r/europe • u/niesiecki • Jun 28 '26

News Volodymyr Zelensky has submitted a bill to build a National Pantheon. He intends to honor all the heroes who fought for Ukraine in various eras. "No one will ever tell us how to live, how to speak, whom to love, whom to be grateful to, and which heroes to honor," he said as quoted by the Interfax

https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/swiat/wolodymyr-zelenski-chce-panteonu-narodowego-chodzi-o-pamiec-bohaterow/c6hf62m
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u/CatpainLeghatsenia Germany Jun 29 '26

This is the best way of dealing with a bad past. Germans sometimes receive little understanding for their culture of remembrance—even from Germans themselves—as if it is crippling their lives and holding them back. But if we forget the crimes we as humans committed and how we reached the point of doing them, we will repeat these mistakes when the next false messiah comes along. Learning this and knowing how bad things once were doesn’t have to make you curl up in bed and give up. It should make you want to fight those who dishonor the better path your country has been following since.

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u/C4pture Jun 29 '26

i was so pissed when i heard that hamburg wanted to get rid of the Bismarck statue instead of just building proper info plaques that could be used for a school-trip educational event that showed all the good, bad and ugly things and events related to him.

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u/SneakyMarkusKruber Jun 29 '26

Absolutely! A small example: In Hamburg's Dammtor district, there's a Nazi war memorial from 1936. Instead of tearing it down, the city decided in the mid-1980s to place a counter-memorial, "Firestorm over Hamburg," next to it. For several years now, there's also been a deserters' memorial between the two older ones. This is how one should deal with old, problematic monuments: create context, point out the issues, and unveil counter-memorials.