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Dominika Czarnecka
As a part of the urban composition, the monuments directly belong to their
surroundings. Ihey become a focal point of a given space, the complement to
architecture, or even the highest chord of the surroundings, while the space in
which the monument is situated has fundamental significance for its rank and
poignancy; it elevates a monument or degrades it. Ihe urban composition has
a significant influence over the process of creation of Otherness, especially when
the new monument is erected without general social consent, within an urban
structure that has been well established over the centuries. Ihe process of othering
is intensified when the monument is erected in a place where previously another,
commonly accepted, monument stood. If this previous commemoration have
played a significant role for the local or national community, and if its place was
perpetuated not just in a given space but also in social memory, the figure which
replaces it against the expectations of a large part of the society is perceived as an
alien element, wrongly located and violating the unity of urban composition. In this
sense Otherness is a type of evaluation that is influenced by locating the figure in an
improper place. The monuments to Red Army soldiers were often erected in places
where before WWI other, important from the point of view of Poles, national
symbols functioned. “Symbols are what unite and divide people. (...) Symbols (...)
determine the kinds of stories we tell; and the stories we tell determine the kind
of history we make and remake” (Whelan 2005: 62). The communist authorities
intentionally abstained from rebuilding these old, destroyed national memorials
and instead attempted to appropriate their accumulated symbolic potential (for
example in Katowice, Warsaw; see Fig. 165). “Ifa monument has its own place,
sanctified by tradition, in the town landscape (which is proved in the graphical
and painted messages) and if it fulfils an important role in its panorama, then
moving, and much less removing it, is felt as undermining the established order,
as a disturbance to the surroundings which we perceive as precious, as a change
which encounters the resistance of our customs and notions” (Wallis 1971: 108).
In a slightly altered version, the monuments of Soviet soldiers were erected as
objects competing with Polish monuments that had survived the war, and which
the communist authorities did not dare, for propaganda reasons, to destroy (for
example in Lublin).
A considerable role in the othering of the monument can be played by the space
that immediately surrounds the monument. This space creates a specific semantic
context and can also emphasise or diminish certain features of physical representa¬
tion, actively contributing to triggering and strengthening the process of othering.
The space around a monument accentuates its dimensions, the special relations
in which it is involved with regard to neighbouring buildings and transportation
routes, and, finally, its symbolism. The Otherness of a monument may be caused
by an exaggerated monumentalism—in comparison with its surroundings—which
upsets the hierarchies of value and importance perpetuated in a given place. This
Otherness may also occur when the monument intersects the established or rep¬