Monuments and Memories: Study Abroad program looks deeper into the meaning

By Holly Hearn

Whether most people realize it or not, monuments are around us all the time, no matter where we are. They represent everything from war battles to prominent figures in history and can take many forms.

“Monuments and Memories: America and Germany in Dialogue” is a Flagler College virtual interdisciplinary course that looks deeper into the meaning behind these monuments.

Instructed synchronously across continents, participating students travel to Wuerzburg to study for five weeks. There, they connect with students online from Germany’s University of Würzburg. 

The course stemmed from the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments in the United States as well as similar issues that can be found in Germany with monuments for the World Wars.

“One of the worst challenges we have is people simply don’t talk to each other,” said Dr. Timothy Johnson, Professor of Religion at Flagler and course leader. “They don’t dialogue with each other, even within our own country.”

Johnson said it’s important not only to see that happening among Americans, but also between Germans and Americans.

“In the long run, it’s so important in international relationships that some people actually know each other so it’s not abstract,” he said. “I think about the foreign policy toward Ukraine. That’s one thing to think about in an abstract, but if you’ve been working with Germans or others that are around that area and hear about their monuments and what’s happening in Ukraine and other places, it becomes a powerful force for understanding, and I think change for the better.”

One of the focuses of the course is having the students work together to recognize the importance of monuments and the memories associated with them.

When monuments are built in specific locations, they claim the importance of the area’s history. As culture changes over time, monuments can shift in meaning, and what could represent a good thing now could be seen as bad, though what it means remains unchanging.

“I agree that many do go unnoticed. However, the atmosphere changes in places which have these monuments and those that really do not,” said Flagler student Nikita Nicolaides, who took the course in the summer of 2024. “What I found is that there really is this profound sense of permanence I think that can be found within monuments; this is, after all, why they are often created.”

Nicolaides’s group consisted of herself and two German students. They focused on schools as monuments, as schools named after people are monuments. This was connected to the controversies in the U.S. regarding places such as schools still being named after Confederates.

They also specifically looked at American flags being in U.S. classrooms, the push for crucifixes to be present in German classrooms, and how they both can be seen as religious monuments.

This summer, Dr. Johnson will bring a new group of students to Germany to learn about the importance of monuments in the local St. Augustine and Germany. They will visit monuments and participate in lectures and readings online and in Wuerzburg and Franconia, Germany.