A statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin has been unveiled in the western German city of Gelsenkirchen. The installation comes amid global protests against monuments to controversial historical figures.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/C. Seidel
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Over 30 years after the end of communism in the Eastern Bloc, the western German city of Gelsenkirchen on Saturday unveiled a new monument to the controversial Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.
Germany's tiny Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), who led the initiative to install the statue, said it was the first statue of the Russian revolutionary figure to be erected in the former West Germany, decades after the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) communist state fell.
The unveiling of the over 2-meter (6.5-foot) tall statue, originally produced in the former Czechoslovakia in 1957, was accompanied by speeches and music. Participants waved red flags from the square where the statue was erected and from the rooftops of the buildings around it.
The MLPD said it is the first such statue ever to be erected on the territory of the former West GermanyImage: picture-alliance/dpa/C. Seidel
"The time for monuments to racists, anti-Semites, fascists, anti-communists and other relics of the past has clearly passed," MLPD chairwoman Gabi Fechtner said in a statement.
By contrast, "Lenin was an ahead-of-his-time thinker of world-historical importance, an early fighter for freedom and democracy," she argued.
Toppled monuments: A selection of controversial figures
Global anti-racism protests following the killing of George Floyd fuel the controversy over the interpretation of the colonial and Confederate eras. In Europe and the US, monuments are damaged, razed and removed.
Image: picture-alliance/NurPhoto/G. Spadafora
Edward Colston: slave trader and philanthropist
Controversy over the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was rife for years. On June 7, demonstrators removed the bronze from its pedestal and tossed it into the water. While Colston was working for the Royal African Society, an estimated 84,000 Africans were transported for enslavement; 19,000 of them died along the way. But he went down in history as a benefactor for his donations to charities.
Image: picture-alliance/NurPhoto/G. Spadafora
Robert Baden-Powell: initiator of the Boy Scouts
Activists accuse Robert Baden-Powell, the man who initiated the Boy Scout movement, of racism, homophobia and admiration for Adolf Hitler. His statue stood on Brownsea Island in southern England. Amid the current wave of monuments being toppled by protesters, local authorities have now removed Baden-Powell's statue as a precaution.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Matthews
Leopold II: Belgian colonial-era monarch
Belgium has quite a few statues of King Leopold II. The monarch ruled the country from 1865 to 1909 and established a brutal colonial regime in Congo that is in fact considered one of the most violent in history. Protesters smeared several statues of Leopold II with paint. Authorities removed the above statue from its pedestal in the Antwerp suburb of Ekeren and sent it to a museum depot.
Image: Reuters/ATV
Christopher Columbus: revered and scorned
In the US, too, disputes have flared over monuments dedicated to controversial historical figures. Among others, protesters have targeted Christopher Columbus. A statue in Boston was beheaded (photo). North American indigenous groups reject the worship of Columbus because his expeditions enabled the colonization of the continent and the genocide of its autochthonous population in the first place.
Image: Reuters/B. Snyder
Columbus in Latin America: a different point of view
Some people see Columbus as one of the most important figures in world history, but for many people in Latin America the explorer's name stands for the beginning of a painful era. From the perspective of the indigenous population, Spanish colonialism is a dark chapter in their history. In Latin America, too, statues of Columbus have been destroyed or damaged in the past.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/B. Boensch
Jefferson Davis: Civil War president
Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America, one of the leaders in the country's mid 19th-century Civil War. Protesters toppled and spray-painted the Confederate president's statue in Richmond, Virginia. House speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the removal of Confederate statues from the US Capitol because they were monuments to men "who advocated cruelty and barbarism."
Image: Getty Images/C. Somodevilla
Robert E. Lee: a divisive figure
Another Confederate statue in Richmond, this one a monument to General Robert E. Lee, is to be removed in the next few days. Governor Ralph Northam has given orders to take down the monument. Many African Americans regards the statues of Confederate politicians and soldiers as symbols of oppression and slavery.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/S. Helber
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Attendees were asked to practice physical distancing and to wear a face mask to protect against coronavirus infections.
Council attempts to block installation
Not all residents of Gelsenkirchen, a city of 260,000 and the center of Germany's former industrial and mining Ruhr region, were happy about the new monument.
"Lenin stands for violence, repression, terrorism and horrific human suffering," representatives from mainstream parties on the district council in Gelsenkirchen-West said in a resolution passed in early March, in an attempt to block its installation.
The council "will not tolerate such an anti-democratic symbol in its district," it added, urging "all legal means" be used to block its installation.
But the upper state court in Münster later rejected the council's attempt to halt the statue, which it argued would interfere with a historic building on the same site.
Some have argued that the Lenin statue will spoil the look of an historic buildingImage: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Kusch
Statues toppled around the globe
Statutes and monuments in Germany and around the globe have come under fire as part of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, which began following the death of African American George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis on May 25.
Last week in Hamburg, a statue of Otto von Bismarck, Germany's first chancellor, was splattered with red paint. Bismarck, who orchestrated Germany's unification in 1871, is also known for hosting the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which Africa was divided between European colonial powers.
Berlin has experienced its own controversies over the renaming of roads honoring 19th-century colonial figures in the city's so-called "African Quarter." The activist-led initiative has met with resistance from many locals.
In recent weeks, protesters in the US, UK and Belgium have succeeded in pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus, slave trader Edward Colston, and King Leopold II, who brutally ruled over the Congo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Germany, by contrast, only a handful of statues have been splattered with paint.
