Imperia: A European Culture Story, Part 3 (and last)

Third and last part of an article discussing Imperia, the large concrete statue of a semi-fictional medieval sex worker.  Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

A Clandestine Erection

Imperia went up in April 1993, and I won’t even try to explain the insane backstory. 

Short version: some people in Constance wanted a cool statue to add luster to the waterfront.  Most of them were thinking of something like a Statue of Liberty.  A minority, however, had a more subversive idea.  And those guys picked Peter Lenk, a sculptor with a reputation.  But when the City Council of this fairly conservative small German city saw the plans… you can probably guess how that went over.  There was, let us say, some pushback.

But Lenk and his allies went ahead and put up Imperia anyway.  The statue was prefabricated and shipped to the harbor in pieces.  Most of the construction happened in a single night, between midnight and dawn. 

So Constance woke up to Imperia, and… honestly, it wasn’t love at first sight.  “Bemusement” was one common reaction.  “Disgust” and “outrage” were up there too.  

Part of it was, of course, that she’s a gigantic sex worker.  Another part is that she was satirizing something that happened almost six hundred years previous, which even in Germany is not exactly front page news.  And of course, there were her let’s say attributes,


[there are a lot of photos of her from this angle for some reason]

plus the fact that she was holding a naked Pope in one hand.  Constance is a pretty Catholic town, and the whole “naked Pope” thing didn’t really go over well.



Sculptor Lenk eventually addressed this point, saying:

“The figures in the Imperia are not the Pope or the Emperor, but rather jesters who have appropriated the insignia of secular and spiritual power. And to what extent the real Popes and Emperors were also jesters, I leave to the historical knowledge of the viewers.”

— which pretty obviously Lenk was lying through his teeth, and grinning while doing it.  

Eventual Respectability

But naked Popes notwithstanding, over years and decades people gradually got used to Imperia.  I wouldn’t say she ever became a beloved mascot.  You won’t be greeted by posters of her when you pick up your checked bag at the local airport.  But the cries to take her down gradually dwindled away, and a modest cottage industry grew up selling Imperia-themed tourist tat.



It was during COVID that Imperia really made the final step to respectability.  She wore a (very large) mask for several months, and was used as a symbol in the city’s public health campaign.


[she’s literally a role model]

So she’s part of the community now, and will be adorning Constance’s modest skyline for a long time to come.

While Richard Nixon, Karl Popper, and Jerry Garcia were still alive

Another thing that happened in 1993:  Bill Clinton was inaugurated as US President. 

MTV — remember MTV? — held its own “Inaugural Ball”, a celebratory concert that was, briefly, the must-have ticket.  It was hip and cool!  It was a coming-out party for the twentysomething Generation X, which had turned out for Bill Clinton in force!  Don Henley performed, and so did Boyz II Men!  Dennis Miller was the host!

And then there was a bit where Michael Stipe (R.E.M.) and Natalie Merchant (10,000 Maniacs) did a duet of “Candy Everybody Wants”.  I watched it at the time, and I remember being struck by the sense of joy and optimism coming off that stage.  Stipe is a guy whose default affect is somewhere between stoic and gloomy, but he’s actually showing signs of mild enthusiasm here.  Merchant is practically bouncing off the stage.  

And why not?  The Soviet Union was gone, and now the Reagan-Bush years were over.  Ding dong, the witch is dead!  We had a charming new President, who was going to use American power to push for peace in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East.  The economy was picking up.  A bunch of promising new drugs were about to start pushing back the AIDS epidemic.  Nirvana was working on a new album.  People were talking about this new thing called the Internet, and it sounded pretty cool.

That said, “Candy Everybody Wants” was a distinctly odd choice.  Because there’s a huge disjunct between the music — which is a big cheerful aural hug, all happy brasses and soaring major chords — and the dark and cynical lyrics.  The music is fist-pumping inspiration.  The lyrics are about how our choices in media consumption are making us cruel and stupid.  Presumably they chose it because it works well as a duet — 10,000 Maniacs’ other big hit, “These Are Days”, was very much a delivery system for Merchant’s distinctive voice — but still: 0dd.

Over in Germany, Peter Lenk was finalizing his designs for Imperia.  She’d go up a few months later.  I very much doubt he watched or listened to “MTV’s Inaugural Ball”.  But I definitely think he was picking up on that early-1990s, post-Cold War swell of optimism. 

That zeitgeist was particularly strong in Germany, where the dust was still settling from the fall of the Wall. 


[no lie, that was a moment]

Re-unification!  All those Soviet armored divisions just across the border suddenly just… going home!  The looming threat of nuclear war dwindling to almost nothing!  And — wildest and most surprising — the sudden disappearance of a corrupt and oppressive system that had seemed invulnerable, immovable.  If Soviet Communism could suddenly just vanish, what might not be possible?

So I think Lenk was definitely feeling that surge of national optimism.  And I think he was reacting against it.  You might say that while the rest of us were dancing to the music of “Candy”, Lenk was listening carefully to the words. 

And I think — whether deliberately or not — he set up Imperia as a critique of that historical moment.  As a counterpoint.  Imperia may be about the Council of Constance, but she’s also about 1993.  If she’d gone up five years earlier, or five years later, I think she would have been something very different.

Give ’em What They Want

Okay, so through the last two and a half posts we’ve zigged and zagged through a bunch of European history and culture:  Botticelli, Balzac, the Emperor Constantine, bad Popes, Expressionism, Renaissance bankers, Nazis.  But none of this answers the question:  is Imperia (the statue) a serious work of art? 

I think yes, she is.  And part of the reason is this: she rotates.  She makes a complete turn every four minutes.

Yes, rotating sculptures are generally dopey.  But here I think it works.  Because Imperia means “empire”, and empires don’t look one way.  Empires have broad horizons.  Imperia turns because her claim to authority is very great.  Universal, perhaps.  Hegemonic.

You can see her as a straightforward comment on hypocrisy and that works.  You can see her as powerful men baffled by female sexuality and charisma — reduced, as we noted, to impotence or frustration.  You can see her as the patriarchy turned inside out.  And those things work, sure.  But I think Imperia is most interesting and alarming when we see her as a system.

Remember, the members of the Council of Constance came together to reform the most important institution in their world.  They had the tools to do so.  They had the brainpower, they had the time, there was broad popular support. But the Council failed because the Council members chose, collectively, to not solve the problem.  And they made that collective choice because they were themselves part of the corrupt system.  Everybody took bribes.  Everybody was profiting.  Everybody was complicit.  A clean and honest Church would have been better, everybody knew that, but they simply couldn’t get there from here.


[nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft]

In 1993, the Germans were still basking in the afterglow of the end of Communism.  Communism was corrupt, oppressive, and claimed to be universal.  But — in Eastern Europe, at least — Communism was imposed at gunpoint, from outside.  And I think, whether deliberately or not, Lenk was saying: all right, the bad system imposed upon us is gone.  Does that mean we’re done with bad systems?  Or will we, collectively, choose something that’s every bit as bad?

And that’s what I think we’re looking at here.  Imperia is a system, and she’s a bad system, and she’s the system that we create for ourselves by our collective  choices. 

Imperia is a bad Nash equilibrium.  She’s that corner of the Prisoner’s Dilemma where we all choose to send each other to jail forever.  

Imperia is the house always wins.  Imperia is a gacha game.   Imperia is vendor lock-in.  Imperia is our fossil fuel addiction.  Imperia is the algorithm that, based on our choices, limits our choices.  She’s the Love Island franchise.  She lifts us up — and leaves us impotent or frustrated.  Imperia is closing down all the newspapers and killing the high streets. She’s all of us knowing what we want, and getting it, good and hard.  If you’re workin’ for the Man every night and day, it’s probably Imperia you’re working for.  When all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life?  He’ll look upwards to meet Imperia’s concrete smile.  

Every four minutes, she turns.  She looks out over the river that the Romans bridged, and the lake where the Hapsburgs fought the Swiss, and the city that the Allies could have bombed but didn’t.  She looks north to Berlin where the Nazis burned Lovis Corinth’s paintings, and east to where Jan Hus came to be burned by the Church.  She looks south to the Rome where Raphael immortalized her namesake, who died young, and then died young himself, and she looks west to Paris where Balzac wrote a story about her and then killed himself through overwork and coffee.  She looks beyond that to the New World that Prince Henry started the search for, all unknowing, back when the Council of Constance was closing up shop, and where Lovis Corinth’s painting of her rests in a private collection.  And in one hand she holds the limp and depressed Emperor, who claims secular power over the bodies of mankind, and in the other she holds the petulant and helpless Pope, who claims spiritual power over the souls. 

And oceans rise, and empires fall, and the tourists come and gawk and snap selfies and maybe buy a keychain.  And she smiles her small cruel smile, and she turns, and she turns, and all the horizon comes under her stony gaze.

And that’s all.