Hamburg Memorial

[Bart150]

This is in Hamburg. Here are some facts about it:

Soon after WW1 the city of Hamburg erected a war memorial.

In the Nazi era a new memorial was made. This one.

The inscription means: Germany must live, even if we must die.

The graffiti means: Away with this Nazi filth.

Plainly this raises some tricky moral issues.

But anyway, I took this photo on 18 August. I'm curious about what will happen to the graffiti. If anyone goes that way, I'd like to hear.

[Paul Reed]

Do you have any close-ups of the figures? That is an amazing looking memorial. Given the pasting Hamburg got, it is incredible it survived.

[Bart150]

Do you have any close-ups of the figures?

Hope this is some use.

Given the pasting Hamburg got, it is incredible it survived.

Not that incredible. While some districts were literally totally devastated, others escaped altogether: notably the chic area west of the Alster lake (on the two occasions the RAF intended to bomb it they screwed up and bombed somewhere else).

[Jack Sheldon]

I have some somewhere. I shall look them out. The answer to the grafitti is that it will be cleaned off in due course - just like the dozens of other acts of vandalism that this memorial has suffered over the years: this despite the fact that it is accompanied by an explanatory sign to place it in the context of its time.

Jack

[Bart150]

Jack, one question that interests me is what "in due course" means here.

Do they clean up this particular graffiti with the same urgency as they clean up neo-nazi graffiti on a Jewish grave, for example, or as the CWGC clean up graffiti on the RN memorial at Chatham?

[Paul Reed]

Bart - thanks for the close-up. Those figures are really quite exceptional.

You could be right about Hamburg; my memory of it is that there is very little pre-1945. Wish I had seen this memorial, however!

[Jack Sheldon]

Herewith the first picture showing an attack with red and green paint.

[Jack Sheldon]

Another view

Yet another view

[Jack Sheldon]

This is the main city memorial in Hamburg. It is not associated with that of IR 76 and RIR 76 which appears in the previous photos. Its inscription simply reads, 'Forty Thousand Sons of the City Gave their Lives for You 1914 - 1918.' This was insufficiently nationalistic for the Nazis, so when the money was raised for the memorial to the city's regiment, it was Nazis and Aryan sculptors all the way. The lines, 'Germany must live, even if we have to die.' were hijacked by the Nazis for their own purposes. This is rather unfair on the reputation of Heinrich Lersch, a popular Great War Poet, who was certainly a patriot and an admirer of the German soldier, but hardly a Nazi when he wrote the poem Soldatenabschied from which the words are taken, at the beginning of the war. It is probably almost contemporary with Lawrence Binyon's 'For the Fallen' and is, in fact, highly sentimental. The first verse reads, Let me go mother, let me go! / All the tears serve no purpose any more / Because we are going to protect Germany! / Let me go mother, let me go / I shall kiss your final greeting from your lips / Germany must live, even if we have to die! (by the way, it does scan and rhyme in German).

Not even the explantory plaque is immune from the attention of vandals.

[Jack Sheldon]

Just for the sake of completeness, this deeply moving piece of scrap is half of the originally planned Hamburg Second World War Memorial. It was to have had four panels and to have been based around a broken swastika. These two chunks were unveiled in the mid 1980s and represent the Hamburg firestorm and the fate of concentration camp victims.

Jack

[Bart150]

Thanks, Jack.

Those who made the graffiti that I saw were expressing a certain point of view, which is not an outrageous one.

I'm wondering about the green and red paint people. Did they intend to express that point of view, too? Or were they just indulging in mindless vandalism?

[Jack Sheldon]

In modern Germany, where pacifism is the prevailing mood, the memorials and statues do not have to be of Nazi origin to be vandalised. In Berlin, for example, the statutes of Moltke the Elder near the Victory Pillar regularly gets paint thrown at it, as do the 19th C Prussian generals and Frederick the Great, whose equestrian statues are located in Unter den Linden.

Jack

[Paul Hederer]

In modern Germany, where pacifism is the prevailing mood, the memorials and statues do not have to be of Nazi origin to be vandalised. In Berlin, for example, the statutes of Moltke the Elder near the Victory Pillar regularly gets paint thrown at it, as do the 19th C Prussian generals and Frederick the Great, whose equestrian statues are located in Unter den Linden.

Jack

In Wiesbaden the various memorials get hit on occasion, and the attention seems to be without any particular awareness. I doubt the people doing it even know exactly what the memorials represent, just that they have something to do with the country's military past. For example, the Waterloo memorial in the Lusienplatz get's painted on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, one of the 1870 memorials has been covered in grafitti for two years now, while the other 1870 memorial on the other end of town was just completely renovated!

Paul

[Potti]

In Wiesbaden the various memorials get hit on occasion, and the attention seems to be without any particular awareness. I doubt the people doing it even know exactly what the memorials represent, just that they have something to do with the country's military past. For example, the Waterloo memorial in the Lusienplatz get's painted on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, one of the 1870 memorials has been covered in grafitti for two years now, while the other 1870 memorial on the other end of town was just completely renovated!

Paul

I think the bigger the town the more often you have to deal with violence and graffiti. I live in a small town with just 5000 inhabitants. We have two war memorials. One for the German-French War 1870/71 and the other for WWI. Violence and/or graffiti have never been an issue at all.

Cheers

Potti

[Bart150]

As the posts above show, this memorial is frequently defaced. It was clean when I went last week.

I rather went to town taking photos from various angles. Here greatly reduced for the constraints of this forum.

More

[Murrough]

I remember this memorial, is it just up from the opera house?

[Bart150]

Yes, on Dammtordamm.

[Beechhill]

While graffiti and vandalism really get my blood boiling, I appreciate the bittersweet sign remembering the political and religious victims of the nazi regime deliberately placed right next to the 'denkmal' for the fallen soldiers of both ww's by Sankt Pauli's Millerntor stadium.

Wish I could find that photo.

/Dan

[Jervis]

I recently visited Hamburg. Many years on from the original post and the monument is still marred by graffiti. 

[Jervis]

The war memorial in the city centre seems to be in better shape. 

Edited 23 October , 2021 by Jervis

[GreyC]

3 hours ago, Jervis said:

the monument is still marred by graffiti.

Not still. Again and again. There is even a task force to clean it quickly, they ran out of money, though.

"The war memorial in the city centre seems to be in better shape. "

It´s because the other one has an inscription that reads: „Germany must live, even if it means that we have to die“.

A sentence that provokes the graffiti. The one in the city centre was designed with the help of  a pacifist (Ernst Barlach, a famous sculptor), during the reign of Social Democrats, who wanted a statement against right-wing politics in 1931.  Hence it lacks any inscription of that kind and instead shows a relief of a mourning mother and child. This was erased by the Nazis in 1938 as it was considered "entartete Kunst" The monument at the Dammtor (now full of Graffiti) had been erected as a reaction against the one next to the city hall by the NSDAP instead in 1936. After the war the destroyed relief by Barlach was redone by a different artist.

GreyC

Edited 23 October , 2021 by GreyC

[Jervis]

Thanks for the context GreyC. 

[GreyC]

My pleasure!

GreyC