Importance of War Memorials

This will be my last blog post, and following the theme from this week’s classes on memorials I am going to write about a Nazi memorial in Germany. In my cultural anthropology class I remember talking about perceptions on things such as memorials, and I remember thinking about how Germans deal with memorials from World War II; specifically Nazi memorials. I found an article online from a couple of years ago (2011) about a Nazi memorial in the northern community of Tümlauer-Koog (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/for-whom-the-bell-tolls-nazi-memorial-embarrasses-german-community-a-800003.html). The memorial in question hadn’t been an issue until a tourist took offense to it and wrote a letter to the local governor. This particular memorial is a massive bell that is dedicated to Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Göring. This bell had been a part of a war memorial since 2008 along with a plaque with a poorly worded explanation. Basically, someone kicked up a fuss after years of no one being bothered by it and now the bell and plaque have been removed. What I am in interested in is what the community members think of this situation. Do they think that this memorial should have been removed; or should it have been left where it was and just simply replaced the plaque with one that would be less misleading? Or do they even care?

Personally, I think that the memorial should have been left where it was and that a new plaque should have been made. It is history and although it may not represent something that many people really want to remember, the people that died in World War II were someone’s relatives too. Not too many people are really proud to say that their relatives fought for the Nazi’s but that doesn’t take away from the fact that they were still related. A lot of families split during the war with different parts of the family taking opposite sides. I know mine is one of them. I think that it is important to remember that they were only human too. How educated were they about what they were fighting for? Or were they simply enlisted with no choice in the matter, unless they wanted to be killed for deserting? There are many different ways of looking at it. Yes, World War II and the Nazi’s were a part of history that almost everyone realizes as something that is wrong. How do we, as humans, learn but through our mistakes?

There are many, many things to take into account when looking at reminders of the past such as war memorials. I believe that history is history and every part of it should be remembered and there is nothing wrong with having monuments to help remember it by. When we look at ancient civilizations and the monuments and such that we find from those times we generally don’t destroy the ones we don’t like, or the ones that we think are bad. They are a part of our history and we can learn from them. In a few thousand years won’t we be ancient history too? Maybe whoever is around then will want to learn about our period in history? Books and other written (or typed) documents are a great record of history, but monuments and old relics are incredibly important too. War memorials from all around the world are important to people now because of their ancestors having been in those wars, in the future those same memorials might be used by anthropologists to show how we honoured those that fought for their countries.