His resurrection in Manchester, where he conducted research on the working class in the 1840s, is thanks to Phil Collins － the acclaimed artist who has made Engels the centerpiece of his most recent project, “Ceremony.”
“It started working on this theme about 10 years ago,” said Mr. Collins, who was nominated for the Turner Prize for British visual arts in 2006. Immersing himself in the history of the Industrial Revolution and of socialism in Manchester, he stumbled upon a quote by a local civil servant, who raised the idea of transporting an Engels statue from Ukraine to Manchester.
Since most Soviet-era statues were removed from their pedestals and destroyed after 1989 － and an Engels likeness was rather rarer than the ubiquitous Lenin － finding the statue was not easy. Mr. Collins traveled for about a year across Eastern Europe before finally finding his prize in an agricultural compound in a district that he said was once named after Engels in the Poltava region of eastern Ukraine.
The statue, 12 feet tall, had been cut in half and dumped. But on May 15, the halves were hauled onto a truck and sent on their way to Manchester. On its travels through Europe, captured on film, the truck stopped in Engels’ birthplace, Barmen, now part of the city of Wuppertal in northwestern Germany.
The Engels project was founded by the Manchester City Council and was featured recently as the closing event of the biennial Manchester International Festival of the arts. The statue was ceremonially welcomed in front of an art theater called HOME, as a crowd gathered in the parking lot to watch the film. The singer Gruff Rhys performed “Communism’s Coming Home.”
“Engels changed the course of history,” said Noel Callaghan, 45, a local resident.
The ceremony also marked the centennial of 1917 Russian Revolution, which was inspired by the ideas of Marx and Engels in their “Communist Manifesto” of 1848. And much of their analysis was based on Engels’s own masterwork, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” published three years before.
In Manchester, Engels is still revered. Alexandra Prodan, a 27-year-old medical secretary from Romania who has been living in Manchester for eight years, said the problem with communism was not with Marxist theory per se. “In practice,” Ms. Prodan said, communist regimes “became totalitarian and oppressive.”
Mr. Callaghan agreed. “Corrupt people,” he said, “they corrupt things, don't they?”
Ms. Prodan added: “Even in the countries where people were oppressed, people were looking out for each other in a way. There was still a feeling of togetherness against the regime. This is basically what Engels wrote about. You know, it's about the people coming together.”
The Engels project was founded by the Manchester City Council and was featured recently as the closing event of the biennial Manchester International Festival of the arts. The statue was ceremonially welcomed in front of an art theater called HOME, as a crowd gathered in the parking lot to watch the film. The singer Gruff Rhys performed “Communism’s Coming Home.”
“Engels changed the course of history,” said Noel Callaghan, 45, a local resident.
The ceremony also marked the centennial of 1917 Russian Revolution, which was inspired by the ideas of Marx and Engels in their “Communist Manifesto” of 1848. And much of their analysis was based on Engels’s own masterwork, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” published three years before.
In Manchester, Engels is still revered. Alexandra Prodan, a 27-year-old medical secretary from Romania who has been living in Manchester for eight years, said the problem with communism was not with Marxist theory per se. “In practice,” Ms. Prodan said, communist regimes “became totalitarian and oppressive.”
Mr. Callaghan agreed. “Corrupt people,” he said, “they corrupt things, don't they?”
Ms. Prodan added: “Even in the countries where people were oppressed, people were looking out for each other in a way. There was still a feeling of togetherness against the regime. This is basically what Engels wrote about. You know, it's about the people coming together.”
The newly erected statue is not the only tribute to Engels in the city. At the University of Salford, not far from where Engels worked at his family-owned mill, an innovative sculpture of Engels’s iconic beard, meant to be climbed, is intended, the university claims, “to inspire the next generation of artists, musicians and performers.”
The statue is now installed in the city center to grant Engels “official recognition,” Mr. Collins said. Of course, things have changed a bit since his day. The statue now stands among such temples of Western capitalism as a Mcdonald's and Hilton.
The festival's artistic director, John McGrath, said he expected the statue’s new location to “invite people to think and ignite debate.” In Mr. Collins’s words: “What's interesting about socialism is that it announces itself.”
Why Engels? To Mr. Collins, it's all about contradictions, “the contradictions we all live in.”
“Engels ran his family’s factory,” and yet he was dedicated to the emancipation of the working class, Mr. Collins said.
“He was a capitalist by day and communist by night,” he added.
Like Engels, Mr. Collins suggested: “Nobody’s outside of a system. We're all kind of bound to it.” He deemed Manchester to be home to “important movements connected with social justice and with resistance.”
Manchester retains a strong air of socialism. Not only did it a Labour member of Parliament in the recent general election, but 94 of the 96 city councilors are members of the Labour Party.
“We've got lots of statues for other 19th-century figures,” said the leader of the Manchester City Council, Richard Leese. “Why not give one to a German Manchester socialist?”
It was hard to find a dissenting voice at the dedication of the statue. When asked about possibly glorifying a figure whose life's work came to be associated with political regimes that ended up immiserating countless millions of people, Mr. Callaghan said that was not the point. “I don't think we're necessarily celebrating it,” he said. “With time, you've got to acknowledge what happened in the past, don't you?”
The statue is now installed in the city center to grant Engels “official recognition,” Mr. Collins said. Of course, things have changed a bit since his day. The statue now stands among such temples of Western capitalism as a Mcdonald's and Hilton.
The festival's artistic director, John McGrath, said he expected the statue’s new location to “invite people to think and ignite debate.” In Mr. Collins’s words: “What's interesting about socialism is that it announces itself.”
Why Engels? To Mr. Collins, it's all about contradictions, “the contradictions we all live in.”
“Engels ran his family’s factory,” and yet he was dedicated to the emancipation of the working class, Mr. Collins said.
“He was a capitalist by day and communist by night,” he added.
Like Engels, Mr. Collins suggested: “Nobody’s outside of a system. We're all kind of bound to it.” He deemed Manchester to be home to “important movements connected with social justice and with resistance.”
Manchester retains a strong air of socialism. Not only did it a Labour member of Parliament in the recent general election, but 94 of the 96 city councilors are members of the Labour Party.
“We've got lots of statues for other 19th-century figures,” said the leader of the Manchester City Council, Richard Leese. “Why not give one to a German Manchester socialist?”
It was hard to find a dissenting voice at the dedication of the statue. When asked about possibly glorifying a figure whose life's work came to be associated with political regimes that ended up immiserating countless millions of people, Mr. Callaghan said that was not the point. “I don't think we're necessarily celebrating it,” he said. “With time, you've got to acknowledge what happened in the past, don't you?”
