissioned to develop her Wallenberg memorial for the Swedish parliament: “Why is it so hard to believe that a person who acts humanely is a human being? Not only as a child, but even still today, I believe that a humane person is a disguised God. Or that God becomes visible in the humane person.”97 According to Sir Martin Gilbert, author of The Righteous (2002), it is difficult to explain why people chose not to sit still and collaborate, but even voluntarily took the decision to leave a secure homeland to help while atrocities were being committed. Many of the rescuers Gilbert was in contact with simply stated that they did what they “had to do,” and that it was “the only correct thing to do” in the given situation. Per Anger responded similarly when asked why he, Wallenberg, and their colleagues acted the way they did. However, as Gilbert quotes Mordecai Paldiel, from 1982 head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem: “Goodness leaves us gasping . . . for we refuse to recognize it as a natural human attribute. So off we go on a long search for some hidden motivation, some extraordinary explanation, for such peculiar behaviour.”98 And Gilbert continues: “Evil instincts are taken for granted; altruistic, humane behaviour appears to need special explanation.” While evil is accepted as a natural part of the human soul, good behavior, especially in times of crisis, seems to demand explanation. Gibbon had suggested that “Wallenberg was transformed and galvanized by having a purpose other than maintaining the comfort of his prosperous life as a businessman.”99 He refers to the letters Wallenberg wrote to his mother from wartime Budapest, “saying that his rescue operation was the most exciting and interesting period in his life.” I remember my own astonishment when reading Wallenberg’s letters in the Riksarkivet, and consider Gibbon’s explanation as reasonable. In his reading about heroes, Gibbon had discovered that altruism can make people happy. According to Gyllenhammar’s interpretation, Wallenberg’s hero status can be grasped by looking at his portrait. Given her work, we believe that Wallenberg’s altruism let him appear beautiful. Realizing that the photograph was taken years before Wallenberg went to Budapest, we assume that Gyllenhammar holds on to the


popular belief that Wallenberg was born with certain characteristics that later on, when the time of crisis appeared, predestined him to become a moral hero. In her monument, Wallenberg’s moral superiority finds its expression in the beauty of his facial features. Gyllenhammar’s monument indeed conveys some kind of religious aura. It stems from the stylistic similarities between the upright portrait and icons, as used in Eastern Orthodox Churches. Gyllenhammar achieves an immediate relation between the image and the beholder by using frontality and axiality. The medium of photography shares the strict two-dimensionality used in icons. By using a black and white photograph, the portrait shares the simplicity and clear compositional lines that are characteristic of portraits on icons. However, it is not only the formal similarities that Gyllenhammar’s work shares with icons. Ulf Abel calls icons “the impressed image.”100 In the Orthodox Churches icons were and are regarded as “a representation of a spirituous reality, a higher, absolute truth”101—an icon is a “secular portrait of a celestial archetype”102 Christ or another saint. It seems as if Gyllenhammar agrees with the belief, as Abel formulates it, that “art is a tool for ever-lasting truths,”103 and that Wallenberg is a “disguised God” or at least that God becomes visible in this human being, as Rothman has expressed it. Standing in front of Gyllenhammar’s monument, it becomes obvious at first sight: in Wallenberg’s portrait, we are confronted with a hero who is able to match the beauty associated with classical Greek sculpture. In many Wallenberg monuments, beauty functions as a means to express worship. In his Budapest monument Pátzay made use of the antique ideal where beauty was synonymous with inner perfection. Something similar but even more complex resonates in Gyllenhammar’s Wallenberg monument. In the openness of Wallenberg’s face and his balanced facial features we meet with an understanding of the heroic based on the belief, held in various forms throughout the centuries, that beauty embodies the good or divine principle. Here, the ideal of beauty represents the ideal of good. Something of Plato’s “kalokagathia,” the beauty-good, or an echo of Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages when beauty meant the glooming of a divine light, the splendor Dei, echoes in Gyllenhammar’s work.104 It appears somehow as if the reason why Wallenberg’s face is beautiful is because he is illuminated by God’s light. We are confronted with an ideal hero who seems to live up to the Socratic belief in the objectivity of goodness and the link between knowing what is good and doing it. Beauty takes the form of analogy and emulation to moral good.


As votive images do, Gyllenhammar’s monument functions as a site that demands a vow. A votation (from the Latin “votum” vow) implies giving a promise: Wallenberg’s challenging gaze seems to call for a reaction. Indeed votives serve as sites of offering of gifts. The offering implies that if the request is fulfilled the suppliants in turn will be committed to doing their part. This brings us to the following analogy. If Wallenberg by his decision to go to Budapest to save the remaining Jews is regarded by posterity as the world’s conscience and thereby, as the inscription on Franco Assetto’s Los Angeles monument expresses it, considered to have “saved our faith in humanity,” it seems only fair that the hero, which posterity has chosen, takes us, the later-born generations, to task. While it is the purpose of icons to rouse reverence because the represented is the beholder’s direct connection to God, Wallenberg’s portrait on eye-level, thus enlarged but not monumental, admonishes our conscience to ponder the choices we make in daily life rather than creating, despite the monument’s religious aura, a connection to a sacred world. The more profane frame of reference is also encouraged by the choice of the material, namely, concrete. While the interaction between monument and observer is meant to provoke a thinking process about responsibility and life choices, Gyllenhammar’s work, much more so than previous examples considered that presented ideas and ideals, implies a demand, a consequence of the thinking process, which leads to action. Gyllenhammar’s sculpture group does not refer explicitly to the historic context of Budapest of 1944 (or the Warsaw ghetto of 1941). The vulnerable, starving children can just as well refer to the millions of children that have to face war, persecution, and starvation today. Facing the suffering of the boys, and realizing that some private individual decided to act on their behalf, challenges us to question our daily ignorance and bystander-mentality. Gyllenhammar’s Wallenberg reminds us that not acting is neither an excuse nor an alternative in the face of contemporary misery.

9 Raoul Wallenberg’s Insubordination

The hero as trouble maker On the one hand, heroes are often pressed as elite representatives of the values on which society is or ought to be based; on the other, as figures of a barely controllable dynamic energy and personal magnetism, geniuses or charismatic leaders whose power has little to do with established social norms and structures of authority. . . . Though “praiseworthy” and “noble”, such heroes “stand outside the normal orbit of human interaction and are never entirely fit for ordinary society.”1 Although not dealt with in Part I, it should be acknowledged that it is not only through classical hero patterns (an extraordinary courageous man fighting evil) that Wallenberg’s story can be told. Other readings can also be found when studying his life. For example, many statements, including those made by Wallenberg himself and by those who assisted him, clearly indicate that Wallenberg was not regarded, at least not at the beginning or in his outer appearance, as the prototype of a classical hero figure, full of physical strength and bravery.2 Instead, Wallenberg seems to have represented other values that became more and more important toward the end of the twentieth century: soft skills, pacifistic values, care, or the ability to communicate.3 By 1946 the survivors sensed that Wallenberg differed in some ways from the traditional hero image, “The role of the hero both attracted and irritated him and he also lacked the hardness of the oldtime heroes.”4

233


As demonstrated previously, it cannot be denied that the hero concept has fallen into disfavor during the twentieth century and that artists who today deal with the theme may chose to reflect the concept critically. When we further recall that the monument genre during most of the twentieth century likewise was often perceived as old-fashioned or outdated, a contemporary artist, deeply concerned with the artistic developments of his age and convinced of the importance of art’s autonomous position, might also chose to reflect the genre itself critically. Such an outcome may clash with common notions of the hero, monument, or Wallenberg understandings. In the following, we will encounter a Wallenberg monument that in many ways differs from more typical monument and hero perceptions and thereby also depicts a somewhat different portrait of Raoul Wallenberg.

The unconventional hero Kirsten Ortwed’s Hommage à Raoul Wallenberg (2001) is situated on the Raoul Wallenbergs torg in the center of Stockholm, Sweden. As the reading of Ortwed’s work strongly depends on its setting, we will first direct our attention to the site-specificity of the placement. Although this square was named after Wallenberg in 1987, many people in Stockholm still refer to Raoul Wallenbergs torg as Nybroplan. The name Nybroplan actually describes the square in front of the national theatre, Dramaten, built between 1901 and 1908 in the art nouveau style, where the famous Ingmar Bergman was director for many years. Raoul Wallenbergs torg is part of a greater square-ensemble formed by Nybroplan, the green lawns and old trees of Berzelii Park, and the adjoining streets. Berzelii Park, which opened in 1863, is surrounded by the Hallwyl Museum on Hamngatan (a private palace built 1893–8, in Moorish style) and the China Theatre (once one of Stockholm’s first cinemas) as well as the Hotel Berns (opened in 1863). Hotel Berns was made famous by August Strindberg being a frequent visitor there, and it was Berns’s red salon that inspired the title of Strindberg’s literary success Röda Rummet in 1879. Close to the Wallenberg monument, on Arsenalgatan, there are prestigious representatives of the art establishment, namely, the auction houses of Bukowski and Sotheby’s. The combined spaces of Raoul Wallenbergs torg, Nybroplan, and Berzelii Park compose Stockholm’s largest square,5 much admired and highly frequented. During the summer months the area radiates an atmosphere of Italian city life. Tourists as well as the inhabitants of Stockholm

Raoul Wallenberg’s Insubordination 235

throng to Berzelii Park and Raoul Wallenbergs torg as well as the broad staircase of Dramaten. Between 1996 and 2001 the Raoul Wallenbergs torg was restored by Aleksander Wolodarski, city architect at Stadsbyggnadskontoret (the City Planning Administration).6 The restoration of the square resulted in several conflicts over the erection of the monument as the city architect and the artist had diverging interests. For instance, the city architect wanted cobblestones as a pavement for the whole square while Ortwed needed a flat surface on which to place her sculptures.7 On several occasions the monument project was endangered and compromises had to be reached. In this study, these conflicts will not be examined further. It is sufficient to point out that the restoration influenced the setting of the work and forced Ortwed to make a compromise regarding the monument’s allotted space.8 This compromise continues to affect, as we will see, the work in a negative way. Aleksander Wolodarski tried to unify the area around the Wallenberg monument by creating a semicircular room that slopes down to the water. A total of 16 beams, made of light Chinese granite, structure the square and radiate toward the bay. Situated on three of the beams are elongated stone benches. The cobblestone street is well integrated into the square, which ends in low-lying semicircular steps that follow the line of the bay, Nybroviken, and then open to a seaside view of the archipelago boats. The famous Nordiska Museet and Vasamuseum are in clear view on the green island of Djurgården (Figure 9.1). Rafael Moneo’s Moderna Museet sits discreetly on the island Skeppsholmen. One may remember that the founder of the museum’s forerunner was Pontus Hultén, whose groundbreaking exhibitions during the 1960s contributed to the recognition of modern art not only in Sweden, but internationally. The light surface of the Chinese granite of the square corresponds with the light sandstone façade of the Dramaten theatre. The cobblestones of the square revive the atmosphere of Blasieholmstorg. Old trees cast their shadows as three new saplings planted close to Ortwed’s monument sway in the breeze. Benches invite one to sit down along the remaining bridge-railing, a remnant of the old bridge that over 130 years ago crossed the inlet between Blasieholmen and Östermalm. It is significant that this square-ensemble in the very center of Stockholm is a symbolic place with many references to Raoul Wallenberg himself and the Holocaust. The cream-colored house at the corner of Arsenalgatan, just opposite the Wallenberg monument, was the property of the Dardel family. Wallenberg’s stepfather was from the Dardel


Figure 9.1 Sweden.

Kirsten Ortwed, Hommage à Raoul Wallenberg, 2001, Stockholm,

family, and Raoul and his brother and sister were often guests at the Dardel home during their childhood.9 It was in this house that Raoul’s step-grandfather, Fritz von Dardel, and his son Nils painted many of their famous works. On the other side of the bay is Stockholm’s most fashionable boulevard Strandvägen, graced by the hotels Esplanade and Diplomat. It was here, on Strandvägen 7a, that Wallenberg worked at the food-trading enterprise MEROPA. Wallenberg was employed as the company’s trade representative and later became a partner. As already mentioned, one department of the office of the American Legation was situated in the same building where Wallenberg and Lauer had their office. Consequently, it was easy for Lauer to meet with Herschel V. Johnson, minister at the American Legation in Stockholm, and Iver C. Olsen, special representative of the American War Refugee Board at the same legation. Not far from Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument, there is Stockholm’s Great Synagogue built in 1861–70, on Wahrendorffsgatan. It was here that Wallenberg met with Chief Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis, Iver C. Olsen, and Norbert Masur, the representative of the Jewish World Congress in Sweden. In the small alley behind the synagogue, called


Aron Isaac’s gränd after the first Jewish immigrant who was allowed to practice his religion in Sweden, one can find the Holocaust Monument.10 It was designed by Sivert Lindblom and architect Gabriel Herdevall and dedicated in 1998. On the walls of the 42 m-long monument, the names of 8000 Jewish victims are listed, their names having been supplied by survivors living in Sweden. The names of those who died of illness and other causes during their transportation to Sweden in 1945 or afterwards are also added. Aron Isaac’s gränd connects the Holocaust Monument with Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument. The two monuments relate to one another in the given context. While the Holocaust Monument reminds us of the destruction of the European Jews, Ortwed’s monument is dedicated to one rescuer of Jews during this period. The synagogue again represents the contemporary Jewish community; some of its members are survivors of the Holocaust, some actually saved by Wallenberg, or their descendants. Even before the Holocaust Monument was proposed, the idea of creating some kind of “connected memory landscape” had arisen. It was hoped that in some form of physical relationship there could be a connection made between the Holocaust Monument and a future Wallenberg monument. As Gabriel Herdevall told me, Sivert Lindblom had, on his own account, already made a proposal for a future Wallenberg monument. However, the idea of making the connection between Wallenbergs torg and the Holocaust Monument a physical reality did not find acceptance at that time. Then, in 2004, the Jewish community started to support this idea because they hoped that more visitors would find their way to the Holocaust Monument, and Wolodarski and Herdevall lobbied once more for their plan. For a long time, the idea of breaking up the bridgerailing was a severe hindrance: the bridge-railing was landmarked, and in the eyes of many the Berzelii Park should be preserved in its old shape. Later, in June 2006, five years after Ortwed’s monument was inaugurated, Wolodarski and Herdevall finally succeeded in making a connection between the two monuments a physical reality.11 They created a direct link between the Holocaust Monument and the Wallenberg monument by a pathway, called Vägen (The Way), made up of cobblestones (again from the former ghetto in Budapest) and bordered by steel that suggests associations with railway tracks.12 Vägen is about 70 m long and makes a direct line between the Wallenberg and the Holocaust monuments. The architects opened up the former bridge-railing close to Ortwed’s monument to make the direct connection possible, and not just a conceptual connection as some had suggested. In between the opening, they placed a granite


globe of about 1.2 m in height (Figure 9.2). On the side toward the bay, the stone bears the inscription Raoul Wallenbergs Torg; on the opposite side, leading toward the Holocaust Monument, is found Aaron Isaacs gränd. Furthermore, the globe contains the line, “The road was straight, when Jews were deported to death. The road was winding, dangerous and full of obstacles, when Jews were trying to escape from the murderers.”13 This sentence appears first in Swedish, followed by English and then in 22 languages, beginning with Polish, given that this is the language of the largest group of victims, followed by the other 20 languages of the countries from which the victims originated. The 22 translations underscore the diversity of European Jewry that the Nazis tried to subsume into one homogeneous group. The text makes clear that the fanaticism

Figure 9.2 The sculpture Vägen behind Ortwed’s sculpture as well as the sign with Per Wästberg’s text.


Figure 9.3

Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument toward the Berns and Berzelii Park.

of the Nazis led to the decision, and the subsequent attempt, to annihilate the Jews. The text makes also clear that it was indeed dangerous and difficult for Jews to escape Nazi persecution, as it was dangerous for those, like Wallenberg, who tried to help them. Kirsten Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument is composed of 12 black or, depending on the light, dark blue or brown pieces of bronze. The monument’s structures cover an area of about 8 m by 20 m (Figure 9.3). The surface on which these elongated sculptures (their size varies between 27 cm and 86 cm in height, between 180 cm and 340 cm in length, and 40 cm to 55 cm in width) are situated is composed of square-cut Chinese granite stones of light beige hue, being in the same material in which the beams that lead toward Nybroviken are composed.14 Wallenberg’s signature rendered in light bronze is embedded directly into the paving. The size of the signature corresponds to the length of the sculptures, but is in fact the longest element at 4.2 m (Figure 9.4). A few meters away, basic information such as the artist’s name, the title of the work, and the year the monument came into existence is listed on a metal plaque mounted onto one pillar of the old bridgerailing.15 Across the sidewalk, by the right corner of the sculpture grouping, is another freestanding notice board that gives information about Wallenberg and Ortwed’s work. Unfortunately, the placement of


Figure 9.4

Wallenberg’s signature in Ortwed’s Hommage in Stockholm.

the text is misleading as it appears to indicate a starting point for the monument’s exploration and the optimal viewing point of the work. The text on the sign is problematic in several ways, and we will come back to it. When moving through the structures, one realizes that it is not intended that the monument be viewed from one designated position, rather it has to be experienced by moving around it. Here it is worthwhile noticing that, in contrast to the other Wallenberg monuments, photography as a tool to complement the written description of a work of art is hardly satisfying in Ortwed’s case. While photography often tends to be more successful than a written text at transferring the atmosphere of a work to the reader, this is not so with Ortwed’s monument. Its entity and its placement in the given surroundings are quite difficult to photograph. Consequently, there is a clear need for a fuller written description of the work, which I will try to satisfy. Ortwed’s sculptures on the floor can be classified as ground sculpture.16 The term has been in common use since the 1960s and means simply that the sculptures are set directly upon the floor.17 During the nineteenth century there was a tendency to overcome the distance between the monument and the viewer. Even then, the pedestal began to open itself up, acting as an invitation and offering a stage that was indeed accessible for the visitor.18 While the tendency to abolish the


plinth is much older, it is among the achievements of forerunners such as Anthony Caro and Carl Andre that sculptures were accepted as such, without a pedestal, positioned on the floor.19 Ground sculpture has its accepted place in art history and is even used for personal monuments, even without any area of respect as in Ortwed’s, or Gyllenhammar’s, work or as in the monument dedicated to the delegates of the parliament, murdered by the Nazis, titled Erinnerung an 96 von den Nationalsozialisten ermordete Reichstagsabgeordnete der Weimarer Republik. This latter monument was created by Klaus Appelt, W. Eisenlohr, Justus Müller, and Christian Zwirner in 1992, and is installed not far from the Reichstag (Parliament) in Berlin. The work has a rather low height: it is made up by 96 black cast-stock slates, arranged very close behind each other in a row; each slate contains the name of a delegate and is about 60 cm in height and 120 cm at width. However, this work is not dedicated to one but to several persons. So even though found earlier, ground sculpture is not an established or commonly used form for personal monuments. Ortwed’s non-objective work, placed directly on ground level, constitutes a genre of sculpture that many visitors have only seen in museums of modern art where they are expected to keep an “arm’s length” distance. But Ortwed’s sculptures, intended as a public personal monument, are accessible to the viewer. Children are allowed to play on them. People sit on them and touch the expressively modeled parts. They knock on the bronzes to see if they are hollow or imitate the signature in the pavement with their hands in the air. The work’s structures are low on one side, horizontal and more or less rectangular. Toward the bay, the sculptures express a voluminous shaped plasticity (Figure 9.5). This plasticity, “like a heavily impasted painting rendered in bronze,”20 as Mai Misfeldt describes it, is best viewed from many different angles in order to appreciate its voluminous dimensions. Each of the monument’s unique forms displays “its own, shifting zones of movement and stillness, its rough patches and smooth surfaces.”21 The monument’s structures seem to move toward the bay, arranged in a “dynamic dispersal,”22 occupying the rectangular space arranged in slightly different directions, while casting their shadows on the ground. The final setting of the sculptures differs much from Ortwed’s sketches and models, as shown in the Kulturhuset after Ortwed’s proposal in November 1998.23 As Ortwed told me in August 2005, she adapted her bronze sculptures to the place that during that period was the object of renovation and according to the given space she finally had for her disposal.


Figure 9.5

One of Ortwed’s bronze sculptures.

Seen from the benches at the bridge-railing, this choppy grouping of forms relates to the rhythmic movement of the bay. The 12 pieces succeed in establishing a relationship, a physical interplay, with both the ground and the surrounding space.24 “One has the feeling that the works are starting, quite literally, to expand into the surrounding space and take it over; not in any dramatic fashion, but creeping.”25 The 12 pieces contain traces of Ortwed’s hands that are still visible in the clay-modeled bronze sculptures (Figure 9.6). The sculptures appear to be in a continuous process of transformation. This appearance of transformation can trigger an associative thinking process in the viewers and invite them to further contemplate the monument. We experience 12 dynamically expressive pieces of bronze. We follow the sculptural queues from the monument toward the water, and witness how the sculptures reveal the physical process behind their construction. The energy of Ortwed’s hands and modeling tools gave texture to the clay structure before it was transferred to the black patinated bronze. Over a two-year period, Ortwed created full-scale models of clay that were then cast into figures of bronze.26 During the making of the sculptures, Ortwed left nothing to chance. She carefully supervised the process in the foundry. Visible in the final bronze sculptures are the two different kinds of clay she used; one was very soft and without


Figure 9.6

Detail showing the traces of the artist’s hands in the final bronze.

structure, the other allowed her to create rough formations. The bronze casts accurately depict the clay modeling. The process of the sculpture’s creation is actually so important to the artist that it remains visible in the final pieces. The viewer can visually comprehend Ortwed’s working process, and is invited to contemplate the forms of the monument and from those forms create new forms from their own imagination: “we follow ideas as they develop in the physical process, giving rise to other ideas.”27 It is obvious that Ortwed’s ground sculptures clearly benefited from the development of Minimal Art. She engages viewers in the formal structure of the sculptures and makes them become aware of themselves. Furthermore, Ortwed uses the technique of allowing the process of how a work came into existence to remain visible in the final pieces. Nevertheless, her work differs from works of Minimal Art of the 1960s. While the sculptures of Minimal Art remained neutral in content, rejecting any kind of informational value and not expecting the viewer to read something into their sculptures, Ortwed uses an entirely different strategy. She wants to achieve an emotional interaction between the viewer and her work that leads to further associations. The recipient becomes an essential part of the work’s concept and thus has to be open to letting the forms evoke emotions, and willing to contribute


to the work by reflecting its forms and possible meanings in the given surroundings.28 Contemplating the sculptures, sections of Ortwed’s voluminous formations may resemble flames or volcanic lava masses. But are we certain? Do we have to know exactly? We perceive a stage-like composition—but where are the actors?29 Are we the actors? Or have they gone? We struggle as we try to integrate ourselves into the work. Some people associate the sculptures with coffins, some with lions or sphinxes. Whatever we see in them, there is something enigmatic about the place and its figures. The atmosphere is somehow catastrophic, standing in contrast to the beautiful surroundings. There is the feeling of emptiness that radiates from the monument as if someone had just departed or as if a powerful event had just taken place. We feel as though we are witnessing the aftermath of a natural disaster, perhaps a powerful thunderstorm, which left the place in devastation, but at the same time it is as if new life has already surged toward the sky. Looking toward the bay, we wonder if the actors of this play, of this monument, departed toward the sea. Turning to face the monument once more, we encounter Wallenberg’s signature on the ground, his imprint. The hurried style of the signature indicates evidently that it was written by a man who was accustomed to signing papers. It is as if Wallenberg had written his signature while standing with his back toward the sea, toward the direction of the departed actors. The synagogue looms in the background and reminds us that those who received Wallenberg’s protection were Jews. An important element of the work is the dispersal of the sculptures, which refers to the fact that Wallenberg was active all over the city of Budapest30 as well as to the fact that Hungarian survivors after the war and the uprising of 1956 fled to many different countries. As Ortwed described it, “There are still people he saved scattered all over the globe.”31 In this context, it is also worthwhile remembering that, while Wallenberg never returned, other members of the Swedish Legation were able to come back and that they traveled by boat, arriving in the next bay not far from Nybroviken. As Lars Berg recalls, while all other families were full of joy, there was one family that “stood still and silent”: Raoul Wallenberg’s family. “The tears that ran down the cheeks of Raoul’s mother were the tears of deepest sorrow.”32 In Ortwed’s monument, the sea acts as a metaphor of freedom for those that Wallenberg saved and reminds us at the same time that—as he “signed the papers” with his back turned against the bay—he himself was not brought back on the boat that transported his colleagues.


The signature on the ground serves as an explanatory link that refers to the monument’s historical framework. The origin of the word signature comes “from the Latin signum, meaning sign. . . . A signature is the individual’s personal sign.”33 As Hungarian writer György Somlyó wrote in his novel Rampa (The Ramp), contemplating the value of a Schutzpass signed by Wallenberg, a name can act as “perception of a pure idea or a vision of rescue itself.”34 Here the signature acts as a sign, and becomes thereby very effective. The moment we read Wallenberg’s name and take on his position, Wallenberg becomes physical, we realize: he was there, his signature testifies to his earlier presence. Usually it was Ambassador Danielsson, not Wallenberg, who signed the passes. However, Christoph Gann published a Schutzpass that clearly shows not only Danielsson’s signature but that of Wallenberg as well. This pass was signed in August 1944.35 Wallenberg also countersigned passes as already mentioned. And it was Wallenberg’s name that became synonymous with the Schutzpass-rescue actions. Consequently, in Ortwed’s work the signature intends to function as a sign of recognition, as a symbol for the actions Wallenberg undertook to succeed with his rescue mission. Notwithstanding the above, many may have reservations concerning the use of the signature and question it critically.36 They wonder if anyone is able to decipher the signature embedded in the ground as the signature of Raoul Wallenberg. Many regard it as impossible to comprehend the monument, because, they argue, the only element of the work that has any relation to Wallenberg is the signature, but for many it is neither legible nor identifiable as Wallenberg’s.37 Although Ortwed chose this signature from among various Wallenberg signatures because she regarded it as the most legible,38 I agree with the critics. Without help, the signature cannot be identified as being Wallenberg’s. Ortwed added the Wallenberg signature as a link to the man himself, but the signature remains incomprehensible for viewers who are unaware of the work’s title or know to whom the work is dedicated. In contrast, the signature Rothman selected for her work in the Swedish parliament is much more legible. Indeed, many of us need help to decipher the signature and will first accept it as a comprehensible aid to understanding the work’s meaning after reading the work’s title on the unobtrusive little plaque on the pillar of the bridge-railing or after studying the words posted on the noticeboard near the monument. Once the viewer recognizes Wallenberg’s signature, the impressions the sculptures evoke by its forms alone are filled with meaning. Looking at it, the viewer perceives that the


abandoned scene is the city of Budapest, the “actors” are the people Wallenberg protected, who have departed from this disastrous place and fled toward the sea, literally to salvation, as a result of Wallenberg’s actions. The monument symbolizes Wallenberg’s involvement by means of the sculptures’ powerful formations, and its meaning is specified with the signature on the ground, which is highlighted by its being the longest element of the work and as it appears in light and not black patinated-bronze. In the winter months, the Wallenberg signature is often covered by snow. As a consequence, one important element of the monument is temporarily missing. One could argue that snow acts as a disadvantage because it prevents the viewer from discovering this informative tool. However, the snow changes the appearance of the sculptures in an interesting way. During the winter, the sculptures appear to grow up from the snow mantle (Figure 9.7). The sharp contrast between the dark bronze and the white snow accentuates the modeled formations. The inhabitants of Stockholm, on their daily walks past the work, can take in the varying appearance of the sculptures throughout the changing seasons. Every spring, the melting of the snow reveals the signature and testifies that historic truth cannot be covered forever, but that memory returns and imprints itself upon our minds—as Wallenberg left his imprint on the course of history. Ortwed’s way of approaching the subject was to investigate Wallenberg’s own way of working. She tried to transfer his working style into clay, thereby expressing Wallenberg’s determination and creativity in the expressively shaped sculptures. To that end she followed Wallenberg’s work patterns. When given the challenge at hand, he had to follow his intuition, as did Ortwed. Wallenberg used all his background knowledge and experience for his mission, as did Ortwed in her profession. Her sculptures make the previous working process visible: “[Ortwed’s] intention has been to make it look as if the modelling was an act, which could continue. Even though the sculpture is complete, it was to have a freshness and liveliness that would encourage you to think—the sculptor’s hand has been there and this can continue.”39 It is extremely important to Ortwed that the sculptures look somehow indefinite, that the pieces look as if they were newly created, because the viewer is meant, “to see the action as if his [Wallenberg’s] actions were continuing.”40 Out of the flat ends of the sculptures, expressively shaped, powerful formations evolve that seem to be in a constant process of transformation. The forms of the sculptures retrace Wallenberg’s capacity to act powerfully and to be inventive. In this way, Ortwed wants to pay tribute to Wallenberg’s actions.


Figure 9.7 winter.

Kirsten Ortwed's Wallenberg monument in Stockholm during the

At first sight, Ortwed’s work differs not entirely from the examples given in Chapter 6 that dealt with the man of action. Ortwed also focuses on Wallenberg’s action. However, in both the use of nonobjective ground sculpture and choice of technique that allows the process of its creation to remain visible, her monument differs to a great extent from all previous examples. Ortwed tries to transfer Wallenberg’s action, as the relevant, decisive factor, into the forms of the bronzes. It is not the individual in the first place but his deed that constitutes the heroic moment: “There is a tremendous power inherent in the individual pieces; these are the marks left by action. . . . The figures are not a portrait of a man, but of what it is that makes someone a honourable human being: positive action.”41


Ortwed’s low sculptures on the ground refuse to give a traditional perception of a hero-man, uplifted and honored in verticality, presenting a fixed or traditional idea of a hero as, for example, the 1901 personal monument to the inventor John Ericsson that is nearby and the 1858 monument to the chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in Berzelii Park. Both depict the honored figuratively and show him highly elevated above the ground. As a matter of fact, one reason why Ortwed’s proposal was chosen as the winning entry was, as the jury expressed it in its judgment in November 1998, that her work had an explicitly contemporary design in contrast to the already existing monument of John Ericsson. Ortwed’s hero understanding, as it is expressed in the monument, shares much of the reservations, the criticism, and skepticism toward the hero concept typical for many intellectuals in the twentieth century.42 At the same time, Ortwed connects to the developments the personal monument had undergone since the 1980s. According to the then-altered monument understanding, the genre no longer aims to manifest historic truths or give a fixed image of history but should raise questions instead. Monuments created in this spirit are meant to encourage discussions long after their own inauguration. They want to function as a pulse transmitter to critical reflection.43 That, too, means the participation of the viewer who, for example, has to make the necessary link between the title and the signature. The viewer has to discover the title on a pillar and the signature on the ground first to then be able to anticipate the title’s meaning. The result of such a skeptical attitude toward the hero concept appears indeed as a convincing expression in terms of Wallenberg’s personality and his unconventional behavior as a “diplomat” in wartime Budapest, as described by many of those who worked with him. Ortwed’s monument is inconvenient—as Wallenberg was for many in Budapest. Although Wallenberg’s deeds are honored today, it is worthwhile remembering that Wallenberg’s untiring efforts to save the Jews of Budapest were often opposed, not just by the German Nazis and Hungarian fascists. Wallenberg’s unconventional methods often evoked, at least at the beginning, feelings of irritation even from some members of the Swedish Legation in Budapest, as becomes obvious when reading the book by Wallenberg’s former colleague Lars Berg. Besides Wallenberg’s reputation of charm and sophistication, it seems not unlikely to imagine that he was, and presumably had to be, radical and non-conformist in order to be successful in that historic situation. As the story goes, during his days in Budapest, Wallenberg was always prepared to assist and rescue those in need, to negotiate—and unlike


the traditional behavior of a diplomat—also to bribe or threaten the authorities, and to hide himself from persecution. It is furthermore said that Wallenberg remained inconvenient also after his imprisonment when the Soviets had apparently made attempts to get him on their side: Wallenberg refused to cooperate.44 Evidently, the jury that chose Ortwed’s proposal as the winning entry shared the perception of Wallenberg as “fearless, persistent, innovative.”45 The jury was apparently convinced that Wallenberg behaved in the described way, as they stated in comments on Ortwed’s monument, that Wallenberg was “imaginative, nonbureaucratic, inventive, and tireless in action”—and the jury found these characteristics visualized in Ortwed’s proposal, which they duly chose as winning entry. Ortwed transfers both the power of Wallenberg’s actions as well as the feeling of uneasiness that arose from the role he had to play in wartime Budapest into the forms and in the style of the arrangement of the 12 sculptures. As a result, her sculptures are non-conformist themselves. In this way, “Ortwed is original—as was Wallenberg. . . . To break established rules and use unconventional methods was something that characterized Raoul Wallenberg.”46 Ortwed’s non-objective monument is, of course, open to other associations. Visitors are invited to contemplate the site-specificity of the monument with the synagogue and the Holocaust Monument nearby. A Jewish viewer may wonder if the 12 sculptures refer to the 12 tribes of Israel, or if the low black bronze pieces refer to “sit Shivah,” the period of seven days of prescribed mourning, when the mourners sit on low stools or on the floor, here in mourning the murdered Jews or Wallenberg himself. A Christian, counting 12 pieces of bronze, may regard the signature as the thirteenth element of the work and find thereby a further level of interpretation: “The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into the transcendent.”47 This approach may lead to regarding Wallenberg as the rescuer of the generations born after 1945 by the Jewish survivors of Budapest. The visitor’s personal, cultural, religious background, his or her emotional state, and/or the changing atmosphere of the seasons may evoke further associations and readings of the monument. In view of the darkness of the sculptures and their amorphous forms, the lasting impression many get from the work is one of devastation or suffering. Many do not find any positive aspects of the


rescue mission for which Wallenberg should be honored, the hope Wallenberg represented.48 Here I mention again the feeling of emptiness and devastation that emanates from the sculptures. However, we should keep in mind that the sculptures had a shiny pitch-black patina from the beginning that is meant to be cleaned once in a while to restore this effect, which would give the sculptures rather an atmosphere of elegance instead of devastation. Given today’s situation, it seems as if Ortwed felt an obligation to reflect in some way the enormity of the Holocaust when creating a monument to Wallenberg, as did Lenke Rothman in her tribute to Wallenberg in the Swedish Parliament. Ortwed expresses the power of Wallenberg’s actions, while at the same time she does not exclude the historical context that meant death for the majority of the European Jews.49 Ortwed dares to deal with the difficult situation of honoring the deeds of a man against the background of the Holocaust. Wallenberg’s action took place as the Holocaust already had become a reality. His actions saved many but obviously he was not able to save everyone, not even in Budapest, and this rescue mission took place very late, when millions of men, women and children had already been killed. Standing among Ortwed’s sculptures, we realize the two sides of the Wallenberg story. The black bronzes result in an uneasy feeling. We are reminded of Jean Fautrier’s heavily impasto Hostage-series from 1942–5. His paintings remember the victims of German occupation against the Résistance in France. “The traces of handling [the material] can be read as violations and mutilations, the unshapen parts of the paint (masses) as a reference to the unspeakable, the un-describable natures of war and fascism, to the unbearability of reality.”50 Our thoughts go back to the historic circumstances of World War II. The murder of the European Jews was the reason why Wallenberg’s rescue mission took place. Despite Ortwed’s ambition to honor Wallenberg, expressed by the consciously chosen title Hommage—already the word itself implies an honoring as well as being easily and internationally comprehensible—the gravity of the historic events overshadows the result of any helping action just as it overshadows the atmosphere of the sculptures.51 As described above, Ortwed’s way of honoring Wallenberg was to capture Wallenberg’s spirit, his cleverness and brightness, and show it in the way she was working. Therefore, the working process was left visible in the final pieces. Although Ortwed’s monument does indeed express loss and devastation, nevertheless I concur with the jury’s evaluation that Ortwed’s sculptures also represent “a creative act and an overwhelming


power. They represent the will to intervene, to reshape, and to change the course of history.” However, it cannot be ignored that many viewers have difficulties accepting the existing ambiguity of the work. They experience the expression of devastation as dominant, and therefore regard the monument as unsuccessful in honoring Wallenberg. As typical for many sculptural works since the 1960s, Ortwed expanded the monument concept and integrates her work into its surroundings. These become part of her work. While the United Nations building, for example, contributes to a wider, but not absolutely necessary reading of Kraitz’s Wallenberg monument in New York, Ortwed’s work in Stockholm depends on the site-specificity of the place to be fully comprehensible. By including the surroundings, as we are invited to by the dispersal of the sculptures leading toward the sea (a symbol for escape or liberation), the reading of Ortwed’s monument becomes plausible as a Hommage à Wallenberg without ignoring or hiding the context in which the rescue mission took place. Whatever one may think about Ortwed’s work, one could hardly argue that her sculptures do not attract attention. By nearly tripping over her low sculptures on the ground, visitors may be reminded that heroes in all times were not meant to obey and please. By nature, “heroes are insubordinate: that is part of their glamour.”52 Heroes have to follow their own moral values and thereby take the risk of clashing with established powers; more than often they stand outside the law, as Phillippe Sellier reminds us. It is their duty and part of their charm, as examples from the Illiad to the Western demonstrate.53 The way Ortwed pays tribute to Wallenberg’s sometimes uncomfortable and resolute behavior in wartime Budapest shows clearly that she is not afraid to clash with established monument-understandings and has no need to please established Wallenberg-narratives. If we follow the thoughts of Linares on the hero concept, we may come to the conclusion that the feeling that comes from the traditional monument based on verticality is a feeling of “Dankschulden,”54 to feel one is indebted to the represented. The exalted hero represents something extraordinary, but easily becomes unreachable. The hero’s elevated or inflated position may lead to a respectful admiration but most probably not to emulation, because such excessively inflation results in the viewer feeling small and unworthy. Ortwed’s rejection of the vertical principle can be regarded as reluctance toward traditional hero-understandings. In her eyes, the vertical principle risks making the viewers feel subordinate and, hence, feel that they are too insignificant to achieve great deeds.


Ortwed denies the heroic concept of the elevated entirely, and consequently, she rejects the concept that the viewer should stand devoutly in front of the admired. Obviously, she did not want to create a cult site, a place of worship in the traditional sense. On the contrary, and with the risk that some misunderstand it as a lack of respect toward Wallenberg, Ortwed wants viewers not to lose themselves but to participate; they should not stand in the shadow of the admired and feel small. Instead one is encouraged to reflect on the deeds and think of one’s own position in life. Still, Ortwed’s work does not demand direct action as Gyllenhammar’s work does. Ortwed’s work claims neither any kind of reverence nor emulation from the beholder. Instead, her work encourages the viewer to critically reflect on what has been conveyed by this understanding of the notion of hero, of monument, and of Wallenberg as a whole. No other of the Wallenberg monuments has caused such an intense and, for a Swedish public, rather unusual emotional debate than Kirsten Ortwed’s Hommage. The controversy about her work was at its most intense in the two years after the inauguration, but even today has not entirely ebbed away. As a result of the debate the Stockholm Arts Council decided about two years after the inauguration to set up a text with explanatory information to help visitors understand the monument better. Ortwed told me that she was at first against such a sign. However, she agreed on the condition that Per Wästberg, author and chairman of the jury, would write the text, which would be similar to his speech at the inauguration. As already touched upon, the text causes confusion in several ways. (For the whole text, see the catalog entry.)55 As demonstrated, the visitor is meant to be involved in the forms of the structures and by free associations that emerge come to a reading of the monument. In contrast to the non-intrusive small plaque on a pillar on the former bridge-railing, the notice added later contains a long explanatory text. First and foremost the text may prevent people from searching for an explanation on their own but read the text instead, accept the given explanation and leave the place without having experienced the monument for themselves. This stands in strong contrast to Ortwed’s monument concept. It is her ambition that the visitor experiences the sculptures in all their physicality. By experiencing their forms, a thinking process should be evoked but no message be read from the work, no concise lesson be learned. The text represents the jury’s, or at least the author’s, perception of art when Wästberg states that “Raoul Wallenberg’s fate is too large to be


expressed by conventional means.” This is a very limited view. Ortwed offers a different kind of monument, based on her different approach toward the hero concept and the monument genre in general. But there are, as the many different solutions of Wallenberg monuments prove, and as it will be discussed more in detail in Part III, many ways to approach the theme and express that in a sculptural way. One wonders also if the jury needed to justify its decision and underline its credibility by adding that the text’s author, Per Wästberg, is a “Member of the Swedish Academy,” a fact that is irrelevant in this context. It begs the question of why a member of the Swedish Academy repeats part of the Wallenberg myth uncritically instead of, when given the opportunity of writing a long text, situating Wallenberg and his deeds in the historical circumstances that contributed to his rescue mission being successful. Similarly, one wonders why the text did not explain the urban context with its historical and personal references to the Wallenberg narrative, which would consequently make Ortwed’s work better accessible and provide a deeper understanding of her work. Instead, Wästberg takes up the common stereotypes that Wallenberg as a single “individual” served “the forces of good,” his “only protection was a diplomatic passport” and his “weapons” were his “selfconfidence [sic], imagination and faith in justice.” Indeed, Wästberg misses the chance Ortwed took so freely in her work: to tell the Wallenberg story in a different way. While Ortwed’s monument has a high degree of de-individualization and offers critical reflection on traditional hero-understandings with her uncomfortable and unconventional monument, Wästberg’s text neither acts as a helping tool nor does it complement the work but reveals a very conventional perception of the hero. Per Wästberg had also written a little brochure, Om Raoul Wallenberg (About Raoul Wallenberg, Stockholm, 1998) that was published in connection with the 1998 exhibit of competition entries for a Wallenberg monument in Stockholm. This text again underlines the “unexplainability” of the legend Wallenberg. Here, the “good guy” Wallenberg fights against the “bad guy” Eichmann; the hero acted alone without any assistance, thereby repeating common stereotypes about Wallenberg. In fact Wästberg’s text on the sign close to the sculptures even risks diminishing Ortwed’s Hommage because the long text sounds like a kind of justification by the jury of why Ortwed’s work was chosen as the winning entry. As a consequence of the text, one wonders if the jury was doubtful that Ortwed’s monument really has the power to attract attention and if they felt that the work’s artistic quality alone justified its existence. In a certain sense, the text stands in contrast to


the jury’s decision to have chosen Ortwed’s monument as its winning entry. Another debatable question is the accumulation of memorials on the site. Additionally to those mentioned, one can find many more monuments and sculptures on the square-ensemble of Raoul Wallenbergs torg, Nybroplan, and Berzelii Park. And while there is indeed a given connection between the Holocaust Monument and Ortwed’s Raoul Wallenberg monument, which as described above was given a physical reality in 2006, it is obvious that Vägen follows an entirely different monument understanding than Ortwed’s work. While her non-representational monument expects the visitor to live in the forms of her sculptures and is considered to be capable of an adequate reading, Wolodarski’s and Herdevall’s globe with its inscriptions and especially the use of the rail tracks—functioning as an (over-)articulated sign for the killing of Jews in the gas-chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau—is highly didactic. One may argue that the globe with the inscriptions, especially with the line Raoul Wallenbergs Torg attracts attention, which it does indeed. After reading Wallenberg’s name as well as the words obstacle and dangerous the visitor may easier decipher the signature in Ortwed’s work as Wallenberg’s and understand that his rescue mission was dangerous and full of obstacles. In this way, it may happen that Vägen even contributes to a plausible reading of Ortwed’s monument. Furthermore, as a consequence of the inscriptions on the globe, the square will (and this tendency seems already to be developing) presumably soon be called Raoul Wallenbergs torg by a wider public and no longer mainly Nybroplan. This can be favorable for Ortwed’s monument. Vägen functions better as an instrument to read Ortwed’s work than does Wästberg’s text. The opening of the bridge-railing, to make a direct connection between Ortwed’s work and the Holocaust Monument possible, has the advantage that the latter becomes more approachable and in this way more known. As members of the Jewish community let me know, the Holocaust Monument has indeed received many more visitors since the inauguration of Vägen. Formerly, many visitors did not dare to open the Wallenberg Gate and enter the fore-courtyard of the synagogue. Furthermore, the given connection, now made physical, contributes to it becoming more natural to discover. However, there is now an accumulation of “Stolpersteine,”56 or stumbling blocks: Ortwed’s on the ground, Wästberg’s text nearby, and the globe in the middle of the former railing. Obstacles are all over the place—an imposition of (best) intentions but an over-articulation that acts contradictory to Ortwed’s monument concept. As in Peter


Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) in Berlin, it seems that the authorities did not have confidence in the work’s aesthetics, in other words, mistrusted the power of a non-objective monument concept without inscriptions and the capability and willingness of individuals to read this kind of artwork.57 Eisenman, who created a field of stelae, wanted his work to raise questions by its pure physical presence alone. The question of what this field means would be sufficient for Eisenman, who did not want to have the added information center.58 Just like Ortwed, he wanted the visitors to move around, experience the movement and the stelae. Instead of giving information, he saw the work’s role as to teach a lesson in history and add a moral that has to be learned from the past, as Jackson does in his Wallenberg monument in London with the intensive use of inscriptions and the line “We must never forget his lesson,” Ortwed and Eisenman want to get the visitor physically entangled in their works. Visitors who expected a concise message from their works and realize they will not find it there, might begin to reflect on their own. Then the artists’ objectives would be met. However, many mistrust such a monument concept. In Eisenman’s case, an information center underneath the monument was added—a concise statement beneath the abstract gesture. Something similar happened in Stockholm. The openness of Ortwed’s work, her offer to reflect was answered by the formulation of concise messages. Accordingly, there is a risk that Wästberg’s text together with Vägen implies an over-kill for Ortwed’s work. While the opening of the bridgerailing can indeed be regarded as favorable for both the Wallenberg and the Holocaust monuments, the text by Wästberg is dispensable, in my opinion, and so is the symbol of the railroad tracks. There is a risk that the over-accumulation and over-articulation of monuments, texts, and symbols invites the drawing of a final stroke under the issue all these people are deeply concerned about. “Fullbordad” (“Accomplished” or “It is done”) was indeed also the headline on Svenska Dagbladet’s feuilleton’s front page that showed Vägen.59 None of the people involved has the intention to sign off. On the contrary, they all care that the Holocaust is remembered by future generations. However, apparently they have very different ideas about which strategies are suitable to evoke interest and remembrance in the public place. These different expectations on the genre as well as the different strategies and concepts contemporary artists use to reach readability within their monuments will be discussed in more detail in the following comparative discussion.


PART III Raoul Wallenberg as Monument and Hero


10 Challenges, Comparisons, and Conclusions

Commissioned personal monuments contrast sharply with artworks generated solely on the artist’s initiative and under the artist’s control. While the latter find their places in museums or private property, commissioned personal monuments are destined for specified public spaces and their commission carries with it a set of conditions. It is worthwhile investigating these factors, which are specific to the genre, as, in many cases, they are the key to understanding why a monument is erected in a given space and why it looks the way it does. The Wallenberg monuments were, for the most part, commissioned personal monuments and as part of that genre were subjected to specific preconditions and expectations that placed limitations on the artistic works and/or affect the perception of the works. At this point in the study I wish to address these factors, which are often neglected even though they are of great importance for the perception of the genre. Given that this is the first monographic study on the Raoul Wallenberg monuments and because of the chosen art historical focus, the discussion itself will be restricted to the monuments. The Wallenberg monuments are quite recent—most being erected between the years 1983 and 2007—and thus they naturally give rise to a discussion of the genre in its contemporary state, its possibilities and limitations. In concluding the chapter, we will come back to the monuments’ protagonist, Raoul Wallenberg.

Specific genre preconditions In general, one can confidently state that the monument genre does not invite artistic originality. Monuments have a purpose and they have purchasers and financiers. Moreover, their realization depends on political decision-makers. In democratic societies the erection of a 259


monument can be a consequence of an official competition or it can be a result of the initiative of a private committee. In the latter case, people from different areas of society come together, united by the desire to commemorate a certain person or event. These people believe in the good intentions of the genre and regard a public monument as suitable to act as an educational instrument. However, the members of these initiatives are frequently autodidacts in the field of art as well as public fundraising. In fact, some Wallenberg projects failed at this early stage and could not be realized; others were delayed for a long time as they awaited fundraising, finding the artist or locating an appropriate setting. Few Wallenberg monuments are realized solely on the artist’s own engagement, and none could be realized, or at least be installed, without the participation of others, as the monuments’ brief histories (see the catalog entries) testify. Frequently, the monument makers (the initiators, the fundraisers, and the donors) do not only want to remember the historical person being honored, they also want to commemorate themselves, especially in the case of private initiatives. Sometimes this interest affects the artwork, and not necessarily in a positive way. For example, if we consider E. M. Adams’s Courage and Compassion in New Jersey, it is striking that the artist had to make compromises with the local committee’s need to find sponsors for the realization of the project. The bricks on the ground around the sculpture contain the names of the donors. Granted it was only through these individuals that the project could be realized at all, nevertheless the bricks look ugly and amateurish. Furthermore, the similarly amateurish-looking portrait-relief was added on the insistence of the committee. In contrast to Adams’s monument, those involving the commissioning of Willy Gordon’s monument acted in a much more respectable manner, even though it too was the result of a private initiative. The inscription on the three entry stones simply says in very general terms that, “The initiative was undertaken by individuals and the monument was financed by many persons, organizations and companies in Sweden.” Furthermore, the design of these stones complements the appearance of Gordon’s monument and does not disturb its aesthetics. The committees involved with the project of erecting a monument all too often lack crucial knowledge needed for the long-term success of the project, particularly knowledge about the costs involved in creating and maintaining monuments. This can occur no matter whether the project is financed by public fundraising or is a result of a public competition. This is often evidenced by not having adequate budget estimates for a

Challenges, Comparisons, and Conclusions 261

monument’s realization or its maintenance. Other areas in which there is sometimes poor knowledge involve the choice of monument type or material appropriate for the respective climate. Low budgets make it difficult to realize a monument, and certainly do they not attract well-established artists to participate in the competition. Those artists who win the competition can be handicapped by limited resources; for instance, neither Uga Drava (Canada) nor Anna Cohn (Australia) was able to use the material they considered to be most advantageous for their works. Drava had bronze in mind for his monument and Cohn wanted marble or granite. In both cases, these more expensive materials would have enhanced their works. A generous budget, such as provided by Marcus Storch for the realization of Gustav Kraitz’s New York monument, and the provision of an established fund to assure future maintenance is rather the exception than the rule. It is not only that the original artistic ideas could not always be realized. Public monuments depend on public institutions or additional fundraising for their maintenance and survival in public places. Even though Cohn chose a durable sandstone of good density instead of the too-expensive marble, the stone has deteriorated over the years and needs to be cleaned from time to time to ensure the original contrast of the dark bronze against the light sandstone is not reduced.1 In the case of Kirsten Ortwed’s sculptures, which had a pitch-black patina from the beginning, maintenance has been built into the project. Arrangements for cleaning such works depend however on public institutions, such as in the case of Ortwed’s (The Stockholm Art Council) and Cohn’s work (The Woollahra Council). But public institutions often tend to neglect the public works in their jurisdiction, especially given that they usually have limited resources. Even when prior agreements are established, upkeep problems may occur. A case in point is Adams’s monument. He reached an agreement with the city of Parsippany, New Jersey, now the owner of his sculpture Courage and Compassion, that the bronze should be cleaned and waxed every second year to keep the coloring. Yet, when I visited the place in May 2003, it appeared that this agreement was not being kept. Indeed, the bronze had a dull appearance, weeds were growing between the paving, and the planting in the flowerbeds looked untended. Neglected works in public places easily risk losing much of their original effects if attention is not paid to the monuments’ illumination needs. Proper lighting is the only tool to make the monuments visible during the dark seasons or in the evenings. Nearly all Wallenberg monuments suffer from inadequate lighting. Even when the artist anticipated


this need and insisted that lamps be installed, the problem of maintenance more often than not steps in the way of the best intentions. In Jackson’s case, for example, the lights, carefully placed into the paving to illuminate the monument from the bottom, were not operable when I visited London in spring 2003. As demonstrated, Staffan Nihlén’s Pienza benefited from the close cooperation between the artist and the responsible department. However, even in that case, the light intended to illuminate Pienza was for a long time obscured by the exuberantly overgrown crest coronet of a tree. However, during my last visit in Malmö, in October 2006, I was encouraged by the positive changes that had been made. The trees had been removed and the lighting functioned. Nevertheless, the whole park entry and its sculptural decoration seemed to have lost the charm I had perceived when I visited it on a sunny, warm September day a few years earlier. The surface of the marble seemed pitted at some points and even showed some small cracks, and, even more unfortunately, there were traces of graffiti. All in all, the once-beautiful stone looked rather dull and rough and even appeared that it had suffered frost damage. However, the Commissioner of Urban Environment Gunnar Ericson and the artist reassured me that irreparable damage had not occurred; the stone had not undergone deterioration owing to frost damage. Rather, they told me that the stone simply needs—and they assured me that this will happen—to be washed from time to time. Furthermore, they said that the graffiti would be removed and graffiti protection installed. It should be noted, however, that the effects of the stone actually depend on the weather conditions. The expression of the marble is intensified by light and warmth, and during the cold season it does not have the same luminance. During fall and winter, the water and the flowers are taken away. Even though currently there is a plan under consideration to plant, instead of flowers, winter-hardy fir bushes,2 the water would be missing during winter and the whole impression of the sculptural decoration with the concept of contrast and balance loses much of its charisma during these months. Not infrequently we see monuments, products of art, clashing with the public sphere when they encounter each other. Unfortunately, Nihlén’s sculpture illustrates this aspect only too well. In 2002 trashcans and lights were added to the entry. Not unsurprisingly, such additions disturb the harmonic composition of the sculptural decoration to some extent. Nevertheless, they do seem to be necessary because the place otherwise would presumably abound with even more


litter. Of course, any artwork in a public place is confronted with such traces of everyday life, but one may find it more disturbing when the monument, as does Nihlén’s, aims at visualizing a utopian idea of a humanitarian worldview. The beauty of the marble, at least as it once was, and the well-thought-out concept of contrast and balance, as it is during the summer months, have to struggle against the exigencies of everyday life. Naturally, a setting in a public place is seldom satisfactory from every point of view, even if the place has undergone a face-lifting specifically for the planned monument, as in Philip Jackson’s Wallenberg monument in London, and even if the artist was involved in its redesign. For example, Adams had the opportunity to design the place around his Courage and Compassion in cooperation with a local landscape architect. In doing so, the artist had both aesthetic as well as practical aspects in mind. Floodlights, placed in the river rocks, illuminate the sculpture from beneath in the dark. Benches at the side invite visitors to sit down. The river rocks and plants are meant to prevent children from skating on the sculpture. However, this example is one of the Wallenberg monuments that have been located in a high-traffic density area. Monuments located in such locations often risk becoming invisible in the given space. Not only do we see that in the case of Adams’s work but also with those of Franco Assetto and Karl Duldig. Adams’s work is situated between a huge parking place, a soccer field and Parsippany’s major highway, Highway 46, and clearly this setting affects the sculpture in a negative way. The noise and turbulence of the traffic do not invite one to come and sit down at the sculpture. The work remains nearly invisible for those driving by or waiting in a car at the crossway. In addition, the power lines trouble the view. The most attention the sculpture is likely to receive is from the daily commuters to New York who leave their cars at the parking place behind the sculpture and pass by the sculpture to wait at the bus stop nearby. On the other hand, Kraitz’s Hope in downtown Manhattan proves that a quiet place is not a necessity for a monument to function in a public place. It is possible for a monument to succeed in a busy, highly frequented spot. Indeed, a quieter, remote setting can sometimes be unfavorable for a work. For instance, this is perhaps the case for the setting of Imre Varga’s monument. Here, it is the monument’s artistic quality, the well-known artist and the honored person that guarantees that the work garners attention, even though it is not situated in a central, highly frequented place. Nevertheless, another setting might be even more favorable for Varga’s, Drava’s or Gordon’s monuments.


Though, in my opinion, Paul Lancz’s work itself is rather ambivalent, it should be noted that the location of the work is in a very advantageous setting in the public square (since 2000 renamed The Raoul Wallenberg Square) behind the Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Montreal. This is an example that shows that a certain placement can be very favorable for a work. Through the engagement of Rev. Andrew S. Hutchinson, Lancz’s bust was able to be placed in the Cathedral’s highly accessible courtyard, a private ground but one that is open to the public night and day. The physical presence of the work in this given situation cannot be ignored (See Figure 6.3). The space is invested with a sense of direction, which leads towards the bust. The apse’s walls and the adjacent buildings create a courtyard enclosure that enhances the effect of the work, leading the visitor to the bust to read the text on the plaque and learn more about Wallenberg. With its many benches, planting and the fountain, the square has the atmosphere of a garden, of a quiet oasis in the very center of the city. It is a popular resting place for the citizens of Montreal. According to the Rev. Hutchinson, tourist busses regularly include the bust on their itinerary. Furthermore, the site itself contributes to the work’s meaning; the memorial stands under a Star of David window that can be found high in the cathedral wall, and carved in stone on the Chapter House and Cathedral wall are the words: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. May they prosper that love thee.”3 While the bust remains controversial, the setting clearly is supportive of the work and to commemorate Wallenberg’s rescue mission. We cannot, nevertheless, jump to the conclusion that a quiet place by definition is equated with a felicitous setting. For example, although Ernest Raab’s Wallenberg monument is placed in a quiet park and in a relevant context, its setting is not really successful. The monument is situated in the Earl Bales Park at Bathurst Street in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood of Toronto. The street within the park is actually named after Wallenberg. The context of the setting and the fact that it stands opposite the Holocaust Memorial (1991), also a work of Raab’s, with its huge, flame-topped obelisk, guarantee visitors to the site, at least on special occasions such as the anniversaries of the end of World War II, Holocaust Remembrance Day or Wallenberg’s birthday. However, it is questionable if many get the chance to discover the shifting images the monument provides because the spot within this “drive-in” park does not invite viewers to circle the monument. The monument is turned towards the nearby park entrance and looks rather lost at this junction. The importance of the setting becomes also obvious when taking a closer look at the Wallenberg monuments in Sweden. It appears


the setting is rather decisive for how much attention a work attracts in the public media and consequently how well known it becomes. Ernst Neizvestny’s sculpture in a gallery two hours north of Stockholm was barely mentioned in the media owing to its remote setting. Even Lenke Rothman’s work, set in the Swedish Parliament, a place of important political relevance, was neglected by the media in comparison to other Wallenberg monuments in Sweden. Both Neizvestny’s and Rothman’s works are placed indoors and that may be the major reason why they did not receive more attention. Nihlén’s Pienza in Malmö, southern Sweden, was primarily discussed in the local and regional newspapers. Gordon’s monument on Lidingö, beyond the city limits of Stockholm, aroused more attention but the attention given can hardly be compared with the intense debates that flared around Ortwed’s monument, which is situated in the very center of Sweden’s capital, in Stockholm’s much-beloved “living room” close to Nybroviken. Among other factors, the placement itself has contributed to Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument being the object of close observation.

The challenge of finding a consistent motif It is worthwhile to keep in mind that the very medium from which the monument is created exercises particular limits and constrains on the monument’s forms. So it is not only the preconditions that may affect the works. The medium’s nature does not lend itself to expressing complex events, much less conveying all the details of the hero’s narrative, except those works where several reliefs are added to cover most aspects of the hero’s narrative or works that consist of several pieces. Most often, the monuments’ creators are forced into deciding what aspects of the hero’s life should be the focus. In making such choices artists reveal and express something about their own particular points of view and judgments as they elucidate their own perceptions of the significant aspects of the hero. Typically, the broader hero narrative is distilled into one or two single moments that the artist regards as the essential essence of the complete hero narrative. Clearly, the choice of that “essential moment,” which is selected to represent the hero, is critical. This is quite evident when we compare the bronze produced by Joseph Wachtel with the monument produced by Klement and Marek Trizuljak. Upon seeing Wachtel’s bronze bas-relief Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg (2000),4 it becomes immediately obvious that the artist, himself a partisan fighter during World War II, sought to commemorate Wallenberg as a man of action. Wallenberg’s face serves as the focal


Figure 10.1 Joseph Wachtel, Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg, 2000, West Palm Beach, Florida.

point and also as a point of rest in the chaotic scenery (Figure 10.1). Wachtel chose a time when Wallenberg was facing great difficulties, the period after the Arrow Cross coup, which in survivors’ memory, as we have seen, has come to be known as “the heroic period.” The portrait protrudes from the bas-relief amid the chaos of wartime Budapest. Its presence serves as a point of rest in a scenery pervaded by flames of fire. By the size of the portrait and by the technique of executing the face onto a smooth shining surface, this portrait of Wallenberg communicates the impression of a kind but determined man whose actions were vital to the survival of the people in need. Watchel’s Wallenberg does not capture the true physical likeness of the historical Wallenberg. Instead, it appears that the artist’s intentions were to represent Wallenberg much along the lines of the classical male hero. In other words, he depicts him as a young, handsome man of action who possesses physical strength and sound mind—attributes that enabled him to overcome the perils confronting him. If we compare Wachtel’s bronze with Trizuljak’s Raoul Wallenberg Monument (2004) in the Old Town of Bratislava, Slovakia, we realize at once the importance of an artist’s choice of which aspect of the


Figure 10.2 Klement and Marek Trizuljak, Raoul Wallenberg Monument, 2004, Bratislava, Slovakia © Klement Trizuljak, Bratislava, Slovakia.

narrative to depict in an artistic work whose function is to memorialize an exceptional individual. Trizuljak’s focal point is not Wallenberg per se; indeed, the figure of Wallenberg is absent. Instead, he focuses on the people who were in danger and seeking succor. Trizuljak uses the motif of the safe house to symbolize the protection Wallenberg offered (Figure 10.2). However, we see a house whose roof is partly destroyed, presumably by fire. This undoubtedly refers to the period following the Arrow Cross coup when Budapest was awash in chaos and not even the safe houses could provide safety. Wachtel’s bronze also shows people in danger, fleeing towards Wallenberg, reaching out for him. But, whereas Wachtel’s people find shelter, embrace each other or take cover in a hiding place, the anxious people represented by Trizuljak appear in


Figure 10.3 Detail of the Trizuljak’s Wallenberg monument in Bratislava, Slovakia © Klement Trizuljak, Bratislava, Slovakia.

the windows of a safe house that can no longer guarantee their safety (Figure 10.3). Also by comparing Jon Rush’s work with Trizuljak’s monument, it becomes obvious that the use of the motif of the safe houses in Rush’s monument is much more concise and pays much clearer tribute to the protection given by Wallenberg. In Trizuljak’s work the title and the text on the back have to accomplish what could have been the task of the monument itself. Without Wallenberg’s name emblazoned on the stone and the explanatory text on the back with the reference to the safe houses (see the catalog entry), the viewer would be left seeing only the difficulties Wallenberg was confronted with, not the actions he took to meet those difficulties, such as providing safe houses. By representing only the peril, the hero’s deed gets lost. Rather than a monument dedicated specifically to Wallenberg, Trizuljak’s monument can rather be seen as “Holocaust Art,” commemorating the suffering of the Jews in Budapest in 1944. Cecilia Campos’s and Karl Duldig’s Wallenberg monuments illustrate the difficulties in attempting to express the timeless and general validity of the Wallenberg story. Campos’s Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Sculpture


Figure 10.4 Cecilia Campos, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Sculpture, 1999, Vitacura, Santiago de Chile, Chile © Doris Isaksson, Swedish Embassy, Santiago de Chile, Chile.

(1999) in Santiago de Chile consists of an iron wall that is affixed onto a concrete background within a lit rectangular water basin5 (Figure 10.4). The silhouette of a large group of people is cut out of the wall, and the full silhouette of a man stands beside the group on the right-hand side, in front of the remaining wall. As the artist had described it, as I discovered the unbelievable life of Wallenberg I decided that the monument had to be in IRON.—It represented as a material the Iron Fist with which the Nazi Regime had held Europe in its GRASP and it also represented the IRON CURTAIN behind which Wallenberg had disappeared never to be seen again but which could not conceal his work6 (emphasis as in the original). On the reverse side of the wall, we find another cutout figure, this time of a negative shape (Figure 10.5). In this way, the two aspects of the Wallenberg story are commemorated: in the negative cutout we


Figure 10.5 ‘Back’ of Cecilia Campos’s Wallenberg monument © Doris Isaksson, Swedish Embassy, Santiago de Chile, Chile.

have Wallenberg’s fate as a missing person behind the “Iron Curtain” being commemorated, and on the front the positive cutout offers the commemoration of the man who made the difference for innumerable people. Campos refers to a motif well known in art history: the motif of the cutout and the full silhouette. One may think of the surrealistic illusions of painter René Magritte, who used the motif to reflect dreams and the unconscious, or sculptor Jonathan Borofski’s 9 m-tall Man With Briefcase (1987), where a male figure was cut out of a 5 cm-thick piece of steel and placed against the landscape and the sky in a sculpture garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The motif of the cutout is also frequently used in monuments with related topics as, for example, in Karol Broniatowski’s Deportationsdenkmal Berlin (1991) concerning the Bahnhof Grünewald, or in Jósef Szajna’s Reminiscences (1969) concerning the former concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof. While Broniatowski works with cutouts to make visible what is missing, to materialize the non-existence of the deported, Szajna uses both negative and positive figures on the inside of his tower-like memorial. Campos also uses this formal motif


to represent both existence and absence, as described above. So far the two motifs of the cutout and the full silhouette are used consistently. However, a problem arises when Campos uses the motif of the cutout to visualize both the missing Wallenberg, with the cutout on the back, but at the same time also the people Wallenberg rescued. It seems that the problem here, similar to the case of Cohn’s Wallenberg monument in Sydney, is that Campos wants to tell at the same time two stories—of Wallenberg’s deed and of his fate—and therefore the use of the motif becomes somewhat inconsistent. We meet with a similar problem in Karl Duldig’s Monument to Raoul Wallenberg (1985) in Melbourne, Australia. The work consists of an accumulation of stone blocks that vary in shape, size, texture, and color with a bronze bust placed on top of the cairn7 (Figures 10.6 –10.7). Apparently, Duldig did not intend to create a true image of Wallenberg but was striving for a symbolic interpretation as his bust shows little likeness to Wallenberg. In his bust, Duldig kept to the minimalist style typical of many of his works.8 Duldig shares in certain ways the approaches that we see in the monuments created by artists such as Cecilia Campos, Franco Assetto, Willy Gordon, and Jon Rush, the latter

Figure 10.6 Karl Duldig, Monument to Raoul Wallenberg, 1985, Melbourne, Australia © Christina Andorfer-Berggren and Uwe Andorfer, Malsch, Germany.


Figure 10.7 The bust on top of the cairn in Duldig’s monument in Melbourne, Australia © Christina Andorfer-Berggren and Uwe Andorfer, Malsch, Germany.

even using the general idea of “The Man Who Makes the Difference” as part of the monument’s inscriptions. Likewise, we may read Duldig’s monument as an attempt to grasp the timeless message of the Wallenberg story in a very general way: Wallenberg, represented by the bust, is portrayed as the one who conquers obstacles, represented by the stone cairn. Duldig successfully expresses some kind of triumph through the monument’s composition: the bust is on an axis with Wallenberg’s name, accentuated by the color of the rose granite stone, and with the elongated bust looms upwards. Duldig furthermore bestowed his confident, smiling man with vividness. However, this reading is not entirely convincing: despite the artistic quality of the bust, it appears far too tiny and in the leathery surface’s texture of the elongated upper part of the body and the face, it gives rather the impression of a fire victim. Even though the man is smiling confidently, it is difficult to believe that he was able to overcome major obstacles. As the texture of the bust’s surface is reminiscent of the sketching process, the facial features remind the viewer of a stick figure, which does not contribute to the impression that this man was capable of powerful action. The bust appears rather lost on this stone wall in the heavily trafficked


intersection where several thousand cars pass along daily. In fact, the final result did not even enjoy the appreciation of all members of the Free Wallenberg Committee that established the monument. Many found the monument poorly proportioned and disliked the minimal resemblance of the bust with Wallenberg. There was even a proposal to erect another monument in another location, but these plans were never realized.9 But as this interpretation is not really satisfactory, another reading of Duldig’s monument may be considered. The stone cairn may be seen as a reference to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The rough texture of the stone blocks does indeed show some likeness to the wall’s roughly structured giant blocks. The Western Wall is the only intact part of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in AD 70. According to Jewish understanding it is the holiest site in Jerusalem. In the West it is commonly known as the Wailing Wall. It functions as a place of mourning over the destruction of the temple and over the Jewish fate in exile. At the same time, the wall acts as a reminder of Israel’s former glory and the hope of its restoration. As mentioned previously, the Wallenberg story is inseparably linked to the Holocaust, and the persecution and genocidal killing of Jews. However, owing to the efforts of Wallenberg thousands of Jews were rescued from death. Consequently, his narrative symbolizes hope. Likewise, the Western Wall symbolizes destruction, persecution, and exile, but incorporates at the same time the hope for a better future for the Jewish people. By seeing the stone cairn as a reference to the Western Wall we can understand why the text on the monument’s back does not mention specifically that the people saved by Wallenberg were of Jewish origin. The reference to the wall would imply that the “Hero of the Holocaust,” as the text states, saved Jews. Furthermore, the reference to the wall would explain why the man in Duldig’s monument is confidently smiling: he contributed to the survival of the Jewish people. The examples above have shown that if the artist’s choice of the motif is not stringent and plausible, the reading of the monument remains to some extent unsatisfying and unconvincing, both in regard to the content as well as to its artistic quality. The examples described here bring us to the related topic of how artists can make their monuments “speak,” how they can convey a message.

The problem of readability in the monument genre All monuments depend on comprehensible picture languages or readable signs to live up to their function and in order to be understood. Their creators have to find a “picture language” that is comprehensible


by the contemporary public and hopefully future generations. However, the binding set character of the arts dissolved during the Baroque period;10 since the beginning of the nineteenth century the Western world no longer had a common, universal set vocabulary based on a humanistic-Christian tradition.11 All sign systems always have been and always will be the subject of continuous change.12 In a media age signs lose their comprehensibility considerably faster than in earlier periods. Therefore, to find widely comprehensible signs to express a subject is a difficult task for every monument creator. Given this, many regard the monument genre as outdated, as one that cannot compete with other media. It is indeed a real challenge for any artist to create a public monument that is expected to be understood by a wide range of people. Non-objective monuments are especially perceived as not being readable. Despite a broad acceptance of abstract art, much of the public has still consistent expectations of the personal monument genre and does not show much tolerance regarding its design.13 In general, we can state that despite the breakthrough of Modernism in the twentieth century, as explained in the Introduction, there still exists a general skepticism towards non-representational monuments. They are often perceived as arbitrary or even mute, as art historian Hans-Ernst Mittig expressed it: A non-objective monument was often regarded as a paradox, as a contradiction in itself. The abstract forms were and are perceived foremost as means of subjective expression, not as comprehensible signs of ideas that are shared by many people or, at best, by all. But addressing such general ideas and stressing or cultivating their commonality was an important task of the monument, a genre that claimed to establish confraternity.14 However, as explained earlier, already by the beginning of the twentieth century one reason for using non-objectivity was that non-objectivity was believed to be understood across national borders and regarded as capable of achieving timelessness. August Endell, architect and artisan, foreshadowed as early as 1898 a “language of forms that activates the human soul solely through the forms, forms that resemble nothing known, that represent nothing and symbolize nothing, that act through the freely found forms as music does through free notes.”15 Nevertheless, non-objective art is even today very often confronted with the accusation of being arbitrary, even though art, especially abstract paintings of the twentieth century, has succeeded in producing countless examples that can be regarded as the fulfillment of Endell’s


expectations. However, in the field of personal monuments Endell’s vision seems indeed especially difficult to achieve. For many, his vision is even perceived as being undesirable within the monument genre because the genre’s purpose is deemed to mediate a concise message. Consequently, non-representational monuments are often categorically rejected by using the argument that they are unable to relay such a concise message. For such critics this is synonymous with lacking the capacity to fulfill the personal monument’s function, and as a result even lacking respect for the person who is meant to be honored. In his study Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit (1995), Felix Reuße has demonstrated that the skepticism that still exists towards non-objective monuments is on the whole not justified. Reuße gave examples of the possibilities as well as the limitations of such monuments. The non-representational monument concept replaces the traditional concept of a figure or allegory on the pedestal with a sculpture of pure expression. The sensual qualities and enormous potential of the forms are the main mode of expression. Some critics, unwilling to accept the inherent characteristics of such a monument concept, regard the informational value of non-representational monuments as unsatisfying. Reuße counters by arguing that the openness of such monuments should instead be regarded as an advantage. Characteristic of non-representational monuments is the artist’s trust that the visitors are able to engage themselves with the forms and that the monument provides in that way a wide range of interpretation. Such non-representational monuments strive to provoke an intense reaction within the viewer. The non-representational monument concept implies that the viewer’s critical questioning of the structure is a part of the inherent nature of the genre.16 The openness of the forms invites the reader into a process of decipherment. By doing so, the viewer is somehow forced to pause and contemplate the work. By not immediately revealing the reason why the work is erected, to whom it is dedicated or what it depicts, the monument transcends the common viewing habits and the work encourages the viewer to reflect further on it.17 Ortwed’s monument, for example, was initially only accompanied by an unobtrusive notice placed on one of the bridge-railing pillars at some distance from the sculptures. It contains merely basic information such as the artist’s name, the work’s title, and the year the work came into existence, but gives no further explanation. This notice has to be discovered; it does not intrude on the artwork. Above all, the visitor’s attention should be held by the sculptures. It is the sculptures and their


arrangement in the given surroundings that invite the viewer to reflect further upon the work. If their interest is caught, then visitors might try to find an explanation and in so doing discover the sign. Here we should note that since the inauguration of Vägen in June 2006 this sign has been obscured by a bench that was moved to give space for the globe. Unfortunately, at the time of writing in January 2009, the information notice is still not readable (a problem that refers to the question of maintenance as discussed earlier). If the sign were readable, as it was intended, the viewer would find information that would help decipher the signature and thus lead to a satisfying reading of the work. However, what is most important is the form of the monument and its invitation for its viewers to involve themselves in the monument—to be active, to move around, and to think. One could, of course, argue that a quite similar process can also be the consequence of a monument that is not based on non-objectivity, but that likewise forces the viewer to pause and contemplate, as does Rothman’s arrangement in the Parliament where one has to trace the items. And, as we will see, the monuments’ concepts are indeed much more decisive for their perception if the work is non-objective or figurative. It is worthwhile mentioning here that it is not only non-objective solutions that are accused of being arbitrary or unspecific but also figurative works, for example, Campos’s and Gordon’s monuments. For many their heroes appear anonymous—“faceless” as they indeed are. Ulla and Gustav Kraitz’s figurative work, the briefcase with the initials “R.W.,” on the island of Lidingö, is for many a very obvious and easy readable monument. However, I argue that only those who read the initials as identifying Raoul Wallenberg and consequently associate the briefcase as belonging to the former diplomat are able to comprehend the work’s theme. In Ortwed’s work we need help in decoding the signature on the ground, but in Kraitz’s work we also need prior knowledge or help to identify the initials on the briefcase as Wallenberg’s. In general, one can state that, except for some figurative works such as Jackson’s, which makes intense use of explanatory texts, all monuments depend to some extent on pre-existing knowledge, as well as on the recipient’s willingness and ability to read the work or to reflect upon its meaning.18 It is crucial that the viewer be willing to become engaged in the monument’s concept, accept its condition, and anticipate the work according to the conditions given by the chosen concept. To achieve clearness and unambiguousness is a general problem for all monument artists. Many artists who made use of non-objectivity respond to the problem of comprehensibility by adding communicative


or explanatory tools to their sculptures. Reuße argues that a general distinction between aesthetic bearers of expression, such as forms, material, space, and composition, and non-aesthetic bearers of expression, such as placement, plaques, and inscriptions, are part of the nonrepresentational monument concept.19 Sol LeWitt’s Black Form (1987), first erected in Münster, in the then West Germany, can be seen as a prime example of this concept. LeWitt’s deep black cuboid structure received its title Dedicated to the Missing Jews only retrospectively: “In doing so, Sol LeWitt formulates the basic formula of the monument: place + sign + dedication.”20 For many Sol LeWitt’s Black Form epitomizes a simple truth: non-representational monuments become monuments primarily through their dedication; through the dedication non-representational monuments receive meaning and deliver a message.21 In fact, many regard the title and inscription as indispensable for every monument. Art historian Dan Karlholm, for example, is one of those. He goes so far to state that every monument, independent from the chosen concept, always needs an inscription, a reading instruction, and a motivation: “A monument without an inscription is not made use of, it is a ‘tabula rasa,’ a literal absurdity with a nearly endless potential for meaning.”22 In the face of the extended understanding of the monument genre, common in democratic societies since the 1980s, such rigidity astonishes. It is reminiscent of Goethe’s statement that the most exclusive exercise of sculpture is to represent human dignity within the human figure. This view remained the accepted norm for a long time. Later Goethe was opposed by Hermann Obrist and others, who argued that such a rigid view hindered the development of the genre.23 While Karlholm would certainly not argue against the existence of nonobjective monuments, his claims for inscriptions or a reading instruction reveals his own precise expectations for the genre. But Karlholm is actually not alone when he demands that inscriptions specify the reason for a monument. As art historian Lars Berggren demonstrates, in Western societies this demand is still very common.24 Like Obrist, I would argue that such claims hinder the development of the genre as well as an open-minded approach towards existing works. But we should note that exclusively non-representational monuments also remain rather the exception in monumental art in the twentieth century. Most often monument artists make use of supplementary tools. In contrast to Drava, Ortwed or Varga (who only uses an Ovid quotation), most of the other artists (or the relevant committees) apparently seem to agree with Karlholm’s postulation and regard the use of inscriptions as necessary.


When the inscriptions are already integrated into the monument’s aesthetics and clearly form a part of the artistic concept, it seems obvious that the artists themselves regarded inscriptions as necessary. Jackson consciously asked journalist and Wallenberg biographer John Bierman to write the text on his Wallenberg monument and integrated the inscriptions into the formal language of the monument. Similar situations occurred in the case of Kraitz in his New York monument and with Rothman in her arrangement for the Swedish Parliament. In all these cases, the formal language and the inscriptions correspond to each other. Jackson’s cursive-style inscriptions are reminiscent of medieval manuscripts or fairy tales in children’s books. The text on the monument melts into the aesthetics of the monument and supports its message. Its indirect placement on the narrow sides and on the ground indicates that the lettering is meant to be discovered. The representational elements dominate the composition and are quite eye-catching; the text is discreetly integrated, nevertheless, it is clearly an inseparable part of the monument. Kraitz’s inscriptions are explicitly articulated, without curlicues and thus underline the appearance of objectivity, which fits the work’s rational and cognitive approach. In Rothman’s work, the word fragments appear on the rectangle section that is sandblasted onto the glass, matching both the work’s archival as well as its poetic character. In this way the word fragments help the viewer to read the objects on the plate and also serve as an invitation to contemplation. In all three cases, the inscriptions match the characteristics of the rest of the monument. The aesthetics and inscriptions have a unity and form a coherent concept. Another option sometimes chosen is to separate the sphere of the image and the text. An example of this is found in the work by Gordon where the entry stones containing inscriptions and the title are integrated into the work and placed to one lower side of the figure’s plinth. For those artists “it is important that the words do not interfere with the image, because otherwise there is a risk that they can destroy the picture,” as Charlotte Gyllenhammar argues and demonstrates in her Wallenberg monument, where the title is placed on the back of the concrete wall.25 As Nihlén told me, he regards the languages of sculptural works and written words as entirely different. He argues that it is difficult to translate the work’s topic or atmosphere into words, but when the inscriptions complement the work it is then successful. Adams understands sculpture and text as different media that speak different languages. In the examples given, we see that these two media are physically separated from each other, but are still meant to complement each other.


Those who consider inscriptions or a monument’s title as essential elements to secure the monument’s message will be rather disappointed by Ortwed’s Hommage à Raoul Wallenberg, modestly installed on the former bridge-railing. In stating the title, Ortwed demonstrates her ambition to honor Wallenberg, and thus clarifies the reason why this work is erected. She consciously chose the title Hommage because the French expression connotes a public honoring and is commonly and internationally comprehensible. However, Ortwed does not use the title as a moral pointer nor does she regard it as an absolutely necessary explanatory tool. In accordance with the work’s concept and the artist’s understanding of art, of the monument genre and of the hero concept, her chosen title remains very open—and is meant to be because she invites the visitor to make their own associations based on the sculptures’ formations and their placement in the given context. Ortwed refuses to give a reading instruction. Her way to accomplish the monument’s function is to make use of other “helping tools,” for example, the signature. In this context it is worthwhile mentioning that even critics, who are generally skeptical towards non-objective memorial art, regard Maya Ying Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980–3) in Washington, DC as powerful precisely because of the use of names. By reading the engraved names of the soldiers, ordered not alphabetically but according to their date of death or the date when they went missing in action, individual soldiers are remembered even if they are not figuratively represented. The name is an abstract symbol but it is sufficient to evoke ideas about the represented.26 Both in Lin’s and Ortwed’s monument the signature acts as a sign and becomes thus very effective. However, for the reading of Ortwed’s work, even more important than the signature is the sitespecificity of the place,27 the arrangement of the sculptures striving towards the sea, the ultimate metaphor of freedom. During the course of the monument’s making, Gyllenhammar altered a couple of original ideas of the proposal with which she won the Wallenberg monument competition in Gothenburg in 2005. When she understood that the pictorial expression she had created with the upright image and the two boys in front of the portrait had such a power that inscriptions were no longer necessary, Gyllenhammar gave up the idea of providing a short informative text about Wallenberg on the back of the portrait wall as well as quotations by survivors. She realized that text and quotations would have only confirmed what she already had expressed in pictorial language, and she decided to leave them out. As she told me, she understood that the originally planned text and the quotations stemmed from some kind of sense of duty that


she felt in the beginning in respect to the genre and the task she was confronted with. Her decision to give up inscriptions was accepted by the commissioner, who agreed that an informative text would be too pedagogic. In my opinion, a personal monument can be a personal monument without an inscription or even a title, at least for a certain period of time. For instance, the title is dispensable if the depicted is, or was, an important person of history or culture and if an apt portrait, one that many can easily recognize, of the person is used as part of the monument. To give just a few examples, most people would immediately recognize Ivor Roberts-Jones’s monument to Winston Churchill (1973) in London (and its copies in Norway, Australia and Canada), or Hubertus von Pilgrim’s Konrad Adenauer (1982) in Bonn, or Rainer Fetting’s Willy Brandt (1996) in Berlin (and its copy in Stockholm). I maintain that a monument can be a monument without a reading instruction and that a title or an added text does not necessarily satisfy the longing for unambiguousness as evidenced by Nihlén’s Pienza. According to the artist and the Commissioner of Urban Environment, Gunnar Ericson, both title and text are designed to contribute in a way so that the whole sculptural decoration at the park entry is perceived as a monument to Raoul Wallenberg. The text on the plaque completes the sculpture and makes the necessary link to Wallenberg. Nevertheless, not everyone perceives Nihlén’s work as a monument dedicated to Wallenberg. One such criticism is expressed by Peter Meyer in his documentary about the Wallenberg monuments. Meyer regards Nihlén’s Pienza to be “just a stone in a park.” To this Nihlén would certainly have responded: “Those who only speak of the stone in my sculptures have not seen them.”28 And of course, he is right: those who do not comprehend that Pienza is both art and a monument have not thought about the work and understood the concept upon which it is based. Nihlén’s art is about human nature and about desire, and he expresses moods by non-objectivity. One could argue that the title Pienza is so general that it could pay tribute to any humanist who represents a similar ideal conception of the world as that of Wallenberg. In fact, it does not seem that Nihlén would have wanted anything else and would be satisfied if his Pienza mediates, quite generally, the idea of a humanitarian worldview. Furthermore, a problem can arise when the texts added to the monuments are not written by or with the participation of the artist. In these cases the text cannot be seen as part of the aesthetic concept and would consequently tell more about those who commissioned the monument,


as in Drava’s or Ortwed’s case, than about the artistic concept. However, whether with the cooperation of the artist or not, ultimately the text appears as part of the work, and the visitor is not able to know whether the artist participated in the creation of the text or not. Given that, one tends to concede Dan Karlholm a point and argue that the artists might better consider integrating inscriptions themselves. But even if a text was integrated by the artist into the work, the text can interfere with the monument’s design. This becomes obvious by looking at Jackson’s Wallenberg monument. It was Jackson himself who wanted written text to be an integral part of his public monument. As already mentioned, Jackson had contacted the Wallenberg biographer Bierman and asked him for a text: “It was always the intention that the monument would have enough words of explanation that everyone visiting it would be able to understand why it had been erected and that it should consequently have an educational element.”29 That the inscription’s role is integrally important to the monument becomes obvious by the little black box, opposite the monument, which contains leaflets the visitor can take home. The leaflet lists the inscriptions plus some additional information about Wallenberg, the statue, and the inauguration. All in all, Bierman’s text gives a description of the reasons, listed in Part I, that account for Wallenberg being remembered, namely, his success against Nazism, his falling victim to Stalinism, and the world’s guilt and bad conscience over his fate. Some historic inconsistencies or oversimplifications, such as statements that Wallenberg was “armed only with determination and courage” and that “the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruelest state machine” do nevertheless match the popular image of the successful diplomat Wallenberg, although these statements ignore the circumstances of the historic situation. This becomes more problematic when Bierman makes a reference to “the six million” Wallenberg “was unable to save,” which supports the belief that there had been an interest in saving Jews in the early stages of World War II. Unfortunately, the world remained largely indifferent to the fate of the Jews for most of the time. Really problematic, because it is contrary to the monument’s design, is the utilization of the word “false” before the word “passports.” This could lead to a misunderstanding of the Schutzpässe, which had no international legal status but were nevertheless effective. In Jackson’s monument, the papers are used repeatedly, acting as the main element to symbolize Wallenberg’s rescue mission. By the use of the term “false” it appears that their value is somehow questioned, which is contradictory to the monument’s message. So even when the artist chooses and


integrates text, the text can be counter-productive for an otherwise felicitous work. The problem culminates if it appears to an artist that an inscription would interfere with the work’s concept and therefore the artist had consciously decided to not make use of inscriptions, but others do not respect the artist’s choice. The artist who favored a solution without inscriptions cannot prevent others from doing so in future, as we have seen in Ortwed’s case. Her work was initially only accompanied by a small plaque modestly installed. Nevertheless, Ortwed’s work is today accompanied by a longer text as well as another monument. Still, as the new introductory notice at Gordon’s work on the island of Lidingö has proven, even an after-comment does not necessarily have to be negative for the monument. Inscriptions on or texts at the monuments demonstrate two sorts of things. First, those texts or inscriptions that were chosen by or in cooperation with the artist agree most often with the concept chosen for the monument. Secondly, just as a monument’s design is subject to the problem of arbitrariness or incompletion, its inscriptions are subject to such problems as well. Even the texts themselves run the risk of arbitrariness. Many inscriptions do not mention, for example, that the people saved by Wallenberg were Jews, or that Wallenberg was a Swede or, as in the one in Cardiff, do not even mention the historical context of World War II. That Wallenberg was a Christian, as the text on Lancz’s monument in Montreal states, remains rather the exception and may be explained by the given setting in the courtyard of a church. Often the choice to simplify or generalize is made consciously because the monument aims to honor Wallenberg as the “humanitarian,” as in Cohn’s monument in Melbourne, to praise Wallenberg’s “great humanity,” as in the Cardiff memorial stone, or his “philanthropic activity” and “dauntlessly vigilant humanism,” as in Pátzay’s monument. Most often the committees behind the realization of the monuments were interfaith organizations, which had to find a compromise between all members and therefore stress the general moral values the Wallenberg narrative mediates. Sometimes Jewish survivors seem to have felt the need to underplay their ethnic origin at the time the committees were working to realize the monuments, but as the Holocaust became more widely accepted as an historic event of relevance for every human being, the survivors began to voice the feeling that their origin was being neglected. Consequently, ex post texts were added that specified the victims as Jews, for example, in Pátzay’s and Cohn’s works.


Of course, the reasons for certain information being concealed or neglected, such as that Wallenberg was a Swede or that the victims were Jews, do vary and would need an investigation at close range. It can be assumed that the goal was not always to grasp the essential, crossnational and cross-ethnic aspects of the Wallenberg story; rather the texts tend to locate the story in areas of relevance for the location. Examples of this are the texts written by Annette Lantos for Stoval’s sculpture in California and Margolin’s bust in the US Capitol. For the latter, with its setting of political relevance, it seems evident that the inscriptions express the notion of incorporating Wallenberg into the national selfunderstanding. Given the context of the Capitol it became important to stress that “Raoul Wallenberg’s mission of mercy” took place “on behalf of the United States.” Any self-criticism that the US responded quite late and was entirely ignorant of the fate of Jews in the years before 1944 remains unsaid. That the persecuted were Jews is not even mentioned in the text, which simply states that Wallenberg saved “tens of thousands of lives.” We note both a simplification as well as an Americanization of Wallenberg in the fact that neither the Jewish organizations, who were the major planners and financiers for Wallenberg’s mission, nor the Swedish Foreign Office are mentioned at all. In Stoval’s monument, nothing is written about Wallenberg being Swedish; indeed, it could mistakenly be concluded that he was an American. This generalization fits America’s self-image as the leading democratic country, which likes to be seen as a melting pot, where the ethnic background is no hindrance to success and the belief in the individual is crucial––as the text on Margolin’s monument says, the “one person with the courage to care can make a difference.” On the whole, the motivation for the generalization that took place when the monuments’ inscriptions were formulated might not be suspect. The intention of Frank Vajda (translator of the English version of Lévai’s Wallenberg book), who wrote the text on the plaque on Karl Duldig’s monument in Melbourne, can be seen as representative in this context: Vajda, a Jewish survivor who was saved by Wallenberg, consciously wrote “people” instead of “Jews” for several reasons. One was because, in his eyes, he saw it as important that Wallenberg not only saved Jews but also non-Jews (according to Lévai). However, Vajda’s main reason was that he regards the Wallenberg story as a universal humanitarian issue, not an exclusively Jewish issue.30 Jon Rush and E. M. Adams made similar arguments, and presumably so would Gunnar Ericson who had written the text added to Nihlén’s sculpture in Malmö. Ericson had consciously abdicated the number of 100,000


because it seemed important to him to refer to the general humanistic attitude of Wallenberg and his civil courage. According to Frank Vajda, in the face of ongoing genocides in the contemporary world, the general lesson that has to be learned from the Wallenberg narrative is that intervention of the international community is necessary. Most often the reasons for generalizations within the texts appear comprehensible. They underline the committees’ and the artists’ wish to grasp the essentials of the Wallenberg story as it could be of interest to anyone today and for future generations. Irrespective of whether the work is figurative or non-objective, whether inscriptions are used or not, we can state that the challenge to grasp the essence of the Wallenberg story tends easily to dilute its specific historic characteristics. The attempt to express a more timeless and universal message that evolves from the historic figure does not necessarily lead towards arbitrariness. Very obviously, figurative solutions are most often used when the monument circles the actor (Wallenberg as a person of history, the fighter, the prisoner but even the victim), and non-figurative solutions appear most often when abstract values and characteristics, ideas, and ideals are represented. In defense of non-objective monuments that are more often accused of being arbitrary than figurative monuments, I argue that even the non-objective Wallenberg monuments are bound to the theme. The historic figure Wallenberg allows for a wider, more open context, but is not without some reference. For instance, the Wallenberg narrative is suitable for the representation of humanistic ideals such as beauty and harmony, as in Nihlén’s or Kraitz’s monuments, or the narrative might represent certain characteristics such as courage and compassion, as in Adams’s work, or it might reflect the foremost task an architect has to fulfill, namely, to provide protection, as we see in Rush’s memorial in Ann Arbor, or to illustrate the value of freedom as in Veress’s sculpture in Illinois. The sculptures’ subject matter can focus on one specific aspect of what the narrative provides, thus opening up a broader and less timespecific context, without for that reason being arbitrary.

Expectations on the monument genre Near a harbor channel in the center of Malmö, lies the Raoul Wallenberg Park. One corner of the park is dominated by an exquisite warm pink stone-sculpture made by Staffan Nihlén. It has an aura of beauty and peace, which immediately creates contact. Every time I see it, I remember Wallenberg and his deed.31


Reading the above comment by Brita Orstadius, one asks: What more can any artist hope for than for an art critic to say this about his work, a work dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg? If the artwork brings to mind the historic deed, creating even a nimbus of peace, through its own aesthetics, its appearance, then is not this sculpture convincing and has not the artist succeeded? However, the text goes on: “But a monument to Raoul Wallenberg it is not. So I ask myself: how becomes a sculpture a monument? And are monuments really in time?” It is not only Nihlén’s Pienza that is suspect for not being a monument. Some of Kirsten Ortwed’s critics seem to believe that her sculptures are not monuments “by definition.”32 In some cases the critics claim that art and monument generally “do not match,” and while conceding that Ortwed’s work does function as art but not as a monument.33 The quotations demonstrate that many regard a sculptural work dedicated to Wallenberg only as artistically successful when it succeeds as being representative of the personal monument genre, while others believe that monuments simply cannot be art. To be perceived as a monument is apparently not as easy as the formalistic openness of the genre, as shown in the Introduction, suggests. What does it take for a majority to perceive a sculptural work in a public place as a monument? What does it take to be perceived as artistically convincing? How autonomous can a monument be? And when does it not make sense? The main difference between personal monuments and other existing forms of commemoration is that personal monuments are placed in public places, accessible by each and everyone. Moreover their audiences are not necessarily trained in art matters and have not planned a visit at the site but rather encounter the work by chance. In this way, if the works succeed in attracting an audience, monuments can in fact act as educational tools, able to reach people who have not yet heard about the subjects or persons to whom the monuments are dedicated and inspire the visitor to learn more about the subjects. But here contemporary monument artists have also to face a dilemma. Their works meet with very many different expectations when being installed in public, as already outlined in previous sections. Simplified, a public unfamiliar with the genre’s artistic developments may not enjoy taking risks. In the eyes of many, creating a public monument requires accuracy and specificity and does not leave much room for speculations.34 Given this, it can be assumed that many accept Philip Jackson’s Wallenberg monument in London as felicitous. In Jackson’s Wallenberg monument the problem of readability is solved by the use of a figure, easily readable signs and symbols and the added text. His work with its


comprehensible symbols and the added inscriptions needs no former knowledge except for being conversant with English. All the information necessary to read about who is represented and what the artist wants his work to say is both visualized as well as explained in the text passages. Jackson’s monument has to be retraced, the inscriptions have to be discovered, but the work needs no decoding. Furthermore, his monument responds to the apparently still common expectations on how a monument should look. Thus modernizing the traditional type of the standing figure, placed on a low pedestal, Jackson’s Wallenberg monument makes use of verticality. Although only slightly elevated from the ground, the spectator’s view goes upwards towards the honored man, who is depicted a bit larger than life. On top of that, Jackson’s monument meets with the commonly established image of Wallenberg as diplomat. Consequently, it is no wonder that Jackson’s work is widely accepted both as a monument and as an apt portrait of Wallenberg. The perception of monuments seems much directed by unconsciously trained behavior patterns or expectations. Jackson’s monument fulfilled two: verticality and reliability, supported by the integrated inscriptions. Wallenberg monuments that obviously stand in the tradition of the genre and are very specific are easier to be perceived as representative of the genre. Another monument, whose right to belong to the genre is unquestioned, is Kraitz’s monument in New York. His five pillars of black diabas are vertically erected and larger than a human figure. Furthermore, Kraitz makes use of inscriptions. However, as we have seen in Nihlén’s case, the use of verticality or a provided text (here added on a plaque) is no guarantee for being perceived as belonging to the monument genre. Nevertheless, it is obvious that all Wallenberg monuments use the vertical principle, the elevation of the admired ideal, except for one: Ortwed’s monument in Stockholm (and to some extent the one created by Jon Rush, but even his stones are much higher than Ortwed’s low sculptures). With the rejection of verticality, Ortwed’s Hommage differs from all other existing Wallenberg monuments. While scale was explicitly important to many of the artists, Ortwed created low sculptures placed directly on the floor. Ortwed does not present a hero to look up to. Her sculptures neither follow the principle of uplifting, nor are they on an axis, but instead spread out on the floor as if striving in slightly different directions. It is not primarily the non-objectivity of her sculptures that prompts rejection in some people, but rather that many can hardly accept the idea that her low sculptures on the ground are actually meant to venerate a


man who they regard as one of the most outstanding Swedes. As one typical example of this attitude, I refer to a letter to the editor of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. The authors accept Ortwed’s sculptures as an “excellent installation with the best intentions,”35 but it is impossible for them to see the sculptures as a lasting tribute to Wallenberg, mainly because the sculptures are just “40 cm high!” and Wallenberg “did not crawl on the floor but was a giant in the true sense of the word.” The authors of this letter differ from the critics who prefer a figurative statue instead of any abstract formation.36 They are generally not against abstract monuments, as their appreciation of Kraitz’s monument in New York demonstrates. The reason for the dislike of Ortwed’s monument lies in the horizontality of the sculptures and their installation on the ground, which apparently does not satisfy their expectations on how a hero should be presented or honored. Apparently, public opinion differentiates very carefully between what it understands to be “modern art” or “public art” and what it expects from a monument, especially a personal monument dedicated to one of their national heroes. In Ortwed’s work it is not the honored who is elevated, but instead the observer who is elevated in relation to the sculptures. The traditional behavior patterns are disturbed. Confronted by the unfamiliar object–viewer relationship that Ortwed’s sculptures offer, some critics regard her work “neither [as] a monument nor as a tribute to the person Raoul in the service of good,” but instead as a “cheesy art experiment.”37 James E. Young has described what happens in this context. The people less at home in the language of contemporary art suspect the artists’ motives, while the artists or critics, at home in their respective media, do not question the appropriateness of the chosen forms.38 Figurative or more traditional monuments also come in for their share of criticism, which stems likewise from preconceived expectations or demands on the genre. An example is the previously discussed text, written by Per Wästberg, on Ortwed’s monument. Wästberg states that “Raoul Wallenberg’s fate is too large to be expressed by conventional means.” While figurative monuments were rejected at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as after 1945 for various ideological reasons,39 skepticism towards figurative monuments was very common throughout the twentieth century, resulting from the sustained loss of faith in ideologies and authority. In fact, many art critics and intellectuals are generally highly skeptical towards the genre. One can assume that Peter Bloch would regard Jackson’s monument only as “delayed historicism.”40 Many regard the monument genre as passé,


especially works placed on (high) pedestals and works adhering to the figurative tradition, particularly if the works are too naturalistic in style. One reason for this is the misuse of the figurative tradition by totalitarian regimes for political propaganda during the twentieth century,41 but also because of the genre’s connections to the powerful in other times, such as during the Baroque. Often the art elites refuse large-scale projects because they remind them of totalitarian or absolute systems. Those who are familiar with the developments of the genre, and of art in general, expect any new monument to contribute to the development of the genre or at least to take a stand in regard to such developments. However, as I have shown in a previous section of this chapter, monuments seldom invite artistic originality owing to the genre’s preconditions. All in all, the artists are confronted with a general problem. Those that dare to challenge the genre and contribute to the field of art, to the artistic development of the genre, are often accused of just creating works in their own very personal styles. Such critics would certainly regard Ortwed’s Wallenberg monument as akin to her other works, clearly identifiable as “an Ortwed” and regard it as an example of autonomous sculpture that asserts the character of a monument simply by the use of the signature and the title on the plaque. To these critics such works would presumably be “memorials that are not really memorials”42 but part of a strategy of survival for a genre that, in these critics’ eyes, has become obsolete anyway. To accuse Ortwed of using her own artistic style when creating a monument is fallacious for several reasons. First of all, all artists do, of course, remain in their artistic language—what else should they do? Secondly, Ortwed was invited to contribute with a proposal and then was chosen as the winning entry—apparently the jury considered her work as convincing. It becomes obvious that the different expectations on the genre clash with each other. In summation, not only the genre’s preconditions but also the different expectations placed upon it affect (if not the final outcome) at least the perception of the works. In this way, the genre can be seen as a particularly difficult artistic endeavor. The diffuse expectations of the genre seem to originate from the differences between common perceptions of the role of the artist and the common perceptions of the personal monument. Or even more generally of art. Since the breakthrough of Modernism, art is mostly understood not to follow a function. Our perception of art thus stands in contrast to the monument’s function with its various moral or political implications.43 Since the “bourgeoisie” has become the purchaser, the


perception of what the artist is and is for implies that they act autonomously, as Karlholm formulated it: In the word’s modern meaning, an artwork is commonly regarded as an independent and free expression of its individual creator. An important characteristic of the modern artwork is also its hermeneutic openness. Monuments, on the contrary, serve. The slave task of the monument is to serve history and the so-called collective memory.44 The common understanding of the role of the artist makes us believe that the genre’s preconditions and its implied function are an obstacle to every artist who creates a monument because the artist seems prevented from acting independently. Consequently, monument artists nearly always encounter a paradoxical situation. Either their work risks being perceived as autonomous art—and is consequently deprived of the status of being a monument, as in Ortwed’s case—or, conversely, if they present an artwork that succeeds in being understood by a wide range of people, then their work risks being not taken seriously as art because many art critics focus on evaluating art according to its contribution to art’s “evolution,” and not whether the work fulfills its task and functions in the given surroundings. While Rosalind E. Krauss more than 25 years ago discussed the ambivalent problem of “originality” in the twentieth century,45 it seems that many still claim that for an artist to be original must be defined in the sense of contributing something new to the field of art. If an artist creates a piece of excellent handicraft or presents a more easily accessible solution, for example, Jackson with his Wallenberg monument in London, the artist risks being accused of not being original, and then risks being ignored or regarded as outdated by the “art elite.” It seems, however, that it is our perception of the role of the artist and our own outdated expectations about the personal monument genre on the whole that stand in the way to approaching the existing works open-mindedly and discovering that their variety indicates that even the monument genre is one in constant change.

A question of concept: Unambiguousness versus openness Contemporary personal monument artists have to face many different expectations that seem to rest on an understanding of the genre as oldfashioned and bound to convention. Most importantly, most people are


unaware of these expectations. In accordance with the chosen method of art historical hermeneutics, my aim has been to expose these expectations with the hope of arriving at a better understanding of the Wallenberg monuments. In my opinion, the biggest hindrances to an open-minded access to the monuments are the preconceived expectations on the genre, as well as the ignorance of the chosen artistic monument concept, as already addressed several times in the previous sections. To put it simply, we deal here with two very different attitudes: one wishes (mostly unconsciously) either for unambiguousness or for openness. These attitudes shape the audience, and are decisive for how the monuments themselves look, given that artists adopt a certain attitude towards the genre and art in general themselves as well. This attitude then finds its expression in their art. Of most relevance for the encounter with the work is the awareness of the attitude or concept the artist used in the monument. It is my concern to present these two different attitudes entirely without valuation, demonstrating that these concepts exist side by side and lead to a rich diversity of formalistic solutions.46 Artists such as Jackson or Kraitz created monuments that are explicit, concise, and mediate a certain, preconceived message. The works are based on the viewer approaching the work in a rational and cognitive way in the first place. The “picture language” used is traceable, the concept didactic, even educational. These monument makers obviously believe in the genre as an educational instrument and create their monuments consciously for a public not necessarily trained in art. The formal means are used in an optimal way to bring the visitor into the work and help to mediate a piece of history or a certain message. Some may regard this concept as the only possible solution given the genre’s function to honor a certain person or event and appreciate the unambiguousness of such works, while others again may suspect this kind of work to be manipulative. However, the chosen concept says nothing about the artistic quality of the work. While I perceive both Jackson’s as well as Kraitz’s monument as a felicitous representative of this monument concept, another representative of this concept, Raab’s monument in Toronto, reaches in my opinion a level of explicitness that overstresses the concept, with the heavy iron chain, the handcuffs, and the snapped-off key in the keyhole on the front bars. On the other hand, we have artists who refuse to mediate a concise message. They create works that remain relatively open and instead invite free association through forms. They offer the viewer an opportunity for reflection, but demand also a willingness to anticipate the forms of the work. These works are primarily based on intuition and empathy.


Ortwed, but also Nihlén, relies on the aesthetic appearance to mediate feelings and meaning. Interestingly enough, both try to achieve this because their works have a very pictorial character. Pienza’s surfaces are dominated by a pictorial expression.47 The modeling of clay is a quick process, and in this way similar to (action) painting. In fact, Ortwed’s sculptures resemble a painting in their vivid shapes and impasto plasticity. We may be reminded that it was chiefly the achievements of painters that had “more significance for the future of sculpture than the achievements of the sculpture.”48 Most important for the latter attitude is the priority given to the autonomy of art. This is expressed by Ortwed thus: “Anything which compromises art’s autonomous position is irrelevant and possibly dangerous, since it threatens to distract attention from what is essential, namely the creative process and the new phenomena it brings before our eyes.”49 The previously described exposure to the making of Ortwed’s sculptures, of the creative process behind the work, is indeed one of Modern Art’s characteristics par excellence. By showing the process of its making the viewer is invited to further anticipate the work, participate by reflecting on its forms in the given surroundings. Artists such as Ortwed are deeply rooted in the democratization of the arts and the emancipation of the viewer. The autonomy of art is in fact an artistic necessity for them. As Ortwed expressed it: “Many people want everything in life to be explicable—art too—and that is precisely what I feel you can’t do with art.”50 The most obvious difference between the two attitudes (unambiguousness versus openness) is that the first offers the viewer a monument he/she can “read off” while in the second he/she is encouraged to anticipate the forms as the main bearer of meaning and reflect upon the associations they create. This is not to say, however, that such a work in itself is mute or arbitrary. The forms, the title, and/or the context of the setting open up and at the same time regulate the frame of possible associations. While the didactic concept described above leads to a message that should be learned, the viewer confronted with the concept of openness should in the first place be astonished and encouraged to reflect. While some may feel invited by the openness of the concept and may even regard it as an antidote against ideological misuse, others regard the concept simply, and safely, as ambiguous or even mute. In the final works, the two concepts may sometimes exist side by side, for example, in the form of a non-representational sculpture whose interpretation is supported by a text on a plaque, as in Nihlén’s, Adams’s or Rush’s monuments—as a result of a compromise between the artist


and the purchaser, as a concession to assumed public needs for explanation or regarded as a necessity. In conclusion, we can state that even monuments whose concept is based on openness have some kind of educational ambition, and provide a “learning process.” While the aim is not to deliver a concise message, monuments based on the concept of openness have also an educational purpose—their aim is to encourage the viewer to think. As Ortwed once described it, one reason for her to create art is that it is a learning process, a chance to discover something new, and she is willing to share her experiences with the public.51 It seems that the monument genre always implies some form of educational ambition.

Wallenberg monuments as contemporary representatives of the genre To summarize, in the face of the diversity of the Wallenberg monuments, the expectations on the personal monument genre say more about the public and art critics than about the actual development of the genre. Since the end of the nineteenth century the personal monument genre has frequently been proclaimed dead or regarded as a utopia of the nineteenth century,52 unable to compete with other media. However, as the existence of the Wallenberg monuments proves, the genre is apparently still very much alive. Monuments are still raised in public places to people we judge worthy to commemorate by contemporary and future generations. If one does not subscribe to the postulated “end of the genre” and instead understands the genre in an extended meaning, also common since the 1980s (in fact during the time nearly all Wallenberg monuments came into existence), then it can be stated that the Wallenberg monuments prove that the personal monument genre has survived and continues to exist today, providing a rich diversity of formal solutions. The very existence of the monuments demonstrates that there still is a desire for and a belief in the genre. And even if the conditions of the genre seldom lead to artistic innovation, some of the Wallenberg monuments testify that monument and art can go together, and new artistic solutions can still be made even in the personal monument genre. All Wallenberg monuments stand in the tradition of the genre that underwent many changes during the twentieth century. While none of the Wallenberg monuments is radically new, for that reason neither are they outdated. In most of the Wallenberg monuments, some of the developments made in the twentieth century, here especially the 1960s


and in regard to Minimal Art, can be retraced. Minimal Art questioned the traditional perception of sculpture and as a consequence it produced radical changes within the genre.53 The goal was to intensify the communication between recipient and monument.54 Minimal artists strove to make the monument genre less hierarchic and more democratic. They invited the viewer to become physically engaged in their sculptures, become an integrated part of the stage they provided. In order to achieve this goal, the monument’s appearance had to change and consequently the role of the recipient changed. The impact this had for sculpture and the monument genre became most obvious in Ortwed’s monument. However, most of the Wallenberg monuments have indeed low pedestals, or are even simply placed on the floor. In the works by Ortwed and Gyllenhammar we have two examples of monuments that were realized in Sweden with only six years between them, both the result of a closed competition, but whose outcomes vary a great deal. As we have seen, Ortwed’s proposal was chosen as the winning entry because of the explicitly contemporary design of her work in contrast to the already existing monument of John Ericsson from 1901. The jury was convinced that Ortwed’s work “renounces from the monumental, the tendency to look back and the sacral.” On the other hand, Gyllenhammar’s proposal was chosen just because it has an “emotional character” and because it does not “avoid the pathetic and the sacral.” These two examples demonstrate that monuments come into existence under certain socio-political conditions and reflect consequently the current ideas the purchasers have about Wallenberg and the monument genre. Both monuments represent different attitudes concerning the way to handle the given task and demonstrate that the monument genre still provides unexpected, new, and artistically convincing solutions. Furthermore, the two different solutions testify that even in pluralistic, democratic societies there is no canon of forms or hero understandings. Democratic societies deal with the hero concept and the personal monument genre and have to reformulate both for contemporary needs and artistic developments if the hero concept and the genre are to have meaning in future. “Only with the belief that human beings have free will and the capacity for generous impulses does heroism become possible.”55 This democratic attitude echoes indeed in many of the Wallenberg monuments such as Jackson’s, which, with its low pedestal, brings Wallenberg to the level of everyday people, making him tangible, and the one we may in principle become. While in Rush’s monument the ground space is defined by a triangular pavement and in Kraitz’s monument defined by the cobblestones,


carefully arranged by the artist, Ortwed goes further. Like Gyllenhammar, she does not create a ground space, an area of respect. Instead she lays her sculptures directly onto the pavement; thus her sculptures define space in the way they are arranged. What all these examples have in common is the tendency to integrate the visitor into the monument and the monument into its surroundings, making the viewer move around the monument and in this way become more engaged with it.56 If we recall how the viewers are meant to circumambulate in Rush’s work to discover different views and inscriptions or how they are encouraged to move around Jackson’s or Gordon’s monument to discover all acts of the “play” presented, we realize that many of the Wallenberg monuments were, to some extent, affected by artistic developments of the 1960s. Since then the engagement of the viewer has become more and more important. The same applies also to artworks placed inside buildings, such as Rothman’s work in the Swedish Parliament. In the allocated space it cannot be circumambulated, but even here the viewers are encouraged to integrate themselves into the work, to come close and inspect the items laid out on the glass pane. Some passers-by may struggle with the unfamiliar type of monument Ortwed has placed upon the floor. However, merely being unfamiliar is not yet a criterion for being judged as ground-breaking57 or classified as a “work for the next millennium,”58 as happened in 1999. One could, of course, argue that Rothman’s arrangement in the Parliament, understood as a monument and not as an installation, is likewise unfamiliar. It is true that Ortwed’s monument is indeed different and, among the Wallenberg monuments mounted publicly, is the one that challenges the genre the most. However, during the last three decades there have been many more radical “monuments” than Ortwed’s, such as those created by Jochen Gerz or Horst Hoheisel, for example. In 1986 Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz created their Harburger Mahnmal gegen Faschismus (Memorial against Fascism), which, in accordance with the artists’ intention, was sunk entirely into the ground in 1993. Horst Hoheisel’s unrealized proposal for the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) in 1995 envisioned the pulverization of Berlin’s Brandenburger Tor. Its powder would have been spread on the site dedicated to the memorial. These “countermonuments” often lean toward invisibility and thus accept the eventual abolishment of the monument genre’s function.59 While such works strive to provoke discussion about a theme as well as the genre itself, all Wallenberg monuments remain in the genre’s tradition; none of them are rejecting the genre. Even Ortwed remains in


the genre’s tradition by creating a work that is meant to last. And like all other existing Wallenberg monuments, she intends to fulfill the genre’s demand to honor, even if her way of honoring varies greatly from the other examples and implies a certain skepticism towards the genre and the hero concept. Interestingly, the currently youngest of the Wallenberg monuments, created by Charlotte Gyllenhammar, appears as explicitly contemporary as Ortwed’s but her work holds on to the traditional forms of the genre. In contrast to Ortwed, who formulated her skepticism towards the genre and the hero concept within her monument, Gyllenhammar’s work incorporates an entirely different attitude. Her monument clearly demonstrates the belief in the genre and the trust in the hero concept. Gyllenhammar’s monument is tied to convention, but it is not outdated. Gyllenhammar is using traditional means such as figurative elements and verticality. At the same time she contributes to the genre by using a technique—graphic concrete—that, to my knowledge, has not previously been used for a personal monument. Furthermore, Gyllenhammar finds a pictorial language that succeeds in attracting attention and in relaying a message without adding any inscriptions on her monument except for the title of the work on the back of the concrete wall. The variety of the offered solutions of the Wallenberg monuments shows that today figurative and non-objective solutions, and their combination, coexist side by side. In their presented solutions the artists were searching for a suitable, at best timeless, language of forms. The works range from figurative to symbolic to abstract forms of representation, and combined approaches, and referred to many different developments in art history. Their creators borrowed freely from the artistic heritage that best suited their chosen concept and artistic language. The artists used traditional materials like bronze and stone, except for Rothman’s arrangement of different items and Gyllenhammar who makes use of concrete in addition to bronze. We find some artists made reference to the bust genre, some to the standing figure mode. Figurative solutions were placed on low pedestals, following the lead of Auguste Rodin who planned to place his Burghers of Calais (1884–6) on the ground. We found the artists varied the type of the column or of the grave stela, thereby replacing allegorical or mythological representation with timeless symbols or objects of daily life. Others again added signs to their basically non-objective solutions or used other helping tools, or integrated their works into the site-specificity of the place. Many, but not all, made use of inscriptions for further explanation or as an aid to interpretation.


Non-objective monuments such as Ortwed’s are not “mute,” and nor do monuments that clearly stand in the personal monument tradition of the standing figure and use attributes, signs, and inscriptions, as Jackson does, appear “grandiloquent in their claims” in our age.60 Both follow entirely different concepts, and their acceptance depends on the willingness of the audience to realize and accept these concepts. While some prefer figurative solutions, others are trained in reading non-objective art, or their skepticism towards the genre and the hero concept leads them to explore Ortwed’s work cautiously. In fact, it is the variety of the monuments that assures that each audience can find its monument, and thus the portrait that fits best to the audience’s own understanding of Raoul Wallenberg.

The monuments’ protagonist: The universal hero Raoul Wallenberg In January 1933 (the same month the Nazis came to power in Germany) Raoul Wallenberg, while a student of architecture in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made sketches of the Capitol in Washington, DC.61 Today his bust is situated in the Capitol’s Small House Rotunda. Monuments to Raul Wallenberg are indeed found worldwide. The fact that he has had such widespread remembrance is the result of many factors, including the cosmopolitan life he had lived. The fact that Wallenberg had lived and worked in several countries made it easier for these countries later to be motivated to erect monuments dedicated to him. Another contributing factor was that many of the Jews who survived in Budapest left the country after the war or after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and went to Israel, the US, Canada, Sweden, or Australia. When the Holocaust and the Wallenberg commemoration gained more and more importance, many of them became engaged in the erection of Wallenberg monuments in their new home countries. These survivors felt a strong need for their rescuer to be finally honored while they were still alive. Wallenberg monuments were, however, not only erected in the countries where Hungarian survivors established their new homes. Among the Jews who survived in Budapest, there were also other nationalities and Wallenberg monuments have been erected in their home countries too, for example in Bratislava. Among the Jews who survived World War II were those who had formerly been transported from Bratislava and other places in Slovakia to Budapest. The example of Margolin’s bust in the Capitol gives another tie that stimulated the desire for a commemorative memorial in the


US: Wallenberg had both a Swedish and an American “employer” for his mission in Budapest. The use of the Wallenberg monument in Argentina shows another way Wallenberg was subsumed collectively and used for the purpose of the respective country. The copy of Jackson’s London monument in Buenos Aires (1998) can be understood as one sign that the Argentine government wanted to overcome its reputation as a haven for Nazi criminals, especially after the bomb attacks on the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and on the AMIA/DAIA, a Jewish community center, in 1994, which killed 115 people. Among the victims was the wife of Rabbi Kreimann who was engaged in the erection of the Wallenberg monument in Santiago de Chile. The erection of the monument in Buenos Aires was one of the subsequent actions taken along with others such as the establishment of the Commission of Enquiry into Activities of Nazis in Argentina in 1997, which resulted in a major conference in 1998. The aim was to establish an image of Argentina as a pluralistic society and a melting pot. The monument of the Righteous Gentile Wallenberg presented a means to support this image and underline, as the added text on the monument indicates (see the catalog entry), the nation’s own humanitarian actions during World War II. In so doing, a more positive image of a nation that had fallen in disfavor could be presented. Given all these factors, it is no wonder that Wallenberg could easily be eternalized as a patriotic hero and collected into the national memory of countries other than his own, which in turn had neglected its “lost son” for too long. While the Wallenberg narrative on the one hand allows itself to be incorporated into the national self-understanding of various countries, the elements of the narrative are suitable to convey even more general values. These include such factors as his cosmopolitan life, the fact that he as a Protestant helped people from a different religious persuasion, and that he acted not on behalf of his profession but freely took responsibility. In fact, the majority of the monuments make use of the universal values the Wallenberg story incorporates, both in the design of the works and in the inscriptions. An example of the universal values Wallenberg represents not considered thus far is a monument to his honor erected in the Civic Center called Alexandra Gardens, part of Cathays Park, in Cardiff, Wales—a place that with all his other monuments celebrates national pride (Figure 10.8). At the center of the gardens stands a cenotaph, unveiled in 1928, which commemorates the soldiers who died during World War I. A plaque for those who died during World War II was added in 1949.


Figure 10.8 Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1985, Cardiff, Wales.

This memorial is the focus of the annual Remembrance Day Parade in November. There are several other war memorials in the garden, among them one for the men of Cardiff who were killed during the Falklands War. Another memorial is dedicated to the men from the International Brigade who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Notwithstanding these military memorials, Wallenberg could find his place of honor here, and the reason is that he represents universal values. The setting of Cudin’s Wallenberg bust in Moscow also stresses the universal value of the Wallenberg narrative, though, at first sight, it may lead to the assumption that Wallenberg is perceived here primarily as a Swedish hero. The busts in the library’s courtyard commemorate one outstanding personality, not limited to literary persons, who represents the best the respective nation has achieved. Among the busts are those of Heinrich Heine, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi. This concept refers, however, less to the nationalistic tendencies of the nineteenth or twentieth century than to the spirit of the cosmopolitan-minded society that was characteristic of the educated classes during the age of enlightenment. Men of spirit, without regard to their national origin, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, and Kant, were seen as worthy for the pantheon of reason. One was convinced that the enlightened spirit belonged to the whole educated world.62 Something of this cosmopolitan


spirit we meet again in the phenomenon of the Wallenberg monuments. In this way, the Wallenberg monuments make reference, in terms of their content, to the tradition of the monument genre. Monuments to Raoul Wallenberg act as visible signs to keep his memory alive, and do so over time in terms of their artistic quality or relevance. One of the ways that their relevance is maintained within the public sphere is through inaugurations and annual commemoration ceremonies that are attended by prominent individuals and addressed by eminent speakers. In fact, about two-thirds of all Wallenberg monuments are the subject of recurring events at least once a year, are the topic of guided tours or are integrated in the context of a museum. Commemorative ceremonies reinvest the monuments with the intended meanings of the artist and/or monument makers, and accordingly keep the Wallenberg narrative alive. In this context, we should mention that the Wallenberg monuments have met not only with affirmative acts but also with negative reactions such as graffiti (Ortwed, Varga), vandalism (Cohn, Jackson, Gyllenhammar) or even replacement (Cohn). While these reactions are certainly not signs of appreciation, they can nevertheless contribute to the work remaining the topic of public debate. On the whole, the Wallenberg monuments have found, however, more appreciation than its converse. As we have seen in Chapter 8, Wallenberg has found prominent promoters, as for example, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. In fact, the inaugurations of the Wallenberg monuments have always attracted prominent and politically relevant speakers and guests who contributed to bringing even more attention to the subject. Among the prominent speakers at various ceremonies have been, for example, Nobel Peace Price laureate Elie Wiesel (Kraitz, New York), British journalist and Wallenberg biographer John Bierman (Cohn, Melbourne), Hungarian writer György Somlyó, author of The Ramp and Smell of Humans (Pátzay, Budapest), Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife Annette (Stoval, Menlo Park, and Margolin, Washington, DC) and the Speaker of the Swedish Parliament, Birgitta Dahl (Margolin, Gordon, Lidingö and Rothman, Stockholm). Dignitaries such as the Queen of England and the King of Sweden have unveiled Wallenberg monuments in London and Stockholm respectively. Invited guests to such ceremonies have included official political representatives from many different countries, foremost among them Hungary, Israel, USA, and Sweden. The lists of prominent speakers and guests give an idea of the political relevance the topic has received over the years in many countries and the media response these works received.


The inauguration of Philip Jackson’s Wallenberg monument in London, unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II, was such a mass media event that many countries throughout the world were eager to cover it. Indeed, many of the Wallenberg monuments have, at least on the day of their inauguration, attracted international media interest, thereby contributing to a renewed interest in the Wallenberg narrative. Thus, the establishing of a global memory based on the Holocaust remembrance takes place—with Wallenberg as one of the key examples. Such prominent promoters have the potential to reach out across national borders. NGOs, such as the Raoul Wallenberg Foundations, or international organizations, such as the United Nations, step outside the national memory and try to create a global ethos, and thus a universal memory. The global memory of the twenty-first century (as the national memory during the nineteenth and twentieth century did) needs representation if it wants to give societies guidelines and ethical norms for orientation. “A cosmopolitan memory [does not] mean . . . a uniform global memory, but a universal memory dependent on the context . . . the Holocaust [serves] as a key to comprehending a new, forwardlooking humanistic memory.”63 Wallenberg is suitable to develop such a cosmopolitan memory. In fact, it seems that his narrative can act as metaphor for the best the civilized, cultivated world offered in the face of Nazi barbarism. His example invites us to reflect upon what constitutes humanity, a human society. While over the decades the Holocaust has become a moral obligation across national borders, as Levy and Sznaider have demonstrated, Wallenberg’s action is taken today as a model to emulate in the face of ongoing crimes. This tendency can be found in all Wallenberg monuments except perhaps for Uga Drava’s Pietá because here the narrative of the victim remains unredeemed, the victim does not become the sacrifice as was supposed to happen. However, even here the unfinished mourning process can be regarded as a continuing warning: a reminder to not forget Wallenberg and the events of World War II. Remembering that in “most of human history, hero has been synonymous with warrior”64 and that “the war hero was the prototype, because the battle tested character and offered a stage for daring deeds,”65 it is significant that no artist depicts Wallenberg as martial warrior. Only few works such as the fighters of Neizvestny, Lancz, and Pátzay, hint at the tradition of the warrior, depicting their hero’s physical prowess. However, even these examples (except to some extent Lancz) do not essentialize brute force: Pátzay’s Snake Killer acts in a well-thought-out manner, and


Neizvestny made use of physical force to illustrate the resistance of his hero against the oppression from which he has to suffer. As referred to at the beginning of this book, more than 60 years ago, Wallenberg received a gift, a little sculpture of Athena. Athena was not only the goddess of wisdom and patroness of the arts, but also of war. However, in contrast to the war god Ares, Athena stood for the intellectual and civilized aspect of war. She was the wise and prudent adviser, regarded as protector of all cities and states. Especially in modern times, Athena became an allegory for wisdom. She was wise not only in war but also in the arts of peace. The sculpture of Athena that Wallenberg received in Budapest could have, particularly after the end of World War II, served just as well as a monument for the man himself. Given today’s pluralistic societies, it appears however that many of the contemporary Wallenberg monuments have the potential of reaching a larger audience. In fact, “today, extraordinary achievement is no longer confined to valor in combat. . . . Likewise, courage means many things besides physical bravery: taking an unpopular position, standing up for principle.”66 Wallenberg stood up for a universal principle: that human beings should not be murdered by other human beings. The modern-day hero Wallenberg does not fight for his “race” or nation or a certain ideology. “The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of him” and that the “community today is the planet, not the bounded nation.”67 Wallenberg’s example seems to prove this. The Wallenberg narrative includes a message to the entire world, but unlike the messages of Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha, this message is not religious. Instead, the Wallenberg story represents common human values aimed at every human being independent of religious, ethnic, political, or genderspecific background. It seems that after the vilification of national heroes in the late nineteenth century and after the decline of heroism and the misuse of ideologies in the twentieth century, positive hero figures are nonetheless still longed for as guiding examples. Wallenberg seems a very welcome hero figure because he was definitely not an ideologue but followed the basic, universal principle that human beings should not be persecuted and killed because of their ethnic or religious origin. The “civic hero Wallenberg” can serve as a “role model” for universal human right policies in an age of globalization because his story incorporates normative values of that type that are still valid even in the twenty-first century’s pluralistic societies.


Even in today’s societies, the Wallenberg story seems to respond to a general human need to be reminded that, as Gibbon demonstrated, idealism and selflessness still exist. After the misuse of the monument genre and the hero concept in the twentieth century, the Wallenberg monuments can be regarded as an attempt to fill the genre with new meaning. Hence, we could say that Raoul Wallenberg has been called upon to respond to another challenge: to wrest the genre from its insignificance and decay and to fill it with new content and relevance. Coming back to the quotation with which this book started, we recall that the educated architect Wallenberg had a talent for and strong interest in the arts. As Lester writes, he certainly had “a special feeling for three-dimensional structure.”68 Today, Wallenberg is honored with 31 monuments on five continents. Of course, not all monuments are equally felicitous or artistically convincing. The question if the works erected to his honor would have earned Wallenberg’s appreciation, as apparently the gift in 1944 did, has to remain unanswered. The variety of the artistic solutions of these works shows however that the pluralistic societies that gave birth to the monuments have no consistent and binding idea of the man, nor do they follow a binding canon dictating how the personal monument genre should look. After the experiences of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, it seems comforting that the Wallenberg monuments make clear that there is no absolute, unquestioning understanding of what constitutes a hero. The solutions presented testify that democratic societies can tolerate many faces of their chosen hero Raoul Wallenberg.

Catalog In the following catalog, the Raoul Wallenberg monuments are listed according to the date the work was created and erected. In some cases, the date in parentheses indicates the year the work was permanently installed in a public place when this date differs much from the date of the work’s creation or from the year a copy was installed in another place. The catalog entries list basic information about each Wallenberg monument and are based on information that was available via visits to the site, interviews with the artists or memorial makers, and secondary literature. The sources are listed throughout the study, predominantly in Part II. If no other reference is given, the information about the artist and the work’s brief history are based on the interviews with the artists and memorial makers respectively.

303


Overview of all Raoul Wallenberg monuments (in chronological order) Artist

Monument’s title

Year

City, country

1

Pál Pátzay

1949 (original) 1999 (replica)

Budapest, Hungary

2

James Stoval

1983

3

Lotte Stavisky

Menlo Park, California, USA New York, USA

4

Karl Duldig

Snake Killer or Wallenberg Memorial Statue Raoul! Where are you? Raoul Wallenberg Bust Monument to Raoul Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Raoul Wallenberg Memorial

5 6

Ernst Neizvestny

7

Anna Cohn

8 9

B. Horn Imre Varga

10

1983 (1987) 1985 1985 1985 (2002)

Uga Drava

Raoul Wallenberg Memorial R. Wallenberg The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Pietà

1986 (2002) 1987 (Copy Tel Aviv 2002) 1987

11

Franco Assetto

Angel of Rescue

1988

12

Miri Margolin

1988 (1995)

13

Mark Salman

14

Adam Chyrek

Raoul Wallenberg Bust Bust of Raoul Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg

15 16

Staffan Nihlén Jon N. Rush

17

Paul Lancz

18

Ernest Raab

19

László Csíky

20

Philip Jackson

21

Lenke Rothman

Pienza Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg Bust The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Raoul Wallenberg Sculpture The Wallenberg Monument To Remember—The Outstanding Deed

1986

1991 1992 1993 1995 1995 (1996) 1996 1996 1997 (Copy Buenos Aires 1998) 1997

Melbourne, Australia Cardiff, Wales Uttersberg, Västmanland, Sweden Sydney, Australia Eilat, Israel Budapest, Hungary Nepean (Ottawa), Canada Los Angeles, USA Washington, DC, USA Jerusalem, Israel Sydney, Australia Malmö, Sweden Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA Montreal, Canada Toronto, Canada Budapest, Hungary London, England Stockholm, Sweden

Catalog

305

(Continued ) Artist

Monument’s title

Year

City, country

22

Edward M. Adams

Courage and Compassion

1998

23

Gustav and Ulla Kraitz

Hope

24

Willy Gordon

The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg

1998 (Copy of the briefcase on Lidingö, near Stockholm, 2002) 1999

Parsippany, New Jersey, USA New York, USA

25

Cecilia Campos

Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Sculpture

1999

26

Joseph H. Wachtel

2000

27

Károly Veress

Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg (in 2006 the artist changed the title to Hero Without a Grave) Freedom

28

Gianpietro Cudin Kirsten Ortwed

29 30

31

Klement and Marek Trizuljak Charlotte Gyllenhammar

Bust of Raoul Wallenberg Hommage à Raoul Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg Monument In Memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed

Abbreviation within the monuments’ inscriptions / = new line // = break

2000 2001 2001 2004

2007

Lidingö (near Stockholm), Sweden Vitacura, Santiago de Chile, Chile Palm Beach, Florida, USA

Rock Island, Illinois, USA Moscow, Russia Stockholm, Sweden Bratislava, Slovakia Gothenburg, Sweden


Catalog entries of every monument (containing basic facts) 1. Pál Pátzay, Snake Killer or Wallenberg Memorial Statue (original 1949/replica 1999) Place Material Dimensions

Description Inscriptions

In the Szent István Park in the XIII District on the Pest-side of Budapest, Hungary. Bronze, limestone. The total height is approximately 5.6 m; the bronze figure measures 2.6 m; the limestone pedestal is approximately 3 m; the relief is placed at a height of about 1.8 m on the front side of the pedestal. A neoclassical sculpture group consisting of a male nude fighting a serpent, raised on a high pedestal. The relief is framed by the following inscriptions in Hungarian, above the relief-portrait [based on the translation from Hungarian to English by the Swedish Legation in Budapest]: Raoul Wallenberg/Envoy of the Swedish nation Underneath the relief: He led the brave and noble philanthropic activity of the Swedish Royal Embassy in Budapest from the beginning of July 1944 to January 1945. He became a legendary hero of ours in that dark period of destruction./May this monument proclaim our unending gratitude in the centre of the city whose persecuted ones were protected by his dauntlessly vigilant humanism in the night of an inhuman age. On the back of the pedestal: This monument is a copy of the artwork overthrown in 1949. Recasting and the pedestal were made by the workshop of sculptor Sándor Györfi. Architect: László Rajk, recreating of the relief: István Marosits. As a supplement further inscriptions can be found on four additional plates behind the monument. The first one states: Raoul Wallenberg, in 1944–45, during the time of Nyilas Terror, saved the lives of several tens of thousands Hungarian Jews. The 1945 established Wallenberg Committee erected the monument through donations, the work of sculptor Pál Pátzay. The Communist dictatorship let it overthrow. The pedestal has disappeared forever. The bronze statue was erected a couple of years later in Debrecen, but its origin had been concealed deliberately.

Catalog

Artist(s)

Brief history

307

The second plaque contains the names of the persons forming the patronage of the committee who succeeded in erecting the first monument as well as the names of the members of the committee. The third plaque states: Given the 50th anniversary of the demolition of the Wallenberg monument, the “Wallenberg Committee’98” arranged its re-erection, on initiative of Gábor Deák and Mátyás Vince and under the patronage of the General Mayor Gábor Demszky. Followed by the names of the members of the committee. The fourth plaque lists the names of the major sponsors. Pál Pátzay (1896–1979) was born in Kapuvár and died in Budapest. He was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1945, where he was active until 1975. During the immediate post-war years, he was a leading personality in the art scene of Budapest. During World War II, Pátzay’s atelier in the X District of Budapest provided shelter for numerous persecuted Jews. Pátzay also remarried his Jewish ex-wife in order to protect her from persecution, therein delaying the marriage to his wife Hertha. Yad Vashem recognized Pál Pátzay as a “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1998. Based on Patzay’s work, Sándor Györfi created a replica of Snake Killer at the original size. Architect László Rajk designed the architectonic addition and the surroundings. The relief was created by István Marosits, a former pupil of Pátzay, based on photographs of Wallenberg that Pátzay also had used, and in his master’s style. The original monument came about by the initiative of Jews saved by Wallenberg. It was erected in April 1949. The night before its planned inauguration, it was removed, apparently on behalf of the Moscow-faithful Security Service. In 1953, the original monument was raised at the entrance of a pharmaceutical factory in Debrecen where it stands to this day. Since 1984, many attempts have been made to move the original sculpture back to Budapest. In 1989, the Wallenberg Statue Committee was formed, which in 1999 succeeded in setting up a replica in the original place.


Inaugurations

Copies

The inauguration of the original monument was to take place on April 11, 1949. However, the monument was knocked down the night before the ceremony. It was not until 50 years later, on April 18, 1999, that a replica was finally inaugurated. Sukarno, President of Indonesia 1949–66 and known for his sculpture collection, had visited Pátzay’s studio when he was in Hungary in 1962. It is not quite clear if Sukarno ordered a copy of Snake Killer or received a copy as a gift from Hungary. Furthermore, it is not known if Sukarno took the replica with him or whether he left it in Hungary. Some assume that the copy is identical with the one later installed in front of the Radiological Clinic at Ulloi utca. Others state that Pátzay made this smaller, slightly different version of Snake Killer as early as 1974 after which he then gave it to the director of the Radiological Clinic, Dr Zoltán Zsebök, as a private gift for the medical treatment he had received. In any case, Zsebök decided that this copy should be placed before a side entrance to the Radiological Clinic in the IX District of Budapest. In 1989, Gábor Deák, who mistakenly thought that this sculpture was the original work from 1949, arranged for the installation of a plaque with following text (which is still in place): This obelisk [sic!] was raised in commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg, who was the second [sic!] secretary of the Swedish Embassy between 9 July 1944 and 17 January 1945.// One of the most outstanding heroes of World War II, the rescuer of several tens of thousands of Jews under the Nazi occupation of Hungary.//1989 In 1982, the Council of Budapest initiated a permanent exhibition of Pátzay’s small sculptures at the Budapest Gallery in the III District, where an original model of Snake Killer was on view. Furthermore, Harvey Rosenfeld mentions in his Wallenberg book that a copy of Snake Killer, prepared by George Gach, was to be installed on behalf of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of New York on the grounds of the Soviet dacha in Glen Cove. However, no evidence could be found that this copy was permanently installed.

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On January 17, the day of Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance, an annual ceremony is held at the monument.

2. James Stoval, Raoul! Where are you? (1983) Place Material Dimensions Description Plaques Inscriptions

Artist Brief history

Inauguration

City Center of Menlo Park, California, USA. French limestone on concrete base. Sculpture: about 125 cm × 40 cm; base: about 40 cm in height and 100 cm in diameter. A non-objective sculpture modifying a type of ancient pillar-like grave-stela. Two bronze plaques. The plaque on the front states: Wallenberg lives!// Raoul Wallenberg’s mission of/mercy on behalf of the United States/behind enemy lines during World War II/was unprecedented in the history of mankind. //He is responsible for saving 100,000 lives, proving that One Man Can Make A Difference.//He was a shining light in a dark and depraved world, and/with his mission of mercy, redeemed the reputation of humanity. //Annette Lantos The plaque on the back states: Raoul!//Where Are You?//by//James Stoval/©1983 James Stoval (declines to give his exact age, perhaps in his 50s), a California-based, regional artist. James Stoval initiated his Wallenberg monument after having learned about Raoul Wallenberg from an article in a Jewish bulletin dating from 1981/2. It was during this period that Stoval was married to a Jewish woman and created the marble sculpture Shalom (1979), which is situated in front of the San Mateo Government Center. Stoval dedicated his Wallenberg sculpture to the city of Menlo Park, in which he had an agreement to deliver another public work. After Stoval learned about congressman Tom Lantos’s engagement in the Wallenberg case, Stoval contacted his office. As a consequence, Lantos’s wife Annette commissioned the bronze plaques and formulated the inscriptions. Stoval’s Raoul! Where are you? is on permanent loan to the city. October 16, 1983.


3. Lotte Stavisky, Raoul Wallenberg Bust (1983) Place

Material

Dimensions Plaque Inscriptions

Description

Artist

Since 1987, on permanent display at the Edna Barnes Salomon Gallery, in the New York Public Library, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, Manhattan, New York, USA. Original bust and reproductions are comprised of solid bronze, with the exception of the bust in the possession of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States of America. That bust is made of bronzini composite and is displayed on a black base. Approximately 30 cm in height. The small bronze plaque on the wooden base states: Raoul Wallenberg//b. 1912//Sculpted by Lotte Stavisky, 1983 The paper sign, next to the bust in the library, lists Wallenberg’s date of death as 1947. Wallenberg is depicted in his twenties when he still had a full head of hair. Although Stavisky was clearly striving to create an idealization of Wallenberg as the young, handsome hero, she managed to achieve a remarkable resemblance. Stavisky expressed the melancholic yet determined character of Wallenberg via the bust’s reserved yet raised eyebrows and the sadness of the sculpture’s gaze in contrast to the work’s closed mouth with full lower lip above a pronounced jaw. Lotte Stavisky (1907–2000), born of German-Jewish descent in Lomza, Poland, died in New York, USA. Stavisky was orphaned at a young age, adopted by a socially prominent and cultured Viennese couple. Originally trained as an X-ray technician, Stavisky was discovered by an associate of Max Reinhardt and became part of his celebrated company. After Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Stavisky finally accepted the visa offered several times before by MGM to become a contract actress. However, she never made it to Hollywood, but returned instead to New York, where her German origin became an obstacle. Stavisky resumed her work as an X-ray technician in order to supplement her income. It was

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not until after the war that Stavisky could work as an actress again. In the 1950s, she began sculpting after winning a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. In 1969, she continued her art training at the Summer Academy of Salzburg. Stavisky produced many portrait busts and numerous works on commission for private collectors. Stavisky learned about Wallenberg in 1983 when she saw his image in a bookstore display of John Bierman’s Righteous Gentile. She was so moved by Wallenberg’s image that she researched extensively about him in libraries and bookstores, after which she executed a bust in admiration of Wallenberg’s character. The bust was completed within a matter of weeks. In 1984, the bust was displayed at the Roosevelt Island Art show where Kofi Annan and his wife Nane, Wallenberg’s niece and an artist herself, discovered it. Nane Annan received the bust as a gift and, in turn, gave it to her mother, Nina Lagergren. In 1986, after learning that the then-president of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Vartan Gregorian, had worked together with The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States of America to acquire a collection of copies of Wallenberg-related documents for the NYPL, Stavisky gave a copy of the bust as a gift to the library. Stavisky felt that the bust was a fitting complement to the collected material. However, owing to renovation work at the library, the bust was not installed until 1987. In December 1986, The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States of America purchased from the artist the mold of the bust and all rights for its use. Since 1987, the committee has used the bust exclusively as The Raoul Wallenberg Hero For Our Time Award and The Raoul Wallenberg Civic Courage Award. The Award, a bronze copy of Stavisky’s bust, is presented periodically by the committee to citizens whose efforts on behalf of humanity are reminiscent of Wallenberg’s. A list of the recipients can be found on the committee’s homepage. Several copies in private property.


4. Karl Duldig, Monument to Raoul Wallenberg (1985) Place

Material Dimensions Description

Plaques

Inscriptions

Brief history

Raoul Wallenberg Garden, at the busy intersection of Kew Junction, where three main streets (High and Princess Street and Studley Park Road) come together in Kew, an affluent residential suburb 6 km east of Melbourne, Australia. Bronze, basalt, granite, sandstone. In total approximately: 2.5 m 3 m 1.5 m; bust: approximately 49 cm 24 cm 23 cm. An accumulation of stone blocks that vary in shape, size, texture, and color. An elongated bronze bust is placed on top of the stone cairn showing a confident man smiling. On the front of one of the gray granite stones, Wallenberg’s name and date of birth are affixed. Wallenberg’s date of death is left out. At the rear, on the right-hand side, the name of the artist as well as the inaugural year are engraved on a smaller granite plate. The following text is engraved on a bronze plaque, on the left side of the sculpture: Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]//Swedish Diplomat, Humanitarian, Hero/of the Holocaust.//In Budapest, Hungary, in 1944 he saved/the lives of tens of thousands of/people threatened by Nazi mass/murder.//He was arrested on January 17th 1945/by Soviet troops, and has been/imprisoned in the Soviet Union ever/since.//Erected January 17th 1985. The text was written by Frank Vajda. The monument was created on the initiative of the Jewish Student Union in 1982 and via the engagement of Frank Vajda. The strip of land at Kew Junction was named Raoul Wallenberg Garden in 1984. As a child, Frank Vajda was saved by Wallenberg in October 1944. Vajda has been the Chairman of the Free Wallenberg Australian Committee since its establishment in 1982, and continues to be highly engaged in the organization. It was also Vajda’s idea to erect a monument in the garden. Originally, he asked the sculptor Michael Meszaros to design the monument, but all three of his proposals were rejected by the Kew Council because part of the design included Nazi helmets. The council decided that the helmets were

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inappropriate for public exhibition. The Secretary of the Wallenberg Committee, John Copland, contacted Karl Duldig, a well-known artist. Three days later, Duldig’s sketches were submitted to the council, and he was commissioned to complete the project. Public fundraising organized by the Free Wallenberg Committee covered the costs of the artist’s fee, the material, the delivery, and the installation of the monument. The monument was classified by the National Trust of Australia (Victorian Division) in 1996 as a Public Work of Art of Significance. In 2004, the park around the monument was redesigned by the City of Boroondara. Landscaping around the monument has added to its appeal. The space around the monument is extremely well attuned to the work, with wellthought-out illumination. The City of Boroondara is responsible for the park. Inauguration January 17, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance. Recurring Since its dedication, the monument has been an events important meeting point for the Jewish community of Victoria. Community members gather regularly at this site, both on Wallenberg’s birthday and the day of his disappearance. Many events at the monument have been organized by B’nai Brith. Frank Vajda was the keynote speaker at the events for over 16 years. In 1994, B’nai Brith commissioned the Commemorative Seat at St Kilda’s Town Hall. Since then, members of the Jewish community prefer to meet at that site for their events, as it is a predominantly Jewish suburb and the site is easily accessible to the elderly. However, many people still come to Kew and lay flowers at the monument, especially on the day Wallenberg disappeared. Artist Karl Duldig (1902–86) was born in Przemysl, then Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, today Poland. In 1914, his family moved to Vienna. Duldig was a student of Anton Hanak at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (1921–5), and a student of Josef Müllner at the Academy of Fine Arts until 1933. In 1931, he married Slawa Horowitz. Because of their Jewish origin,


the couple decided to flee after Austria’s annexation. Duldig’s mother and brother were shot by the Nazis. The couple escaped via Switzerland to Singapore. As Austrian citizens, they were expelled from Singapore by the British Colonial Government in 1940, and deported to Australia, where they were interned as enemy aliens for two years. In 1942, the Duldigs settled in Melbourne. They earned their living as art teachers while running a pottery business. Duldig and his wife were instrumental in exposing sculpture to a wider audience in Australia. Today their house, known as The Duldig Studio, is a museum and art resource center. The Duldig Studio’s permanent collection contains the original terracotta maquette, the terracotta original of the bust, and the mold as well as a pen and ink drawing of the monument. The Wallenberg monument was Duldig’s last major commission before he died in 1986. 5. Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1985) Place


Plaques Inscription

Brief history

Alexandra Gardens, part of Cathays Park, Cardiff, Wales. The memorial is placed in the Civic Center, a highly frequented recreational area, close to the City Hall and the university. An Ailanthas Altissima, commonly known as the Tree of Heaven, and a boulder. Approximately 110 cm 80 cm. A Tree of Heaven is planted behind the boulder. The boulder is triangular in shape. The right side is flattened while the other side is rounded. The stone has a green–blue–gray texture. It is surrounded by red brickpavement. One bronze plaque, approximately 15 cm 20 cm. This tree is planted for/Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]/ Who saved 100,000 lives//A token to his great humanity// Cardiff Wallenberg Committee/24th November 1985 In 1983, an exhibition in Cardiff dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg attracted an enormous public response, with thousands of visitors attending. This was the initial motivation behind the Cardiff Wallenberg Committee’s interest in honoring Wallenberg with

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a permanent memorial in the center of the capital. Initially, the committee wanted to name a street after Wallenberg. The committee had hoped to honor Wallenberg by renaming a centrally located street, but the streets offered for renaming were too remote. Alban Levy, Chairman of the Committee, became the driving force behind the project. The Cardiff Wallenberg Committee had the full support of the Cardiff City Council, and it was the city council that actually came up with the idea of planting a tree and the placement of a stone marker. The city council offered the site for the memorial and donated the tree. In addition, the city council agreed to erect a stone monument close to the tree. The stone monument resembles the one erected in the civic centre a few years earlier, honoring the veterans of the Falklands War. The Cardiff Wallenberg Committee was instrumental in setting up the plaque with the inscription. The tree-planting ceremony was funded by private and commercial contributions. Inauguration The tree-planting ceremony was held on November 24, 1985. Recurring Annual gatherings at the site on different days of events the year. 6. Ernst Neizvestny, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1985) Place Material Dimensions Description

Artist

Exhibited since 2002 at Galleri Astley in Uttersberg, Västmanland, Sweden. Bronze, iron, patina. Approximately 88 cm × 40 cm × 35 cm. A broad-shouldered muscular man, whose arms are entwined behind his back, is imprisoned in a spiralformed cage. His head is held high, as his chin thrusts out. His facial muscles appear strained. The voluminous forms of his body signify his vigor and vitality. His entire body expresses the power of resistance. Ernst Neizvestny was born in 1925 in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), in the Ural Mountains, USSR. His mother was the Jewish poet Bella Dizhur. Neizvestny attended a school for artistically gifted children, first in Leningrad, then in Samarkand (1939–42). He studied


Brief history

art at the Academy for Fine Arts in Riga, Latvia (1946), then at the Surikov Institute of Art in Moscow (1947–54). Neizvestny also studied philosophy at Moscow University. He immigrated to the West in 1976 and settled in New York City in 1977. Neizvestny is an internationally renowned artist who has been the recipient of numerous prizes and decorations. He has created several monuments throughout the world and lectured on art and philosophy at outstanding universities in the US. After 1989, he began lecturing at Russian universities and was commissioned to create monuments for the victims of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union. He achieved full recognition as an artist and was even President Yeltsin’s Cultural Advisor. Today, Neizvestny lives and works both in Shelter Islands and New York City. The Swede Astley Nyhlén (1925–2008), the owner of the Galleri Astley, was one of Neizvestny’s first collectors in the West. Astley built a studio for Neizvestny, which is where he worked for many summers after his exile. Galleri Astley was a welcome sanctuary for him. In return for Astley’s hospitality and help, Neizvestny agreed to create a copy of every work produced for his Tree of Life, to be exhibited at Astley’s gallery. In 1987, Neizvestny’s Tree of Life Museum opened in Uttersberg. It is placed on the 3rd floor of the gallery. Here, the largest collection of works by Neizvestny in Europe is assembled. Neizvestny, who had heard about Wallenberg as early as the late 1960s or early 1970s in the USSR, was inspired by Nyhlén to create a Wallenberg memorial. The original idea was to place the memorial in front of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. If realized, the memorial would have been between 5 m and 7 m in height, but the plan did not come to fruition. Instead, Neizvestny gave the model as a gift to Galleri Astley to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its establishment in 2002. The sculpture has been on public display at Galleri Astley ever since. If ever realized, Neizvestny would like the memorial to be situated in Stockholm.

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A version of the sculpture in Portuguese marble with an iron cage exists in a private collection in the US.

7. Anna Cohn, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1985) Place

Material Dimensions

Description

Plaques

Inscriptions

Raoul Wallenberg Garden, at the corner of Queen Street and Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, an eastern suburb of Greater Sydney with a large Jewish population, Australia. Sandstone, bronze, bronze-welded copper rods. Total height (from base to apex): 1.85 m; pedestal stone: 90 cm 105 cm 55 cm; upper stone with figurative elements: approximately 70 cm 90 cm 40 cm; head, hands and bird are approximately life size. The memorial consists of two rectangular stones that are linked together by another minor stone. The lower serves as the pedestal while the upper part contains figurative bronze elements. Wallenberg is depicted as an elderly, emaciated man. His left hand clutches prison bars, symbolizing his internment. His face is turned to the right, looking down toward a crowd of prisoners. On top of the stone a bronze hand is holding a dove, symbolizing the freedom made possible by Wallenberg’s deeds. Bronze-welded copper rods make up the barbed wire, which imprisons both the crowd of prisoners on the front as well as the similar, though larger, group of figures on the back. The monument is placed on a cement base. A circular pathway of stone plates surrounds the memorial, which is placed on a triangular traffic island covered by many shady trees in a residential area that includes a few shops and boutiques on the adjoining streets. Two plaques on the front of the pedestal, one on the back. Another wooden sign, erected parallel to the street, states that the area is named the Raoul Wallenberg Garden. First plaque: In Honour of/Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]/Swedish Diplomat in Hungary,/Humanitarian, Hero//1944–5 saved thousands of lives/Then lost his own freedom/ 1985 he is still behind prison bars/in the U.S.S.R.//Erected by/The Raoul Wallenberg Committee, Sydney//Sculptor—Anna Cohn


The second, lower plaque, added four years after the inauguration, states: Survivors of the Shoah/pay tribute to/Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]/Righteous among the Nations/for saving thousands of/Jewish lives in Hungary/1944–45 Back: Raoul Wallenberg Garden/dedicated by the/Council of the Municipality of Woollahra/12 May 1985 Artist Anna Cohn was born in 1921 in Krakow, Poland. In 1943, she was forced to live in the ghetto Jaworzno, from which she was deported and forced into the labor camp Annaberg and then later to Auschwitz. While on a death-march to another labor camp, she was liberated by the American Army. After the war, Cohn received a painting scholarship for the Académie des Arts Modernes, Paris (1945/6). She moved to Australia in 1947. Cohn attended the Diploma Art Course, East Sydney Tech (1950–1), the National Art School (1956–8), and the Orban Studio with Jon Olsen (1959). Cohn went on to study sculpture with Lyndon Dadswell at the National Art School (1960–2). A painter, ceramist, sculptor, writer, and art critic, Cohn has won a great number of prizes and fellowships. Cohn’s work is visible in public places and collections throughout Australia. Brief history Commissioned by the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of Sydney in 1984, headed by Ervin Forrester, who himself was saved by Wallenberg. The committee organized the necessary fundraising; the Woollahra Council, which now owns the monument, donated the land and prepared the cement base. The second plaque was added in about 1989 by the local Holocaust Survivors Association, because they felt that they were not sufficiently represented in the original text. The memorial was listed as Australian Survey of Sculpture, Monuments & Outdoor Cultural Material (SMOCM) in 1997. Inauguration May 12, 1985. Recurring Since the inauguration, a number of events have taken events place at the memorial, including Holocaust Memorial services and visits by classes from a nearby Jewish school.

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8. B. Horn, R. Wallenberg (1986) Place

In the library of the Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study and Memorial Center of Eilat, Eilat, Israel. Material Bust: gypsum imitating bronze by its coloring; base: wooden box covered with green fabric. Dimensions Bust: 56 cm in height, shoulder section width: 40 cm; base: 20 cm 20 cm 20 cm. Description Idealized version of a young, determined Wallenberg. The bust achieves a remarkable resemblance to Wallenberg. The head is bent forward slightly and tilted to the left, which endows the man with an insightful and sympathetic expression. The texture of the coat collar suggests a valuable material, possibly fur. The man does not wear a shirt, instead his prominent Adam’s apple and the upper part of the body appear bare under the collar. The back of the sculpture is undeveloped. Plaques A yellow paper sign is attached to the base, stating: Inscriptions Raoul Wallenberg [the text continues in Hebrew]/ Righteous Gentile/Born in Sweden on 4.8.1912/Saved tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest/Arrested by the Russians on 14.1.1945 [sic]. On the front B. Wallenberg is engraved into the gypsum. Artist B. Horn. Brief history The bust was presented to the Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study and Memorial Center in Eilat on the day of the institute’s official opening by the Mayor of Eilat, Mr Gabi Kadosh, who had kept the bust in his office for a couple of years. Jad Bamidbar is a religious secondary high school for girls. The bust is situated in the institute’s library. The schoolgirls, as well as other groups, come to the center to learn about the Holocaust and meet with its survivors. Many of the Holocaust survivors who work at the school come from Hungary. They stop at the bust and recount Wallenberg’s deeds for the visitors. Inauguration On April 9, 2002, the 27th of Nisan 5752 (Holocaust Memorial Day), the same day the institute opened.


9. Imre Varga, The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1987) Place

At the corner of Szilágyi Erzsébet fasor and Nagyajtai utca, four tram stops from Moszkva tér, in the II District on the Buda-side of Budapest, Hungary. Material Bronze, granite stone blocks. Dimensions The bronze figure is approximately 2.2 m in height; the granite stone blocks are higher than the bronze figure. Description The figure of an elderly man extends his hand in an authoritative gesture. He is in the center of the composition. The figure stands between two large upright granite stone blocks. Additional granite stones provide a base. On the back of the two blocks, Pál Pátzay’s Snake Killer is carved into the stone and highlighted in gold. There are swastikas on the snake’s back. The following quotation from Ovid is carved into the stone: Inscriptions Donec Eris Felix Multos Numerab Amicos/Tempora Si Fuverint Nubila Solus Eris Raoul Wallenberg’s name and a short text in Hungarian are carved into a large granite stone with a polished surface. Apparently, the text was added later, as it is not visible in earlier photos. The stone was erected a few meters from the monument toward the street: The monument was erected by the Wallenberg family, Nicholas M. Salgó, Ambassador of the United States of America to Hungary. Council of the Capital Budapest 1987. Artist Imre Varga was born in 1923 in Siófok, Hungary. It was thanks to artist Pál Pátzay that Varga was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1950 and graduated in 1956. In 1984, Varga represented Hungary at the Biennale in Venice. He is one of Hungary’s most successful contemporary sculptors. Varga has created numerous memorials in Budapest and other Hungarian and European cities. He has been decorated with numerous national and international prizes. During the 1980s, he was engaged in politics, as an independent party member of the parliament. Brief history The model for the monument was created at Varga’s own initiative. It was largely financed by the American Ambassador to Hungary, Nicholas M. Salgó, himself a

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native Hungarian Jew. Peter Wallenberg from Sweden paid for the granite. János Kádár, former Premier of Hungary and General Secretary of Hungary’s Communist Party, welcomed the idea of the monument. Kádar was aware that an official visit to Sweden was imminent. Inauguration The official ceremony took place on May 15, 1987, organized by the City of Budapest, the Budapest Committee, and the so-called Hazafias Népfront (Patriotic Front of Citizens). Recurring A ceremony takes place at the site every year, events on August 4, Wallenberg’s anniversary. Copies Models can be found, for example in the Varga Museum in Budapest and in the Jewish Museum in Stockholm. There are also privately owned models. On June 16, 2002, a slightly different version of the monument was inaugurated in Tel Aviv, Israel. It stands at the intersection of Raoul Wallenberg and Habarzel Streets in the suburb Ramat-Gan. Here the granite blocks are replaced by limestone, which are slightly lower in height than the ones in Budapest. The figure of Wallenberg stands on a bronze plate mounted on the low limestone base. The cutout of Wallenberg was extended in order to make the figure more visible from the busy street. Furthermore, the carving of Pátzay’s monument, as well as the quotation by Ovid, were left out. Consequently, this version of the monument focuses on Wallenberg’s fate as a martyr, even more so than the original monument in Budapest. He sacrificed himself for the survival of the Jewish people. The portrayal of Wallenberg as a martyr corresponds with the Israeli salvific historic– zionistic view that Jews, who were annihilated in the Holocaust, are martyrs.

10. Uga Drava, Pietà (1987) Place

In the Raoul Wallenberg Park, at the intersection of Viewmont Drive and Four Season, in the City of Nepean (now part of Ottawa), Ontario, Canada.



Plaques

Inscriptions

Artist

Brief history

Inauguration

Gray Canadian granite. Approximately 210 cm in height, 120 cm in width and 60 cm in depth. Modification of the classical Pietà motif. A male corpse diagonally penetrates the body of a mourning female figure. A huge sign identifies the Raoul Wallenberg Park. A bronze plate on a large stone was placed in the park in order to not obstruct the view. The plaque states: Raoul Wallenberg Park//“He who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.” (Talmud)//Raoul Wallenberg saved more than 100,000 lives from extermination during WW II./ This park and sculpture were commemorated by Nepean City Council for his humanitarian deeds.//The City of Nepean gratefully acknowledges the financial/contributions for the Wallenberg sculpture from:/The Ontario Ministry of Culture and Communications/The Holocaust Remembrance Committee of Ottawa-Carleton/Jewish Community Council/ B’nai Brith Canada/Residents of Ottawa-Carleton//Sculptor: Uga Drava/Park Commemoration: August 21, 1983/ Sculpture unveiled: May 31, 1987 Uga Drava was born in 1954 in Riga, Latvia. Drava studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Sculpture, in Riga. He was able to defect from Soviet-occupied Latvia in 1984 to Canada, while on an artist’s tour in Mexico, with the help of a Jewish woman. After winning the competition for the sculpture in the Raoul Wallenberg Park, it seemed to Drava as if he had come full circle. In creating a memorial to Wallenberg, Drava was able to pay tribute and express his thanks to the man who saved many Jews, while giving thanks to the Jewish woman who had saved him. His own fate and experiences in occupied Latvia made it easier for Drava to comprehend Wallenberg’s fate, which he had already heard about while in Latvia. The Pietà was Drava’s first major work. The winning entry of the Raoul Wallenberg Park Competition, commissioned by the City of Nepean and the Wallenberg Foundation (out of 26 entries). Financed by the City of Nepean as well as by private funding. May 31, 1987.

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11. Franco Assetto, Angel of Rescue (1988) Place

Material Dimensions

Description

Plaques

Inscriptions

On a small plaza, in the northeast corner of Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, USA. This corner has been called the Raoul Wallenberg Square since 1986. A street sign marks the square. Polished bronze, stainless steel, concrete terrazzo pedestal. Silhouette of Wallenberg: the approximate dimensions of the work are 180 cm in height; wings 270 cm in height; pedestal: 90 cm in height. The polished bronze silhouette of Wallenberg appears between two plates of stainless steel wings. Wallenberg is stepping forward, stretching out his hand as if he wants to shake another man’s hand. The sculpture is mounted on an octagonal pedestal. Four bronze plaques affixed on the sides of the pedestal. On the front of the plaque is Raoul Wallenberg’s name, beneath which a longer text is inscribed (see inscription a); on the side of the plaque is the artist’s signature; the rear plaque lists the names of major patrons as well as a dedication (see inscription b). a: This “Angel of Rescue” went to Budapest in the/summer of 1944 as a Swedish diplomat with a/mission to save the remainder of the Jews of/ Hungary from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.//He issued thousands of protective passes, set up “safe houses” and brought back the persecuted/from the deportation trains and the death marches./In the final hours of the siege of the city,/he prevented the Nazis from blowing up the ghetto/where 70,000 Jews still lived.//The Soviet army misunderstood his work/and took him prisoner. He was never released./He saved our faith in humanity.//—The survivors b: This monument was erected by the efforts of these individuals, as well as the hundreds of other/people whose support cannot go unrecognized. Special thanks go to Great Western Bank for/providing this site and to John Prager-Brooks, Paul Brooks and Suzanne Weiner Zada, for/without their dedication this dream would not have become a reality. The artist’s signature appears on a plaque on the monument’s base in a style unlike signatures that Assetto has


Artist

Brief history

used on other artworks. On the Wallenberg monument the “ss” of his name is written in the same style as the double ss of the Sig Rune SS insignia that was used for the military Nazi organization Schutzstaffel (Protective Squadron). Its usage is something of an enigma in this context. Franco Assetto (1911–93) was born in Turin, Italy. He graduated with a degree in pharmaceutical studies. After a long military service, he devoted himself to painting and sculpture. Assetto lived and worked both in California and Italy. In September 1986, the corner of the intersection was named Raoul Wallenberg Square. According to Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles City Councilman, this was the first time a street corner had been named after a person in L.A. During the dedication ceremony of the street sign, John Brooks, who was rescued by Wallenberg, announced that a plaque or bust should be erected at the site. Brooks became the driving force behind the initiative. He turned to the art dealer Suzanne Zada, herself a Holocaust survivor, saved by the White Busses of Folke Bernadotte. Zada contacted the Italian artist Franco Assetto, the only artist she represented who worked sculpturally. Assetto had never heard of Wallenberg before, but Zada convinced the artist that taking on the Wallenberg commission would be a worthy cause. Assetto then volunteered his efforts. The sculpture was produced in Italy where Assetto supervised the work. Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky helped with the fundraising and won approval for the project from the city’s bureaucracy. Furthermore, he contacted James F. Montgomery, then Chairman of the Great Western Bank. The bank agreed to allow the sculpture to be installed on its private property. Public fundraising financed the material for the sculpture as well as the production and installation costs. The sculpture was donated to the City of Los Angeles. The work was accepted into the Los Angeles permanent art collection, and the city agreed to assume all maintenance and liability costs. However, the site is still the property of the Great Western Financial Corp. Bank, thus the sculpture

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could be removed any time on demand on the bank’s owner. Inauguration December 4, 1988, the first day of that year’s Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights.

12. Miri Margolin, Raoul Wallenberg Bust (1988) Place

Material Dimensions

Description

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Erected 1995 in the southeast niche of the Small House Rotunda on the first floor of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA. Bronze bust mounted on a shaft of polished red Vätö granite from Sweden. Bust: approximately 48 cm in height, 43 cm in width and 27 cm in depth (from the back of head to the tip of the nose); pedestal: 140 cm in height, 45 cm in width and 38 cm in depth; plaque: approximately 30 cm 30 cm. Wallenberg is depicted as a balding, middle-aged man with narrow eyes, nose, and mouth. Wallenberg’s figure appears stiff and rawboned. The upper body includes his shoulders, depicting Wallenberg dressed in a suit, shirt, and tie. The bronze plaque on the pedestal states: Raoul Wallenberg/Swedish Humanitarian//Raoul Wallenberg’s mission of mercy/on behalf of the United States during/ World War II was unprecedented in the/history of mankind. He was responsible/for saving tens of thousands of lives/ during the Holocaust. A shining light/in a dark and depraved world, he proved/that one person with the courage/to care can make a difference.//Dedicated on November 2, 1995,/ fifty years after his disappearance The text was written by Annette Lantos. Miri Margolin was born in 1917 in Chechochinik, Poland. Two years later Margolin’s family immigrated to Israel. Margolin is the aunt of the former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu between 1996 and 1999. Margolin worked as a ceramic artist until her nephew, Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Netanyahu, was killed in the Entebbe Operation in 1976. It was because of his death that Margolin began creating sculptures. She studied sculpture at Tel Aviv’s Avni Institute for five


years. Margolin’s first bust depicted her nephew, and was followed by portrait busts of several outstanding Jewish personalities, such as Ben Gurion. Portrait busts became one of her specialties. Brief history In 1987, Margolin attended a special event in Wallenberg’s honor. It was at this event that she met Wallenberg’s brother Guy von Dardel and sister Nina. Consequently, Margolin requested that Nina Lagergren send her pictures of Wallenberg, so that she could create a bust. Within a couple of weeks, a bust was executed from the photos sent by Lagergren. A few years later, Margolin’s American friend Lillian Hoffman, a Colorado philanthropist and the organizer of the Colorado Committee of Concern for Soviet Jewry and Chairperson of the Raoul Wallenberg National Committee, saw the bust in her studio. Margolin asked Hoffman to show pictures of the bust to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Back in the US, Mrs Hoffman showed Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife Annette pictures of the bust. In response to Lantos’s efforts, Congress adopted House Concurrent Resolution 222 in 1994, which authorized the permanent placement of a Wallenberg bust in the US Capitol. The Joint Committee to the Library accepted the bust. The bust found its setting in the Small House Rotunda where a space was available. The granite shaft on which the bust is mounted was a gift from the Swedish Government. Inauguration Originally the bust was to be unveiled on January 17, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance. For logistical reasons within the American Congress, however, the date had to be changed. Before the actual unveiling on November 2, 1995, a grand dedication ceremony took place with more than 800 guests, in the Great Rotunda at the US Capitol. 13. Mark Salman, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg (1991) Place

Displayed in the Righteous Among the Nations Study Room in Yad Vashem’s Administration and Research Building, Yad Vashem—The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel.

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Material Dimensions

Bronze. Material of the background unknown. 25 cm in height 15 cm in width 18 cm in depth; background structure: 135 cm in height 95 cm in width 1 cm in depth. Description The portrait depicts a young, proud, yet melancholic Wallenberg, with thinning hair and a pale forehead. Salman achieves a remarkable physical likeness without working in a naturalistic style. Instead, his artistic approach is much more subtle. The work of the artist’s hands is still visible, keeping both Wallenberg’s facial expression as well as his coat collar and tie in a vague adumbration. As a result, the bust appears somewhat unfinished while exuding an aura of melancholia, which is suggestive of Wallenberg’s uncertain fate. The bust is placed upon a console on a puce-colored wall. On the lower end, in line with the portrait bust of Wallenberg, there is a stylized flower that rises from the ground, above the adumbrated barbed wire, toward the Righteous Gentile—symbolizing the hope Wallenberg represented. Inscriptions The bust placed upon a console, transfixed to a puce-colored wall with Wallenberg’s name in bronze lettering. The text is in Hebrew and beneath in Latin script. The year Wallenberg was born is listed between the texts while the day of death is left out. Artist Mark Salman was born in 1938 in the North Caucasus. His entire family was murdered during the German occupation. The experiences of the Holocaust and World War II had a strong impact on his art. Salman completed his art studies at the Stroganoff Institute in Moscow in 1967. Salman immigrated to Israel in the beginning of 1991. Brief history The bust and background was commissioned by Yad Vashem in 1991. Inauguration In May 1991.

14. Adam Chyrek, Raoul Wallenberg (1992) Place

Inside the Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst, an eastern suburb of Greater Sydney, where many Jews live and where the Jewish Community Centre and the B’nai


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B’brith Centre are located. Chyrek’s Wallenberg statue stands in front of a section of the permanent Holocaust exhibition entitled Righteous Among the Nations that reopened in May 2005. Plaster of Paris with a bronze patina on a wooden base placed on a marble floor. Figure: 175 cm 55 cm (at the shoulders); irregular pentagonal base: 11 cm in height, angels: 70 cm, 70 cm, 30 cm, 57 cm, 57 cm. Wallenberg is depicted as a young, considerate diplomat, in a suit with a cloak hanging over his shoulders, distributing protective passports. A brass plaque on the marble floor states the artist’s name, the year the sculpture was created, and the material. The name Raoul Wallenberg is affixed in huge brass letters onto the two front surfaces of the low wooden base. As part of the exhibition, an additional sign with a longer text, underneath the statue, informs the viewer about Wallenberg’s mission and fate. Adam Chyrek was born in 1941 in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Chyrek graduated from the Academy of Art in Krakow in 1966, with a major in sculpture. He worked as a freelance artist in Poland until he immigrated to Australia in 1979, where he decorated interiors of Polish churches. Chyrek later worked for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Chyrek’s sculptures of Wallenberg and Janusz Korczak were the result of a competition announced by the Sydney Jewish Museum.

15. Staffan Nihlén, Pienza, also known as The Raoul Wallenberg Monument (1993) Place Material Dimensions

Raoul Wallenberg Park, at Lilla Nygatan and Kanalgatan, Malmö, Scania, Sweden. Portuguese marble, diabase, granite and cobblestone pavement. Sculpture Pienza: approximately 2 m in height, the surrounding structure, at its base, is about 10 m in

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diameter with space allotted for the water basins, flower beds, and the low-level elevation, whereby the granite and diabase are between 15 cm and 40 cm in height; entry stones: approximately 2 m in height and 4.2 m in length. The entire area around Pienza is about 20 m in diameter, in addition to the opening toward Gustav Adolfs torg. Three huge, dark entry stones lead toward the large, light marble sculpture Pienza, which stands in a water basin. The sculpture is the focal point of a composition based on balance and contrast. Two plaques. The first, a small metal plaque, unobtrusively placed on the low semi-circular granite wall, states in Swedish: Entry to the/Raoul Wallenberg Park/1991 The second plaque is made of bronze and placed upon a separate granite stone on the ground, in front of the basin. It states: Raoul Wallenbergs Park [in huge letters]//[The inscription in Swedish is followed by an English translation beneath it, between the following text in Swedish only:] //The sculpture /PIENZA/Sculptor Staffan Nihlén/Erected 1993/by/the City of Malmö and/ Malmö Beautification- and Planting Association //Raoul Wallenberg rescued many Jews from persecution in Budapest from 1944–1945. He was taken prisoner by/the Soviet forces during the final stage of the war and taken to Moscow. His fate from that time onwards is unknown.// Throughout the world the name Raoul Wallenberg stands as a symbol of hope and light/in the struggle against persecution and oppression. The text was written by Gunnar Ericson in association with the artist. Staffan Nihlén was born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden. He was a pupil of Isaac Grünewald (1943–4) and at Otte Sköld’s School of Painting, Stockholm (1945–8). Nihlén studied painting at Kungliga Konsthögskolan (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Stockholm (1950–5). Nihlén took several study and work trips abroad, mainly to Italy, in addition to exhibiting extensively throughout


Europe. He also taught at art schools and universities, for example as Head Professor of Sculpture at the Valand Academy of Art in Gothenburg. Nihlén started sculpting around 1966/7. Nihlén has worked with marble since 1984 during long stays in Pietrasanta, Italy. Nihlén had already heard about the Nazi atrocities during World War II. His father, John Nihlén, actively saved Jews from Nazi Germany. John Nihlén traveled through Germany and followed the political developments with deep anxiety, so much so that he expressed his concerns in articles published by Dagens Nyheter. Around 1938, John started to arrange fictitious marriages. John’s brother became involved in Nihlén’s rescue actions by marrying a German Jew. As fate would have it, the couple ended up happily married. As a result of his father’s as well as his uncle’s actions, Staffan Nihlén in his youth had contact with refugees and dissidents from Germany. He knew of Wallenberg’s deeds and fate, and was intrigued by Wallenberg. Although the design for the Raoul Wallenberg Park was a commission, Nihlén held a personal interest in completing the work. Brief history After the former Altona Park in Malmö was renamed Raoul Wallenberg Park in 1988, Staffan Nihlén was commissioned to undertake a renewal of the entrance to the park that would include a sculptural decoration. It was the Commissioner of Urban Environment, Gunnar Ericson, who had suggested Nihlén. The design and sculpture were to be worthy of the memory of Wallenberg. The work on the sculpture and the renewal of the park were begun in 1990. The design of the park entrance was a collaboration between the artist and a landscape architect. Inauguration The first inauguration took place on September 6, 1991, when the entrance to the park and the sculptural base decoration were completed. In addition, the small plaque on the semicircular granite wall was erected. The grand inauguration took place in July 1993, when the marble stone was erected, and the ground plaque, with an extended text on the granite stone, was put up.

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16. Jon Rush, Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg Place

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(1995)

Jon Rush’s Köszönöm is located next to the western front entrance of the Art and Architecture Building at 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard on the northern campus of Ann Arbor University, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Raw rose and gray granite stone blocks, stainless steel, light red paving stones and concrete. The triangle measures approximately 8.8 m 8.8 m 12.6 m; the tallest, upright gray stone is approximately 2 m; the longest of the leaning stone blocks, in front of the gray stone, is approximately 2.5 m; the steel construction is approximately 1.7 m in height. An equilateral triangle is the foundation of a sculptural group made up of huge granite stones and stainless steel. The ensemble on the left is meant to symbolize the destruction of wartime Budapest while the framework of stainless steel over granite stones on the right is a metaphor for the shelter provided by the Swedish safe houses. Three bronze plaques with imitation leather backing. The two smaller plaques are approximately 30 cm × 30 cm. The largest plaque is approximately 60 cm × 60 cm. The first plaque, at the peak of the triangle, states: Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg/Thank you Raoul Wallenberg// Jon Rush, Sculptor//Dedicated by Ambassador/Per Anger// October 26, 1995//Gift of the Sol King Family/and the Sculptor The second plaque, which is in front of the arrangement and closest to the entrance, was replaced because the first text stated that the memorial was dedicated to Sol King in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, and not vice versa. Therefore, it was exchanged with the following: A Memorial/to/Raoul Wallenberg, ’35//Given in memory of/Sol King, ’34//Classmates/Friends and humanitarians The third plaque, close to the arrangement covered by the stainless steel construction, states: During World War II, from July 1944 to January 1945, Raoul Wallenberg/served as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, Hungary. There he saved over/one hundred thousand Jewish


men, women, and children from execution by/the Nazi regime. He offered them “instant” Swedish citizenship, a Swedish/passport known as a “Schutzpass,” and sanctuary in “safe houses” which/provided Swedish diplomatic immunity.//On January 17, 1945, Raoul Wallenberg left Budapest to meet with a/Russian commander to obtain food for refugees. On the way he was taken/into protective custody by the Soviet secret police and sent to Lubianka/Prison in Moscow. That was the last time Raoul Wallenberg was seen as a/free man.//*//“Wallenberg clearly saw the need for one man to bring all his resources of/knowledge, creativity, and talent, to bear on his efforts to ensure the survival/of others. Let us hope his selfless and understanding example will serve as an/inspiration as we face the challenges both of the present and of the future.”//Sol King All texts were written and selected respectively by Mary Ann Drew, Development Officer, and Robert M. Beckley, Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Artist Jon N. Rush was born in 1935 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He studied sculpture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he received his Bachelors of Fine Arts in 1958 and his Master of Fine Arts in 1959. He accepted a position at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in 1962. He became a Professor of Sculpture and retired in 2005. Brief history The concept for Rush’s Wallenberg monument originated with a letter he had written in 1975 to the School of Architecture in which he offered to create a Wallenberg memorial. The memorial was not realized until 17 years later. The sculpture was largely financed by the Sol King family, who viewed the monument as an opportunity to honor not only Wallenberg but also the late Sol King. The family financed the plaques, the steel, as well as the memorial’s installation costs. Rush donated his services and the granite stones. The replacement plaque was financed by the university. The memorial is part of the University of Michigan Sculpture Collection. Inauguration The sculpture was dedicated on October 26, 1995 by Wallenberg’s former colleague in Budapest, Per

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Anger, 60 years after Wallenberg’s graduation from the School of Art and Architecture, and 50 years after his disappearance and the end of World War II.

17. Paul Lancz, Raoul Wallenberg Bust (1995) Place

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Raoul Wallenberg Square (commonly known as Place de la Cathedral), behind the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Montreal, Canada. Bronze, polished dark black–green granite. Bust: about 85 cm 60 cm 40 cm; column: in total over 170 cm 75 cm 60 cm; plaque: about 80 cm 70 cm. Wallenberg is represented, as the cutout of the upper part of the body reveals, as a naked hero with a quiff and a receding hairline. Wallenberg’s affixed, over-articulated eyebrows accentuate his frown and the strong outlines that characterize his jowls and chin. Also, the design of the larynx and the pronounced bones of his upper body suggest a physically strong man. His face is dominated by an expression of determination, dauntlessness, and purposefulness. The artistic style of this bust is strongly reminiscent of the optimistic and dynamic Socialist Realism of the mid-1930s. In 1998, a large bronze plaque was added to the sculpture. It covers the original inscription that was carved directly into the column. The first inscription stated (a photo is on the artist’s homepage): Raoul/Wallenberg [in huge letters]/1912–?/Budapest [in huge letters] 1944 The plaque from 1998 states: Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]/1912–?//In wartime Budapest in 1944, this Christian Swedish diplomat, through his/humanity, great courage and compassion, rescued tens of thousands of/Hungarian Jews and others from certain death in the Holocaust./His is an example of the capacity of one person’s actions to overcome evil.//Under the noses of the brutal Nazi occupiers and their cohorts, Wallenberg/established safe houses under the Swedish flag and issued many thousands of/Swedish “safe passes,” [sic] thus affording


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shelter, food, and protection to those who/would have otherwise surely perished.//Arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in January 1945,/he was never released and his fate remains unknown./He was made an Honorary Citizen of Canada in 1985.//“Whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved the entire world.”—Talmud//(followed by a French translation)//Sculptor Paul Lancz//1995 Paul Lancz, born in 1919 in Budapest, survived World War II in the Hungarian capital by going underground, with the help of Catholic nuns and also by means of a Swedish passport. As it is stated on the artist’s homepage, Lancz happened to “catch a glimpse of Wallenberg on two occasions.” He lost the great majority of his relatives in the Holocaust. Lancz began carving at the age of 12. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, but quit before passing the final examination in order to start working in the studio of his former professor, the well-known Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl. In 1957, after the Hungarian uprising, Lancz immigrated to Montreal. Together with his brothers, Lancz ran a picture-framing business. Lancz continued to sculpt, creating mostly busts. During the 1980s, Lancz built up a clientele in Montreal with the help of his son Peter, who acted as his agent. As a result, Lancz produced many busts of eminent Canadians, mostly from Quebec, and other personalities; some are privately owned while others are on public display. The monument was the initiative of The Canadian Friends of Raoul Wallenberg (the Canadian affiliate of The Raoul Wallenberg International Movement for Humanity (RWIMH), both founded by Vera Parnes in 1991), and headed by the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Montreal. According to Parnes, the idea to erect a monument stemmed from Irwin Cotler, an international human rights lawyer and noted peace activist, Chair of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg. In 2003 Cotler became Canada’s Minister of Justice. According to Parnes, Cotler presented the idea to Alan Rose, who served for 25 years as the Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Jewish Congress until 1995. Rose approached

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Peter Lancz, whose father created a bust. Then his father was commissioned by the Jewish Congress to execute the bust. After Alan Rose’s death, Eugene N. Riesman took over Rose’s mandate and pushed the project ahead by contacting his friend Rev. Andrew S. Hutchinson. As a result of Hutchinson’s engagement in the project, the bust was placed in the courtyard of the Christ Church Cathedral. In 2000, this spot was named The Raoul Wallenberg Square. Eugene N. Riesman helped to create a fund, first for the monument, and later for the plaque. The numerous inaugurations of the monument testify to the long and often difficult process characteristic of many private initiatives of this kind. Lancz’s son launched a campaign, called The Raoul Wallenberg World Wide Campaign Against Racism. The aim of the campaign was to set up copies of the bust all over the world. So far, no additional copies have been erected. Inauguration(s) Unveiling of the bust and dedication ceremony: November 23, 1996; unveiling of the memorial plaque: March 15, 1998. In 2000, the courtyard behind the church was named The Raoul Wallenberg Square, but owing to construction around and under the church, the ceremony for the renaming of the square was postponed until October 2002. Recurring Annual commemoration ceremonies on the day of events Wallenberg’s disappearance, January 17.

18. Ernest Raab, The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial (1996) Place

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Description

On the Raoul Wallenberg Road in Earl Bales Park, located at Sheppard Avenue and Bathurst Street, North York, in the heart of the Jewish community in Toronto, Canada. Bronze, red granite, black steel. In total: entire length 3 m 2.3 m 2 m; half-figure: approximately 90 cm 64 cm 50 cm; pedestal: approximately 120 cm 60 cm 50 cm. Wallenberg as a half-figure, dressed in a suit and tie, as a prisoner behind bars, depicted in a resigned posture with his arms folded in front of him. His gaze is sad and distant. The bronze half-figure is situated on a


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red polished granite pedestal placed upon two granite steps. The steps and the grassy bank elevate the monument from the ground. On the two opposing corners of the granite base, black bars are mounted, symbolizing Wallenberg’s imprisonment. The heavy iron chain and handcuffs as well as the key inside its lock on the prison bars, in front of the figure, underline Wallenberg’s fate as a prisoner without hope of release. There are two bronze plaques on the red granite pillar, which ends with a triangular form. On the triangular form is the Swedish emblem of the triple crowns, which is also on the street sign stating Raoul Wallenberg Rd. The plaque on the front states: Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]/1912–19??//A man with a heart/whose courage knew no bounds./A guardian angel of human life./May his example be honored for all time.//A Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest, Hungary/ from July 1944 to January 1945.//In the midst of the most terrifying period of the Holocaust/he risked his life on a daily basis and saved from/certain death tens of thousands of Jewish men, women/and children.//In fighting the Nazis and Hitler’s accomplices/he was arrested, tortured and swallowed up forever/by Stalin’s henchmen. (followed by a French translation) The text on the second plaque contains the work’s title, the name of the sculptor, the names and the respective logotypes of private individuals and foundations as well as other public donors. Ernest Raab (1926–2003) was born in Komárom, previously Czechoslovakia. After the Nazi occupation of his home town, the Hungarian Army abducted him into forced labor. He managed to escape and survived the last months of the war with the help of false Christianidentity papers in Budapest, where he worked as a bread delivery boy. Along with his brother, he smuggled bread into the ghetto and the Swedish and Swiss safe houses. Most of his family members died in the Holocaust, including four of his six siblings. In 1946, Raab moved to Paris where he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After seven years in France, he immigrated to Canada.

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Ernest Raab had already heard of Wallenberg in wartime Budapest. Many years later, Raab’s wife Goldi became the driving force for the memorial’s realization. Both Raab and his wife wanted to commemorate Wallenberg with something enduring. In 1994, Ernest designed a memorial, while his wife established The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Committee. The committee realized the project by public fundraising within the Jewish community of Toronto. The City of Metropolitan Toronto supported the erection of the memorial and donated the site. The city is also responsible for the monument’s maintenance. September 8, 1996.

19. László Csíky, Raoul Wallenberg Sculpture (1996) Place


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In the Holocaust Chamber of the Jewish Museum, part of the synagogue on Dohány utca, Budapest. The bust is placed in front of an enlarged photo depicting a deportation scene at a railway station in the Köszeg countryside, close to the Austrian border. Bronze. 60 cm in height. The bust depicts Wallenberg as a middle-aged man, with heavy eyebrows and with deep furrows, wrinkles, and sunken eye sockets; however, Wallenberg’s smile reveals his optimism. Parts of his clothes are visible as tie, shirt, and suit. On a copper plaque, Wallenberg’s name is engraved. The plaque has been added to the pedestal. László Csíky was born in 1942 in Szeged, Hungary. Csíky graduated from medical school in 1966, and went on to study graphic design and sculpture in Budapest until 1969. Today, Csíky works in Szentes, Hungary as well as in various locations throughout the world. Csíky created the bust, on his own initiative, in admiration of Wallenberg, and donated it to the Jewish Museum. The artist has a copy of the bust in his home.


20. Philip Jackson, The Wallenberg Monument (1997) Place Material Dimensions Description

Inscriptions

In Great Cumberland Place, City of Westminster, London, England. Bronze, York stone. The total height is approximately: 4.2 m in height, 2.4 m in width, and 1.5 m in depth. A standing male figure, slightly larger than life, stands in front of an upright rectangular bronze wall of approximately 4.2 m in height. He is identified by the name Wallenberg on the upper part of the wall. Wallenberg is depicted as a diplomat, holding passports in his hands. The whole composition rests on a small, elevated square base of York stone. The back of the monument depicts a wall of papers. On the ground, three protective passports are lying on top of each other. On the right-hand side of the sculpture hangs a Swedish flag. The wording is integrated into the design. On the front: Wallenberg [in huge letters] On the narrow side (clockwise): In 1944, armed only with/determination and/courage, Raoul/Wallenberg arrived in/Budapest as a member of/ the neutral Swedish/Legation and set about/rescuing the 230,000 Jews/who remained. Snatching/many from Nazi and/Hungarian death squads,/he demanded the removal/ of others from trains/departing to the gas/chambers at Auschwitz./He placed tens of/thousands under the protection of the Swedish/crown by issuing them/with false passports/“Schutzpasses,” sheltering/them in safe houses from/which he flew the Swedish flag. On the rear side one finds a Schutzpass. On the other narrow side: Wallenberg’s bravery/helped save the lives of as/many as 100,000 men,/women and children/destined for death/ camps only because they/were Jews. When in/January 1945, Budapest fell to the Soviet army,/Wallenberg was taken/ under guard to Moscow/where he vanished into/the Soviet prison system./The last resting place of/this selfless hero is/unknown.

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On the ground (counter-clockwise): The 20th century spawned two of history’s vilest tyrannies. Raoul Wallenberg outwitted the first, but was swallowed up by the second. His triumph over Nazi genocide reminds us that the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruellest state machine. The fate of the six million Jews he was unable to rescue reminds us of the evil to which racist ideas can drive whole nations. Finally, his imprisonment reminds us not only of Soviet brutality but also of the ignorance and indifference, which led the free world to abandon him. We must never forget his lesson. All of the texts were written by John Bierman as requested by the artist Philip Jackson, born in 1944 in Inverness, Scotland. Between 1961 and 1965 Jackson studied sculpture at the Farnham School of Art, Surrey, England. He is based in Midhurst, West Sussex. Jackson had visited the sites of former extermination camps, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, during an earlier commission by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). His studio, the Edward Lawrence Studios, took castings, for example from the main gate at Auschwitz, which is one of the main exhibits at the museum in Washington. The project gave Jackson a deep insight into the Holocaust and inspired him to his Wallenberg monument. Jackson considered Wallenberg to be the reason why most of the Budapest Jews were spared from the death camps. Since 1988, the Conservative MP David Amess has been engaged in the Wallenberg case. Amess’s original idea to introduce legislation to confer honorary British citizenship upon Wallenberg was rejected in 1989, on technical grounds. Even his demand for a bill allotting space for a statue in a royal park failed, owing to lack of space. Nevertheless, interest in Wallenberg managed to penetrate political borders, and the British government eventually reacted positively to the idea of honoring Wallenberg. In 1991, talks were initiated with the Westminster City Council, which resulted in the erection of a monument on the crescent side of Great Cumberland Place in 1994. The politician Lionel


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Altman realized the project. On the recommendation of Lord St John Fawsey, Chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, Philip Jackson was commissioned and his proposal was accepted. Fundraising was undertaken by the Wallenberg Appeal Committee, headed by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, patron of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), in cooperation with the Holocaust Educational Trust. The project was financed by private and corporate donations, and supported by the British government. The monument was cast at the prestigious Morris Singer Foundry. February 26, 1997, unveiled by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. The first model, which is slightly different from the monument, can be found at the exit of the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London. In addition, there are about 8 maquettes, which were used for fundraising, one, for example, at the Sternberg Centre in Finchley, London. A copy, in the original size but without any base and some minor differences, can be found in a park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, not far from the corner of Figueroa Alcorta Avenue and Austria Street. It was inaugurated on November 17, 1998. According to the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF), the copy was initiated by its founder, Baruch Tenembaum. It was commissioned by the Argentine government. The monument is maintained by the city of Buenos Aires. Generally, the monument is identical to the one in London, except that the lettering of the name Wallenberg on the front is cut into the surface and not, as in London, in relief. Furthermore, the wording on the monument has been translated into Spanish. However, because there is no base, the text on the ground is missing. Instead the text on the second narrow side was extended; the Spanish text is approximately as follows: With the erection of this monument, we also honor the Argentine public servants who, on the basis of diplomatic or consular representation in the European countries, helped people who were persecuted by Nazism during World War II

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In August 2003, the IRWF donated another marble stone, with an additional inscription, which was placed on the ground in front of the monument. The Spanish inscription is approximately as follows: Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg/“Hero without a grave”/4 August 1912/Swedish Diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews and others who were persecuted by the Nazi regime, arrested and disappeared due to/the Soviet Army 1945. On the 91st Anniversary of his birth./The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation/Buenos Aires 4 August 2003

21. Lenke Rothman, To Remember— The Outstanding Deed Place Material Dimensions

Description

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(1997)

In the southern passage that links the two buildings of the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament), Stockholm, Sweden. Arrangement of various everyday items in a variety of materials. Approximately 2.7 m in height and 1.3 m in width; base: approximately 20 cm in height; triangle plate at a height of 120 cm; the sandblasted text section begins at a height of approximately 180 cm with the dimensions 40 cm 40 cm. A glass pane sections off a corner of the room, forming a triangular space in which to display the work. On the work’s base, eight candlesticks are lined up. Behind them is a stamp. In the middle of the glass plate, at waist level, is a leather-bound almanac, with the inscription Skandinaviska Banken and the year 1944. It is placed among small stones, gravel, cullet, an open seed, some broken mural pieces, and a piece of red bakelite. The soft lighting from above, on the small stones, casts shadows on the walls beneath. In the middle of the upper part of the pane, a rectangle is sandblasted onto the glass. The sandblasted rectangle contains word-fragments that instill the other items with symbolism and integrate the work into the historical framework of Wallenberg’s actions during wartime Budapest in the summer of 1944. Two boxes contain leaflets in English and Swedish installed on the opposite side of the passageway. The leaflet contains a longer text written by Lenke Rothman herself. The Swedish leaflet also contains pictures.


Inscriptions

Words and word-fragments are sandblasted onto the glass plate: en sistnämnda frivilligt åtföljd av/kland, den förre Gmunden, de senare/e och var och en av herrarna lära i/et få begiva sig utomlands. Weiss-konce/till ett till Gestapo överlämnat ungersk//lad arrendesumma på RM 1.000.000 och/a övergått till Gestapo-Waffen SS-grup//Budapest den 18 juli 1944 This section is followed by Wallenberg’s signature. Artist Lenke Rothman (1929–2008). Rothman was born in Kiskunfélegyháza, Hungary. At the end of June 1944, Rothman was deported to Auschwitz with her mother and her seven younger sisters and brothers. All of Rothman’s siblings and her mother were killed in Auschwitz, except for one of her brothers. Her father died as a consequence from forced labor just after the end of the war. Rothman barely survived Auschwitz, the working camp Guben, and the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Rothman came to Sweden in 1945 with the Red Cross. It took her six years to recover from the tuberculosis she had contracted in the camps. Rothman is not considered to be a “Holocaust-artist;” only a few works of her extensive art production dealing explicitly with the Holocaust. However, the loss of her family and her long illness, as a consequence of the concentration and labor camps, had a strong impact on her art. In 1951–5, Rothman attended Konstfackskolan (School of Arts and Crafts), Faculty of Painting, in Stockholm, Sweden; during 1957–8, she attended the Accademia di Belli Arti, Ravenna. Brief history From 1986, Member of Parliament Elisabeth Fleetwood (member of the center right party Moderaterna) made several motions to honor Raoul Wallenberg in the Riksdag by an artistic work. All of her motions were rejected until 1995. In 1996, the Art Group of the Riksdag asked Rothman to design a work in honor of Wallenberg. Her second proposal was accepted by the Art Group as well as by the political steering committee. Inauguration January 27, 1998 (Holocaust Remembrance Day).

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The work is included on guided tours of the Riksdag for school classes and visitor groups.

22. Edward M. Adams, Courage and Compassion (1998) Place Material Dimensions

Description

Plaques

Smith Field Park, Parsippany, New Jersey, USA. Bronze, river rocks, bricks, granite. The sculpture is approximately 4 m in height; the curled bronze bands are approximately 60 cm in width; the plate on the ground is approximately 2.7 m in width and 1.8 m in depth; the three granite stones on the side are approximately 25 cm in height and between 60 cm and 90 cm in width and 77 cm in depth; the whole area around the sculpture, composed of river rocks and brick pavement, is about 6 m 6 m. Two curved, square-edged bands in bronze extend upwards. The bronze bands form an imperfect semicircle. The bands cross at a height of approximately 4 meters; however, they do not meet. Instead, the bands support a bronze hexagon that appears to hover between them. The bronze plaque on the bronze plate states: Honoring/Raoul Wallenberg//“Courage and/ Compassion”// Edward M. Adams, Artist On the right-hand side, there are three granite stones with bronze plaques on top. On the first plaque is Wallenberg’s portrait relief, which faces to the left; above in huge letters is Raoul Wallenberg’s name, and the line: Rescuer and Humanitarian Hero Beside the portrait is the following text: Dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the 32/year old Swedish diplomat instrumental/in the rescue of nearly 100,000 Jewish/and other lives in Budapest, Hungary./His decisive task began on July 9, 1944,/during the darkest hours in the reign of/terror by the Nazis and local fascists.//This “Angel of Budapest” was arrested/by Soviet authorities on January 17,/1945 and never heard from again. For/his extraordinary courage, relentless/compassion, and personal integrity,/Wallenberg is esteemed world wide and/is an Honorary Citizen of the United States of America.//Raoul


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Inauguration Copies

Wallenberg is a guiding light for/future generations and proof that//One Person Can Make a Difference! [in huge letters] All texts were written by the members of the committee. The second plaque states: Dedicated in Honor of/Raoul Wallenberg/Courage & Compassion/Edward M. Adams, Artist//by the/Committee to Honor Raoul Wallenberg/Founding Chair: Kayla Bergeron Past Co-Chair: Marilee C. Goldberg/Co-Chairs: the Rev. Richard W. Horn & Harry Ettlinger//in partnership with the/ Township of Parsippany—Troy Hills/Mimi Letts, Mayor// June 1998 The third plaque contains the names of the sculpture’s major benefactors, while the minor donors are carved into the light bricks of the paving stones around the sculpture. Edward M. Adams was born in 1949 in New York, USA. Adams is a psychologist who works part time in his profession and part time as an artist, mainly as a painter. Adams has had his own gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and since 2008 in Lambertville, New Jersey. The sculpture was commissioned on the initiative of the predecessor to the Wallenberg Foundation of New Jersey, called The Committee to Honor Raoul Wallenberg. Ten years before Adams’s sculpture was inaugurated, this private interfaith group planned to honor Wallenberg. The Committee to Honor Raoul Wallenberg announced a call for proposals in local newspapers. The committee then chose between approximately ten entries. Adams was awarded the project. But faced with difficulties in fundraising, the project came to a halt. It was not until the committee was reformed that Adams was able to complete his sculpture. June 14, 1998. There are 25 maquettes of the sculpture. A depiction of the sculpture is used as the logo of the Wallenberg Foundation of New Jersey.

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23. Gustav and Ulla Kraitz, Hope (1998) Place

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Description

Inscriptions

On a traffic island on First Avenue, at the corner of 47th Street, close to the Raoul Wallenberg Walk, not far from the UN building, in downtown Manhattan, New York, USA. Diabase, cobblestones, bronze, ceramic material. The tallest of the columns is 6 m in height. All of the columns are 60 cm in width and 60 cm in depth; the attaché case is approximately 42 cm 48 cm 15 cm; the globe: 1 m in diameter. The whole area around the columns comprised of cobblestones is about 12 m in diameter at its widest point. Five huge square diabase columns are placed on a low base comprised of cobblestones that were collected from the previous ghetto in Budapest. The mid-column is crowned by a ceramic globe, glazed in an intensive bright blue, thereby visualizing the monument’s title Hope. At the side of the mid-column stands a bronze briefcase with Raoul Wallenberg’s initials, representing both Wallenberg’s mission and the fact that he is a missing person. Inscriptions are integrated into the columns, as well as into a stone in the pavement, to ensure the monument’s message. On the side toward the UN building, the inscription on the first column (from the front) reads: Dedicated to/Raoul Wallenberg/a Swedish diplomat/ born in 1912,/who was stationed/in Budapest, Hungary/ 1944–45 Second column: Displaying great/daring and ingenuity,/Raoul Wallenberg/ saved the lives/of countless/Hungarian Jews/by placing them/under the protection/of the/Swedish government Third column: On January 17, 1945/Raoul Wallenberg/was detained/and imprisoned/by the/Soviet government//His fate remains unknown Fourth column: Raoul Wallenberg,/with extraordinary/courage and with/ total disregard/for the constant/danger to himself,/saved the lives/of almost/one hundred thousand/men, women,/


Artists

and children …//—From the 1981/Joint Resolution of Congress/making/Raoul Wallenberg/an Honorary Citizen of/the United States Fifth column: “I could never/return to Stockholm,/knowing that I had/ failed to do/everything/within human power/to save as many/Jews as possible.”//—Raoul Wallenberg Back: Hope/Gustav Kraitz, artist/Sweden, 1998//A gift of the family/of Hilel Storch/of Stockholm, Sweden On another column, on the bottom, the name of the contractor: Skånska granit, Sweden Engraved on one of the cobblestones on the ground: The columns are black diabase,/mined from the Swedish bed-rock//The paving stones were taken from/the former Jewish Ghetto in Budapest/A gift from the City of Budapest Ulla and Gustav Kraitz. Ulla was born in 1936, in Stockholm, Sweden. Gustav was born in 1926, in Miskolc, in the northeast of Hungary. Both artists are sculptors and ceramicists. In 1944, Gustav Kraitz received a government scholarship to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Maybe it was this scholarship that marked him as suspicious to some Soviet-loyal politicians in the government of Hungary after 1945. However, for some reason, Gustav Kraitz was, at only 19 years, caught and arrested—actually two days after Wallenberg disappeared—and was carried off to a forced-labor coal mine in Donbas, close to the Black Sea, where he had to work for five years as part of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. As one of the ten per cent who survived the camp, Gustav Kraitz returned from the mine to Hungary, and was eventually allowed to rejoin to the Academy, where he studied sculpture. In the wake of the uprising of 1956, he fled Hungary via Austria and came as a refugee to Sweden. In Sweden, he met his wife, and life-long working companion, Ulla. Gustav and Ulla Kraitz are regarded as leading artists within the Swedish contemporary art scene. They live in southern Sweden, in

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Fogdarp, outside Förslöv (Hallandsåsen). Gustav Kraitz, who was raised a Catholic, felt closely connected to Wallenberg because of his own fate in the Soviet coal mine. Furthermore, Kraitz’s uncle-by-marriage was Jewish and was selected by the Nazis to clear paths in the minefields for the troops, which was how he came to be killed. During his studies at the Academy, Kraitz became aware of what happened to the Jews. Several of his Jewish classmates had disappeared. “The idea of conceiving such a monument was for me like a means of recreating a part of myself. My ties to that time, that place, those deeds, were a central part of my life. It was a monument I had to produce as part of my own history.”(Finn, Hope, 17) The monument was realized through discussions between Dag Sebastian Ahlander, Consul General of Sweden in New York in the years 1992–9, Gustav Kraitz, and Henry Stern, New York City Parks Commissioner. It was Stern who proposed the triangular traffic island close to the Raoul Wallenberg Walk as the site for the monument. It took nearly four years to realize the project. It was financed by the Marcus Storch family from Stockholm. Marcus Storch also established a fund to cover future maintenance costs for the monument. November 9, 1998, the Anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). 15 copies of the attaché case were produced, which was the idea and creation of Ulla Kraitz. Gustav Kraitz proposed giving copies of the attaché case to people who contributed large sums of money to fund the monument. However, this was not necessary because of Marcus Storch’s fundraising for the project. One of the attaché cases can be found in Skärsätra, Lidingö, on the grounds of the family’s summerhouse Kappsta, where Wallenberg was born (inaugurated on May 2, 2002). After reading an article in Dagens Nyheter (October 24, 2001, A17) by Rolf Broberg, who came up with the idea to place Kraitz’s attaché case in Kappsta, Marcus Storch, together with Nina Lagergren, presented the


Recurring events

idea to the City of Lidingö, who then accepted Storch’s donation. Copies of the attaché case can also be found in the garden of Skissernas Museum, Lund, in Malmö not far from Staffan Nihlén’s Pienza, as well as in Jewish museums in London, Berlin, and Paris, and in private collections. Occasionally, The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation of the United States organizes commemorative ceremonies on Wallenberg’s birthday at Hope.

24. Willy Gordon, The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg (1999) Place

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Description

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Inscriptions

In Stadshusparken (a park close to the town hall), in the city center of Lidingö, an island outside Stockholm, Sweden. Bronze, granite, concrete. About 3.4 m in total height; figure: about 2.4 m in height; bronze plinth and concrete base together: approximately 1 m in height, hands: approximately 40 cm in diameter. Wallenberg is represented as an abstract bronze figure with a hollow head, raised on a plinth. In his hands he holds papers with three crowns, two above one, which symbolize a Swedish Schutzpass. From the lower bronze block, four large hands reach out desperately for the passports offered by their rescuer. On the plinth of the monument one finds the work’s title, the artist’s name, and the year of origin. A bronze plaque is placed on the middle of the three upright granite stones at the side, created by Gordon’s wife Mona. It contains the following text, which translated from Swedish reads as follows: Raoul/Wallenberg [name in huge letters]/saved innumerable Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust at the end of World War II/In remembrance of his deed—and in tribute to other individuals who showed moral courage during this difficult period—this monument was erected in 1999 at Wallenberg’s birthplace/The initiative was undertaken by individuals and the monument was financed by many persons, organizations, and companies in Sweden

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The text was written by the committee. The work’s title can be found on the pedestal that bears the figure. Willy Gordon (1918–2003), born in Renge, Latvia, died in Stockholm. In 1926, Gordon’s family moved to Sweden, where his father was offered the position of the cantor to the Jewish community in Malmö. Gordon returned regularly to Lithuania where his father had grown up and to Latvia where his mother was from. He went to school in Riga for three years, where he completed his final examinations. In 1937, Gordon received a small scholarship, which enabled him to travel throughout Lithuania. This offered him the unique opportunity to experience the thriving Jewish communities in the country before the Nazis destroyed them. From 1940 until 1945, Gordon studied at Kungliga Konsthögskolan (the Royal University College of Fine Arts) in Stockholm. Gordon grew up in an Orthodox Jewish environment, in which Judaism, Jewish culture, and the historic tragedies of the Jewish people, the lost Jewish culture of his parents’ homelands and the destruction of European Jewry, as well as the established state of Israel (where Gordon spent a few years during the 1950s), were always a significant part of his life and work. Consequently, the creation of the model of Raoul Wallenberg, solely on his own initiative, was the result of a long process. Toward the end of August 1996, Carmen Regnér, a local businesswoman who visited Gordon’s studio, discovered the plaster model for the Wallenberg monument that Gordon had made earlier that year. According to Regnér, Wallenberg was the ultimate hero of the twentieth century, though in his Swedish homeland a much-neglected hero. It was thanks to Regnér’s initiative and engagement that a private committee was established, which was to succeed in realizing Gordon’s monument. After several attempts to install the monument in Stockholm failed, the City of Lidingö, the island where Wallenberg was born, gladly accepted the donation. The monument was financed by a nationwide fundraising campaign,


organized by Regnér’s committee. The total costs were about 2 million SEK, whereas 1.5 million SEK was spent on the monument itself. Nearly one thousand private persons contributed to it. Among the donors who gave larger amounts were the political parties, LO (The Swedish Trade Union Confederation), SAF (Confederation of Swedish Enterprise), RF (The Swedish Sports Confederation), several Swedish companies, Carmen Regnér, the IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and the Jewish community. Three weeks before the inauguration, the government decided to donate a larger sum. All donor names can be found in the Golden Book in the Raoul Wallenberg Room in Lidingö’s town hall. Inauguration May 28, 1999. Recurring The realization of the monument was followed by the events opening of the Raoul Wallenberg Room in Lidingö’s town hall, where marriage ceremonies take place. Here, one can find material on the monument’s history and on Raoul Wallenberg. In 2002, the City of Lidingö declared January 27 as Raoul Wallenberg Day. Every year the city organizes a torch parade to the monument, followed by a speech by a prominent guest. Afterwards, the awards for the annual contest In Raoul Wallenberg’s Spirit (I Raoul Wallenbergs anda) are distributed to pupils from local schools.

25. Cecilia Campos, Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Sculpture (1999) Place Material

Dimensions

Description

In a green area between the tracks of the busy Avenida Américo Vespucio, Vitacura, Santiago de Chile, Chile. Iron, cement, and concrete for the water basin. Originally, iron letters were mounted on the wall, beside the silhouette symbolizing Wallenberg. Today, the monument is painted in a dark gray color. Monument: approximately 250 cm 400 cm 30 cm; water basin: approximately 8.65 m 3.2 m; plaque: 60 cm 100 cm. The monument consists of an iron wall in which the silhouette of a large group of people is cut out. The full silhouette of a man stands beside the group to the right,

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in front of the remaining wall. Here the silhouette represents Wallenberg as the man who rescued innumerable people. On the reverse side, we find an additional figure cut out in negative space. This “missing” figure also symbolizes Wallenberg, thereby referring to his fate as a missing person behind the “Iron Curtain.” The iron wall is affixed to concrete inside a lit rectangular water basin. The original text in Spanish was written by the artist. The text, difficult to translate, is approximately as follows: Raoul Wallenberg/1912–1947/Wallenberg heard the voices of immortality. His heart felt compassion, in view of the tragedy of the Jewish people, and his actions left their mark on the sands of time.//This great man gave us humanity and love for our neighbor, and because of this the people of Israel placed a wreath of laurels and glory on his unknown grave. However, this text was vandalized and never replaced. A separate stone plaque was added in 2004. It was financed by the B’nai B’rith Lodge Raoul Wallenberg and placed on the edge of the water basin. It contains the following text: Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]//1912–(?)//A Righteous among the Nations. He gave his life to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust//B’nai B’rith-Chile [in huge letters] Cecilia Campos was born in 1947 in Santiago de Chile. She studied art history, drawing, painting, ceramics, and stone carving from 1986 to 1989. The Confraternidad Judeo-Cristiana de Chile, a local branch of the International Council of Christians and Jews, initiated the monument. The monument to Wallenberg was the suggestion of Sir Sigmund Sternberg, patron of the ICCJ, and Rabbi Dr Angel Kreiman. Kreiman presided over the Confraternidad at that time. The Confraternidad commissioned the cultural department of the Municipality of Providencia to invite Chilean artists to compete for the Wallenberg commission. Out of 22 invited artists, 15 were accepted, but only seven met the deadlines and conditions. The jury was composed of an art critic, two museum directors, representatives of the Santiago Archdiocese, a Jewish Community member, and the Municipal


Cultural Director of Providencia. Campos’s proposal was chosen as the winning entry. Rabbi Kreiman raised funds for the project. Jewish families, predominantly with a Hungarian heritage, struggled to finance the monument. Vitacura, an affluent Municipality of Santiago de Chile, accepted the monument and covered the costs for the water basin. The Chilean Foreign Ministry also contributed with a minor, symbolic sum for some of the transport expenses. Originally, the monument was placed in a green park at the intersection of two highways, at the corner of Américo Vespucio Norte and Monseñor Escrivá de Balaguer. Young people played ball here, and occasionally used the monument as the goal during their soccer games. Because the basin was rarely filled with water, the monument wall was easily accessible. As a result, the monument wall was soon covered by graffiti. Within a two-year period, the monument rusted and the plaque’s text was vandalized. The artist repeatedly demanded that the authorities do something about the deteriorating condition of the monument. However, it was not until Campos started talking about her work in public that the Municipality of Vitacura and the Swedish Embassy decided to move the monument. It was shifted to a green area between the tracks of the highly frequented Avenida Américo Vespucio, just in front of the building that, until 2006, served as the residency to the Swedish Ambassador of Avenida Américo Vespucio Norte. The neighborhood is one of the most affluent in the capital. However, Campos was not consulted about the move. The monument belongs to the Municipality of Vitacura, which is also responsible for its maintenance. Inauguration November 9, 1999, the Anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). Recurring After the cleaning of the work, a commemorative events ceremony, organized by Rabbi Kreiman, was held on November 9, 2000. Since the monument’s relocation, annual commemorative events have taken place on Wallenberg’s birthday, as organized by B’nai B’rith of Santiago de Chile.

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26. Joseph Wachtel, Tribute to Raoul Wallenberg (2000) Place


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Artist

Currently in the possession of the artist. According to the artist, the bronze was accepted by the Miami Holocaust Museum, which was due to open in 2007. Bronze. Approximately 60 cm 80 cm 4 cm 8 cm (at maximum thickness); approximately 50 kg. The shiny surface of Wallenberg’s countenance attracts the viewer’s attention. His kind but determined face protrudes from the base-relief amid the chaos of wartime Budapest. Wallenberg’s portrait is a compositional “point of rest” in a scene pervaded by flames of fire. On the right, underneath a huge temple, men and women, one with a child in her arms, flee toward Wallenberg, reaching out for him. On the left, the persecuted find shelter, embracing each other, while others seek refuge in a hiding place. Above Wallenberg’s face, there is a train, hinting at the threat of deportation, and three houses, one with a flag, suggesting the shelter provided in the form of Swedish safe houses. A small black plaque, added directly underneath the portrait on the front of the bronze relief, states in gold lettering: Raoul Wallenberg [in huge letters]/Swedish legendary hero/ saved more than 100,000 Jewish souls/from Nazi extermination/in Budapest, Hungary/1944–1945//1999–2000 Joseph H. Wachtel The artist changed the work’s title in 2006 and replaced the plaque with the new title Hero Without a Grave. Joseph H. Wachtel, born in 1914 in Guraputila, in the Ukrainian region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1925, his family moved to Czernowitz, in Romanian Bukovina. After the city was overrun by the Germans in 1941, Jews were transported to camps. Wachtel escaped and joined a Jewish partisan group that assisted the Red Army. Wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad, Wachtel managed to save his wife Gabriela, who was forced to work in a coal mine in Kazakhstan. Reunited, they made it back to his unit in the Ukraine in 1943. Wachtel and his wife followed the Red Army as it liberated Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In January 1945, they


Brief history

Recurring events

arrived in Budapest. After the war, the couple returned to his wife’s home town of Satu Mare, Romania. In 1960, they were finally granted permission to leave Romania, and immigrated via Austria to the US in 1962. Wachtel and his wife lived and worked in New York before retiring to Florida in 1982. Wachtel always had an interest in art, but it was only after he retired that he found time to attend art classes at the Norton Gallery Art School, West Palm Beach, Florida, where he studied sculpture. Since his wife’s death in 1991, Wachtel regularly speaks at schools about the Holocaust and serves on Holocaust memorial committees. After his retirement, Wachtel fulfilled his wife’s wish for him to write down his wartime experiences, and to commemorate the Holocaust with a series of sculptures. In 1993, Wachtel’s memoir Escape from the Hounds of Hell was published. His wife, of Hungarian descent, wanted him to recount not only his losses and terrible experiences during the Holocaust, but also the assistance they, and other family members, had received from Gentiles during the war. However, even though Gabriela’s mother possessed a Swedish Schutzpass she was deported to Auschwitz. In spite of this, Wallenberg became for the Wachtels, as Joseph says, the “greatest humanitarian who ever lived” because Gabriela’s aunt and her closest classmate survived the Holocaust due to Wallenberg’s Swedish passes. After his wife’s death, Wachtel felt an intense obligation to create a lasting tribute to Wallenberg. Wachtel’s bronze relief has been exhibited in a variety of places in Florida’s Palm Beach County. It has been on loan for extended periods to Palm Beach Community College, the West Palm Beach Public Library, and to the Temple Beth Tikvah, Lake Worth. It accompanied a community-wide drama program Honoring Raoul Wallenberg (written by Pamela Hope Levin), where it was on display as part of the Wallenberg tribute. Over the course of several years, the bronze was exhibited on special occasions, such as the Tribute to Peace at the First Presbyterian Church, or in connection with Holocaust commemorations at synagogues or other institutions,

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such as the Palm Beach County School and the Friedberg Lifelong Learning Auditorium or on the Independence Day of Israel at the Temple Emeth. Additionally, Wachtel’s bronze sculpture has been on display at the Finnish Festival, at an exhibition at the Armory Art School, and in connection with the movie screening of Desperate Hours (a documentary by Victoria Barrett about Turkey and the Holocaust, 2001) at the Congregation B’nai Israel. In February 2006, it was displayed at the Palm Beach International Sculpture Biennale.

27. Károly Veress, Freedom (2000) Place



Situated on the lawns in front of the Denkmann Memorial Building on the campus of Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, USA. On the second floor of the Denkmann Building is Wallenberg Hall, a concert and lecture hall, which received its name in 1991, after it was renovated with funds by the Wallenberg family of Sweden. Housed inside the Denkmann building is the Scandinavian Institute and the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, a major research facility devoted to the study of all aspects of Swedish immigration to the US. The building also houses sculptures by Carl Milles. Bronze on a round concrete pedestal. Sculpture: approximately 1.5 m in height and 3.2 m at its widest point; pedestal: approximately 170 cm 60 cm. “Freedom” is expressed as an abstract version of a bird with outstretched wings, about to fly. The shiny dark bronze arises from the massive center of the sculpture into the adumbration of a bird’s head and two wing-like formations. The viewer’s gaze follows the sculpture’s lines into the surrounding space, according to the many directions described by the bronze formations and its straight edges. A bronze plaque on the bottom of the base, containing the title, the artist’s name, and the name of the donors. Freedom/by/Károly Veress/bronze, 2000/Gift of Mrs. Isador Katz,/Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Harris and/Mr. and Mrs. Zeivel Harris.


Artist

Károly Veress was born in 1935 in Zaul de Campie, Transylvania, previously Romania, but during the artist’s youth also Hungary. He studied literature at the University of Budapest. Originally, Veress wanted to become a poet. After his participation in the Hungarian uprising, he fled to the Netherlands where he continued to study linguistics at the University of Leiden. However, he saw no future in writing because he was a poet deprived of his audience, owing to the fact that he wrote only in Hungarian. Therefore, Veress chose sculpture as his means of expression. Veress has lived in Canada since 1980. Brief history Veress was already known to the Katz and Harris families, who frequently sponsored art for the Augustana College. He had previously been commissioned by the family to create sculptures for the campus. They commissioned Veress again in 1999. When Veress learned that the hall on the second floor of the building was dedicated to the Wallenberg family, he immediately remembered Wallenberg’s deeds, which inspired him to create the sculpture. The commissioners gladly approved of Veress’s idea to create a sculpture as a tribute to Wallenberg. The sculpture was a gift to the college from Mrs Isador Katz and members of the Harris family. Inauguration September 21, 2000. Recurring Regular campus tours, organized by the Office of the events President of Augustana College, tell the history of the sculpture and its connection to Wallenberg. 28. Giampietro Cudin, Bust of Raoul Wallenberg (2001) Place Material Dimensions

Description

In the courtyard of the Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow, Russia. Bust: limestone (Vicenza stone); pedestal column: white marble. Bust: approximately 30 cm in height; pedestal: approximately 1.2 m in height, 30 cm in length 30 cm in width. Highly stylized facial features portray a friendly but somewhat naïve image of Wallenberg, with equally curved brows above pensive eyes. He looks upwards

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toward the sky. He is characterized by a balding head and articulated strains of hair, which are combed to the side. The shoulder section of the bust depicts the adumbration of a diplomat’s clothes. Plaques A small plaque contains the following text in Russian: Inscriptions Raoul Wallenberg 1912–?/The Swedish diplomat who saved over 100,000 Jews from extermination during World War II. Artist Giampietro Cudin, born in 1948 in Gorizia, Italy, studied psychology at the University of Padova. Brief history Cudin’s Wallenberg bust is the first and, to this date, only Wallenberg sculpture in Russia. The idea for the bust originated with the Director of the Library for Foreign Literature, Ekaterina Genieva. After returning from a trip to Vladimir in June 1999, the place where it was said Wallenberg had been incarcerated, Cudin felt the need to initiate a monument in his honor, particularly given the work of the Swedish–Russian Commission, who exchanged research results about Wallenberg’s fate in December 2000. Cudin’s sculptures were already represented in the Library for Foreign Literature’s courtyard. The library’s collections included Cudin’s busts of Machiavelli and Father Alexander Men. Cudin was requested to create a Wallenberg bust, which he later donated to the library. In connection with the inauguration of the bust, the library’s publishing house, Rudomino Publishers, printed a Russian translation of Jan Larsson’s booklet on Raoul Wallenberg. It was distributed to all invited guests and copies were sent to other Russian libraries. In that same year, Rudomino Publishers also printed a translation of both John Bierman’s Righteous Gentile as well as the Swedish research results of the Swedish– Russian Commission. Inauguration January 18, 2001.

29. Kirsten Ortwed, Hommage àRaoul Wallenberg (2001) Place

Situated on Raoul Wallenbergs torg, commonly still known as Nybroplan, in the center of Stockholm, Sweden.


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Description

Plaques

Text on Added Sign

Bronze. The sculptures are between 27 cm and 86 cm in height, between 1.8 m and 3.4 m in length, and between 40 cm and 55 cm in width; the signature is approximately 4.2 m in length. The sculptures occupy an area of about 8 m 20 m. The monument consists of 12 dark pieces of bronze, mounted directly on to the ground. The sculptures are low on one side, horizontal, and somewhat rectangular in form. Toward the bay, the sculptures are voluminous. The entire sculpture group extends toward the bay. Wallenberg’s signature in light bronze is embedded into the pavement. A metal plaque is mounted onto one pillar of the old bridge-railing. The plaque lists the artist’s name, the title of the work, and its inaugural year. Another sign, with a longer text, is situated across the sidewalk, near the right corner of the sculpture group (both in English and Swedish): To Raoul Wallenberg/Swedish Diplomat in Budapest//As a fighter for human rights, Raoul Wallenberg (1912–?) was one of the 20th century’s true heroes.//Of the 750,000 Jews living in Hungary in 1944, 120,000 survived thanks to the/actions of Raoul Wallenberg and others. His weapons were/selfconfidence, imagination and faith in the justice of his cause; his only/protection was a diplomatic passport, he printed “Schutzpässe” in the/Swedish colours of blue and yellow and hid tens of thousands Jews in/houses rented by him.//Evil thrives on the inaction of others. Raoul Wallenberg is an example of/how an individual can overcome helplessness and oppression and act as a/guide and role model for further generations. Through empathy and/determination he served the forces of good.//Raoul Wallenberg’s fate is too large to be expressed by conventional/means. The signature of those “Schutzpässe” reproduced here in shining/bronze, was written in a space of a second that separated life from death./From that signature, Kirsten Ortwed’s twelve figures spread out,/nameless disguised, in bundles and rags, tossed into mass graves, robbed of their identity.//Kirsten Ortwed has created a place for free movement that resists/tyranny. She is searching ways to escape from imprisonment, down

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to the/waters of Nybroviken and the sunrise beyond. Her figures serve as/moulds for our own feelings: Despair, fear, empowering anger and/creative action; they tear themselves out from a heavy mass in the will to/fight racism and indifference. They also conceal something gentle and/tranquil: a place to rest, a passageway among many others. We are on the/same everyday level where Raoul Wallenberg lived. Here, there are no/set answers, no overview—rather a dialogue about the meaning of/existence that must not cease.//Per Wästberg/Author/Member of the Swedish Academy Kirsten Ortwed was born in 1948 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Ortwed graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in 1975. She lived in New York, Cologne, Germany, and Pietrasanta, Italy. Ortwed is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors, and is also renowned internationally. She represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Ortwed lives in Germany. When asked to create a proposal for a Wallenberg monument, Ortwed was reminded of her father, who, as a Danish resistance fighter, was transported, on an eight-day train journey, to the concentration camp Dachau. Ortwed recalled her father’s stories of the time he spent in the dark train car, and the feelings he experienced during the train’s journey through a country at war. He had no idea what would happen when the train reached its final destination. Wallenberg carried out his mission in Budapest at approximately the same time Ortwed’s father was sent to the concentration camp. The fact that Wallenberg was attempting to liberate captives from transportation to concentration camps, like the one her father traveled on, had a strong impact on Ortwed. The call for a public Wallenberg monument in central Stockholm intensified after Willy Gordon presented his Wallenberg proposal to local politicians. Gordon’s model was rejected. Consequently, it was decided that a competition was the correct procedure to select a Wallenberg monument. Stockholm’s Kultur- och idrottsnämden (The Culture and Sports Committee) decided to commission a Wallenberg monument. Stockholm’s Konstråd (Stockholm Arts Council)


announced the competition. After a selection committee, composed of members of Stockholms konstråd, Statens konstråd (The National Public Art Council) and the Art Academy, had discussed several eligible contemporary artists, six artists were invited to participate in the competition in 1998. Three of the artists were from abroad and three were from Sweden: Bernard Kirschenbaum (USA), Kirsten Ortwed (Denmark), Jaume Plensa (Spain), Franco Leidi, Lars Olof Loeld, and Christian Partos (all from Sweden). By recommendation of a jury, the Arts Council commissioned Kirsten Ortwed in November 1998. Statens Konstråd contributed to the financing of the monument. Recurring No official events to commemorate Wallenberg have events been organized in connection with Ortwed’s monument. The square is a busy traffic area, both for cars and people. Activities and even exhibitions are often held here, for example a Chanukah Celebration at Raoul Wallenbergs torg in the winter of 2003. Since 2003, the Forum för levande historia has held annual commemorative ceremonies on Holocaust Remembrance Day at a site near to Ortwed’s monument. These ceremonies were always concluded by all participants lighting candles and placing them on and around Ortwed’s sculptures. Inauguration August 24, 2001, unveiled by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

30. Klement and Marek Trizuljak, Raoul Wallenberg Monument (2004) Place Material Dimensions Description

In the Old Town of Bratislava, at Zámocká utca, at the foot of Castle Hill, Slovakia. Concrete, bronze. Approximately 300 cm 240 cm 45 cm. Two standing concrete walls are linked together by a bronze silhouette depicting a house, with a roof that is partially destroyed, perhaps by fire. The house dominates the upper part of the two stones. In some of the house windows appear individuals, couples, or families, all of whom appear to have a look of concern on their faces. Beneath the house, Raoul Wallenberg’s

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name is depicted in huge letters across the two stones. Beneath his last name are the words Righteous Among the Nations. Inscriptions A longer text in Slovak is located on the back of one of the stones. The text is as follows (based on the translation by the artist): Raoul Wallenberg//1912–?//A Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Jews, including Slovak citizens, in the years of World War II. In the asylum houses in Budapest, refugees were waiting to receive false personal documents, so they could escape the area occupied by the fascists. After the war, he was captured by Russian soldiers and sent to the Gulag. The place where he is buried, and even when he died, is still unknown to us. On another stone is a list of the project’s sponsors. Artists Klement Trizuljak, born in 1958 in Bratislava, studied architecture at the Technical University of Bratislava in 1977–82; Marek Trizuljak, born in 1953 in Bratislava, studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague in 1974–80. Brief history Many of the Jews saved in Budapest during World War II were transported from Bratislava and from other locations throughout Slovakia. Consequently, the Slovakian Council of Christians and Jews, a local branch of the International Council of Christians and Jews, initiated a Wallenberg monument in 2001. The council’s patron was Pavel Hrušovský, Speaker of the Parliament. Sir Sigmund Sternberg, patron of the ICCJ, had originally sponsored the project. The engagement of the council’s Chairperson, Stefania Salisova, in the project led to the approval of the monument by leading politicians. The monument was financed by donations from companies and private persons. Inauguration November 11, 2004.

31. Charlotte Gyllenhammar, In Memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed Place Material

On Haga Kyrkoplan, between the church and a library, close to the university, in central Gothenburg, Sweden. Concrete; black patinated, waxed bronze; concrete foundation.


Dimensions Description

Inscription

Artist

Brief history

Approximately 250 cm in height, 138 cm length and 20 cm in depth. A photo of Wallenberg in his early twenties is transferred directly to the surface of the upright slab of concrete, an example of the technique of graphic concrete. In front of the portrait, placed directly on the floor, lie two emaciated, sleeping boys who are sculpted from dark bronze. They are held together by a coat or blanket, leaning against each other and against the stone. On the back of the concrete wall appears the monument’s title. On the ground is an additional plate containing the artist’s name and the year the work came into existence. Charlotte Gyllenhammar, born 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden, went to the Hovedskous konstskola in Gothenburg, studied painting at Kungliga Konsthögskolan (the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm) in the years 1983–9 and sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London (1990–1). She lives and works in Stockholm and exhibits both in Sweden and abroad. Gyllenhammar’s paternal grandmother and her siblings were born in Gothenburg but her great-grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Lithuania. All the relatives who lived in Germany and France were killed during World War II. In 2001 the City of Gothenburg decided to honor Raoul Wallenberg with a monument. This followed a motion presented by Margita Björklund (member of Folkpartiet) that approved by all the relevant authorities. The Charles Felix Lindbergs donationsfond was commissioned to realize the project and approximately 1.5 million SEK was provided for this purpose. The decision was taken to place the monument in Haga Kyrkoplan. In 2003, a selected jury was asked to propose three or four artists who would be invited to enter into the design competition (in 2005 the number of artists was raised to five). The jury consisted inter alia of representatives of Gothenburg’s municipality and Gothenburg’s konsthall (Art Museum). In 2005, Meta Isaeus Berlin, Charlotte Gyllenhammer, Ronald Jones (together with Laurie Haycock Makela),

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Maria Miesenberger, and Jan Svenungsson were invited to deliver an initial sketch. A council group was composed, among others, of the Commissioner of Urban Environment, representatives of Gothenburg’s museum of art and the City Planning Administration as well as two artists, Bianca Maria Barmen and Lars Olof Loeld. (Loeld was actually also invited to participate in the Wallenberg contest in Stockholm, which Ortwed had won.) After the council group had judged the entries, the members voted unanimously for Gyllenhammar’s proposal. This decision was then followed by the delegation of the Lindbergs donationsfond in 2005, and in 2006 the Department of Culture awarded Gyllenhammar the commission to create the monument. Inauguration May 25, 2007.

Notes Introduction 1. The project was initiated in 2005 by pupils of the Rudolf-Virchow High School in Berlin-Marzahn, based on the information given by the teacher of the project, Regina Kittler, and one of the participants, Anne Leutzsch. See also the article “Spurensuche zu jüdischen Schicksalen,” in Berliner Zeitung (January 21, 2007). 2. Quoted from the documentary 30 Monuments to Raoul Wallenberg by Peter R. Meyer (Sweden, 2001). Frank Vajda became an important figure in keeping the Wallenberg memory alive. For more information on Vajda, see the article “Han räddades av Raoul Wallenberg” by Mats Carlbom, DN (July 22, 2007), 22–3. 3. Within the title of this study, the term “contemporary” refers only to the time period the monuments came by. I am aware of the term’s weakness. However, the term is suitable to encompass all monuments created after World War II, including those in 1949. 4. See Tim Cole’s article “Turning the Places of Holocaust History into Places of Holocaust Memory: Holocaust Memorials in Budapest, Hungary, 1945–95,” in Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (eds), Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington, 2003), 272–87. 5. See Paul Levine’s article, “Whither Holocaust Studies in Sweden? Some Thoughts on Levande Historia and Other Matters Swedish,” in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 11 (1) (2005), 75–98, here 76. 6. See, for example, Janet Blatter, Art of the Holocaust (London, 1982). 7. In this context, I mention Art Spiegelman’s comic Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York, 1986), and the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art that was shown at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2002. 8. See Thomas Lutz, “Einleitung,” in Wulff E. Brebeck (ed.), Über-LebensMittel. Kunst aus Konzentrationslagern und in Gedenkstätten für Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Marburg, 1992), 7–11. 9. Quoted from Tom Rogers, “An Architecture of Sanctuary,” in Michigan Alumnus (Early Spring 1996), 34–6, here 34. 10. In addition, Eva Palmqvist wrote about Ortwed’s monument in her university major’s thesis (32 pages) I offentlighetens tjänst: En studie av Raoul Wallenbergs Torg och tre hjältars monument vid Nybroviken (Stockholm, 2002). 11. The address of the IRWF is <www.raoulwallenberg.net> [reaccessed July 21, 2008]. The address of the Raoul Wallenberg föreningen (updated in the meantime) is, www.raoulwallenberg.se> [reaccessed July 21, 2008]. 12. This is, for example, the case for the unburned bust created by Tove Hansen and Tani Abdulkader in 1999, stored in a repository of the Besættelsemuseet (The Museum of Occupation) in Århus, Denmark, or 364

Notes

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

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for the small-scale marble sculpture showing Wallenberg at 77, created by US artist Hal Goldberg, which seems to be in private property in Irvine, California. For basic information and an image of the sculpture, see the homepage of The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (= IRWF) <www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/wallenberg/tributes/world/647.htm> [reaccessed July 21, 2008]. As it is, for example, in the case with the St John Ambulance Annual Raoul Wallenberg Award of Brighton, a presentation of a Raoul Wallenberg trophy linking Wallenberg with the life-saving work of the St John Ambulance service. See the articles “Remembering Wallenberg,” in Jewish Chronicle (August 18, 1989) or “Wallenberg’s 80th birthday celebrated with care award” by Cecily Woolf in Jewish Chronicle (August 14, 1992). The same applies also for the Ottawa Raoul Wallenberg Award Lending Hand, shown on the homepage of David Kilgour, member of the Canadian parliament: <www.david-kilgour.com/mp/wallenbg.htm> [reaccessed July 21, 2008], or the small-scale bronze sculpture Homage to Raoul Wallenberg, created at the request of the IRWF by Argentine artist Norma D’Ippólito. See the homepage of IRWF: <www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/wallenberg/tributes/ statues/707.htm> and of the artist <www.normadippolito.com.ar> [both reaccessed July 21, 2008]. See Gundolf Winter, Zwischen Individualität und Idealität: Die Bildnisbüste. Studien zu Thema, Medium, Form und Entwicklungsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1985), 17. Unfortunately, I learned about Károly Veress’s Freedom in Rock Island, Illinois, only long after my study trip to the US. Therefore I did not have the chance to see the sculpture on the spot. In the following, I mainly refer to Maria Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Persönlichkeitsdenkmals in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und West-Berlin seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Münster, 1982), especially “Zur Geschichte des Individualdenkmals bis 1945,” 11–41. My predominant use of German literature seems “justified by that country’s contribution to the developments of the 1980s and 1990s. Since the mid1980s, German artists and critics have been at the forefront of the debate about public monuments.” See Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London, 1998), 203–4. See Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 13. Ibid., 16. See Peter Bloch, “Heroen der Kunst, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft: Zierbrunnen und ‘freie’ Kunst,” in Eduard Trier and Willy Weyres (eds), Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts im Rheinland, vol. 4 (Düsseldorf, 1980), 281–348, here 281. Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 84. Felix Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit (Stuttgart, 1995), 123. Peter Springer, “Rhetorik der Standhaftigkeit: Monument und Sockel nach dem Ende des traditionellen Denkmals,” in Wallraf-Richartz-Jb. (48/49) (1987/88), 365–408, here 373–4. See Werner Hofmann, Die Plastik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/Main, 1958), 16.

366 Notes 24. Wolfgang Eberl, “Sind Denkmäler heute möglich?,” in Ekkehard Mai and Gisela Schmirber (eds), Denkmal—Zeichen—Monument: Skulptur und öffentlicher Raum heute (Munich, 1989), 35–7, here 36. 25. See Peter Bloch, “Denkmal und Denkmalkult,” in Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz and Jutta von Simson (eds), Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914 (Berlin, 1990), 191–205, here 193–4. 26. See Hans-Ernst Mittig, “Die Entstehung des ungegenständlichen Denkmals,” in Evolution générale et développements regionaux en histoire de l’art 2 (1972), 469–74, here 471 (Actes du XXII: Congrès international d’histoire de l’art, Budapest 1969). 27. Unfortunately, there exists no extensive, general study on the genre of nonrepresentational personal monuments. I will predominately refer to the dissertations of Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, and Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien. 28. Hofmann, Plastik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 83. All original German and Swedish quotations within this study were translated by the author. 29. Johannes Langner, “Denkmal und Abstraktion: Sprachregelungen der monumentalen Symbolik im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Mai and Schmirber (eds), Denkmal—Zeichen—Monument, 58–68, here 59. 30. Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 40. 31. Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 132. 32. Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 38. 33. Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette, Sculpture. The Adventure of Modern Sculpture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1986). See also Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 137–58. Tatlin’s model will be taken up again in Chapter 7, the section on Ernst Neizvestny’s monument. 34. According to Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 285ff. 35. See Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (London, 1968), 44. 36. Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 31. 37. See Hans-Ernst Mittig, “Das Denkmal,” in Werner Busch (ed.), Funkkolleg Kunst. Eine Geschichte der Kunst im Wandel ihrer Funktionen (Munich, 1987), 532–58, here 549. 38. See Ekkehard Mai and Gisela Schmirber, “Mo(nu)ment mal: Denkmal?,” in Mai and Schmirber (eds.), Denkmal—Zeichen—Monument, 7–12, here 7. 39. See Martin Damus, Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert: Von der transzendierenden zur affirmativen Moderne (Reinbek/Hamburg, 2000), 235. 40. Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 291. 41. Langner, “Denkmal und Abstraktion,” 60. 42. Michalski, Public Monuments, 156. Some feared that also non-representational monuments could be used ideologically in connection with the Cold War. However, according to Reuße, non-representational monuments were hardly suitable to be appropriated by any political ideology because of the art form’s inherent fundamental “tenet of liberal ideology.” 43. Based on Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 287. 44. Christoph Heinrich, Strategien des Erinnern: Der veränderte Denkmalbegriff in der Kunst der achtziger Jahre (Munich, 1993), 19. 45. Ibid., 20ff. 46. Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 51.

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47. See Heinrich, Strategien des Erinnern, 162. 48. See Stefanie Endlich and Thomas Lutz, Gedenken und Lernen an historischen Orten: Ein Wegweiser zu Gedenkstätten für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus in Berlin (Berlin, 1995), 105. 49. Heinrich, Strategien des Erinnern, 162. 50. Lars Berggren, Giordano Bruno på Campo die Fiori: Ett monumentprojekt i Rom 1876–1889 (Lund, 1991), 255. 51. Heinrich, Strategien des Erinnern, 162. 52. Ibid., 163. 53. Lisa R. Saltzman, Art after Auschwitz: Anselm Kiefer and the Possibilities of Representation (Cambridge, 1994), 252. 54. See, for example, James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven/London, 2000); Young, The Changing Shape of Holocaust Memory (New York, 1995); Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York, 1994). 55. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Wort und Bild—‘so wahr, so seiend,’” in Jean Grondin (ed.), Gadamer Lesebuch (Tübingen, 1997), 172–98, here 195. Gadamer refers to architecture, which shares with monuments the characteristic of having a purpose, a function, in contrast to the other arts. See also Gadamer, “Zur Fragwürdigkeit des ästhetischen Bewußtseins,” in Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Ästhetik und Poetik: Kunst als Aussage) (Tübingen, 1993), 9–17, here 12. 56. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Ästhetik und Hermeneutik,” in Grondin (ed.), Gadamer Lesebuch, 112–19. 57. Of course, many doubt the power of monuments and would consequently disagree with me, as certainly Jochen Spielmann, “Steine des Anstoßes— Denkmale in Erinnerung an den Nationalsozialismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in kritische berichte (3) (1988), 5–16, here 16. 58. See Hubertus Adam, “Bestimmtheit, Unbestimmheit, Unsichtbarkeit: Wirkungen und Wirkungsbedingungen neuester NS-Mahnmäler,” in Eberhard Grillparzer (ed.) Denkmäler—ein Reader für Unterricht und Studium (Hanover, 1994), 26–39, here 26. 59. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, 1976), 95–104, here 100. 60. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven/London, 1993), 12. Young’s emphasis. 61. See Jean Grondin, Einführung zu Gadamer (Tübingen, 2000), 77. 62. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” in Gottfried Boehm, Was ist ein Bild? (Munich, 1994), 90–104, here 94. 63. See Peter Bloch, “Vom Ende des Denkmals,” in Friedrich Piel and Jörg Traeger (eds), Festschrift Wolfgang Braunfels (Tübingen, 1977), 25–30, here 25. 64. See Oskar Bätschmann, “Anleitung zur Interpretation: Kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik,” in Hans Belting, Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp et al. (eds), Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Berlin, 1996), 5th rev. edn, 192–222, in particular 219. 65. My approach is based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics as developed in Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method, first published in 1960) as well as in his other essays on art and aesthetics. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London, 1989), 2nd rev. edn, xxii.

368 Notes 66. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 98. 67. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Circle of Understanding,” in John M. Connolly and Thomas Keutner (eds), Hermeneutics Versus Science? Three German Views: Essays by H.G. Gadamer, E.K. Specht, W. Stegmüller (Notre Dame, IN, 1988), 68–78, here 69. 68. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Wort und Bild—‘so wahr, so seiend,’” in Grondin, Gadamer Lesebuch, 172–98, here 172. 69. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 95–104, here 98. 70. Gadamer, “On the Circle of Understanding,” 68. 71. Ibid. 72. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Was ist Wahrheit,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2: Hermeneutik: Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen; Register (Tübingen, 1999), paperback of the 6th rev. edn of 1990, 44–56, here 47, quotation 48. 73. Here I borrow from Emil Staiger (who in his turn followed Heidegger, not Gadamer) and adopt his use of the hermeneutic circle, but I modify the approach, of course, by applying it to art history instead of literature. Staiger, “Die Kunst der Interpretation,” in idem, Die Kunst der Interpretation: Studien zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Zurich, 1967), 5th unchanged edn, 9–33, 11, 12ff. 74. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Lesen ist wie Übersetzen,” in Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 279–85, here 280. 75. See Gadamer, “Wort und Bild—‘so wahr, so seiend,’” in Grondin, Gadamer Lesebuch, 186. 76. See Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation, 19. 77. These definitions correspond to those presented in academic studies on this field, for example, in the various articles in the publication Denkmal— Zeichen—Monument by Mai and Schmirber; see also Stefanie Endlich, “The Monument as a Work of Art and Sign of Remembrance,” in Daidalos (49) (1993), 90–9, here 92. I follow particularly Kluxen, “Denkmäler setzen— Identität stiften,” 30–2, and Bloch, “Vom Ende des Denkmals,” 25–30, here 25. For a more extensive study of the use of the term see Helmut Scharf, “Denkmalbegriff,” in Kleine Kunstgeschichte des deutschen Denkmals (Darmstadt, 1984), 5–19. 78. See Berggren, Giordano Bruno på Campo die Fiori, 22. 79. See Winter, Zwischen Individualität und Idealität, 43. 80. The following is mainly based on ibid., and especially the introduction, 7–19. 81. See Gottfried Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum: Über den Ursprung der Porträtmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance (Munich, 1985), 34. 82. See Ursula Merkel, Das plastische Porträt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Bildhauerei in Frankreich und Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1992), 13. 83. Rudolf Preimesberger, Hannah Baader, and Nicola Suthor (eds), Porträt (Berlin, 1999), (Geschichte der klassischen Bildgattungen in Quellentexten und Kommentaren; 2nd vol.), 17. 84. The phenomenon that those represented are recognized as the historical persons without having seen them or any other image of them is described by Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum, 28, 30. 85. Christa Nickel, Imre Varga im Gespräch (Bonn/Budapest/Monte Pitoro, 1995), 49.

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86. See Wolfgang Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” in Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Georg Kugler (eds), Zeitreise Heldenberg: Lauter Helden, Catalog of the Niederösterreichische Landesausstellung (Horn/Vienna, 2005), 3–13, here 11. 87. See Winter, Zwischen Individualität und Idealität, 13. 88. See Gadamer, “On the Circle of Understanding,” especially 75.

1 The Monuments’ Protagonist 1. Raoul Wallenberg (about architecture) in a letter to his grandfather dated April 9, 1932, in Gustaf Söderlund and Gitte Wallenberg (eds), Älskade farfar: Brevväxling mellan Gustaf och Raoul Wallenberg 1924–1936 (Stockholm, 1987), 55. All quotations used in this text are taken from the English translation published as Letters and Dispatches 1924–1944, trans. by Kjersti Board (New York, 1995), here 48. 2. Miksa Domonkos recalls Wallenberg with these words as early as June 21, 1945. Domonkos was Executive Chief Secretary of the Budapest Jewish Community, which arranged a ceremonial meeting, whose only subject was a tribute to Wallenberg. Quoted from Jenö Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg: His Remarkable Life, Heroic Battles and the Secret of his Mysterious Disappearance, trans. Frank Vajda (Melbourne, 1989) [Hungarian original 1948], 237. 3. See Krister Wahlbäck, “Allt förr ivrig nedskrivning av en hjälte,” in SvD (April 25, 2004), 5. See further Ulf Zander’s review of Lajos’s dissertation in Scandinavian Journal of History 30 (3/4) (2005), 350–3. 4. The author’s name appears in different spellings: Jenö or Jeno, sometimes even Eugene, and Lévai or Levai. Jenö Lévai also collected and published material concerning the fate of Hungarian Jewry. According to Braham, Lévai is “a prolific Hungarian-Jewish journalist,” and one of the most important early authors, not only for Wallenberg but also for the Hungarian Holocaust. Note the numerous entries of works by Lévai in Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Jewish Catastrophe: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography, 2nd rev. and enlarged edn (Boulder, 1984), 451, quotation 85. 5. The Swedish version is not an exact translation of the Hungarian original. See Jenö Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg: Hjälten i Budapest (Stockholm, 1948). The slightly different versions are, however, not of interest here. According to the translator of the Hungarian version into English, Professor Dr Frank Vajda (Melbourne, Australia), the English version is “verbatim to the original,” plus extra notes and an index. Email from Frank Vajda to the author (November 26, 2002). 6. See Lévai, Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 259ff. 7. Per Anger in his foreword to Lévai, Wallenberg. See also William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London, 2000). Rubinstein, too, regards Lévai’s book as “unquestionably the most comprehensive account” in terms of Wallenberg, 252 (note 40).

2 Raoul Wallenberg’s Life, Mission, and Fate 1. See Lauer’s letters to Marcus Wallenberg, April 20, 1945, and to Jacob Wallenberg, September 29, 1944, in Gert Nylander and Anders Perlinge, Raoul Wallenberg in Documents, 1927–1947 (Stockholm, 2000), 100, 101, 106, 107.

370 Notes 2. Elenore Lester, Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1982), 62. See also Lena Einhorn, Handelsresande i liv: Om vilja och vankelmod i krigets skugga (Stockholm, 1999), 173. 3. See Christoph Gann, Raoul Wallenberg: So viele Menschen retten wie möglich (Munich, 1999), 19. 4. The Nazis’ will for a “Final solution” of the “Judenfrage” was not the only reason for the occupation of Hungary, as is often stated; see Jenö Lévai, “The Hungarian Deportations in the Light of the Eichmann Trial,” in Nathan Eck and Arieh Leon Kubovy, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. V (Jerusalem, 1963), 69–103, here 72ff. and 88. 5. According to Per Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest: Minnen från krigsåren i Ungern (Stockholm, 1985), 84, deportations on a smaller scale continued; see also Jenö Lévai, The Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry, ed. by Lawrence P. Davis (Zurich, 1948), 249, 254ff., 302. See also Gann, Wallenberg, 37, 43, 48. 6. For the early phase of the rescue attempts, see Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust 1938–44, 2nd rev. and enlarged edn (Uppsala, 1998), chapter 12, 246ff., 258, 264; see further Lévai, Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 46ff., or idem, The Black Book, 227ff., 274ff. 7. Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols (New York, 1981), here vol. 2, 1085. 8. See Gann, Raoul Wallenberg, 19. 9. Harvey Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, rev. edn (New York, 1995), 66. 10. See Anger, Med Wallenberg i Budapest, 62. 11. For the outcome of the Swedish part, see Raoul Wallenberg: Report of the Swedish–Russian Working Group (Stockholm, 2000). 12. The following is based on Ett diplomatiskt misslyckande: Fallet Raoul Wallenberg och den svenska utrikesledningen. Kommissionen om den svenska utrikesledningens agerande i fallet Raoul Wallenberg (SOU 2003: 18) (Stockholm, 2003). Jan Lundvik, Swedish Ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1998, helped elucidate this complicated matter. Even as early as 1946, in his book Raoul Wallenberg, the Austrian-Jewish journalist Rudolph Philipp, who had immigrated to Sweden, had criticized the Swedish government for negligence.

3

Raoul Wallenberg in Historiography and Popular Imagination

1. Rudolph Philipp, Raoul Wallenberg: Diplomat, kämpe, samarit (Stockholm, 1946); John Bierman, Rigtheous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust (London, 1981); Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg [1982]; Lester, Wallenberg. In this context other (even earlier published) popular books should be mentioned: Hans and Elsa Villius, Fallet Raoul Wallenberg (Stockholm, 1966); Eric Sjöquist, Affären Raoul Wallenberg (Stockholm, 1974); idem, Raoul Wallenberg: Diplomaten som försvann (Stockholm, 1981); Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero: The Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg (New York, 1982); Andres Küng, Raoul Wallenberg: Igår, idag (Stockholm, 1985); Eric Sjöquist, Raoul Wallenberg (Stockholm, 1985); Danny Smith, Wallenberg: Lost Hero (Basingstoke, 1986); Jacques Derogy, Raoul

Notes

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

371

Wallenberg: Le juste de Budapest (Paris, 1994); Eric Sjöquist, Dramat Raoul Wallenberg (Stockholm, 2001). Anger, Med Wallenberg i Budapest; Lars G. Berg, Vad hände i Budapest (Stockholm, 1946, republished in 1983). As Wilhelm Agrell, however, demonstrates, it is most unlikely that Wallenberg had been a spy. See his Skuggor runt Wallenberg: Uppdrag i Ungern 1943–1945 (Lund, 2006), 19ff. and 270ff. The quotation is taken from Letters and Dispatches, 273–4. The original letter of August 6, 1944 was written in German. See, for example, Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue, 191ff., or Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 248, 277, or Andrew Handler, A Man for All Connections: Raoul Wallenberg and the Hungarian State Apparatus, 1944–45 (Westport, CT, 1996). Peter H. Gibbon, A Call to Heroism: Renewing America’s Vision of Greatness (New York, 2002), 9. Ulf Zander in his review of Lajos’s dissertation in the Scandinavian Journal of History. However, Zander himself is a very good example that this judgment is, of course, not valid for all historians. See his text “Heroic Images: Raoul Wallenberg as a History-Cultural Symbol,” in Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2007), 126–35. In the text, he also refers to other historians who share this broader approach towards history and historic figures. See introduction by Peter J. Gomes to Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 2. Levine, “The Unfinished Story of a Swedish Hero,” in the catalog of the exhibition Raoul Wallenberg: One Man Can Make a Difference, Jewish Museum in Stockholm (Stockholm, 2004), 57. Levine,“Raoul Wallenberg was a Real Life Hero,” in One Man Can Make a Difference, 33–5. Levine, “The Unfinished Story of a Swedish Hero,” 52. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue, 193. Levine, “The Unfinished Story of a Swedish Hero,” 56. The last quotation was taken from Levine’s article “One Day during the Holocaust: An Analysis of Raoul Wallenberg’s Budapest Report of 12 September, 1944,” in Samtidshistoria och politik: Vänbok till Karl Molin (Stockholm, 2004), 235–57, here 253. First quotation from Levine, “The Unfinished Story of a Swedish Hero,” 48, the second from Levine, “Raoul Wallenberg was a Real Life Hero,” 34. See my review of the exhibition. It can be found on the homepage of H-Net (Humanities and Social Science Online): www.h-net.org/mmreviews/showrev. cgi?path=735 [reaccessed July 22, 2008], or, in an altered version, Schult, “Raoul Wallenberg—One Man Can Make a Difference: Utställning: Judiska Museet i Stockholm 2004,” in Scandia 72 (1) (2006), 142–4. Svante Beckman, Utvecklingens hjältar: Om den innovativa individen i samhällstänkandet (Stockholm, 1990), 136–7. Beckman analyzed the gap, and the reasons for it, between the lack of interest of historians and social scientists in the hero theme since the late 1940s and the strong interest of public opinion in exemplary hero figures. See his chapters “Hjälten och samhällsvetenskapen” and “Hjälten, historikern och sociologin,” as well as 11ff.

372 Notes 18. Marshall W. Fishwick, American Heroes: Myth and Reality (Washington, DC, 1954), 229. 19. For an elaboration of different theories of hero myths, see Robert A. Segal (ed.), Hero Myths: A Reader (Oxford, 2000). 20. See Morton W. Bloomfield, “The Problem of the Hero in the Later Medieval Period,” in Norman T. Burns and Christopher J. Reagan (eds), Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Albany, NY, 1975), 27–48, here 27. 21. Wolfgang Schmidbauer, “Helden und Superhelden,” in Psychosozial 10 (31) (1987) (Schwerpunktthema: Helden), 85–95, here 93. 22. See Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (London, 2005), 3. 23. See the article by György Konrad, “Der rätselhafte noble Retter,” in Berliner Zeitung (November 7, 1998), m4. 24. Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (London, 1945), 17. Hook’s emphasis. 25. Ibid., 108; see also 157. 26. For the history of the term “myth” and its changing meanings, see Ernst Müller, “Mythos/mythisch/Mythologie,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, vol. 4 (Medien-Populär) (Stuttgart, 2002), 309–46. 27. See Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 3. 28. Geoffrey Cubitt, “Introduction,” in Cubitt and Allen Warren (eds), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester, 2000), 1–26, here 3. 29. See Nicole Ferrier-Caverivière, “Historical Figures and Mythical Figures,” in Pierre Brunel (ed.), Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes (London, 1992), 578–85, here 580; and Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 11. 30. Eva-Carin Gerö, “Winterson gör inget storverk med Herakles,” in SvD (November 21, 2006), 6. 31. See Samo Kobenter, “Die triumphale Niederlage, mit einem Wort Österreich,” in Müller-Funk and Kugler, Zeitreise Heldenberg, 139–43, here 139. 32. See Ferrier-Caverivière, “Historical Figures and Mythical Figures,” 582. 33. Jan de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend (Oxford, 1963), 209. 34. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York, 1991), 206. 35. See letter by Ehrenpreis for a ceremony in Stockholm’s concert hall on January 11, 1949, where he was not able to participate, but about 1000 people were present. The letter was published in Judisk Tidskrift 21 (1) (1948), 1–2. 36. See Hughes-Hallett, Heroes, 9–10. 37. Bloomfield, “The Problem of the Hero in the Later Medieval Period,” 30. 38. Ibid. 39. See the homepages www.raoulwallenberg.org/heroes/rwcsite/heroes.html and www.rwa.se [both reaccessed July 22, 2008]. 40. See Georg Seeßlen, “Held,” in Wolfgang R. Langenbucher, Ralf Rytlewski and Bernd Woyergraf (eds), Handbuch zur deutsch-deutschen Wirklichkeit: Bundesrepublik Deutschland—Deutsche Demokratische Republik im Kulturvergleich (Stuttgart, 1988), 258–60, here 258; and especially Ute Frevert, “Herren und Helden: Vom Aufstieg und Niedergang des Heroismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Erfindung des Menschen: Schöpfungsträume und Körperbilder 1500–2000 (Vienna, 1998), 323–44.

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41. Frevert, “Herren und Helden,” 342. 42. Ibid., 344. 43. Joseph Epstein, “Knocking on Three, Winston,” in idem, With My Trousers Rolled (New York/London, 1995), 70–88, here 85. 44. See Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 6–7. 45. See Alan Edelstein, Everybody is Sitting on the Curb: How and Why America’s Heroes Disappeared (Westport, CT, 1996), 213. 46. See Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Georg Kugler, “Lauter Helden: Eine Einleitung,” in idem, Zeitreise Heldenberg, XI–XIV, here XIII. 47. Stuart Hall (ed.), Soundings: Heroes & Heroines (3) (Summer 1996), 116–18, here 116. 48. See Hook, The Hero in History, 158. 49. Daniel J. Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event,” in idem, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York, 1985), 45–76, here 46 and 47, last quotation 63. Boorstin believes that we live in an age without heroes, but celebrities instead. Time will tell if this perception stems from a comparable skepticism towards possible heroes of today. 50. See also Beckman, Utvecklingens hjältar, 126, 131. 51. Hook, The Hero in History, 162 (as also for the following quotation). 52. Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 9. However, even if the terms “hero” and “role model” are often used synonymously, the term “role model” seems to mean something slightly different than hero. While the hero tries to answer universal questions about life, and provide ideals to strive after, role models are people who inspire us in our daily life. Therefore, I try not to use the terms synonymously. 53. Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity,” 48. 54. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Commemorative edn (Princeton, 2004), 230. 55. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Die Kunst des Rühmens,” in Merkur 58 (665/666) (2004), 808–17.

4 Raoul Wallenberg—A Hero’s Tale 1. I was much inspired by Wolfgang Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden.” 2. Otto Rank, Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (Leipzig, 1909), remains the classic Freudian analysis of the hero’s origin, which has inspired many scholars, such as Joseph Campbell, to whom I frequently refer. However, to use Rank’s terminology when describing Wallenberg’s origin would only lead to over-analysis, and it would not help in understanding the monuments any better. 3. See, for example, Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 17ff. 4. However, being the son of one divine and one mortal parent often caused personal disorders. See Gomes, “Introduction,” 4. 5. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 294. 6. Hughes-Hallett, Heroes, 10. 7. See the letter by Raoul’s maternal grandmother, Sophie Wising, dated August 9, 1912, to his paternal grandmother Annie Wallenberg, in Maj von Dardel, Raoul (Stockholm, 1984), 30. The book contains correspondence largely

374 Notes

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

concerning Wallenberg’s childhood. For Wallenberg’s childhood, see also the unpublished manuscript Raoul Wallenberg—en karaktär, en livsinriktning compiled by Louise Schlyter, Curator of Culture at the Cultural Activities and Recreation Department at the City of Lidingö, in 2002. For example, Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, writes frequently that Wallenberg came from an aristocratic family (see for example 19), although he himself, later on in the text, quotes Wallenberg’s brother, who points out that this is not the case (see 24). Also Gibbon mistakes Wallenberg for being a Swedish aristocrat, in idem, A Call to Heroism, 168, as does Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his book Courage: Eight Portraits (London, 2007): see the chapter on Raoul Wallenberg, 65–87, especially 80, 83, 86. See, for example, Leni Yahil, “Raoul Wallenberg—His Mission and His Activities in Hungary,” in Livia Rothkirchen, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XV (Jerusalem 1983), 7–53, here 24. See Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 5. See the two short articles of the psychoanalyst and author, and also member of the exhibition team, Thomas Böhm, “Getting my Bearings on Raoul Wallenberg,” and “Raoul’s Childhood and Youth—a Psychological Reflection,” in One Man Can Make a Difference, 19–20 and 30–2. Von Dardel, Raoul, 107. See, for example, Raoul’s letter to his grandfather in June 1935, in Älskade farfar, 146. Ibid., 206. However, during recent years some scholars have shed new light on Wallenberg family affairs that seem to revise the former picture, at least about Jacob Wallenberg. As it seems, Jacob supported resistance fighters both in Norway and in Germany. See Anders Johansson, “Jacob hemlig agent för Hjemmefronten?,” in SvD (January 5, 2007). See also the second part of the documentary series by Gregor Nowinski on the Wallenberg family, broadcast on Swedish television in January 2007, and Håkan Lindgren, Jacob Wallenberg 1892–1980 (Stockholm 2007). Lenke Rothman, “Att minnas—den goda gärningen,” in idem, Hågkomsten, hyllningen och respekten för Raoul Wallenbergs gärning i Budapest 1944 (Stockholm, 1998), 6. According to an interview with Nina Lagergren. For the following, see also the interview with her recorded by Jan Levy for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (Interview 51634 from May 5, 2001). Mrs Lagergren was so kind to lend me a copy of the interview. See also the 27-minute interview “Ansikte mot ansikte” with her on the Internet portal AXESS <www. webbtv.axess.se/web/main.nsf/webbklipp?openpage&ID=C7985D06DECE1 A26C125743B002F16B7> [reaccessed July 27, 2008]. All quotations are from the English movie Pimpernel Smith, 1941, directed by Leslie Howard, which I saw at the Statens ljud- och bildarkiv (= SLBA, The Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images). See the letter to his grandfather, dated 1936, in Älskade farfar, 204. See, for example, the letter to his boss, Kálmán Lauer, dated December 8, 1944, which can be found in the Raoul Wallenberg föreningens arkiv in Riksarkivet (1,6 correspondence with Koloman [= Kálmán] Lauer), Stockholm.

Notes

375

21. According to his sister Nina Lagergren. See the interview with her recorded by Levy for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. 22. See Jiri Grusa, “Helden,” in Müller-Funk and Kugler, Zeitreise Heldenberg, 15–20, here 15. See also Hook, The Hero in History, 16. 23. Hook, The Hero in History, 157. 24. Filadelfo Linares, Der Held: Versuch einer Wesensbestimmung (Bonn, 1967), 15–17. 25. See Lars G. Berg, The Book that Disappeared: What Happened in Budapest (New York, 1990), 13–16. Historian David Cesarani refers twice to Wallenberg in his book on Eichmann. However, he only mentions that Eichmann “commenced a bitter duel with Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats” in Budapest; see idem, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London, 2004), 13 and 192. 26. See Ulf Zander, “I våldets virvelvind. Representationer av Adolf Eichmann i förintelsens historiekulturer,” in Våld: Representation och verklighet (Lund, 2006), 303–22. 27. Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 96. The quotation should not give a wrong impression: Lévai notes Ambassador Danielsson’s important role in the rescue process. 28. Levine, “Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Modern Jewry’s Ultimate Hero?,” in M. Mor, Crisis and Reaction: The Hero in Jewish History (Omaha, 1995), 251–68, here 260. 29. The translation of the text in German and English can be found at the Raoul Wallenberg-föreningens arkiv (F 4:3) in Riksarkivet, Stockholm. 30. Yahil, “Raoul Wallenberg—His Mission and His Activities in Hungary,” 36. 31. Sol King, “In Tribute to Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg,” in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner: Architecture as a Humane Art (Ann Arbor, 1973), 5–12, here 6. 32. Statement by Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s brother, in a lecture given in Toledo. OH (apparently in the 1980s). Quoted in Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, xiii. 33. De Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, 183. 34. See Linares, Der Held, 19. 35. However, returning from Budapest would not necessarily guarantee that the rescuer’s deeds were appreciated, as the example of Carl Lutz, Swiss Consul in Budapest, 1942–5, demonstrates. Lutz’s humanitarian efforts were for a long time unacknowledged by his government. See Theo Tschuy, Dangerous Diplomacy: The Story of Carl Lutz, Rescuer of 62,000 Hungarian Jews (Grand Rapids, 2000). In fact, many rescuers’ efforts during World War II were not praised until late in life or after their deaths. 36. Wallenberg’s rescue mission was already considered to be outstanding both during and directly after the war. Note the plans of his former boss to start a Raoul Wallenberg’s Aid Committee for Hungarian Deportees as early as May 1945, “to continue Raoul Wallenberg’s work!” See Lauer’s letter to Marcus Wallenberg dated May 16, 1945, in Nylander and Perlinge, Wallenberg in Documents, 114ff. (English 115ff., quotation 117). 37. Just to cite a few examples, I refer to the public appeal organized by the Israeli Raoul Wallenberg Honorary Citizen Committee headed by Max Grunberg in the summer of 2005, and the still ongoing worldwide signatures campaign, launched by The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation

376 Notes

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

(IRWF), “100,000 names for 100,000 lives saved by Wallenberg.” See the IRWF’s homepage <www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/news/2018.htm> [reaccessed July 22, 2008]. Philippe Sellier, “Heroism,” in Brunel, Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes, 557–65, here 559. See Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 7. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 362. See the artist’s homepage <www.lancz.com/news/writing_1.html> [reaccessed July 22, 2008]. See Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity,” 48. See, for example, Jack Kemp’s foreword in Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, vii, or the article “Ge Wallenberg egen dag,” in SvD (January 28, 2004), Nyheter, 13, in which Canada’s Minister of Justice, Irwin Cotler, states that Wallenberg saved more lives than any single government. See also Zander, “Heroic Images,” 129. Ulf Zander notes that The Guinness Book of Records (1996), in the entry “Saving Life,” praises Wallenberg as the man who managed to save the greatest number of people from extinction. For the value of the Schutzpässe see Chapter 6, in the section on Willy Gordon’s monument. Strictly speaking, Perlasca was not an officially appointed attaché and only pretended to have this position. So in contrast to Wallenberg, who was officially appointed, Perlasca lacked any official position and was consequently not protected by diplomatic immunity. Like Lutz, Perlasca received recognition only many years later. See the Italian movie Giorgio Perlasca: An Italian Hero, released in 2002, directed by Alberto Negrin. According to Levine, the number of people who received some kind of Swedish protection was between 20,000 and 30,000. See Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 247. See Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 230ff, or Anger, Med Wallenberg i Budapest, 86–8, and Fredrik von Dardel, Raoul Wallenberg: Fakta kring ett öde. En sammanfattning (Stockholm, 1970), 28. Hughes-Hallett, Heroes, 12. See Levine, “The Unfinished Story of a Swedish Hero,” 57. Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 8. See Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 9. Franz Schuh, “Über Helden,” in Müller-Funk and Kugler, Zeitreise Heldenberg, 23–9, here 29. Prologue for the gala concert in memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s work on June 26, 1946, written by Paul Forgács. See Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue, 191. See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 360. Prologue by Paul Forgács. See Älskade farfar, 35, 61, 63, 123. Prologue by Paul Forgács. Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins, “Introduction,” in idem (eds), A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture (London/New York, 2000), 4. If one follows Jerzy Topolski. His examples are Florence Nightingale, the priest Maksymilian Kolbe and Mother Theresa. See Jerzy Topolski, “Helden

Notes

61.

62. 63.

64.

5

377

in der Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung,” in Jerzy Strzelczyk (ed.), Vorträge einer gemeinsamen Konferenz des Instituts für Geschichte der AdamMickiewicz-Universität Poznan und des Historischen Seminars der Universität Hannover, Poznan, 26–27 October 1995 (Poznan, 1997), 11–19, here 18–19. Walter Reich in his remarks at the unveiling of the bust; Reich’s emphasis. The speech was given to me by Kay King, Tom Lantos’s senior policy advisor, at the Capitol in Washington, DC during an interview with Annette Lantos on May 20, 2003. See Congressional Record H 1199 (1981). Also the record I received from King, see previous note. Kirsten Ortwed, quoted in Merete Pryds Helle and Morten Søndergaard, “Shaping Chance: A Portrait Interview with Kirsten Ortwed,” in Kirsten Ortwed: The Sculptor’s Palette (Horsen, 2000), 23–50, here 31. See Ulf Zander, “To Rescue or be Rescued: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and the White Busses in British and Swedish Historical Cultures,” in KlasGöran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (eds), The Holocaust—Post-War Battlefields: Genocide as Historical Culture (Malmö, 2006), 343–83, especially 346–8. Zander briefly reflects about what was known about the atrocities and hearsay, and how stories of the Germans killing millions of people were regarded as war-propaganda and impossible in reality.

The Monuments as Part of the Wallenberg Commemoration

1. Different sources offer different dates for when the tree was planted. Yad Vashem, however, confirmed in an email to the author that the tree was planted in 1979. The first Wallenberg monument was actually created by Pál Pátzay shortly after the war but was dismantled and removed on the day of its inauguration: see Chapter 6, in the section on Pátzay’s monument. 2. Trees in Wallenberg’s memory were planted in many countries throughout the world. Sometimes the idea was not only to plant a single tree but many, which were meant to grow into a forest, as in the case of the Raoul Wallenberg Forest in Galilee overlooking Nazareth, Israel. Here, the first tree was planted in summer 1981 and trees were added until 1991. Then again, as in the case of the Raoul Wallenberg Forest within the Riverdale Park Preserve, Bronx, New York (which was named after Wallenberg in about 1991), an already existing forest belatedly received its continuing function as a commemorative monument. 3. Among the many tree plantings one project sticks out because of its architectonical design around the tree: in June 1994, the Reflexive Seat to Commemorate the Life and Work of Raoul Wallenberg was inaugurated. It was created by Andrew Brophy on the initiative of the Raoul Wallenberg Unit of B’nai B’Brith in Melbourne. 4. Alban Levy in his inauguration speech. The information concerning the Cardiff memorial is based on an interview with Alan Schwartz, member of the Cardiff Wallenberg Committee, on March 9, 2003 in Cardiff, and the information he provided me. 5. The following is based on an interview with Annette Lantos and Kay A. King, Tom Lantos’s senior policy advisor, at the Capitol in Washington,

378 Notes

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

DC on May 20, 2003, and the material they provided me. Among the material were many articles, as for example Annette Lantos, “My Fight for Raoul Wallenberg” in Moment (October 1987), 20–5 and 58; Gretchen Trees, “Tom & Anette [sic] Lantos Continue Search For Wallenberg Answers,” in San Mateo Weekly (September 19, 1990), 24 and 38; or Tom Lantos’s preface to William Korey’s The Last Word on Wallenberg? New Investigations, New Questions, published on Lantos’s government address, <www.lantos. house.gov/NR/rdonlyres/06243192-B8E5-43DD-A775-9F3305310536/0/ajc_ wallenberg_last_word.pdf> [still available when accessed on February 25, 2007, but no longer when reaccessed in July 2008]. See also the Oscar prizewinning documentary The Last Days, directed by James Moll (USA, 1998). During that time Wallenberg was widely forgotten. As the story goes, Tom Lantos discovered a brief note in the New York Times that Wallenberg, according to Simon Wiesenthal, was still alive in a mental hospital in the Soviet Union. According to the information given by Annette Lantos, Tom had seen this note in the New York Times of November 7, 1977. See for example Alan Gersten, A Conspirancy of Indifference: The Raoul Wallenberg Story (Philadelphia, 2001, 160), for the Lantoses, especially Chapter 8 “The Lantos take up the fight,” 159–79. However, this information could not be verified; no such entry could be found in that issue of the New York Times. In 1985, Wallenberg was made an honorary citizen of Canada, in 1986 of Israel and in 2003 of the city of Budapest. For the importance of the series Holocaust for the historic event of the Holocaust to become better known, see for example Ulf Zander, “Historical Culture and the Nazi Genocide in the Television Era,” in Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (eds), Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe (Lund, 2003), 255–92 (including many references to other works on the series). See Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 170. To avoid confusion, this is how I use the term Holocaust: I follow Yehuda Bauer’s definition of it as the attempt to annihilate every member of European Jewry. Yehuda Bauer, Die dunkle Seite der Geschichte: Die Shoah in historischer Sicht. Interpretationen und Re-Interpretationen (Frankfurt/Main, 2001), see the Introduction and Chapter 1, “Was war die Shoah?,” especially 30. Even if some favor enlarging the term to apply to other victim groups too, in the context of this study, Bauer’s definition is fully satisfying: Raoul Wallenberg came to Budapest with the purpose of saving the remaining Hungarian Jews, even if he eventually helped other persecuted groups as well. Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, 2000), see 1 and 3. A suitable way to explain this phenomenon has been developed by the sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider. See their book Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt/Main, 2001). The English translation, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, followed in 2006. See also Michael Jeismann, Auf Wiedersehen Gestern: Die deutsche Vergangenheit und die Politik von morgen (Munich, 2001). His study shows how the Holocaust became an important part of international politics. The Holocaust Conference of Stockholm in January 2000 can be seen as a culmination of an earlier development. This Conference on Education,

Notes

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21 22.

6

379

Remembrance and Research gathered more than 40 heads of state together to discuss the question of how recognition of the Holocaust can best serve democracies to become aware of intolerance and xenophobia. See the conference homepage <www.holocaustforum.gov.se/index.html> [this site was still in use when accessed on March 6, 2007, but was no longer available when accessed in July 2008]. For the conference itself, see especially Jens Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung: Der Holocaust im Fokus geschichtspolitischer Initiativen (Frankfurt/New York, 2006). Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im Globalen Zeitalter, 188ff., 200ff. To give just three examples, representative of the many publications and films that commemorate the unknown rescuers, see Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Überleben im Dritten Reich: Juden im Untergrund und ihre Helfer (Munich, 2003); Bertil Neuman, En miljon bortglömda hjältar: berättelser om mod och goda gärningar under Förintelsen, 2nd, enlarged and rev. edn (Stockholm, 2000); or the homepage of research project “Silent Heroes” Memorial Center <www. gedenkstaette-stille-helden.de/english.html> [reaccessed July 22, 2008]. See the museum’s brochure The New Expanded Holocaust Memorial Center, 2002, or the museum’s homepage <www.holocaustcenter.org>; see also projects as the planned Garden of Righteous Worldwide on the project’s homepage <www.gariwo.net/eng/document.htm> [both reaccessed July 22, 2008]. For this project, the Garden of the Righteous in Yad Vashem serves, of course, as a starting point. However, for the “Garden worldwide,” everyone who acted against crimes against humanity committed during totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century is meant to be commemorated. See the homepage of the IRWF <www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/ monument> [reaccessed July 22, 2008]. See also Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung, 152. Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im Globalen Zeitalter, 216ff. See the institute’s homepage <www.alkaritha.org> [reaccessed July 22, 2008]. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Oxford, 1935), 33. Paul A. Levine points out that documentary evidence exists that could shed new light on Wallenberg’s role: see his “Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Modern Jewry’s Ultimate Hero?,” 252, or idem, From Indifference to Activism, 248; see also idem, “The Myth has obscured the Reality of his Heroism,” in Washington Post (January 7, 2001), B3. However, so far Levine has not presented new evidence that could question Wallenberg’s role in historiography or change his position in the collective consciousness. It would, of course, be interesting to learn more about the details of Wallenberg’s mission in Budapest. We will see if Levine’s forthcoming publication succeeds in shedding new light on the Raoul Wallenberg narrative.

Raoul Wallenberg’s Deed

1. Cubitt, “Introduction,” 7. 2. According to historian János Pótó, Pátzay had originally intended to place his sculpture on Swedish granite as Pátzay describes in his notes. This is the reason that the pedestal is often described as being granite although it is

380 Notes

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

really made out of limestone. It can be assumed that Pátzay had the more durable granite in mind for the Hungarian climate but that the limited resources of the committee in post-war Budapest could not extend to the more expensive material. See János Pótó, “The Wallenberg Monument,” in História (1) (1984). I received the English translation of this text from the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. See the English summary in Pátzay Pál: Az ember és a mu" (Budapest, 2001), 168. See Angelika Storm-Rusche, “Personendenkmäler,” in Will Cremer and Ansgar Klein (eds), Heimat. Analysen, Themen, Perspektiven (Bielefeld, 1990), 706–42, here 729–31. See Martin Damus, “Die Vergegenständlichung bürgerlicher Wertvorstellungen in der Denkmalsplastik. Das Denkmal zur Erinnerung an den 20. Juli 1944 von Richard Scheibe in Berlin—der nackte Jüngling als Symbolfigur für den Widerstand,” in K+U (Sonderheft) (1974), 70–80, here 72. Sellier, “Heroism,” 563. See, for example, Bierman, Rigtheous Gentile, 203–4; Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 121; Cole, “Turning the Places of Holocaust History into Places of Holocaust Memory,” 278; Lester, Wallenberg, 156. As in the material I received from the Swedish Embassy. See further Eric Sjöquist and Rune Ström, “Expressen fann ‘Wallenberg’—en stympad staty!,” in Expressen (June 15, 1964), 10ff.; Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 121. See, for example, Lucia Impelluso, Gods and Heroes in Art (Los Angeles, 2003), 106–22. My translation of Hans-Jürgen Wirth, “Die Sehnsucht nach Vollkommenheit,” in Psychosozial 10 (31) (1987), 96–113, here 109. See also Uwe Steffen, Drachenkampf: Der Mythos vom Bösen (Stuttgart, 1984). This summary is given in a much abbreviated, generalized manner. It is based on information given by the Swedish Embassy, including unofficial translations of a newspaper article in Hungarian by István Riba, “The Fate of the Wallenberg Statue of Szent István park,” in HVG (January 30, 1999), and a longer article written by the historian János Pótó, “The Wallenberg Monument,” along with Dossier No. 57 R 18 (October 30, 2000), and an interview with Attila Zsigmond, General Director of the Budapest Galéria, on February 7, 2003. Dr Anikó Serege, Stockholm, checked my first text with reference to additional Hungarian newspaper articles to corroborate the basic facts I collected and sought answers to my remaining questions concerning these articles. Furthermore, she later translated the additional inscriptions on the monument into German from which I translated them to English. I would like to express my warmest gratitude for her help. For the Wallenberg monuments in Budapest, see also the article by Gábor Murányi, “Wallenberg-emlékmuvek Budapesten,” in Mária Ember, Wallenberg Budapesten (Budapest, 2000), 185–97. Based on the information given by the artist’s widow, Hertha Pátzay, whom I met on February 8, 2003, in Budapest. See also Sjöquist and Ström, “Expressen fann ‘Wallenberg’—en stympad staty!,” in Expressen (15.6.1964), 10ff. See the article by Gábor Murányi, “A Wallenberg-szobor kálváriája: Az eldugott emlékmü,” in HVG (July 11, 1998), 79–83, here 79–80. See the article by László K. Tóth, “Három szobor: Változatok egy Wallenberg emlékmüre,” in Remény 2 (3) (1999), 63–7, here 65.

Notes

381

15. As Vajda wrote to me on November 26, 2002 and April 19, 2005. 16. See also Bierman, Righteous Gentile, 203; Lester, Wallenberg, 156. 17. Pótó also found a price quote for the repair of damage on the sculpture in 1950. Somebody must have asked for it knowing its whereabouts. See Murányi, “Wallenberg-emlékmuvek Budapesten,” 189. 18. See Reuben Fowkes’s doctoral thesis “Monumental Sculpture in Post-War Eastern Europe, 1945–1960” (University of Essex, 2002; also available in microfilm form at the British Library, London), 40ff. 19. Ibid., 201. 20. Ibid., 24, 25. 21. See ibid., 25ff. 22. Ibid., 192. 23. Ibid., 227. 24. See James E. Young, “The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument,” in Young, Texture of Memory, 155–84, especially 165ff. 25. The Hungarian original and an image of the relief can be found in Ember, Wallenberg Budapesten, 192, 193. 26. See Henry Kamm, “Wallenberg: Statue rises in Budapest,” in New York Times (April 15, 1987), A2. 27. A picture of the plate can be found in Ember, Wallenberg Budapesten, 194. 28. Based on information given by Ferenc Orosz from copies of the correspondence in early 1989 between the Raoul Wallenberg Association and the Biogal Pharmaceutical Factory of Debrecen. János Zolnay, one of the founding members and executives at that time, wrote a letter on behalf of the association; this was answered by Ribor Keri, then the general director of Biogal. 29. See, for example, Sjöquist and Ström, “Expressen fann ‘Wallenberg’—en stympad staty!,” 10ff.; Pótó, “The Wallenberg Monument;” see also Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 122. " s, 30. According to an email dated February 5, 2007, sent to me by Lajos Hegedu managing director of TEVA. 31. According to Tóth, “Három szobor: Változatok egy Wallenberg emlékmüre,” 67. 32. For a brief history of the monument, see the catalog entry. The brief history is based on an email from Vera Parnes dated April 6, 2003; she also gave me some Canadian newspaper articles. Parnes was the founder of The Canadian Friends of Raoul Wallenberg. I interviewed her in Montreal on May 10, 2003. Further information was found on the artist’s homepage <www. lancz.com> [reaccessed July 28, 2008]. The information was completed by the speech of Rev. Andrew S. Hutchinson at the vigil dedicated to the 55th anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance. Hutchinson was then Bishop of Montreal and responsible for the Wallenberg bust finding its setting in the courtyard. His speech was published in The Raoul Wallenberg Bulletin (2000), and on the homepage of The Raoul Wallenberg International Movement for Humanity <www.rwallenberg-int.org/frameset_history.htm>: see the section “The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial in Montréal” [reaccessed July 27, 2008]. Hutchinson gave another speech at McGill University, “An Address at the Raoul Wallenberg 60th Anniversary Memorial,” on the 60th anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance: see the homepage of the Anglican Church of

382 Notes

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

Canada, under “Office of the Primate” <www.anglican.ca/primate/writing/ address-2005-01-17.html> [still available when accessed on January 11, 2007, but no longer in use when reaccessed in July 2008]. Additionally, I met with Paul Lancz and his son Peter in Montreal on May 11, 2003. Fowkes, “Monumental Sculpture in Post-War Eastern Europe,” 48. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 38. See also David Johnston and Basem Boshra, “Haider wraps up visit: Far-right leader met with prominent Jews: lawyer,” in Montreal Gazette (February 18, 2000), A1; Jane Davenport, “Outrage greets Haider visit: He’s not welcome— Jewish leaders,” in Montreal Gazette (February 17, 2000), A1. Based on information given by Jacques Pri-Gal, project manager and director of Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study and Memorial Center, Eilat, Israel. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find out more about the artist, not even his first name. Based on interviews with Diane Blake from The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States of America, Joel C. Feffer, Stavisky’s lawyer and administrator, and his secretary, Joy Glass, on May 13, 2003 in New York, and the information they supplied to me. For a brief history of the bust, see the catalog entry. Fred Hoot, “Sculpting Raoul Wallenberg: Highlight in an Artist’s Life,” in Newsletter of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States (3) (September 1987), 4–5, here 4. However, it was not, as one may assume after reading the quotation, Lester’s book that inspired Stavisky to realize her Wallenberg bust, but rather an image of Wallenberg in a bookstore display of John Bierman’s Righteous Gentile. For the quotation, see Lester, Wallenberg, 86. The texts on Gordon’s monument are based upon materials available in the Raoul Wallenberg Room in Lidingö’s town hall, which include information from the minutes of the private committee and texts of the speeches at the inaugurations. See especially the CD-ROM Raoul Wallenbergs gärning—ett monument kommer till (The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg—A Monument Comes into Existence), containing interviews with Willy Gordon, Carmen Regnér, and Oscar Lindqvist, conducted by Louise Schlyter, Curator of Culture at the Cultural Activities and Recreation Department at the City of Lidingö in 2001. Furthermore, there are articles and other material about Wallenberg such as stamps, medals, videos, cassettes, and books. Biographical data about Gordon (see the entry in the catalog) is taken from Willy Gordon, Willy Gordon (Järna, 1976); and Willy Gordon and Tsila Zak, “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Vilnius 1990. International Monument Competition (1990). See Springer, “Rhetorik der Standhaftigkeit.,” 370. See Babette Krimmel, “Manualità—Aspekte der Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte der Hand,” in Andreas Pfeiffer (ed.), la mano: Die Hand in der Skulptur des 20. Jahrhunderts (Heilbronner Museumskatalog No. 84) (Heilbronn, 1999), 29–43. See Lidingö city’s press release (May 28, 1999) and the article in Expressen (December 4, 1998), 26, or the letters to the editor by Hans Baruch in SvD (September 21, 1998), 14, and in SvD (January 11, 1999), 10. However, according to an interview with the artist’s widow Mona in February 2007, Willy Gordon described likewise his figure holding his hands behind the back and

Notes

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

383

was not aware of the two interpretations (according to my reading) he had created. According to his widow, Gordon saw nothing negative in that pose but thought that the historic circumstances demanded quick, covert action. See Nathan Eck, “The Rescue of Jews with the Aid of Passports and Citizenship Papers of Latin American States,” in Yad Vashem Studies (YVS) 1 (1957), 125–52. See Leni Yahil, “Raoul Wallenberg,” 17; Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest, 42ff.; Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, 70, 78–9; Levine, From Indifference to Activism, 268. See Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 88. See, for example, Lévai, The Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry, 355. One Schutzpass with his signature can be found in Gann, Raoul Wallenberg, 57. Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 100, 273. Lévai gives examples where a Schutzpass was not helpful or was even the reason for particular violence. He emphasizes how Wallenberg and his numerous helpers constantly insisted on the need for using these passes. See ibid., See Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest, 65, 85; also Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 134ff. See Eck, “The Rescue of Jews with the Aid of Passports and Citizenship Papers of Latin American States,” 142. Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 94–5. See Berg, Boken som försvann, 169–70. See Lajos, Hjälten och offren, 128. There are other, less popular theories that the three crowns were perhaps used much earlier. However, the first reliable source is a seal from 1364 showing a shield with three crowns. For the triple crowns as heraldic symbol representing Sweden, see Justitiedepartementet, Sveriges Riksvapen och Sveriges Flagga (Stockholm, 1981). See Hugo Kehrer, Die “heiligen drei Könige” in der Legende und in der deutschen bildenden Kunst bis Albrecht Dürer (Strassburg, 1904); idem, Die heiligen drei Könige in Literatur und Kunst, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1908). For the triple crowns as symbol for Sweden and their association with the Magi in particular, see Heribert Seitz, De tre kronorna: Det svenska riksvapnet i sitt europeiska sammanhang (Stockholm, 1961). See also Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconolgy: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, 1993), 56–7. See Seitz, De tre kronorna, 44. The speech given by Miksa Domonkos, executive chief secretary of the Jewish Community, contains frequent references to Wallenberg’s hero-hood. Cited in Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, 237–8. See Kehrer, Die “heiligen drei Könige”, 21. The comparison of Wallenberg with light is a significant point of reference; see, for example, “Lights in the Darkness—Raoul Wallenberg and the Saving of the Jews in Budapest 1944/45,” a touring exhibition organized by the German lawyer Christoph Gann, author of the previously cited book about Wallenberg.

384 Notes 64. See Seitz, De tre kronorna, 25, 46. 65. One needs only to think of Hermes, the messenger of the gods. See Christer Jönsson, “Antik mytologi banade väg för diplomatin,” in SvD (August 29, 2001), 9. 66. According to the artist. The analysis is based on an interview with Philip Jackson at his studio and gallery in Midhurst, West Sussex, England, on March 7, 2003. 67. See Bloch, “Heroen der Kunst,” 284. According to Bloch, the gaze turned upwards reveals the “twinkle of a creative thought.” 68. Einhorn, Handelsresenade i liv, 173. 69. Per Anger, With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Memories of the War Years in Hungary, Foreword by Congressman Tom Lantos (Washington, 1995), 38. 70. See Ricki Neuman, “Wallenberg? Which one?,” in One Man Can Make a Difference, 16–18, here 17. 71. See Älskade Farfar, 103–4, 79–81. 72. Bloch, “Heroen der Kunst,” 284. I will return to Jackson’s rooting in the genre’s tradition in Chapter 10. 73. Ibid., 284. 74. Cubitt, “Introduction,” 11. 75. Here I follow Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 7. 76. Ibid., 28. 77. For a brief history of the monument, see the catalog entry. All information is based on correspondence with Adam Chyrek and the Sydney Jewish Museum. 78. For a brief history of the monument, see the catalog entry. It is mainly based on the email correspondence with Miri Margolin and the catalogs she was so kind as to send me; an interview with Annette Lantos on May 20, 2003, in Washington, DC, and further mail exchange with her, as well as the tribute to Margolin written by Tom Lantos published in the Congressional Record (November 20, 1995), E 2222. 79. Ekkehard Mai and Gisela Schmirber, “Mo(nu)ment mal: Denkmal?,” in Mai and Schmirber, Denkmal—Zeichen—Monument, 7–12, here 9. 80. These letters can be found in Nylander and Perlinge, Raoul Wallenberg in Documents. 81. Based on an interview with Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles City Councilman, on May 1, 2003 and art dealer Suzanne Zada on May 2, 2003, and the material they provided me, such as newspaper articles, photos and press releases. Suzanne Zada also showed me the sketches and the original model and gave me a copy of her speech from the inauguration as well as lending me a book about Assetto, entitled A Small Map for a Journey in Time [year, place and publishing house unknown]. 82. At the time of the inauguration, it was the Great Western. In 2003, when I visited Los Angeles, it was the Washington Mutual Bank. 83. The “feathers,” however, are best visible in the model. In her inauguration speech, Suzanne Zada describes the back of the plates as prison walls. This interpretation appears in various newspaper articles: see, for example, Mathis Chazanov, “Statue of Anti-Nazi Hero rises in Square,” in Los Angeles Times (November 13, 1988), Westside, part 9, 1; or David Keller, “Local Hands aid Wallenberg tribute,” in the Post (December 1, 1988), 1. I cannot follow this interpretation and keep to the motif of the wings.

Notes

385

84. Based on information given by Louise Schlyter, Curator of Culture at the Cultural Activities and Recreation Department at the City of Lidingö, who after careful archival research wrote the new text on the noticeboard in front of the foundation walls that was installed in connection with the inauguration of the monument.

7

Raoul Wallenberg’s Fate

1. See Bernhard Schlink, “Das Opfer des Lebens,” in Merkur 59 (679) (2005), 1021–31. 2. Campbell, The Power of Myth, 151–6. 3. See Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity,” 53. 4. The texts on Cohn’s monument are based on information given by Anna Cohn and her children Carol Vleeskens and Colin Cohn. Among the material received was the contract between the committee and the artist, from which I quoted above, as well as copies of the sketches of the design and photographs taken after the inauguration. 5. The texts on Raab’s monument are based on an interview with Ernest Raab and his former wife Goldi Steiner-Raab on May 9, 2003. For Raab’s life, see his autobiography Violin of Stone: Journey of a Soul (Toronto, 1999). 6. For the brief history, see the catalog entry. The texts on Cudin’s bust are based on correspondence with Vladimir Skorodenko from the library, correspondence with the artist and the artist’s secretary Emanuela Strano, as well as articles from Russian newspapers, and Dossier No. 30 (January 19, 2001) from the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. 7. See Langner, “Denkmal und Abstraktion,” 58ff. 8. Based on Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 147. 9. Albert Leong, Centaur: The Life and Art of Ernst Neizvestny (Lanham, MD, 2002), 12. 10. Torsten Ekbom, “Tatlins torn,” in idem, Tatlins torn och andra texter (Stockholm, 1986), 142–9, here 143. 11. Leong, Centaur, 6. 12. Here I quote from information given via email by the Galleri Astley on April 29, 2005. 13. Based on a telephone interview with Anna Graham, Ernst Neizvestny’s wife, on June 27, 2005. 14. Leong, Centaur, 67. 15. Neizvestny’s approach has much in common with that of the models created by Karl Hartung and Fritz Koenig. See Michalski, Public Monuments, 160. The competition, won by Reg Butler, was intended to pay tribute to those who had been imprisoned or lost their lives in the cause of human freedom. However, the project was abandoned in 1960; no model was ever realized. 16. See Leong, Centaur, 177. This information was confirmed by Anna Graham in a telephone interview on August 27, 2006. 17. See Leong, Centaur, 42. 18. See, for example, the work Crucifixion of 1977–80. Egeland points out that Neizvestny uses the motif not only in a sacral meaning but also to symbolize conflicts in societies. See Erik Egeland, Ernst Neizvestny: Liv och

386 Notes

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

Verk (Skinnskatteberg, 1984), 26. See also Neizvestny’s Rebirth Monument in Moscow. Leong, Centaur, xiv. Ibid., 13. Here it may be worth mentioning that Neizvestny later on created a grave monument for Nikita Khrushchev on request of Khrushchev’s son. See Leong, Centaur, 156–63. Ibid., 183. As Vera Gara wrote in “Unveiling of Raoul Wallenberg Sculpture,” in Clarion (December 9, 1986), 2. Vera Gara, herself a Holocaust survivor, was the driving force behind the competition. Joanna E. Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines in the southern Low Countries, c. 1300–c. 1600 (Brussels, 1992), 28. Ibid., 16. Wilhelm Pinder quoted after ibid., 28. Uga Drava in his proposal for the sculpture. The texts on Drava’s work are based on interviews with the artist over the period 5–8 May 2003 during my stay at the Drava family’s home in the Niagara Escarpment and in Toronto. Drava gave me the proposal for the sculpture as well as other background material, including newspaper articles on the work in the Clarion, the Ottawa Citizen, Manchester Journal and Le Droit. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 33. Ibid., 35. G.B. Freed [G. Barany], “Humanitarianism vs. Totalitarianism: The Strange Case of Raoul Wallenberg,” in Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters XLVI (1961), 503–28, here 512. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 34. Ibid., 329. Lester, Wallenberg, 176. The texts on Stoval’s monument are based on an interview with the artist on May 4, 2003, followed by a visit to the site. See de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, 231. See Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 166. This phrase is often used to describe Wallenberg’s unclarified fate: see, for example, the homepage of the Raoul Wallenberg’s Foundation, especially the article by Yoav Tenembaum, under the section “In the press” <www. raoulwallenberg.net/?en/press/307013.htm> [reaccessed July 28, 2008]. The brief history is based on the interviews with Imre Varga at his museum in Óbuda, Budapest, on February 6, 2003 (with the kind assistance of Tamás Dragonitz), and an interview with Attila Zsigmond, Director of the Budapest Galéria, on February 7, 2003, as well as information given by the Swedish Embassy in Budapest; the latter includes, the Promemoria from April 14, 1987 and May 7, 1987, and Dossier No. 73 (May 20, 1987). The text is based on Nickel, Imre Varga im Gespräch, especially the chapter “Märtyrer, Opfer und Helden im 20. Jahrhundert,” 13–39, with detail on Varga’s Wallenberg monument at 16–21. See, for example, Steven A. Mansbach, Two Centuries of Hungarian Painters 1820–1970: A Catalogue of the Nicholas M. Salgo Collection (Washington, DC, 1998).

Notes

387

40. Cole, “Turning the Places of Holocaust History into Places of Holocaust Memory,” 281. 41. Based on interviews. See also Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, xxii; Kamm, 1987, A2; John Eisenhammer, “The search goes back to Moscow for the truth about Wallenberg,” in the Independent (October 12, 1989), 12. 42. The perception of the gesture as authoritative or weak depends on the point of view. The power of the gesture of the hand was the starting point for Gennadij Ajgi in the composition of the 1988 poem (written in Russian), Die Letzte Fahrt. The working title was in fact Wallenberg’s Hand. The poem elaborates on the gesture and the associations it elicits. See Gennadij Ajgi, Die Letzte Fahrt (Berlin, 1993). 43. In Stavisky’s estate I found a photo showing Varga’s monument, most probably taken soon after the work’s inauguration. Her quotation, however, refers originally to her own group of Auschwitz bronzes and sounds as the whole, “Whether you are a prisoner in a concentration camp, a prisoner in a prison, or a prisoner in your own body… suffering alone does not make you a hero. Its how you meet suffering that makes the difference.” See Fred Hoot, “Sculpting Raoul Wallenberg: Highlight in an Artist’s Life,” in Newsletter of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States (3) (September 1987), 4–5, here 5. 44. See Irvin Zupnick, “Saint Sebastian: The Vicissitudes of the Hero as Martyr,” in Burns and Reagan, Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 239–67, here 239. 45. See Nickel, Imre Varga im Gespräch, 17. 46. See The Blade (October 13, 1995), 9. 47. See Cubitt, “Introduction,” 8. 48. See Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 10. 49. See Franz Schuh, “Über Helden,” in Müller-Funk and Kugler, Zeitreise Heldenberg, 23–9, here 25. 50. The texts on Salman’s bust are based on information given by Yad Vashem and via a telephone interview with the Russian-speaking artist made on my behalf during summer 2006 by my colleague Johnny Rodin, Södertörn University College. Unfortunately, it was not possible to gather more detailed information about the work or the artist.

8

Raoul Wallenberg’s Legacy 1. See the correspondence and the sketches in the Raoul Wallenberg-föreningens arkiv (F 4:3) in Riksarkivet, Stockholm. 2. Freed mentions Wallenberg’s nomination in 1947, in “Humanitarianism vs. Totalitarianism: The Strange Case of Raoul Wallenberg,” 503 and 516. According to Anger, Wallenberg was suggested for the Nobel Peace Prize for the first time in 1947 and the last time in 1983. See Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest, 177. Except for Dag Hammarskjöld (Nobel Peace Prize 1961) and Erik Exel Karlfeldt (Nobel Prize in Literature 1931), all other laureates were still living when they received the prize. On the homepage of the Nobelmuseum one can learn that “from 1974, the Statues of the Nobel Foundation have stipulated that a prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless death has occurred after the announcement of the Nobel Prize.”

388 Notes

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

On that page, it is noted that Wallenberg was nominated 23 times between 1948 and 1949. Those who proposed Wallenberg were apparently convinced that he was still alive and that the Nobel Peace Prize would contribute to hasten his release. See the section “The Nomination Database for the Nobel Peace Prize” at <www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace> on The Norwegian Noble Institute’s homepage. [reaccessed July 29, 2008]. If Anger is right, people tried to nominate Wallenberg even after 1948 and following the change of the statutes. So although the chance that Wallenberg was still alive and could receive the prize did not increase over the years, he was still proposed. The reason for that was either that he was really believed to be still alive or that a nomination was one attempt to raise public attention concerning his fate. However, after my inquiry at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, I learned that the foundation’s statutes have a clause that does not allow anyone to reveal who was nominated during the last 50 years. Consequently, Anger’s information could not be confirmed. Based on information given by Elisabeth Fleetwood as well as Martin Brandorf and Anselm Eggert (both of whom worked at the Riksdag), and an examination of all the motions. See Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest, 177. Based on interviews with Anselm Eggert on November 26, 2004 and April 13, 2005. Historian Paul A. Levine is mistaken when he states that inside the parliament “one can view a bust which resembles the man himself.” See Levine, “Whither Holocaust Studies in Sweden?,” 96, footnote 3. The so-called program Auschwitz-Dagen or Vi får aldrig glömma: Till åminne av Förintelsen (The Auschwitz Day or We should never forget: In Memory of the Holocaust) was broadcast on Swedish television SVT 2 (on January 27, 1998), 12:55–14:00. I saw a copy at the SLBA. For the work, see Lenke Rothman, Att minnas—det goda gärningen: Hågkomsten, hyllningen och respekten för Raoul Wallenbergs gärning i Budapest 1944. Gestaltning av Lenke Rothman (Stockholm, 1998). For an overview of the art collection in the parliament, see Bo Lindwall, Art in the Riksdag Building (Stockholm, 1990), or Hedvig Hedqvist, Möte med Sveriges Riksdag: Arkitektur, konst och inredning (Stockholm, 2003). This reading is shared by Henriette Zorn, “Grus, almanacka och ljusstakar: Lenke Rothman har gjort en lågmäld och stark hyllning till Raoul Wallenbergs minne,” in DN (April 4, 1998), A6. Gitta Magnell, “DN gratulerar: Vittnen i stram givakt,” in DN (March 28, 1999), A6. Ibid. The dispatch can be found in Rothman, Att minnas—det goda gärningen, 11ff. The text of the leaflet, in Swedish and English, can be found on the homepage of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the University of Minnesota, www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/wallenberg/rememberSw.html [accessed July 29, 2008] See Lajos, Hjälten och offren, 125. See Günter Metken, Spurensicherung: Kunst als Anthropologie und Selbsterforschung. Fiktive Wissenschaften in der heutigen Kunst (Köln, 1977), 139 as well as idem, Spurensicherung: Eine Revision. Texte 1977–1995 (Amsterdam/Dresden, 1996).

Notes

389

16. See for example Lenke Rothman, Ok Ok No New York, with photos by Tana Ross (Åhus, 1984), in which she described, during a stay in New York in 1981, how she approached art. This essay can be seen as symptomatic of her approach towards art in general. See also idem, Inskrifter (Stockholm, 2000). 17. See Herbert Molderings, “‘Spurensicherung’ in der Bildenden Kunst,” in Detlef Hoffmann together with Karl Ermert (eds), Spurensicherung. Geschichte und Vergangenheit in Kunst und Wissenschaft (Rehburg-Loccum, 1985; Loccumer Protokolle (55) 1984), 8–33, here 9. Molderings argues, however, for the use of the term “conceptual art” instead of Spurensuche because the “artwork is first of all an invention not a find.” 18. See ibid., 13. 19. See Metken, Spurensicherung, 15. 20. Yvonne Granath, “Ett estetiskt förhållningssätt hjälpte mig också i Auschwitz,” in Stockholms Fria Tidning (February 6, 2005). 21. Torsten Ekbom, Ett skrin fullt av samlade saker: Om Lenke Rothmans konst [Stockholm: L. Rothman, 1995], 10. 22. Lenke Rothman, Regn (Stockholm, 1993), 69. 23. Rothman is indeed also a writer. See her prose works Regn, and Stygn (Hedemora, 2001). The quotation is taken from idem, Quality of Life (Åhus, 1981) [unpaginated]. See also idem, Regn, 23, 154. Rothman also referred to the number eight in titling her pictures as, for example, in 8.8.1964 (from 1964). 24. Lenke Rothman, Spår—ett minnesmärke / Track—A Memorial (Stockholm, 1995), 26. 25. See Helena Östlund, “Stygn,” in Socialpolitik (3) (2001), 21–7. 26. Quoted from Rothman, Regn, 191. 27. Ekbom, Ett skrin fullt av samlade saker. 28. See ibid., especially 19–22, quotations 20 and 22. 29. For the cult of hero worship, see Jan de Vries, Heldenlied und Heldensage (Bern/Munich, 1961), 307ff. 30. Based on information from Lenke Rothman. See also Lindwall, Art in the Riksdag Building, 74. 31. See Kring 1809: Om regeringsformens tillkomst (Stockholm, 1965). I want to thank the historian Reinhold Wulff, Berlin, for his advice concerning this topic. 32. According to an email from the artist of May 1, 2003 to the author. The brief history is based on interviews with Jon Rush in Ann Arbor on April 23–24, 2003. 33. For the names of all nominees, see Penny Schreiber and Joan Lowenstein (eds), Remembering Raoul Wallenberg: The University of Michigan Celebrates Twentieth-Century Heroes (University of Michigan Wallenberg Executive Committee, 2001). 34. Quoted from Rogers, “An Architecture of Sanctuary,” 34. The statement can also be found in Laura Nelson, “Sculpture honors Wallenberg, King,” in The Michigan Daily (October 27, 1995), 6. 35. Even other readings of the construction, inspired by statements by the artist, appear in newspaper articles. See for example Rogers, “An Architecture of Sanctuary,” 34. According to those, the framework can

390 Notes

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

also be read as the cell where Wallenberg was hidden: the sanctuary transforms into Wallenberg’s prison cell. I regard this as an over-interpretation that expresses the wish to cover every facet of the Wallenberg narrative. Based on the interviews with the artist. See also Nelson, “Sculpture honors Wallenberg, King,” 6, or Rogers, “An Architecture of Sanctuary.” See Älskade Farfar, 203. See also Lester, Wallenberg, 30, and Lillian E. Stafford, “Raoul Wallenberg Remembered,” in Michigan Alumnus 91 (6) (May 1985),16–28, here 19. The letter can be found in the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For a complete list of the nominees up to 2001, see Rafael Moneo,: The Freedom of the Architect. The Raoul Wallenberg Lecture (Ann Arbor, 2002), 46. King, “In Tribute to Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg,” 8. The text on Adams’s sculpture are based on an interview with the artist in Parsippany on May 16, 2003, and completed by information given on the artist’s homepage <www.adamsart.com> [reaccessed July 29, 2008]. Further information was available via mail exchange with the Wallenberg Foundation of New Jersey: see their homepage <www.wallenbergfoundationofnj.org> [reaccessed July 29, 2008]. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Aktualität des Schönen” [1974], in idem, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Ästhetik und Poetik: Kunst als Aussage) (Tübingen, 1993), 94–142, here 129. The texts on Veress’s sculpture are based on information given by the artist’s wife, Margot Dalnoki-Veress, and Sherry Maurer, director of the Augustana Art Museum at the college. The following is based on Dag Sebastian Ahlander, “The History of the Monument,” in the booklet The Raoul Wallenberg Monument in New York: Lest We Forget The Cruel History Of Our Time (Malmö, 1998), 9–11, and a telephone interview with Ahlander on July 18, 2005 that clarified remaining questions. Ahlander has also written the children’s book Raoul Wallenberg. Hjälten som försvann (Stockholm, 2001). Based on Lena Einhorn’s drama-documentary Handelsresande i liv (Stateless, arrogant and lunatic) (Sweden, 1997). The film was broadcasted on Swedish television SVT 2 (March 25, 1998), 20:00. I saw a copy at the SLBA. The book about this subject appeared two years later: Einhorn, Handelsresande i liv: Om vilja och vankelmod i krigets skugga (Stockholm, 1999). See David Finn, Hope: A Monument to Raoul Wallenberg: Sculpture by Gustav Kraitz. With an introduction by Kofi Annan (Woodstock, 2001), 10: “each stone was carefully selected, placed and numbered before reaching its final home.” See also 18. See Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture. All quotations can be found on 30. Waldemar Otto, in Mai and Schmirber, Denkmal—Zeichen—Monument, 173–5, here 173. As for example Finn, Hope, 8. For more about both their team work as well as the special Chinese technique used for their ceramic sculpture, see the documentary Den Kinesiska

Notes

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

391

Hästen på Hallandsåsen (March 24, 1983, SVT, TV 1, 19:00) as well as the short insert about Ulla and Gustav Kraitz in Sköna Söndag (March 20, 1988, SVT, TV 2, 9:30), both available in the SLBA. For further details on the technique as well as Kraitz’s ceramic works in general, see Ulla and Gustav Kraitz [Förslöv, 1993], or Ulla och Gustav Kraitz: Keramisk skulptur och collagemålningar (Stockholm, 1996). Quoted from the article “Makarna Kraitz i Hishult,” in Nordvästra Skånes tidningar (July 11, 1998). James Yood, “Gustav and Ulla Kraitz in Chicago 1993–94,” in Ulla och Gustav Kraitz. Keramisk skulptur och collagemålningar, 19–21, 19. Jan Torsten Ahlstrand, “Ett monument som hejdar tidens ström,” in Gustav Kraitz: Raoul Wallenberg Monument i New York (Lund, 1999), 2–8, here 5. See also Finn, Hope, 11. Gustav Kraitz, “Lest we forget the cruel history of our time …,” in The Raoul Wallenberg Monument in New York, 25–6, here 25. Kraitz, in an article by Bengt Hansson, “Hopp: Idag tar New York emot Raoul Wallenberg-monumentet,” in Göteborgs-Posten (November 9, 1998), 33. Kraitz, in an article by Larsolof Carlsson, “Minnesmärken med symbolik,” in Helsingborgs Dagbblad (April 15, 1999), 25. Kraitz, in an article by Larsolof Carlsson, “75-åring som skapar offentlig konst,” in Helsingborgs Dagbblad (March 29, 2001), 19. Göran Christenson, “The Artist,” in The Raoul Wallenberg Monument in New York, 29–31, here 30–1. Kraitz’ statement was quoted in various newspaper articles repeatedly before and after the monument’s inauguration. See for example Eva Dandanelle, “Monumentets dramatik förmedlas,” in Borås Tidning (September 4, 2000), 16, or Hansson, “Hopp,” or Carlsson, “Minnesmärken med symbolik.” Furthermore the booklet of the exhibition at the Skissernas Museum in Lund in 1999 as well as a booklet about the monument edited by the artist himself affirm this reading. Gustav Kraitz, “Lest we forget the cruel history of our time …,” 25. Finn, Hope, 18. Yood, “Gustav and Ulla Kraitz in Chicago 1993–94,” 20. Already in January 1942, the Declaration of the United Nations has been signed by 26 allied nations. During the course of the war, 21 more nations added their signatures to this declaration. See Grusa, “Helden,” 15. See Raoul Wallenberg: Report of the Swedish–Russian Working Group, 36. For Wallenberg’s reconstruction plan, see Gann, Raoul Wallenberg, 137ff. See Lester, Wallenberg, 107 and Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 85; see also the interview with Tom Veres in Der Spiegel (20) (2001), 128–9. Gann, Raoul Wallenberg, 180. Using the search function on the official UN homepage, the researcher will find some 15 entries where Annan refers to Wallenberg. See the official homepage of the United Nations, <www.un.org> (when reaccessed on January 8, 2007, 31 entries could be found). All quotes by Annan were taken from the Internet. However, the site from which I quoted, <www.proasyl.de/serien/euregio/kofi_annan.htm>, is no longer available.

392 Notes 72. See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights,” in Journal of Human Rights 3 (2) (June 2004), 143–57. 73. Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 5. 74. Levy and Sznaider, “The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality,” 147. 75. Quoted from Gann, Wallenberg, 137. 76. See the homepage of the United Nations (updated in the meantime) <www. un.org/holocaustremembrance> [reaccessed July 29, 2008). 77. Kraitz in Hansson, “Hopp,” 33. 78. The following is based on an interview with Staffan Nihlén and the Commissioner of Urban Environment, Gunnar Ericson, on September 4, 2003 in Malmö, together with a follow-up telephone interview with Nihlén on June 14, 2005. The Gatukontoret (Streets and Parks Department) of Malmö provided me with additional documents. 79. As Aldo Caserino formulated it. See Staffan Nihlén: Statuario (Hishult, 2005), 14. 80. See for example Nihlén’s publications Skulptur: 1986–1991. Rosso Levanto (Skurup, 1991); Mediterraneo (Lund, 1996); Dialogo con Leonardo / Dialogue with Leonardo (Montespertoli, 1999). 81. Marble absorbs light, which in turn makes the stone shine; see Nihlén’s statement, for example, in Per Sinding-Larsen, “Marmorn har ljus,” in Ystads Allehanda (May 11, 1990). 82. Here I follow Jörgen Klinthage’s interpretation; see his article “Granit och rosor marmor,” in Hallandsposten (July 3, 1996). 83. Bloch, “Heroen der Kunst, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft,” 317. 84. See ibid., 320. 85. Ibid., 317. 86. See for example Jan Pieper, Pienza: Der Entwurf einer humanistischen Weltsicht (Stuttgart/London, 1997), or Andreas Tönnesmann, Städtebau und Humanismus (Munich, 1990). 87. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. with an introduction and notes by Adam Phillips (Oxford, 1998), 36: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible, but at certain distances … they are delightful.” 88. See ibid., 103ff. 89. Nihlén, Mediterraneo, 90. 90. Brita Ostadius, “Tre nordiska mästare trollar med sten,” in Borås tidning (July 7, 1996). 91. Prologue for the gala concert in memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s deed on June 26, 1946, Raoul Wallenberg-föreningens arkiv (F 4:3) in Riksarkivet, Stockholm. 92. When I interviewed Charlotte Gyllenhammar on June 19, 2006 in the artist’s studio, I also saw the model created for the competition. Another telephone interview took place on December 5, 2006 and we had further email exchanges. Furthermore, I received information and documentation from Cecilia Borgström-Fälth from the Cultural Department of the City of Gothenburg, among the material she provided being

Notes

93. 94.

95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

9

393

Gyllenhammar’s justification for her proposal with which she won the competition. Based on information given by Nina Lagergren on February 9, 2007. Mikael Göransson’s design for the underground station Stadshagen in Stockholm was his first large-scale artwork in graphic concrete and the first public work to make use of this technique in Sweden. See the artist’s homepage <www.mikaelgoransson.com> [reaccessed on July 29, 2008], which was very helpful to understand the technique and where also images of the test-castings of the Wallenberg monument can be found. The contrast “private–public” is indeed an essential element of Gyllenhammar’s work; see especially Håkan Nilsson’s article “Charlotte Gyllenhammar,” in Magnus Jensner and Evalena Lidman (eds), Charlotte Gyllenhammar (Stockholm, 2005). Published for example in Debórah Dwork, Children With a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, 1991), 204. Rothman, Regn, 11. Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (London, 2002), 375. Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 169. Ulf Abel, Ikonen: Den besjälade bilden. Essäer och uppsatser om ortodox kyrkokonst (Skellefteå, 2006). Ibid., 146. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 146. See Hans-Dieter Gelfert, Im Garten der Kunst: Versuch einer empirischen Ästhetik (Göttingen, 1998), 21–2.

Raoul Wallenberg’s Insubordination

1. Cubitt, “Introduction,” 8–9. 2. See Berg, Vad hände i Budapest, 49, 50. 3. See Müller-Funk, “Anatomie des Helden,” 8. According to Müller-Funk, these skills are traditionally described as “female.” 4. Prologue for the gala concert in memory of Raoul Wallenberg’s deed on June 26, 1946. 5. See the unpublished manuscript “Raoul Wallenbergs Torg” by Dorothea Flodin (John Ericsson Minnesmonument), Vanessa Gandy (Jorden sedd från ovan) and Johanna Gullberg (Wallenberg monumentet) (Stockholm University, September 2002). I thank Dorothea Flodin for giving the manuscript to me. 6. For the restoration of Raoul Wallenbergs torg, Aleksander Wolodarski received the Sienapriset by the Association of Swedish Architects in 2003. See their homepage (last update November 23, 2003) <www.arkitekt.se/s8852>, the section on awards (in Swedish only) [reaccessed July 29, 2008]. 7. According to telephone interviews with Kirsten Ortwed in August 2005 and August 2006. 8. See the article “Hotellkonst som bryter av” by Ricki Neuman, in SvD (June 6, 2003), 2.

394 Notes 9. See Meyer, 30 Monuments to Raoul Wallenberg. 10. For the monument, see the publication Glöm oss inte: En bok om Förintelsen och Minnesmonumentet i Stockholm (Stockholm, 1999). 11. The text is based on (telephone) interviews with Wolodarski in May and June 2006 and Gabriel Herdevall in January 2007. 12. While it was not possible to take real rails, the cobblestones stem from the former ghetto of Budapest. Wolodarski received the cobblestones from Gustav Kraitz. The work was erected by the City of Stockholm, the Jewish community, and largely financed by Storch & Storch AB. 13. The text was written together with Per Ahlmark. 14. A side note on the choice of material: journalist Markus Lutteman points to the health risks for workers in China, but also in Sweden, who work with the cheap Chinese granite. See his article “Billig kinesisk sten till svenska skrytbyggen,” in SvD (November 21, 2006). In a global age, urban planning may reflect moral responsibility in the choice of material, even more so when the place is dedicated to a great humanitarian. 15. However, after Vägen was inaugurated, a bench was moved so that, and still at the time of writing in August 2008, the information is not readable. 16. See Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, especially 19–48, see also D.A. Nawrocki, Grounded: Sculpture on the Floor (Ann Arbor, 1990). 17. See Eva Renate Meyer-Hermann, Das Phänomen Bodenplastik. Untersuchungen zu einem Problem der sechziger Jahre an Werkbeispielen von Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Franz Erhard Walther und Franz Bernhard (Bonn, 1991), 19. 18. See Springer, “Rhetorik der Standhaftigkeit,” 365–408. 19. Ibid., 279. 20. Mai Misfeldt “The Sculptor’s Palette,” in Kirsten Ortwed: En samling en kunstner (Aalborg, 2002), 70–6, here 70. 21. Ibid. 22. As Kirsten Ortwed expressed it herself. Quoted Pryds Helle and Søndergaard, “Shaping Chance,” 25. 23. The sketches can be studied in the archives of the Skissernas Museum, Lund. One of the sketches can also be found in Wilfried Dickhoff, Kirsten Ortwed: Heavymetalopenspace. Skulpturen für öffentliche Räume. Sculptures for Public Spaces 1996–2006 (Cologne, 2006), 66–7. 24. To establish such a relationship is indeed one of the main elements in Kirsten Ortwed’s art, as Jochen Kronjäger demonstrated in his article “Calculated Space.” This explains the artist’s disappointment about the “not satisfying space” given to her sculptures on the Raoul Wallenbergs torg. Kronjäger’s article can be found in Kirsten Ortwed: En samling en kunstner, 61–5. The article was published first in German in 1986. 25. Misfeldt, “The Sculptor’s Palette,” 71. 26. For the following, see the ten-minute documentary by Peter R. Meyer, Kirsten Ortwed (Sweden, 1999). Available at the SLBA. 27. Troels Wörsel, “Introduction,” in Kirsten Ortwed, 2000, 7–10, here 10. 28. Based on Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 302. 29. In the following reading I was much inspired by Philip Spectre, Rabbi of the Great Synagogue on Wahrendorffsgatan until May 2005, with whom I met on February 25, 2003. 30. See also Pryds Helle and Søndergaard, “Shaping Chance,” 23–50.

Notes

395

31. Kirsten Ortwed in ibid., 31. 32. Quoted from Berg, The Book that Disappeared, 227. In the Swedish version of his book Berg mentions Skeppsbron as place for their arrival. This information was confirmed by Nina Lagergren. Anger writes of Stådsgården instead. See Anger, Med Raoul Wallenberg i Budapest, 133. Both landing stages lay in the same bay, but Skeppsbron is actually even closer to Nybroviken and thereby to Ortwed’s monument. 33. Misfeldt, “The Sculptor’s Palette,” 76. I do not follow Misfeldt’s judgment that the signature is easy legible, as will be discussed later on. 34. György Somlyó, Die Rampe (Berlin, 1988), 33. 35. See Gann, Wallenberg, 57. 36. Compare, for example, Fredrik von Feilitzen, “Wallenbergmonumentet: Ortweds förslag ingen vinnare,” in SvD (January 9, 1999), 15, and Lars-Göran Oredsson, “Av människan blev en struktur,” in Sydsvenskan (May 8, 1999), A4. 37. Per Anger, Georg Klein, Jan Lundvik, and Harry Schein, “Hedra Raoul Wallenberg med ett annat minnesmärke,” in DN (January 2, 1999), C4. 38. See Meyer’s documentary Kirsten Ortwed. 39. Pryds Helle and Søndergaard, “Shaping Chance,” 25. 40. Kirsten Ortwed in ibid., 34. 41. Misfeldt, “The Sculptor’s Palette,” 73. 42. See for example the articles on heroes in Wespennest: Zeitschrift für brauchbare Texte und Bilder (129) (Vienna 2002), especially those by George Blecher and Burghart Schmidt. 43. See Heinrich, Strategien des Erinnern, 162. 44. Raoul Wallenberg: Report of the Swedish–Russian Working Group, 166–7. 45. Letter to the editor by Margareta Bauer and Birgit Brulin, in SvD (March 14, 1999), 14. However, both knew Wallenberg from their time in Budapest and consider Ortwed’s “bronze lumps” on the ground to be unworthy of the commemoration of Wallenberg. 46. Letter to the editor by Hans Baruch, “Kirsten Ortwed’s förslag är originellt,” in SvD (January 11, 1999), 10. 47. Campbell, The Power of Myth, 32. 48. See Anger, Klein, Lundvik, and Schein, “Hedra Raoul Wallenberg med ett annat minnesmärke.” 49. In this context, it is interesting to mention that Ortwed’s work shows strong similarities with Gesine Weinmiller’s unrealized proposal for a Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in 1997. If even much bigger in size, the 18 stones would have much in common with Ortwed’s outspread sculptures, especially in the dispersal of the single pieces in the given space and the fact that the stones were meant to have a rough structure. Weinmiller’s monument should call to mind the murdered Jews. Her stones were meant to describe an abstract version of a Star of David. 50. Damus, Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert, 244. 51. The events of World War II and the Holocaust made it indeed impossible for many artists to continue between past and present as Max Liljefors so accurately writes. See Max Liljefors, “The Interplay of Memory and Amnesia: Sites of Memory in Europe and Africa,” in the exhibition catalog Förlust/Loss (Knislinge, 2008). 52. Hughes-Hallett, Heroes, 5.

396 Notes 53. See Sellier, “Heroism,” 559. 54. Linares, Der Held, 31. 55. The text appeared again, in a slightly different version, see Per Wästberg, “Reflections on Kirsten Ortwed’s Proposal for Raoul Wallenberg’s Square, Stockholm,” in the exhibition catalog Förlust/Loss (Knislinge, 2008). 56. Here, I refer to the monument project of Stolpersteine by German sculptor Günter Demnig. Demnig sets stones with inscriptions into the pavement at the sites where victims of Nazi persecution had their last residence: see the project’s homepage <www.stolpersteine.com> [reaccessed July 29, 2008). 57. See Stefanie Endlich, “Bilder und Geschichtsbilder: Kunst und Denkmal als Mittel der Erinnerung,” in Dachauer Hefte 18 (3) (2002), 3–22, here 10 (note 6). 58. See Michael Blackwood’s documentary film Peter Eisenman: Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial (USA, 2005). The film was broadcast on Swedish television SVT 2 (August 25, 2006), 20:00–21:00. " 59. See U lkü Holago, “Väg håller minnet vid liv,” in SvD (June 14, 2006), front page Kultur and 5.

10 Challenges, Comparisons, and Conclusions 1. This becomes quite obvious by looking at the work, and even more so when comparing the newly taken photos with the photos Cohn’s son Colin sent me, taken at the time of the monument’s installation. 2. According to an email from Gunnar Ericson to the author dated November 2, 2006. 3. Rev. S. Hutchinson in the already mentioned speech given on the sixtieth anniversary of Wallenberg’s disappearance. 4. In 2006, Joseph Wachtel changed the title to Hero Without a Grave. The texts on Wachtel’s bronze are based on interviews with the artist between May 27 and 29, 2003 in West Palm Beach, Florida. 5. The texts on Campos’s monument are based on information given by the artist, Rabbi Dr Angel Kreiman, one of the driving forces behind the monument, Ana Veghazi of B’nai B’rith International and Doris Isaksson, Social Secretary at the Swedish Embassy in Santiago de Chile. 6. Cecilia Campos in an email to the author dated July 5, 2005. 7. The texts on Duldig’s monument are based on information given by the artist’s daughter Eva de Jong-Duldig, representing The Duldig Studio— museum, Melbourne, and Frank Vajda, head of the Melbourne Free Wallenberg Committee. 8. See for example Duldig’s ceramic head of 1941, his Brickyard Madonna, 1964, or the model for his Hakoah Monument, 1968, in Peter Stasny, Karl Duldig: Sculptures/Drawings (Vienna, 2003); for images see 151, 74–5, and 66. 9. Based on information given by Frank Vajda. 10. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Kunst und Nachahmung” [1967], in idem, Gesammelte Werke. vol. 8 (Ästhetik und Poetik. Kunst als Aussage), 25–36, here 30 and 32. 11. See Gadamer, “Die Aktualität des Schönen,” 129. 12. Hubertus Adam, “Zwischen Anspruch und Wirkungslosigkeit: Bemerkungen zur Rezeption von Denkmälern der DDR,” in kritische berichte 19 (1) (1991), 44.

Notes

397

13. See Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, “‘Der Torso eines Ritters’ von Hans Arp. Anmerkungen zum Problem des modernen Denkmals,” in Mai and Schmirber, Denkmal—Zeichen—Monument, 125–33, here 129 and 132, quotation 132. 14. Mittig, “Das Denkmal,” 548. 15. Endell, quoted after Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 133. 16. See ibid., 303. 17. Ibid., 198. 18. See Gadamer, “Die Aktualität des Schönen,” 116ff., especially 128. 19. Ibid., 295, with reference to Langner. 20. Heinrich, Strategien des Erinnern, 24. 21. See ibid., 13. 22. Dan Karlholm, “Det tomma monumentet,” in Vad betyder verket? Konstvetenskapliga studier kring måleri, skulptur, stadsplanering och arkitektur (Stockholm, 2001), 43–52, here 45. 23. See Eduard Trier, Bildhauertheorien im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1999), 195–7. 24. See Berggren, Giordano Bruno på Campo die Fiori, 19. 25. See Michelle Marie Roy, “Powers of Inversion: Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s Dual Perspective,” in Art Papers (March/April 2005), 22–3, here 22. 26. See Franziska Kirchner, “Zur Frage der Abstraktion oder Gegenständlichkeit im heutigen Denkmal,” in Orte des Erinnerns (Berlin, 1994) (vol. 1: Das Denkmal im Bayerischen Viertel: Beiträge zur Debatte um Denkmale und Erinnerung), 44–52, here 46. 27. See Ingela Lind, “Att söka hem,” in Wanås 2002: Ann Hamilton. Charlotte Gyllenhammar (Wanås, 2002), 7–9. 28. Staffan Nihlén, Skulptur 1986–1991. Rosso Levanto (Skurup, 1991), 13; for the following see also 11. 29. Philip Jackson in an email to the author dated May 25, 2005. 30. Vajda in an email to the author dated April 18, 2005. 31. Brita Orstadius, “Monument och engagemang—en fråga i tiden,” in Borås Tidning (April 24, 1999), 5. 32. See Bengt Sjösten, “Flytta Wallenbergmonumentet,” in SvD (November 26, 2002, Inrikes). 33. Here I refer to Peter Hansen, significantly an assistant professor in literature not an art historian. See Hansen, “Konst och monument går inte ihop,” in Svensk Tidskrift (1) (2002), 11–13. 34. See Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Thinker and the Dilemmas of Modern Public Sculpture (New Haven/London, 1985), 119. 35. Letter to the editor by Britta and Kurt Swedhner, in SvD (February 7, 1999), 14. Carl Hamilton expresses his harsh critique concerning Ortwed’s sculptures, which in his opinion resemble “(dog-)shit”—unworthy for the “greatest hero” in the Swedish twentieth century: see his article “Konstclowner slår till mitt i stan med tolv klickar b*js,” in Aftonbladet (November 29, 2001), 40. 36. See for example Lars Gustafsson, “I snigelskugga,” in Expressen (April 2, 2003), 6. 37. Letter to the editor by Bengt Sjösteen, “Smaklöst konstexperiment,” in Tidningen Östermalm (December 1, 2001). 38. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 4, 9, 10. 39. Reuße, Das Denkmal an der Grenze seiner Sprachfähigkeit, 286–7.

398 Notes 40. Bloch, “Denkmal und Denkmalkult,” 203. 41. See Hans-Ernst Mittig, “Über Denkmalkritik,” in idem and Volker Plagemann (eds), Denkmäler im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutung und Kritik (Munich, 1972), 283–304, here 284. 42. Springer, “Rhetorik der Standhaftigkeit,” 379. 43. See Berggren, Giordano Bruno på Campo die Fiori, 31. 44. Karlholm, “Det tomma monumentet,” 44. 45. Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in idem, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge/London, 1985), 151–70. 46. In this approach, I was much inspired by Adam, “Bestimmtheit, Unbestimmheit, Unsichtbarkeit.” Adam states that monument artists can make use of four approaches to mediate message (or combine them): these are the iconographic, the symbolic, the intellectual-associative (thereby inscriptions specify the monument’s meaning) or the emotional-associative approach. 47. Indeed, Nihlén began his artistic career as a painter. It was only in the mid1980s that he began to work in marble. To many, his sculptural works do evoke associations with painting. It seems as if Nihlén “paints” in marble. See Jan Torsten Ahlstrand, “Två skulptörer—två temperament,” in Jørgen Haugen Sørensen: Staffan Nihlén. Dansk-svensk skulpturutställning (Lund, 1996), 3–7, here 6. 48. Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History (reprinted New York, 1994), 10. 49. Halldór Björn Runólfsson, “Introduction,” in Kirsten Ortwed (Helsinki, 1992), 4–7, here 6. 50. Quoted from Kirsten Orted, in Pryds Helle and Søndergaard, “Shaping Chance,” 26. 51. “Interview: Rosemarie Trockel/Kirsten Ortwed,” in Kirsten Ortwed, 17–27, here 20. 52. See for example Springer, “Rhetorik der Standhaftigkeit,” 378. See also Hartmut Boockmann’s article “Denkmäler: Eine Utopie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 28 (3) (1977), 160–73. 53. See Margit Rowell (ed.), Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert. Figur—Raumkonstruktion— Prozess (Munich, 1986), 126ff. See also Minimal, Maximal: die Minimal Art und ihr Einfluss auf die internationale Kunst der 90er Jahre / Minimal Art and its Influence on International Art of the 1990s (Bremen, 1998). 54. See Zimmermann, Denkmalstudien, 164. 55. Gibbon, A Call to Heroism, 162. 56. See ibid., 165. 57. As Lina Pihl reflects in “Fult eller snyggt? Åsikterna går isär om nya Wallenbergmonumentet,” in Aftonbladet (August 8, 2001), 16. 58. Mai Misfeldt, “Værk for det næste årtusinde,” in Berlingske tidende (October 16, 1999), section 2, 8. 59. Young, “The Countermonument: Memory against Itself in Germany,” in idem, The Texture of Memory, 27–48. 60. See Nathan Glazer, “Monuments in an Age without Heroes,” in Public Interest 123 (Spring 1996), 22–39. 61. Copies of the sketches (apparently handed to Wallenberg’s teachers on January 16, 1933) can be found at Riksarkivet, Stockholm; the originals are the property of Nina Lagergren.

Notes 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

See Bloch, “Denkmal und Denkmalkult,” 195. Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust, 30. Quoted from Gomes, “Introduction,” 4. Gomes’s emphases. Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity,” 46. Gomes, “Introduction,” 5. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 360 and 359. Lester, Wallenberg, 120.

399

Bibliography Archives Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Raoul Wallenberg-föreningens arkiv (The Raoul Wallenberg Association Archives) in Riksarkivet (The National Archives of Sweden), Stockholm, Sweden Statens ljud- och bildarkiv (The Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images = SLBA), Stockholm, Sweden

Newspapers and magazines Aftonbladet Berliner Zeitung Berlingske tidende Borås tidning Clarion Dagens Nyheter (= DN) Der Spiegel Expressen Göteborgs-Posten Hallandsposten Helsingborgs Dagbblad Heti világ gazdaság (HVG) Jewish Chronicle Judisk Tidskrift Le Droit Los Angeles Times Manchester Journal Michigan Alumnus Moment Montreal Gazette New York Times Nordvästra Skånes tidningar Ottawa Citizen San Mateo Weekly Stockholms Fria Tidning Svenska Dagbladet (= SvD) Sydsvenskan The Blade The Independent The Michigan Daily The Post The Washington Post Tidningen Östermalm Ystads Allehanda 400

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Films and other forms of electronic media 30 Monuments to Raoul Wallenberg. Documentary written and directed by Peter R. Meyer (Sweden, 2001). Auschwitz-Dagen or Vi får aldrig glömma. Till åminne av Förintelsen (The Auschwitz Day or We should never forget. In Memory of the Holocaust) (Sweden, 1998). Den Kinesiska Hästen på Hallandsåsen (Sweden, 1983). Giorgio Perlasca: An Italian Hero. Movie directed by Alberto Negrin (Italy, 2002). Handelsresande i liv (Stateless, arrogant and lunatic). Drama-documentary by Lena Einhorn (Sweden, 1997). Interview with Nina Lagergren. Recorded by Jan Levy for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (Interview 51634 dated May 5, 2001). Interview with Nina Lagergren on Axess (Internet portal/Web-TV, 2008) Kirsten Ortwed. Documentary by Peter R. Meyer (Sweden, 1999). Peter Eisenman: Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial. A documentary by Michael Blackwood (USA, 2005). Pimpernel Smith. Movie directed by Leslie Howard (England, 1941). Raoul Wallenbergs gärning—ett monument kommer till (The Deed of Raoul Wallenberg —A Monument Comes into Existence). CD-ROM containing interviews with Willy Gordon, Carmen Regnér, and Oscar Lindqvist, led by Louise Schlyter (City of Lidingö, 2001). Sköna söndag (Sweden, March 20, 1988). The Last Days. Documentary directed by James Moll (USA, 1998). Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story. TV series, scripted by Gerald Green, directed by Lamont Johnson (USA, 1985). Wallenbergs (The Wallenbergs). A documentary series by Gregor Nowinski (Sweden, 2007).

Internet resources “Silent Heroes” Memorial Center <www.gedenkstaette-stille-helden.de/english. html> Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies of the University of Minnesota <www. chgs.umn.edu> David Kilgour, Member of the Canadian parliament <www.david-kilgour.com/ mp/wallenbg.htm> Edward M. Adams, artist <www.adamsart.com> Ernst Neizvestny, artist <www.enstudio.com> Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan <www.holocaustcenter. org> László Csíky, artist <www.csikymed.hu> Mikael Göransson, artist <www.mikaelgoransson.com> Norma D’Ippolito, artist <www.normadippolito.com.ar> Paul Lancz, artist <www.lancz.com> Raoul Wallenberg Academy For Young Leaders <www.rwa.se> Stolpersteine by sculptor Günter Demnig <www.stolpersteine.com> The Anglican Church of Canada <www.anglican.ca> The Arab Institute for the Holocaust Research and Education <www.alkaritha.org>

402 Bibliography The Association of Swedish Architects <www.arkitekt.se> The Garden of Righteous worldwide <www.gariwo.net/eng/document.htm> The Holocaust and the United Nations. Outreach Programme of the United Nations <www.un.org/holocaustremembrance> The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (= IRWF) <www.raoulwallenberg. net> The Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo <www.nobelpeaceprize.org> The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of Sweden <www.raoulwallenberg.se> The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States <www.raoulwallenberg.org> The Raoul Wallenberg International Movement for Humanity <www.rwallenberg-int.org> The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust. A Conference on Education, Remembrance and Research <www.holocaustforum.gov.se/index.html> The United Nations <www.un.org> The Wallenberg Foundation of New Jersey <www.wallenbergfoundationofnj.org> Uga Drava, artist www.ugadrava.com

Primary resources Regular interview partner: Nina Lagergren, Raoul Wallenberg’s sister. Interview with artist Imre Varga at his museum in Óbuda, Budapest, Hungary, on February 6, 2003 (with the kind assistance of Tamás Dragonitz). Interview with Attila Zsigmond, General Director of the Budapest Galéria in Budapest for 28 years, in Budapest, Hungary, on February 7, 2003. Interview with artist Pál Pátzay’s widow Hertha Pátzay in Budapest on February 8, 2003. Interview with Philip Spectre, Rabbi of the Great Synagogue on Wahrendorffsgatan until May 2005, in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 25, 2003. Interview with artist Philip Jackson at his studio and gallery in Midhurst, West Sussex, England, on March 7, 2003. Interview with Alan Schwartz, member of the Cardiff Wallenberg Committee, in Cardiff, Wales, on March 9, 2003. Interview with artist Jon Rush in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, on April 23 and 24, 2003. Interview with Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles City Councilman, in Los Angeles, USA, on May 1, 2003. Interview with art dealer Suzanne Zada in Los Angeles, USA, on May 2, 2003. Interview with artist James Stoval in Menlo Park, California, USA, on May 4, 2003. Interviews with artist Uga Drava at the family’s home in the Niagara Escarpment and in Toronto, Canada, May 5–8, 2003. Interview with artist Ernest Raab and his former wife Goldi Steiner-Raab in Toronto, Canada, on May 9, 2003. Interview with Vera Parnes, founder of The Canadian Friends of Raoul Wallenberg, in Montreal, Canada, on May 10, 2003. Interview with artist Paul Lancz and his son and manager Peter in Montreal, Canada, on May 11, 2003. Interview with Diane Blake from The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States of America, in New York, USA, on May 13, 2003.

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Interview with Joel C. Feffer, Stavisky’s lawyer and administrator of artist Lotte Stavisky’s estate, and his secretary Joy Glass in New York, USA, on May 13, 2003. Interview with the artist E. M. Adams in Parsippany, New Jersey, on May 16, 2003. Interview with Annette Lantos, the wife of Congressman Tom Lantos, in the Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, on May 20, 2003. Interviews with artist Joseph Wachtel in West Palm Beach, Florida, USA, May 27–29, 2003. Interview with artist Staffan Nihlén and the Commissioner of the Urban Environment, Gunnar Ericson, in Malmö on September 4, 2003, as well as a further telephone interview with Nihlén on June 14, 2005. Interviews with Anselm Eggert, then interior decorator at the Swedish Parliament, in Stockholm, Sweden, on November 26, 2004 and April 13, 2005. Interview with Jan Lundvik, Swedish ambassador to Hungary, 1994–8 and member of the Swedish–Russian working group, in Stockholm, Sweden, on January 12, 2005. Interview with artist Lenke Rothman in Stockholm on February 18, 2005. Interview with György Krausz, member of the Budapest Wallenberg Statue Committee, in Oslo in March 2005. Telephone interview with Anna Graham, wife of artist Ernst Neizvestny, on June 27, 2005. Telephone interview with Dag Sebastian Ahlander, Consul General of Sweden in New York (1992–9), on July 18, 2005. Telephone interviews with artist Kirsten Ortwed in August 2005 and August 2006. Interview with Elisabeth Fleetwood, member of Moderaterna, at the Riksdag, in spring 2006. Telephone interviews with Aleksander Wolodarski, City Architect at Stadsbyggnadskontoret (The City Planning Administration) in May and June 2006. Interview with the artist Charlotte Gyllenhammar at her studio in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 19, 2006. Another telephone interview took place on December 5, 2006. Interview with architect Gabriel Herdevall in Stockholm, Sweden, in January 2007.

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Photograph Credits All photographs in this publication were taken by the author, except for the following: Christina Andorfer-Berggren and Uwe Andorfer, Malsch, Germany: Figures 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 10.6, 10.7 Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem, Israel: Figures 7.20, 7.21 Stephanie Forsmann, Sydney, Australia: Figure 7.1 Galleri Astley—Museum Tree of Life by Ernst Neizvestny, Uttersberg, Sweden: Figures 7.9, 7.10 Blake Hamilton, Sydney, Australia: Figure 6.17 Doris Isaksson, Social Secretary at the Swedish Embassy, Santiago de Chile, Chile: Figures 10.4, 10.5 Maris Khalilov, Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow, Russia: Figure 7.8 Photographer unknown. Compliments of Joel C. Feffer, New York, USA: Figure 6.6 Jacques Pri-Gal, Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study and Memorial Center in Eilat, Israel: Figure 6.5 Klement Trizuljak, Bratislava, Slovakia: Figures 10.2, 10.3 Károly Veress, Fonthill, Ontario, Canada: Figure 8.11 Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the author will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. I want to express my warmest gratitude to all these photographers. Without their help, my study could not have been completed. 417

my heroes Jan Torsten Ahlstrand, Lars-Göran Andersson, Christina AndorferBerggren and Uwe Andorfer, Nicholas Aylott, BaltSeaNet (The Baltic Sea Area Studies: Northern Dimension of Europe, a research training network financed by the European Community), Kristina Benc, Frances Boylston, Dan Brändström (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond / The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation), Jan Brockmann, Claus Bubner, Daniela Büchten, Staffan Carlsson (Swedish Embassy, Budapest), Tamás Dragonitz, Uga Drava, Stephanie Forsmann, Kristian Gerner, Fred Girod (Collegium Budapest), Berit Gulyás, Edit Györgyjakobi, Juliane Hahn, Blake Hamilton, Bernd Henningsen, Madeleine Hurd, Doris Isaksson, Vera Kempa (Raoul Wallenberg Guesthouse of Collegium Budapest), Nina Lagergren, dict.leo.org, Ohad Livne, Jan Lundvik, Joachim Marcuse, Alexander Mauersberger, Hans-Joachim and Renate Mauersberger, Camilla Olsson (Södertörn högskola’s library), Tom Olsson, Marta Reuter, Lenke Rothman, Jon Rush, Mai-Brith Schartau and The Centre for Germany Studies at Södertörns högskola, Louise Schlyter, Maike Schult, Anikó Serege, Edith Sinapius, Svenska Föreningen i Buenos Aires, Kantor Emil Tóth, Joseph Wachtel, David and Monica Wadsworth, Barbara A. Wolanin, Marianne Yagoubi, Ulf Zander All artists and interview partners And many, many more, who contributed in one way or another so that this project could become a reality And especially Alexander, Mats, and Niklas Thank you

418

Index Abdulkader, Tani, 364 Abel, Ulf, 231 Adams, Edward M., 196–201, 224 260–3, 278, 283–4, 291, 305, 343–5, 390 Ahlander, Dag Sebastian, 203–7, 210, 347, 390 Ahlstrand, Jan Torsten, 209 Altman, Lionel, 340 Ambassador Danielsson, 57, 91, 108, 119, 245, 375 Amess, David, 339 Andre, Carl, 241 Angel of Budapest, 114, 343 Anger, Per, 33, 41, 47, 55, 90–1, 108, 122, 207, 230, 331–3 Annan, Kofi, 216–7, 299, 311 Annan, Nane, born Lagergren (Raoul Wallenberg’s niece, Nina Lagergren’s daughter), 216, 311 Arbitrariness, arbitrary, 274–6, 282–4, 291 Arp, Hans, 201 Arrow Cross coup, 38, 45, 57, 81, 110–11, 215, 266–7 Arrow Cross, also Nyilas Party, 38–9, 42, 71, 90, 215, 306 Art of the Holocaust, 3 Assetto, Franco, 24, 61, 68, 129–31, 232, 263, 271, 304, 323–4 Attaché case, also briefcase, 131–2, 205, 209, 212–14, 218, 270, 276, 305, 345, 347–8 Auschwitz, also Auschwitz-Birkenau (concentration camp), 12, 37, 63, 74, 107, 109, 119, 172, 184–5, 217, 254, 318, 323, 338–9, 342, 354 Autonomous, 10, 234, 285, 288–91 Baskin, Leonard, 189 Becher, Kurt, 56 Beckley, Robert M., 332

Benchmark, also fundamental rupture, civilizational break, 12, 14, 74–5, 79, 91 Benedicks, Michael, 53 Berg, Lars, 41, 47, 56, 110–11, 244, 248, 395 Bergen-Belsen (concentration camp), 342 Berggren, Lars, 277 Bernadotte, Folke, 110, 188, 324 Bierman, John, 41, 47, 119, 278, 281, 291, 299, 311, 339, 357 Bildt, Carl, 172–3 Biogal, 91–3 Björklund, Margita, 362 Björlin, Ulf, 56 Blake, Diane, 382 Bloch, Peter, 287 Board, Kjersti, 207 Boccioni, Umberto, 145 Boorstin, Daniel, 49 Borgström-Fälth, Cecilia, 392 Borisov, Boris, 173 Borofski, Jonathan, 270 Bottos, Gerö, 90 Braham, Randolph L., 33 Brancusi, Constantin, 201, 207 Brandorf, Martin, 388 Brändström, Elsa, 54–5, 114 Breda, Carl Fredrik, 173 Broberg, Rolf, 347 Broniatowski, Karol, 270 Brooks, Paul, 323–4 Brophy, Andrew, 377 Bruchfeld, Stéphane, 173 Burke, Edmund, 224–5 Burnham, Jack, 207 Bystander, 68, 74, 232 Campbell, Joseph, 50–1, 154 Campos, Cecilia, 269–72, 276, 304, 350–2, 397 Carlyle, Thomas, 45 419

420 Index Caro, Anthony, 241 Carter, Jimmy, 72–3 Cesarani, David, 375 Chamberlain, Richard, 52 Churchill, Winston, 72, 280 Chyrek, Adam, 111, 125–6, 304, 327–8 Cohn, Anna, 24, 134–8, 261, 271, 282, 299, 304, 317–18 Cohn, Colin, 385, 396 Cold War, 13, 73, 217 Cole, Tim, 3 Copland, John, 313 Cotler, Irwin, 334, 376 Croake, Richard, 190 Csíky, László, 128–9, 304, 337 Cubitt, Geoffrey, 124 Cudin, Gianpietro, 141–2, 298, 305, 356–7 Czinder, Antal, 91 Dadswell, Lyndon, 318 Dahl, Birgitta, 172–3, 299 Dalnoki-Veress, Margot, 390 David, Jacques-Louis, 82 de Jong-Duldig, Eva, 396 de Vries, Jan, 46 Deák, Gábor, 93, 307–8 Death-march, 38, 109, 135, 318 Democratization of art, 16, 291 Demszky, Gábor, 93, 210, 307 Didactic, 9, 210, 213, 254, 290–1 Diner, Dan, 73 Dizhur, Bella, 315 Domonkos, Miksa, 113, 369, 383 Drava, Uga, 149–54, 165, 261, 263, 277, 281, 300, 304, 321–2, 386 Drew, Mary Ann, 190, 332 Dromberg, Ragnar, 158 Duldig, Karl, 263, 268–73, 283, 304, 312–14 Eatough, Carl W., 169 Eggert, Anselm, 171, 388 Ehrenpreis, Marcus, 35, 46, 236 Eichmann, Adolf, 56, 253 Einhorn, Jerzy, 172 Einhorn, Lena, 122 Ekbom, Torsten, 146, 186

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 122, 125 Endell, August, 274–5 Ericson, Gunnar, 219, 225, 262, 280, 283, 329–30, 392 Ericsson, John, 248, 293 Expectations on the monument genre, 25–6, 255, 259, 274–7, 284–92 Fautrier, Jean, 250 Feffer, Joel C., 98, 382 Finn, David, 4, 214, 216, 347 Fleetwood, Elisabeth, 170, 173, 342, 388 Flood of monuments, also pestilence of monuments, 9 Ford, Gerald, 34 Forgács, Paul, 57 Forrester, Erwin, 318 Forum för levande historia (Forum for Living history), 40, 173, 360 Frank, Anne, 75 Frevert, Ute, 48 Gach, George, 308 Gagarin, Yuri, 65 Gandhi, Mahatma, 63, 65, 298 Gann, Christoph, 245 Gara, Vera, 386 Gerner, Kristian, 91 Gerö, Eva-Carin, 46 Gerz, Jochen, 16, 294 Ghetto in Warsaw, 90, 126, 228, 232 Ghetto, the international ghetto with the protective house, close to the island of Margaret, Budapest, 81 Ghetto, the large or sealed ghetto in the VII district of inner Pest, Budapest, 38, 61, 81, 131, 209–10, 215, 237, 323, 336, 345–6 Giacometti, Alberto, 191 Gibbon, Peter H., 49–50, 230, 302 Gilbert, Martin, 230 Glass, Joy, 382 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 277 Goldberg, Hal, 365 Göransson, Mikael, 228, 393 Gorbachev, Michael, 73, 158, 164 Gordon, Mona, 100, 348, 382

Index Gordon, Willy, 99–114, 125, 260, 263, 265, 271, 276, 278, 282, 294, 299, 305, 348–49, 359 Graham, Anna, 385 Graphic concrete, 228, 362, 393 Green, Gerald, 52 Gregorian, Vartan, 311 Ground sculpture, sculpture on the ground, 240–1, 243, 248, 251, 286 Grünewald, Isaac, 329 Grusa, Jiri, 215 Guben (working camp), 342 Gulag, 59, 70, 72, 115, 137, 140, 146–7, 153, 160, 165, 227, 361 Gurion, Ben, 326 Gyllenhammar, Charlotte, 63, 226–32, 241, 252, 278–9, 293–5, 299, 305, 361–3, 392 Györfi, Sándor, 306–7 Haider, Jörg, 96 Hanak, Anton, 313 Hansen, Tove, 364 Hatvany, Lajos, 88 Haycock Makela, Laurie, 63, 362 Hegedu˝s, Lajos, 91–2, 381 Hercules, 86–7 Herdevall, Gabriel, 237, 254, 394 Hermeneutics, also the hermeneutic approach, hermeneutic circle, 21–3, 26, 112, 289–90 Hero, author’s use of the term, 44–5 Hero, ideal, 48, 231 Hero, modern-day, 301 Hero, moral, 231 Hero, national, 65–6, 287, 301 Hero, origin of, 51–4, 59, 230 Hero, patriotic, 65, 297 Hero, real-life, 26, 43, 47, 51, 134 Hero, tragic, 42, 185 Hero, universal, 65–8, 215, 296 Hero-as-victim, 133, 149, 157 Heydecker, Joe J., 228 Himmler, Heinrich, 110, 177, 205 Hitler, Adolf, 56, 75, 195, 336 Hoffman, Lillian, 326 Hoheisel, Horst, 294 Holocaust, author's use of the term, 378 Holocaust Art, 3, 268

421

Holocaust memory, 18, 74 Holocaust remembrance, 3, 26, 73, 75–6, 216, 264, 300 Hook, Sidney, 45, 49, 50, 56 Hope Levin, Pamela, 354 Horn, B., 96–7, 304, 319 Horowitz, Slawa, 313 Horthy, Miklós, 37–8, 179 Hrušovský, Pavel, 361 Hübner, Lutz, 56 Hungarian uprising in 1956, 39, 67, 244, 296, 334, 346, 356 Hutchinson, Andrew S., 264, 335 International Criminal Court, 216–17 Isaac, Aron, 237–8 Isaeus Berlin, Meta, 362 Jackson, Philip, 115–25, 129, 154, 216, 255, 262–3, 276, 278, 281, 285–7, 289, 290, 293–4, 296–7, 299, 300, 304, 338–40, 384 Jad Bamidbar Holocaust Study- and Memorial Center, Eilat, Israel, 97, 319 Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT), 36 Johnson, Herschel V., 36, 236 Jones, Ronald, 63, 362 Kádár, János, 158, 321 Kadosh, Gabi, 319 Kállay, Miklós, 36 Kamm, Henry, 90 Kappsta, 99, 107, 131–2, 347 Karlholm, Dan, 277, 281, 289 Kemény, Elisabeth, 52 Kemény, Gabor, 52 Kennedy, John F., 49 Keri, Ribor, 92, 381 Kersten, Felix, 205 King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, 172–3, 299, 360 King, Martin Luther, 49, 63 King, Sol, 35, 189–96, 331–2 Kirschenbaum, Bernard, 360 Kisfaludi Strobl, Zsigmond, 96, 334 Kittler, Regina, 364

422 Index Klimsch, Fritz, 84 Konrad, György, 45 Korczak, Janusz, 126, 328 Kraitz, Gustav, 4–5, 68, 74, 107, 131, 203–18, 226, 251, 261, 263, 276, 278, 284, 286–7, 290, 293, 299, 305, 345–7 Kraitz, Ulla, 107, 131–2, 203–18, 276, 278, 305, 345–7 Krauss, Rosalind E., 289 Krausz, György, 93 Kreiman, Angel, 297, 351–2, 396 Krushchev, Nikita, 148, 386 Lagergren, Nina, born von Dardel (Raoul Wallenberg’s sister), 54–5, 69, 72, 187, 236, 311, 326 Lajos, Attila, 32–3, 43, 111, 125 Lakatos, Géza, 37 Lancz, Paul, 59–60, 93–96, 124, 145, 264, 282, 300, 304, 333–5, 382 Lancz, Peter, 96, 335, 382 Langlet, Valdemar, 108 Lantos, Annette, 62, 71–3, 165, 283, 299, 309, 325–6, 378 Lantos, Tom, 62, 66–7, 71–3, 165, 299, 309, 326 Lauer, Kálmán, 35–6, 236 League of Nations, 55 Leidi, Franco, 360 Leong, Albert, 146, 148–9 Lester, Elenore, xi, 41, 47, 72, 98, 107, 154, 302 Leutzsch, Anne, 364 Lévai, Jenö, 33, 43, 47, 57, 68, 87–8, 90, 108, 114, 283 Levine, Paul A., 3, 32, 42–4, 61, 173, 379, 388 Levy, Alban, 315 Levy, Daniel, 75, 217–18, 300 LeWitt, Sol, 277 Leyser, Henry J., 169 Lin, Maya Ying, 279 Lincoln, Abraham, 298 Lindblom, Sivert, 237 Lindqvist, Oscar, 382 Loeld, Lars Olof, 360, 363 Lorch, Emil, 195 Lubianka Prison, 39, 332

Lundén, Alejandra, 17 Lundvik, Jan, 370 Lutz, Carl, 61 Magnell, Gitta, 175–6 Magritte, René, 270 Maillol, Aristide, 84 Mandela, Nelson, 63, 65 Man-in-action, 99 Margolin, Miri, 56, 67, 73, 127–9, 170, 283, 296, 299, 304, 325–6 Marosits, István, 84, 306–7 Marshal Malinovsky, 39 Martyr, 32, 58, 86, 157, 164–6, 227–8, 321 Masur, Norbert, 236 Maurer, Sherry, 390 Memory, cosmopolitan, 217, 300 Memory, cultural, 18–19 Memory, global, 215, 300 Memory, national, 19, 297, 300 Memory, of Wallenberg, 2, 67, 69–71, 76, 90, 158, 199, 219 Memory, personal, 180, 210 Memory, popular, 110 Memory, public, 18 Memory, universal, 75, 300 Meropa, 35, 236 Meszaros, Michael, 312 Meyer, Peter R., 4, 280 Michelangelo, 146 Miesenberger, Maria, 104, 363 Mikus, Sándor, 96 Minimal Art, 16, 243, 293 Misfeldt, Mai, 241 Misuse of the hero-concept, 12, 45, 48, 64, 96 Misuse of the monument genre, 4, 17, 20, 302 Mittig, Hans-Ernst, 274 Modernism, 10–12, 274, 288 Montgomery, James F., 324 Monument understanding, altered/ extended, 248, 277, 292 Moses, 165 Mukhina, Vera, 94 Munke, Sven, 170

Index Nansen, Fridtjof, 54–5 Natzweiler-Struthof (concentration camp), 270 Nazism, 4, 17, 36, 48, 76, 85, 87, 91–2, 147, 165, 216, 281, 340 Neizvestny, Ernst, 94, 143–9, 265, 300–1, 304, 315–16 Netanyahu, Benyamin, 325 Netanyahu, Jonathan, 325 Neufeld, Robert, 173 Neuman, Ricki, 122 Nihlén, John, 330 Nihlén, Staffan, 5, 219–26, 262–3, 265, 278, 280, 283–6, 291, 304, 328–30, 348 Nobel Peace Prize, 55, 170, 189, 299, 387–8 Nyhlén, Astley, 147, 316 Obrist, Hermann, 11, 277 Oldenburg, Claes, 14 Ollivier, Yann, 4 Olsen, Iver C., 36, 236, 318 Orosz, Ferenc, 381 Orstadius, Brita, 285 Ortwed, Kirsten, 3, 5, 99, 216, 234–55, 261, 265, 275–7, 279, 281–2, 285–9, 291–6, 299, 305, 357–60, 363 Ovid, 163, 165, 277, 320–1 Paldiel, Mordecai, 230 Parnes, Vera, 334, 381 Partos, Christian, 360 Pátzay, Hertha, 85, 88, 307, 402 Pátzay, Pál, 81–95, 98, 124, 157–64, 197–8, 209–10, 224, 231, 282, 299, 300, 304, 306–8, 320–21 Perlasca, Giorgio, 61, 376 Persson, Göran, 40, 172–3, 189 Philipp, Rudolph, 41, 47 Pienza, 225 Pimpernel Smith, 55 Pinder, Wilhelm, 152 Plensa, Jaume, 360 Pótó, János, 88 Prager-Brooks, John, 323 Pri-Gal, Jacques, 97, 382 Putin, Vladimir, 58

423

Queen Elizabeth II, 300, 340 Raab, Ernest, 138–41, 264, 290, 304, 335–7, 385 Radiological Clinic, Budapest, 92, 308 Rajk, László, 306–7 Rank, Otto, 373 Raoul Wallenberg Academy for Young Leaders, 47 Raoul Wallenberg Committee of Sydney, 318 Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the Unites States of America, 47, 204, 310–11 Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund, Sweden, 169 Raoul Wallenberg Room, Lidingö, 107, 350 Raoul Wallenberg Walk, 204, 345, 347 Rapoport, Nathan, 90 Readability, readable, 104, 125, 136, 178, 194, 212, 255, 273–4, 276, 285 Reagan, Ronald, 72–3 Regnér, Carmen, 349–50 Reich, Walter, 67 Reuβe, Felix, 145, 275, 277 Richier, Germaine, 191 Riesman, Eugene N., 335 Rigtheous Gentile, 64, 66, 74–5, 119, 167, 297, 311, 319, 327, 354, 357 Robert-Jones, Ivor, 280 Rodin, Auguste, 295 Rodin, Johnny, 387 Roncalli, Angelo, 61 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 36, 109 Rose, Alan, 334 Rosenfeld, Harvey, 41, 308 Rosselino, Bernardo, 224 Rothman, Lenke, 4, 54, 170–89, 230–1, 245, 250, 265, 276, 278, 294–5, 299, 304, 341–2 Rowkes, Reuben, 89 Rubinstein, William D., 42–4, 64 Rückriem, Ulrich, 194 Rush, Jon, 3, 189–96, 213, 268, 271, 283–4, 286, 291, 293–4, 304, 331–2, 389 Ryback, Sue, 190

424 Index Sachs, Nelly, 188 Safe houses, 38–9, 71, 113, 119, 177, 179, 194–6, 209, 267–8, 323, 331–3, 336–8, 353 Salgó, Nicholas M., 157–8, 320 Salisova, Stefania, 361 Salman, Mark, 24, 166–8, 304, 326–7 Schapiro, Herb, 56 Schellenberg, Walter, 110 Schindler, Oskar, 60, 74 Schlyter, Louise, 374, 382, 385 Schutzpass, also Schutzpässe, protective papers, protective passports, passes, documents, 1, 38–9, 60, 63, 90, 99, 101–2, 104, 105, 107–13, 116–21, 124–6, 182, 215, 244–5, 253, 281, 323, 328, 332, 333–4, 338, 348, 354, 358 Secular saint, 64, 153 Sellier, Phillippe, 85, 251 Shaelv-Gerz, Esther, 294 Site-specificity, 234, 249, 251, 295 Skandinaviska Banken, 175–6, 341 Skepticism towards the hero-concept, 48–9, 50, 63, 248, 295–6 Skepticism towards the monument genre, 295–6 Skissernas Museum (Museum of Sketches for Decorative Art), 5, 348 Skorodenko, Vladimir, 385 Socialist Realism, 12, 89, 94–6, 145, 149, 333 Somlyó, György, 245, 299 Spectre, Philip, 394 Speer, Albert, 195 Spielberg, Steven, 74 St George, 85–7, 218 Stalin, Josef, 89, 90, 94, 96, 145, 148–9, 336, 346 Stalinism, 4, 17, 48, 76–7, 281, 316 Stavisky, Lotte, 24, 96–8, 164, 304, 310–11 Steiner-Raab, Goldi, 337, 385 Stern, Henry, 203, 347 Sternberg, Sigmund, 340, 351, 361 Stone setting, 23, 69 Storch, Hilel, 205, 346 Storch, Marcus, 205, 261, 347–8

Stoval, James, 66, 68, 72, 154–7, 283, 299, 304, 309, 386 Strano, Emanuela, 385 Sukarno, 308 Svenungsson, Jan, 363 Swedish emblem, 102, 108, 112, 119, 125, 336 Swedish flag, 119–20, 124, 333, 338, 353 Szajna, Jósef, 270 Szálasi, Ferenc, 38 Szent István Park, 71, 81, 88, 158, 306 Sznaider, Natan, 75, 217–18, 300 Sztójay, Döme, 37 Tatlin, Vladimir, 11, 13, 145–6 Tenembaum, Baruch, 340 Terror Háza (House of Terror), 160 Teva, 91–2 The Cardiff Wallenberg Committee, 314–15 The Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948, 217 The Free Wallenberg Australian Committee, 88, 273, 312 The Gromyko Memorandum, 39 The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF), 5, 216, 340–1, 348 The Magi, 112–14 The Raoul Wallenberg Committee of Sweden, 5 The Raoul Wallenberg International Movement for Humanity (RWIMH), 334 The triple crowns, 102, 104–5, 108, 111–14, 336 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 316, 339 Treblinka (concentration camp), 126, 339 Trizuljak, Klement, 265–8, 305, 360–1 Trizuljak, Marek, 265, 267–8, 305, 360–1 Tüür, Erkki-Sven, 56

Index United Nations (UN), 55, 173, 203–5, 214–18, 251, 299, 300, 345 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, 68, 215, 217 Universal values, 27, 201, 297–8 US Capitol in Washington DC, 56, 67, 127–8, 170, 283, 296, 325–6 Vägen (The Way), 205, 236, 237–8, 254–5, 276 Vajda, Frank, 76, 88, 283–4, 370 Varga, Imre, 5, 66, 85, 91–2, 157–66, 194, 210, 263, 277, 299, 304, 320–1, 386 Veghazi, Ana, 396 Veres, Tom, 107, 215 Veress, Károly, 201–2, 284, 305, 355–6 Verticality, vertical, 150, 154, 178, 211–12, 214, 223, 248, 251, 286 Vince, Mátyás, 93, 307 Vleeskens, Carol, 385 Vöczköndy, László, 38 von Dardel, Fredrik (Raoul Wallenberg’s stepfather), 34, 69, 235 von Dardel, Fritz (Raoul Wallenberg’s stepgrandfather), 235–6 von Dardel, Guy, 34, 58, 69, 236, 326 von Dardel, Nils, 235–6 von Dardel, Maj, born Wising, married Wallenberg (Raoul Wallenberg’s mother), 34, 42, 53–4, 69, 111, 171, 179, 244 Wachtel, Gabriela, 353–4 Wachtel, Joseph, 63, 265–7, 305, 353–5, 396 Wallenberg, Annie (Raoul Wallenberg’s paternal grandmother), 373

425

Wallenberg, Gustaf (Raoul Wallenberg’s paternal grandfather), 34–5, 54, 65, 179, 195 Wallenberg, Jacob (Raoul Wallenberg’s uncle and godfather), 35 Wallenberg, Marcus (Raoul Wallenberg’s uncle), 369, 375 Wallenberg, Peter (Raoul Wallenberg’s second cousin), 158, 321 Wallenberg, Raoul Oscar (Raoul Wallenberg’s father), 34, 53–4 War Refugee Board (WRB), 36, 66, 109, 236 Wästberg, Per, 238, 252–5, 287, 359 Werbell, Fredrick, 72 White Busses, 110, 324 White House Rose Garden, 72 Wiesel, Elie, 189, 299 Wiesenthal, Simon, 378 Wising, Sophie (Raoul Wallenberg’s maternal grandmother), 373 Wolodarski, Aleksander, 235, 237, 254 World Jewish Congress (WJC), 36, 205 Wulff, Reinhold, 389 Yad Vashem – The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 69, 88, 166–7, 216, 230, 307, 326–7, 377, 387 Yaroslavsky, Zev, 324 Yeltsin, Boris, 316 Yood, James, 208, 214 Young, James E., 18, 20, 287 Zada, Suzanne, 323, 324, 384 Zander, Ulf, 32 Zsebök, Zoltán, 308 Zsigmond, Attila, 93, 159 Zwirner, Christian, 241

Plate 1


Plate 2


Plate 3

Franco Assetto, Angel of Rescue, 1988, Los Angeles, USA.

Plate 4


Plate 5 Imre Varga, The New Raoul Wallenberg Memorial, 1987, Budapest, Hungary.

Plate 6 Jon Rush, Köszönöm Raoul Wallenberg (Thank You Raoul Wallenberg), 1995, in front of the Art and Architecture Building on the Northern Campus of the university, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Plate 7 Gustav and Ulla Kraitz, Hope, 1998, New York, USA. Detail of the globe symbolizing the work’s title.

Plate 8


A Hero's Many Faces: Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments (The Holocaust and Its Contexts)

Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945-50 (Holocaust and Its Contexts)

The many faces, and causes, of unbelief

National Human Rights Institutions in the Asia-Pacific Region (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

The Many Faces of Lisa Adorn

Contemporary Spiritualities: Social and Religious Contexts (Issues in Contemporary Religion)

The Right to Food and the TRIPS Agreement (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

Beyond A One-Dimensional State: An Emerging Right To Autonomy? (Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

The Many Faces of Islam: Perspectives on a Resurgent Civilization

Fichte: Historical Contexts Contemporary Controversies

The Many Faces of Maxwell, Dirac and Einstein Equations

Human Rights and Intellectual Property Rights (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute New Authors)

Fichte: Historical Contexts, Contemporary Controversies

Judicial Protection of Economic, Social and Culture Rights: Case and Materials (Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights)

Faces in the Fire

The Holocaust: A Reader

Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts (Symposium)

Jung in Contexts: A Reader

Before the great spirit: the many faces of Sioux spirituality

Intellectual Property: The Many Faces of the Public Domain

Le heros des siecles

Constitutionalism: New Challenges, European Law from a Nordic Perspective (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

On heros, heroworship and heroic in history

Le heros des siecles

Monuments and Mainstreets

The Peoples Of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces

Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts

James Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel Iconography

The Many Faces of Philosophy: Reflections from Plato to Arendt

Paul Edwin Zimmer - A Gathering of Heros

A Hero's Many Faces: Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments (The Holocaust and Its Contexts)

Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945-50 (Holocaust and Its Contexts)

The many faces, and causes, of unbelief

National Human Rights Institutions in the Asia-Pacific Region (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

The Many Faces of Lisa Adorn

Contemporary Spiritualities: Social and Religious Contexts (Issues in Contemporary Religion)

The Right to Food and the TRIPS Agreement (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

Beyond A One-Dimensional State: An Emerging Right To Autonomy? (Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

The Many Faces of Islam: Perspectives on a Resurgent Civilization

Fichte: Historical Contexts Contemporary Controversies

The Many Faces of Maxwell, Dirac and Einstein Equations

Human Rights and Intellectual Property Rights (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute New Authors)

Fichte: Historical Contexts, Contemporary Controversies

Judicial Protection of Economic, Social and Culture Rights: Case and Materials (Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights)

Faces in the Fire

The Holocaust: A Reader

Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts (Symposium)

Jung in Contexts: A Reader

Before the great spirit: the many faces of Sioux spirituality

Intellectual Property: The Many Faces of the Public Domain

Le heros des siecles

Constitutionalism: New Challenges, European Law from a Nordic Perspective (The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library)

On heros, heroworship and heroic in history

Le heros des siecles

Monuments and Mainstreets

The Peoples Of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces

Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts

James Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel Iconography

The Many Faces of Philosophy: Reflections from Plato to Arendt

Paul Edwin Zimmer - A Gathering of Heros

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