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The significance of monuments rests on their social
tasks; a town hall, for example, embodies the polity, a palace
authority; a cathedral the role of religion and of the church.
As manifestations of political life and of world views, monu-
ments express the relationships of people to their epochs and
their societies in concentrated and aesthetically effective ways.
Speaking through them are both everyday rituals as well as
the prestige requirements of past epochs. In the present, this
function is assumed by public buildings, which will in turn
become the monuments of tomorrow. Today, banks can be
regarded as monuments of financial power, and museums as
memorials of the culture industry.
It is possible to adopt a variety of attitudes in relation
to historic monuments: we can surrender to the other elegiac
mood of transitoriness, to feel repelled by the false monu-
mentality of quasi-sacred demonstrations of power, or sim-
ply allow these now ‘invisible’ relics of the past to escape our
attention altogether. Nonetheless, monuments address us to
the extent that they confront us directly with history – and
to some extent, our own history. They provide opportunities
to contemplate the passage of > time and to enter into di-
alogue with history and with the site of historical events
(> memory). Through them, we can situate and interpret our
own situations, and position ourselves in relation to them
through adequate interventions. On the one hand, a monu-
ment can be read in relation to its historical significance; on
the other, current meanings may be ascribed to it, reframing
it, thereby reinterpreting both the past and the present. But
monuments may also set limits to memory; we can simply go
around them and continue on our way.
The adjective monumental, meaning ‘colossal’, refers to
the fact that monuments are often particularly imposing and
well-fortified buildings that are designed for permanence, and
that would be difficult to demolish by virtue of their solid-
ity and > size. But as recent exemplars have demonstrated,
monuments – which, alongside buildings, also include purely