Tour: Heroes. Honoured – misjudged – forgotten

Heroes. Honoured - misjudged - forgotten

In Kassel, there are a number of monuments of honour and memorials dedicated to a wide variety of ‘heroes’. But who are these heroes made of stone? Who made them?

When the memorial to the heroes of the First World War was inaugurated on 9 May 1929, the way the ‘fallen’ was depicted caused irritation in Kassel. Some of the population saw the figure as denigrating the fallen heroes. Some spoke of ‘pacifist filth’ or the ‘Sautter corpse’. The National Socialists even considered removing the sculpture.

When Pina and Via Lewandowsky presented their proposal for documenta IX in 1992, the traditional associations had reconciled themselves to the ‘fallen man’. Identification with the figure was now so strong that a lawsuit was filed against the artistic action. The accusation was that the documenta artwork defamed the fallen, which was tantamount to desecrating their graves. The artists concealed Sautter's sculpture under a copy made of paraffin, which can be seen today in the Museum for Sepulchral Culture. In this context, the malleable material can be seen as an analogy to the unreliability of human memory.

The ‘Heroes’ tour begins as a short journey through time in the Museum for Sepulchral Culture at the documenta artwork by Pina and Via Lewandowsky. It leads via the memorial to the victims of fascism by Hans Sautter back to his memorial on the slope of the Karlsaue. In the process, the concept of the hero, which was revealed in the handling of the memorial and the documenta artwork, will be illuminated from different perspectives.