The Cult of Fallen Soldiers. German Cemeteries and Memorials of the First World War in Italy, 1935-1943

Abstract

A little more than ten years after the end of the First World War, the scenario of devastation of the battlefields of the Western Front appears almost unrecognizable, regenerated by nature and the work of men. But thousands of cemeteries hold the bodies of fallen soldiers, unconcealable scars of the wounds of the first “war of materials” of the contemporary age.

In Germany the construction of military cemeteries outside national borders is the work of an organization, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (“German People’s Association for the Care of War Burials”), founded in 1919 in Berlin. German cemeteries are designed with “natural material”, to create “a strip of native soil in a foreign land”. They are simple and austere, to express the seriousness of the word “front”. Individual graves are grouped together to “form a whole” and a symbolic role is assigned to the collective burial area (Sammelgrab, later Kameradengrab), always in close relation to the “space of honor” (Ehrenraum). The memory of the individual fallen is annulled in “sanctuaries built not for the consolation of families, but for the loyalty and elevation of the Nation”. This condition of the “anonymous soldier”, a hero “without personality or individuality [...] son of the earth whose destiny is to fertilize Mother Earth”, is finally stoned in the “castles of the dead” (Totenburgen): in them the “community of the nameless” rests in a single burial ground, in “immortal landscapes” consecrated by battles.

In this perspective, we can consider the constructive program launched by the VDK at the end of 1935 in Italy, on the Isonzo, Tagliamento, Piave and Dolomite passes. The cemetery of Feltre (1936-37), the Ehrenmales of Quero and Tolmin (1936-37), the Totenburgen of Pordoi and Pinzano (both started in 1938 in a pan-Germanic perspective, the first completed in 1959, the second remained unfinished), are conceived as sentinels of an “eternal guard”, consisting of a ring of similar monuments placed in a crown around the German Reich.