The essay explores some issues and challenges related to the role of monuments, particularly contested or tainted commemorations, in what many have conceptualized as a "New Historical Condition", a time of radical change. To this end, monuments are read as sites of a porous juxtaposition of various historical conditions, pointing out their complicity with the forms of denial that such conditions entail. Monuments can accompany and reinforce denials vis-à-vis the “unimaginable” – unimaginable “as it happens” and beyond; in the past and in the present or the future. By way of conclusion, the essay reflects on what scholarship on monuments can contribute to work on the new historical condition, and vice versa: What would a monument here look like? Does it even make sense to have monuments at all? Do we need monuments in our "new historical condition"?