LIVE from NYPL: Fallen Idols: Alex von Tunzelmann with Paul M. Farber on Toppling Statues

The historian asks whether the people destroying and defacing monuments are erasing history or making it.

From the United States to the United Kingdom, to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, statues and monuments personifying histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide are being vandalized and torn down. Robert E. Lee has been graffitied in Virginia, Columbus beheaded in Massachusetts, and King Leopold II set on fire in Antwerp. As these iconic figures fall, the backlash against what's perceived as historical erasure is vigorous and swift, raising the question of whether monuments chart the history they represent, or serve as political statements about the moments in which they were created? 

Alex von Tunzelmann's Fallen Idols explores the rise and fall of 12 famous and controversial statues around the planet. Paul M. Farber, Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab, joins Tunzelmann to discuss the book, how societies remember—and confront—the past, and asks whether statues have had their day. 

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Alex von Tunzelmann recommends the following titles:

• Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, by Thomas J. Brown — NYPL Catalog
• The Destruction of Art, by Dario Gamboni — NYPL Catalog
• Prisoners of History: What Monuments to World War II Tell Us About History and Ourselves, by Keith Lowe — NYPL Catalog
• Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, by Susan Neiman — NYPL Catalog ; NYPL Talking Books ; Bookshare

Alex Von Tunzelmann is the author of Blood and Sand, Indian Summer, and Red Heat. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, BBC, Lonely Planet Magazine, The Daily Beast, and more. She lives in London. 

Paul M. Farber is Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. He also serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art & Space at the University of Pennsylvania. This academic year, he is the William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement at the George Washington University. Farber is the author of A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) which tells the untold story of a group of American artists and writers (Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde) who found refuge along the Berlin Wall and in Cold War Germany in order to confront political divisions back home in the United States. He is also co-editor with Ken Lum of Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2019) , a public art and history handbook designed to generate new critical ways of thinking about and building monuments, and the co-director with Laurie Allen and Sue Mobley of the National Monument Audit (Monument Lab/Mellon Foundation, 2021). 

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