The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Joe Kerr
4.1 | The erasure of memory: the destruction of the Lenin Memorial, 1948.
rial: for it was created during the war, for the war, and it served as the focus
of collective emotions generated by that conflict.
Of particular historical significance was its unplanned role as the
site for a local enactment of the global conflict against fascism, and what
that suggests to us about the reality of London’s wartime experiences. For
instance, that this monument was continually attacked by fascist gangs is a
telling insight into what Angus Calder has labeled “the myth of the Blitz,” 7
that popular conception of a time when ordinary citizens heroically pulled
together in a communitarian effort against the fascist enemy. This carefully
orchestrated construction of history, as we shall see, has remained central to
the telling and retelling of London’s wartime experience, and to the monumentalization
of that experience.
But in terms of theorizing the public meanings of monuments, it
is paradoxically the arbitrary destruction of the Lenin Memorial that raises
the most intriguing questions about the process of memorialization. For in
a country that has no particular tradition of continually creating or destroying
official iconography—unlike, for instance, that which Laura Mulvey has
shown exists in Russia 8 —this story illuminates important questions about
the commemoration of the Second World War. The erasure of this curious
artifact of total war was not the necessary precursor to a new, sanctioned system
of monuments to reflect the concerns of a different era, and a different
kind of war; instead, for half a century the war of 1939 to 1945 has remained