Paula Levine knows history, how to write with educated opinion with cited inserts to get across what she wants her readers to understand about her educated opinions in her short essay on all roads to monuments lead to Germany, and the Holocaust. Meandering down the road with her on Northern California's Bodega Bay Highway readers first enjoy descriptive reflections of the scenery as she searches for a memorial plaque commemorating the Watson Running Fence Historical Park. When the road sign says “detour” she decides not to take that “detour to history”, instead, she takes a detour to four pages about the history of monuments with a wealth of quotes on the subject telling that is a road definitely more traveled. This educational journey lets the reader know why humans erect monuments with an explanation of how America copied Europeans. This leads to an interesting inset quote on a criticism of an 1876 Civil War monument to the Emancipation Proclamation forgetting to remind that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed Southern slaves and not those still existing in the North. No closure.
Cutting to the quick on this road trip finds Levine in Harburg, Germany looking for the weed-covered graffiti decorated plaque of the monument against Fascism, War, and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights. Her point is memorials are to evoke memory and it works for some of the people, some of the time. People have to care to want to remember whether there is a memorial standing in their back (unbeknown to the Hamburg shop keepers). One of the quotes makes the most sense, “too many memorial days (monuments), too little remembering”.Mounuments stay alive only if we keep them alive!
This article was very well organized and enjoyable.
No comments:
Post a Comment