Abstract
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.
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
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Notes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
See Lévai, Wallenberg, (Melbourne, 1989), 259ff.
Per Anger in his foreword to Lévai, Wallenberg. See also William D. Rubinstein, The Myth ofRescue: 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).
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© 2009 Tanja Schult
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Schult, T. (2009). The Monuments’ Protagonist. In: A Hero’s Many Faces. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236998_2
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