In Germany, some 100,000 memorials to the First World War had been erected, from simple boulders bearing a plaque to large and elaborate constructions. From the very beginning, these memorials were accompanied by heated public discussions: who should be remembered, and with which intentions? When the Nazis took power in 1933, they changed the general agenda from mourning the dead to worshipping heroic sacrifices. After the Second World War, the situation became even more complex: In Eastern Germany, the First World War was regarded as a purely imperialist conflict that had nothing to do with the new socialist state; thus, the memorials became neglected or even removed, with new "anti-Fascist and anti-militarist" memorials being built. In West Germany, the First World War memorials were often reframed to remember the dead of the last war, too, thus blurring their highly different nature. The German reunification of 1990 changed the situation again, and even more so did contemporary discussions how we should memorise the vastly different wars and their victims. To remember the different victim groups, additional plaques were put to existing memorials, or new memorials were erected, while counter-memorials try to break the narrative of the old, heroic ones.
In Göppingen, for example, a medium-sized town in southwestern Germany, it took until 1930 (and many discussions) to build a First World War memorial next to the main church: a pietà to express grief for the bloodletting. The Nazis, of course, disliked the Christian approach, the focus on sorrow, as well as the expressionist art form. Instead, they ordered a new memorial depicting two upright standing soldiers and removed the "defeatist" one to the cemetery. The heroic memorial was completed two weeks after the Second World War had commenced – and so the rulers decided it should be unveiled after the expected "final victory". When US soldiers liberated Göppingen in 1945, they discovered the still boarded memorial. As neither swastikas nor other symbols of the Nazi dictatorship were part of it, the memorial became unveiled soon thereafter. For decades, the local Volkstrauertag ceremony (the German national day of mourning the war dead) was held at this place, before it was shifted to the original memorial, still at the cemetery. Further plaques remembered the expellees and the city's Jewish victims of Nazi rule. In recent years, however, right-wingers tried to stand honour guard at the two stony soldiers, with others demanding their destruction. Instead, commenting plaques were built to explain the memorials' genesis. In 2017, a counter memorial called "Schalung" (casing) by Nasan Tur, a Berlin-based artist with migrant background, was erected opposite the 1939 memorial, abstracting the heroic stance while referring to the longstanding boxed up situation.
Commented and reframed anew, are such contemporary approaches finally a convergence of different ways of commemoration? Or should burdened memorials rather be removed?
