the Debate raging these days about whether one should remove the statues of among others, Winston Churshill or Ludvid Holberg.
elsewhere, protesters took matters into their own hands, as with Christopher Columbus, under the charges of genocide and racism.
the Story has also changed in the virtual world. Most recently, the BBC removed the last episode of ’the Stuff of fawlty towers’ because of ‘racist scenes’.
– You can’t remove your past. On the way, I think, that one must be very careful not to remove the statues or movies and TV series, which you do not like. It is a part of the story, whether you want it or not. We don’t remove past atrocities by removing the statues, tells Claus Bundgård Christensen, who is the historian at Roskilde University.
here in Denmark, the landscape is also adorned by ancient monuments and statues of kings and cultural figures, from a time before the slave trade finally was abolished in 1803 and the first in 1848 in the Danish West indian islands.
Why were many statues tampered down, if it was about their relation to the slave trade, says the historian.
Denmark was a slavenation. It comes we can’t ignore. It is a horrific part of our past, but we doesn’t remove it or what we did to the poor people. It eliminates the we do not know to remove the statues. If we are to understand our present, we must also know the way thereto, tells Claus Bundgård Christensen.
– It is much more important to learn from history than to go after the random symbols in the public space. For where stop it so this time? So, should we tear some of the old mansions from the 1700-century Copenhagen, which today is listed. They are largely based on the earnings you got on the slave trade. It is the same. We create just a hole in the story. We just get dumber of it.
Claus Bundgård Christensen. Photo: Christian Klindt Sølbeck / Polfoto
the Historian stresses that the statues change in importance over time.
– When we see a king sitting upon his horse, from the time when Denmark was a slavenation, it does not mean that we as modern people are neither racists or in any way believe that slavery is in order, he says.
– It is important to understand it here, if you are very eager to tear the statues down. We just get dumber of it, because then we do not know our own past, if we want to make on it, can we not, but we can understand it and learn from it. Therefore, it is important to take care of the kulturspor, that is from the past in our cities and our countryside.
the Historian believes, however, that we can discuss whether a statue rather should stand in a museum than on a public space.
– Personally, I would have it quite tight to get past a statue of Adolf Hitler – the course at home in a museum, says Claus Bundgård Christensen, however, believe that you can settle with information notices at the copenhagen statues.
however, It is not everything, the historian believes should be original with regard to that language evolves.
– I’m fine with that, change some words in the nursery rhyme or the word ‘negro’ in children’s books. There are things that change. I will not sing ‘niggerdreng’ from ’the Elephant’s Lullaby’ by Harald Lund. I wouldn’t say to a child today, since the reader does not necessarily have an eye for, that they are written in a particular historical context. But it is a balance.
When the left uses the Danish slavefortid to a point about racism, it is an expression of a struggle over how the story should be read and understood, saith the historian.
– You should think that history is a battleground. We use the story to highlight our present. That is why the story is important because we all use the story, regardless of where we stand on the fringes, to make our own opinions. Here is Denmark’s occupation is also a classic.
– Therefore one must be careful to remove the physical traces, whether they are virtual or whether it’s concrete statues. If we do not understand history, so we do not understand how evolution has brought us to where we are today.