Digging up Lenin and Mussolini on iPhone

Digging up Lenin
David Crossland reports in Der Spiegel on plans in Berlin to dig up the giant statue of Lenin that was famously torn down in 1991. The statue will be displayed alongside 100 other disgraced statues in a new museum in the Spandau Citadel, a Renaissance fortress in the Spandau district of Berlin, due to open in 2013.
In Makers of the Twentieth Century: Lenin, D.A. Longley questions the usual criteria by which Lenin’s legacy and influence are judged.


Mussolini on iPhone
The iMussolini is an iPhone application released on January 21st which enables users to download the full text of over 100 speeches by Benito Mussolini. It has become a bestseller in Italy on the Italian version of iTunes. Its success has also stirred considerable controversy. Read the article in Spiegel Online.
In The Dead Duce John Foot tells the story of the death and posthumous life of Mussolini and the continuing power of the cult of his body over the Italian imagination.
In Coming to Terms with Fascism in Italy R.J.B. Bosworth describes how Italians of both the left and the right have used memories of Mussolini’s long dictatorship to underpin their own versions of history and politics.


Renovation of Christ the Redeemer
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports on the recent announcement of a 2.7 million euro project to restore the statue of the Christo redemptor in Rio de Janeiro. The construction of the statue took nine years from 1922 to 1931. It was inaugurated on October 12th, 1931. In 2007, the statue was named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.


Staffordshire Hoard E-newsletter
At the beginning on the week, Staffordshire County Council announced the launch of an E-newsletter produced by the Staffordshire Hoard partnership with all the latest updates on fundraising efforts, events and research into the Anglo-Saxon treasure. It is possible to view the newsletter online and to subscribe to it.


The extraordinary story of the owner of the world’s largest poster collection
On the website of The Times, Suzanne Glass shares the story of her grandfather Hans Sachs, who was both Einstein’s dentist and the owner of the world’s largest poster collection in Germany prior to the Second World War. His collection was stolen from him on Kristallnacht, in 1938, and he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. When he wife successfully secured his release, the couple emigrated to the US. He was later told that his collection had been used by Soviet soldiers to wrap sausage meat. However, in 1970, some of the posters were rediscovered in the basement of the Museum for German History. Despite the family’s fight to reclaim the collection, the posters remain, to this day, in the museum.
In The Battle for Art in the 1930s David Elliott looks at how Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler used culture to their own ends and how the ramifications of this has continued to the present.