Elisabeth Tworek and Norbert Göttler attach great importance to the positive examples. The one in the city park in Traunstein, Upper Bavaria, for example. There has been an obelisk there since 1837, commemorating the dead of the Napoleonic Wars – and for five years this has been supplemented by a steel cube designed by the Traunstein artist Rolf Wassermann with an open side and three walls of text, which in clear words describes the injustice of the wars names and the misery of those misled, betrayed, forced and sacrificed who perished in these wars. “Only death alone has the victory in the war,” are the last words. Initially, there was debate in the city about this type of war memorial, but I don’t think anything better could have happened. And it would be very similar with Tworek’s and Göttler’s book that has just been published.
“War memorials in Upper Bavaria. From hero worship to a peace memorial” is the name of this book, which was initiated by the Upper Bavarian district council led by its President Josef Mederer and has now been published by the district of Upper Bavaria. Tworek and Göttler both worked for the district until they recently retired – one as head of the culture department, the other as district home nurse.
Above all, Göttler was repeatedly confronted with the subject that both made the subject of their book: how on thousands of war memorials the countless dead were often thought of as heroes for the fatherland and how in this way the war was transfigured into something that this alleged heroicness was only created and made possible. But that is only half of the subject. The other is the contemporary, reasonably civil use of it. Hence the good examples.
There are enough bad examples anyway. The occupying powers prevented the worst after the Second World War, says Göttler, and the Americans in Upper Bavaria. Depictions of heavy weapons, machine guns and grenades would not have been tolerated on German war memorials after 1945. In some places, however, the vanquished were patient, as in Neuötting, where a rather martial war memorial was stored and erected again several years later after the Americans had left. Right-wing extremists laid wreaths there in 2012.
The monument in Wasserburg am Inn was inaugurated in July 1933 and depicts Saint George. The Nazis reinterpreted the saint as either the German national symbol “Roland” or “Siegfried”.
(Photo: Norbert Göttler)
From Göttler’s point of view, war memorials like this one and about two dozen others in Upper Bavaria would need at least one explanatory plaque for classification from today’s perspective or an additional redesign – as happened around 2021 after years of arguments with the commemorative plaque for the “Freikorps Oberland” in Schliersee. For Tworek and Göttler, there are still more than enough places where supposedly holy sacrificial battles and the supposedly sweet death of a soldier are glorified or an aggressive homeland ideology and a desire for revenge are conjured up. However, none of these monuments would have to be completely demolished.
“You shouldn’t overwhelm a stone,” says Göttler. Complex relationships such as the prehistory and history of a war can hardly be chiseled into a few words, which is why such a war memorial, together with a possible modern supplement, could also be a starting point for school and youth work and for adult education offers.
Most of the war memorials were created after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 and then especially after the First World War – after the Second World War, names were often added, of which the locals usually knew very well whether the bearer might have been a high-ranking SS man is. The oldest war memorial in the book is a stone cross from 1705 near Königsdorf in the district of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, which commemorates the dead of the War of the Spanish Succession and there in the Oberland specifically of those of the Sendlinger Murder Christmas. Other places of remembrance of those events emerged much later and in retrospect from the spirit of the current political situation.
The bronze “Schmied von Kochel” on Munich’s Lindwurmstraße is reminiscent of 1705, but was created more than 200 years later
(Photo: Norbert Göttler)
Well-known artists such as Leo von Klenze, Friedrich von Gärtner or Richard Riemerschmid also designed war memorials, while many other models were standard models, selected by the mayor from the catalog according to what the municipal finances allowed. Tworek and Göttler also want to address today’s local politicians with their book. “Dear mayors, dear local councillors, be sensitive, be careful, find out beforehand,” says Göttler. District President Mederer has announced that he will send a copy of the book as a handout to the district chairmen of the warriors’ and soldiers’ associations.
Norbert Göttler, Elisabeth Tworek: “War memorials in Upper Bavaria. From hero worship to the peace memorial”, Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg, 2023, 160 pages, 29.95 euros