Abstract: This article investigates activist-initiated modifications to Soviet-era World War II monuments and memorials and the erection of alternative monuments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland over the past ten years, identifying their main attributes, similarities, and differences, as well as reflecting on their connections to the global movement to decolonize public memory. I argue that in Central Europe activists have been much less willing to remove or destroy these structures, preferring to modify them by correcting or supplementing their reference to World War II, a practice I term rehistoricization. However, the Russian military aggression in Ukraine triggered a new wave of activism which inscribes new references onto monuments that explicitly pertain to the present yet implicitly build on past contestations, a practice I term dehistoricization.
Kata Bohus (Wed,) studied this question.